Will EA and Bioware actually use MEA as a learning lesson?

The issue with the Extended Cut is the dissonance between the narration and the slides. The narration takes place in present time after the Crucible has been activated, while the slides take place at unspecified times in the (far) future. Furthermore I'm not even sure whether the slides are supposed to depict actual future events or if instead they're just meant to be a general indications of future events. Lastly the slides by themselves are really ambiguous and without context I have no actual idea what is precisely happpening in a particular slide, for example an image of Miranda looking at schematics is no more informative to me than if it had just appeared on screen as text.

The Extended Cut would have worked better if it had been a single continuous scene set on earth, from the eyes of a young alliance soldier the player witnesses the Crucible fire and depending on your choices, Hackett, Catalyst Shepard or EDI delivers a speech, it's contents varying depening on Shepard's choices. After the speech is finished the player can roam around speaking with Shepard's suriving associates (the Normandy crash would be retconned). Instead of the breath scene in high ems destroy Shepard's surival would be ouright confirmed and based on morality he/she makes a short statement.

Iakus I especially loved the reactions to the father dying and Liam after putting the crew in the dangerous situation that he did lol. After playing this game it almost made me forgive Bethesda for the wisecracking Deadpool like Sole Survivor they gave us in Fallout 4. Nathan Drake Jr over here was a thousand times worse.

I totally heard that in Ron Perlman's voice

Games don't have to be dark to be written well, though the best of the best tend to end up that way. The original trilogy wasn't even that dark. Games like Witcher 3 and Half Life had a perfect balance between humour and the serious without feeling like they were over doing one or the other. But yes that is a correct assessment people in this era prefer realness. It's one of the main reasons X-men became such a hit among the generation x. It's one of the reasons Batman overtook Superman's popularity long ago. It's one of the reasons Wolverine & Gambit are the coolest, and Iceman with his lame so 2 decades ago puns has no fans lmao. It's one of the reasons DC slowly but surely will dominate cinema again after everyone tires of Marvel's formula where every character has the same jokey and overly sarcastic personality, especially if Marvel continues to over do it like they did in Guardians 2. Quote me on that.

If you saw the dev cycle and their reaction to SWTOR not being a WoWkiller in mid-2012 and compare that to the dev cycle and reaction to ME:A not selling one quadrillion units and not having all one quadrillion buyers playing it with feral meth addict glee constantly, then I'd have to ask which mistake did they learn from? because I'm not seeing any learning.

No. The Marvel films have a clear creative direction and that's why even with the inferior entries, the MCU succeeds. DC will not overtake them because they force bright hopeful characters like Superman into contrived angst in poorly written cgi mess stories that try to cherrypick small moments from too many comic sources. So enjoy whatever that brown stuff is you'll be eating as the DC films continue to stumble. Wonderwoman is the only decent DC film out there and that's after how many films in how many years?

I'm not saying I think all the MCU films are great, they're not, but they will score bigger bank in the cineplex because of their formula. That and well-managed continuity between a host of films and several tv shows. So enjoy contrived angst and overindulgent cgi for young boys in sixth grade. I won't.

1) I can "imagine" for any game.  

2) And how, exactly was the father and sibling used for comedic effect?  And I'm not saying the situation has to be taken as that dire.  But if I want to role-play a Ryder who misses his father and worries about his sister, I'd like to have some options to actually EMOTE that in anything but a tepidly mild concern.

3) And if Cassandra had gotten the Anchor, she would have been the Inquisitor.  It doesn't alter the fact that the MacGuffin attached to the protagonist makes the protagonist "special"  And that the fate of the Andromeda Initiative (and by extension, everyone in the Heleus Cluster) depends on Ryder.

1) Perhaps you're finally seeing my point... as long as the opposite isn't shoved in your face present... you CAN imagine stuff.  The moment Bioware would have put up a really emotional reaction to dad's death, because they were not putting in two completely different scenes to hand the "other" situation where Ryder may not give a damn about dad, they went with a more neutral reaction and expressly gave you the opportunity to imagine the other scenario.  It's not jarring enough for people to be making such a huge deal over it.  They were able to pick Shepard's background with only a paragraph describing it.  But here, now, they want his whole background hand fed to them in perfect cinematic color right on screen.  You're JUST picking Ryder's background relationship with his dad;a dn it is of minor consequence in the game.  Sure, it would be great if they did cinematic scenes to cover off every range of emotion possible in every possible situation that might come up in the PC's life during the game time... but that isn't being realistic and you know it.

2) The overall tone of the game is comedic and ironic.  You've complained that you don't like it.  Fine, you don't like it... but don't suggest that it's inherently the situation that's making it so.  As for the last part... see 1)

3)  Still missing the point - SAM is special, Ryder is not.  SAM is a separate and sentient being.  You're not playing as SAM... You're really playing only as SAM's conduit to the world... a way to gather the language bits he needs to put the whole galactic puzzle together.

We don't know where the sequel was heading with all of that... and we may never know.  The bottom line possibility remains that everything Ryder did to alter the previous status quo in that galaxy may be detrimental to it in the long run.  It's a possibility brought up in the dialogue in the game repeatedly.  Were the monoliths intentionally shut down and if so, why?

Imagining something off screen does not substitute for good writing especially when not enough substance was given to go on to begin with lol. Using that amazing logic we could consider some of the most terribly written and acted films to be masterpieces by imagining the characters as something better or carrying out actions they never did. Basically you're telling people to ignore what actually happens in-game and dip into the sweet oceans of delusion. I guess that's what is necessary to justify all of this game's shortcomings.

Where... in anything I've said so far have I indicated "good" or "bad" writing?  I haven't... you're assuming a lot.  I said that there was nothing taboo about using any of the subject matter in Andromeda as a comedy (rather than the war torn tragedy that the ME Trilogy ultimately was).  They used a neutral non-emotive tone with dad because they did not want to use (or perhaps did not have) the resources to generate two scenes to reflect both possibility that they did put into the game via dialogue... that of Ryder either caring and respecting his dad or the other Ryder who did not know his dad and did not respect him.  This was a background choice of the same nature as choosing Shepard's background... and in that case all we were given to work with was an arbitrary "pick one" decision made before the game began.  From the aspect of it being a background choice (one that is of little consequence in the game... much the same way as Shep's background was of little consequence ultimately), I don't see it as the major sin that people here keep trumping it up to be.

In addition, from what lakus has said... part of the issue is not the writing (i.e. what is said); but the VA (i.e. how it's said).

1) then what's the point of dialogue at all?  Just give us silent protagonists again.  Then we can "imagine" the tone.  

I mean seriously, I keep getting reminded of the scene in the Trespasser DLC where the Anchor is starting to go critical and is threatening to kill the Inquisitor.  the emotions there felt REAL!  The Inquisitor can

Be freaking TERRIFIED



Or analytical



Or p*ssed off:



Or simply tough it out:



How does anything MEA has even compare?


2)  The overall tone of the game was wildly inconsistent.  And that, I think is a big part of what hurt the game.

Is this a problem with tonal inconsistency itself, or just ME:A's execution of it?