Everything done wrong with MEA:MP - a community anthology (prep for eulogy) Edit: right/good also w

RIP Asari Punchtress.

Yeah, this lines up with my experience pretty well, although I never really got any messages from random pugs in ME3. Just some, shall we say, "love letters" from the usual suspects on PS3. I just wanted a more refined version of ME3MP, and Bioware tried to reinvent the wheel without fully understanding what made the wheel popular in the first place. Chalk it up to whatever you want - overbearing corporate influence; complete lack of direction from the project leads; turbulent development cycle; new and inexperienced developers; Frostbite being unfit for purpose; all of the above; or something else entirely, but at the end of the day, they failed to deliver a worthy successor to 3's MP.

A few months ago, I said that the introduction of the jetpacks wasn't inherently bad, but the fact that they used it's abilities as a cornerstone of map design was a problem. It meant that every character had to have access to the same movement abilities, leading to all the characters feeling similar in terms of movement. Combined with the absurd power recharge speeds and low power damage at launch, and now the vast majority of kits all played the same as well. Use power A, shoot stuff or jetpack around for 10-15s, use power A again, repeat. This was only compounded by the removal of heavy melees, since as you noted, even Krogan manage to blend in with the other races.

It wasn't fun. It was bland and mediocre at best, and while Platinum was actually enjoyable this time around (in my opinion), it wasn't enough to alleviate the monotony of actually playing the game. And I don't want to get into the whole loot pool thing as this is already turning out to be a longer post than I had intended.

I wasn't expecting another amazing experience to dump 1500+ hours into, but I definitely wasn't expecting to be left feeling cold and spent after 120. Even though my expectations weren't nearly as high as it seemed like other people's were (and I was under no illusions that the singleplayer would be any good), I'm still thoroughly disappointed with Andromeda, and no longer have any faith whatsoever in Bioware.

I think the gunplay is better than Bioshock's...

On the whole, I say ME3 was the better experience only because it was something new and all the friends I made while playing it (not to say I haven't met a lot nice people in ME:A MP as well). From purely a game perspective, I like both MPs about the same. My fav toons are split about 50/50 between ME3 and ME:A now.

To me, having both games gives me a greater variety of kits to play, so I don't see one game of having to be "superior" to the other. They are both familiar, but play differently; both have annoying bugs that will never be fixed, but I get to play the toons I like from both. The only grind left is getting the UR characters to rank X. I have enough lesser siphon weapons to make all the kits work at this point (at least on gold).

I'm still interested in ME:A MP, as I haven't finished tinkering with different builds and playstyles (next up is batscarf). Once it's all done, I'll play both games off and on as long as there are still people playing (and servers don't get yanked).