Why do people here act like animations....

Time is irrelevant. The difference is effort, being that the viewer does not have to spend the few extra calories processing written words when a voice is dictating these thoughts to them.

I honestly don't think overall that a lot would have changed even if you released the 1.10v of the game. You would have avoided the memes and jokes early but I still think the game sold well enough early based off of pre-orders and launch week sales off of the popularity the OT.

But somehow we got the point where enough people weren't still playing to create a market big enough to make DLC worthwhile. So the question is why did all these people stop playing. How many people do you think put the game down based solely off of the animations and bugs? Also, keep in mind that a lot of people have said that they didn't experience game breaking or major bugs. Why did these people stop playing? If people thought the game was solid outside the animations and bugs, wouldn't people have come back to try it after the patches and eventually start playing again?

I've never once mentioned animations in any critique I've done on this game, bugs yes, animations no.

I just didn't like protagonist, the antagonist, the story, most of the characters, pretty much didn't connect with anything.

Thought Ryder was way too laid back, should have made corny, joking, it's own option on the wheel like sarcastic Hawke, let you tell people how you really feel more often.

Never really felt like a Pathfinder. The AI videos before the game came out said you'd be first on the ground, exploring, testing, finding suitable locations. That was what I wanted and expected, but none of this happened in the game, your job in the game was pretty much activating vaults, or fighting Kett. No real first contacts, no finding suitable places to make a colony, no pathfinding. The good stuff was done when you arrived.

Archon and Kett were terrible enemies. I need to either fear or hate the antagonist. Feared the reapers because of what Sovereign did in ME1, feared the collectors because they destroyed my ship and killed at the start of ME2. Hated Loghain because he left me to die and pinned the King's death on me. The Archon, however, offered no setbacks, nothing to make you fearful, didn't really do anything to make you care about him one way or the other. You, with barely 20 -30K people out of cryo curb stomped the Kett the entire game in almost every encounter even though they should have been the superior force. The Kett were more fodder than the villains.

Quests to me were boring and offered nothing most of the time but AVP, so your reward was seeing a meter increase that offered no changes. It's not like there were storms, dangerous weather, or things that calmed and cleared as you increased the viability, nothing happened. The game should have let your quests control how your colonies developed, give you tangible rewards and something to look forward to. Come back to Eos, new science lab, or hydroponics bay at Prodromos, anything.

I tried the game after the patches and barely got off Eos, and ultimately quit at the start of Voeld.

I do think the game would have received less criticism from the regular joes if animations weren't that bad simply because all those gifs wouldn't have been passed around so often.

I do think the game would have received less criticism if ME3's ending PROBLEM never happened.

With those two things aside, I'm sure people would have still complained about the game here on BSN--mostly the writing. I remember when I first joined BSN, it was a few months after ME2 came out, and I had a chance to play through it a few times. I was eager to discuss the game and everything I liked about it, what I walked into was a shit storm of toxic users complaining of "plot holes" to the point I thought they'd slit the game's throat if they could. It was the first time I saw such a fervor/dislike over a game (especially one that I considered one of my favorites)!

I didn't participate in the arguing, but it made me view other Bioware fans pretty negatively. I'd make an innocent thread to spur positive discussion, and I'd get shut down in a matter of seconds by some elitist piece of shit. Example would be making a thread about why I thought we'd see EDI as a squamate in ME3 (a long while before ME3 was ever announced), only to receive replies with how stupid that would be, or how I was wrong and blahblahblah. I know it's the internet and you need thick skin, but enthusiast/fan forums exist for people with common interests to come together and enjoy discussion.

I feel kind of bad. I've been one of those people popping in and out of this forum, just casually shitting on MEA because I was disappointed, and even though I'm not name calling, I'm still acting like a hypocrite.

Ignoring the whole sexbot design, I really liked having EDI as a squadmate. Her sitting down on the Citadel, relaxing, in a world that's scared shitless of AI kinda made me chuckle. Unfortunately, like others have pointed out, the reactions of the world to your Geth teammate (in ME2) and EDI were pretty unsatisfying. I thought there'd be opportunities for some really interesting side content and reactions, but c'est la vie  

That's an excellent point. I noticed there were some (non quest-giving) NPCs in the settlements with whom Ryder could converse. Nice bits of world-building I suppose, but that word budget was probably wasted on most players who didn't both to seek them out.


That's one thing I really noticed and appreciated about MEA - a lot of the sidequests that seemed really minor had some pretty big payoffs in terms of lore / world-building / making the world seem more alive.

 Not needing to process is kind of the problem. I know I've seen stuff in TED talks that would never fly as text. OTOH, that may be because TED talks are infotainment anyway.

That was well-constructed snark. (pasquale, you did lead with your chin there.)

He's got a point, though. It's a lot easier and faster to get the gist of text than a video. (Well, assuming the text is well-constructed; sometimes there's no there there.) You can just blip over the stuff you know is true, the stuff you know is false, the clips of the game that you remember quite well without seeing again, and the empty rhetoric that doesn't have any truth-value at all.

Couldn't agree more with the OP. Many fanboys and Bioware shills, still believe the game didn't do well because of the outrage from fans. How about because maybe the game just isn't good? Admittedly, the game isn't terrible, a 6/10 on its best day, but those aren't the standards Bioware and AAA developers go for. So in those regards it's deemed as a failure. There just isn't a whole lot to talk about in Andromeda, nothing stands out but the combat, which in itself is flawed. Weak story, characters, villain, and setting, make this arguably one of the worst, if not, the worst game Bioware has ever done.

"In-depth" is the issue. Most articles (from gaming to journalism, not talking about scholarly papers) are summary pieces, pieces that lack depth precisely because they're taking into consideration the limitations of text and the audience's chances of reading a 5 page essay on the topic. You have exceptions, there's a few newspapers around that give indepth articles (but not many) and a couple of fansites that give very thorough and in depth game reviews (but I've never seen a mainstream game site do that.) Because of this the information is often superficial and lacking depth. Most mainstream game reviews are short, and what's in there is often superficial nonsense. 

So what you're really doing (in most cases) is skimming a summary. I used to have the same opinion of video a couple of years ago, but if you want things that are in depth in the gaming (or fan) community more often than not you'll need to go there, because sticking to text mostly you'll get superficial crap anyone can churn out.

Actually I said that video can present far more content in a shorter period of time (whether it's efficient has to do with the specific guy making the video,) and it does this by utilising visuals in many ways. If I were to demonstrate how the game does something poorly in text, I would first have to address what they did and then (after that) I would present why it was bad. You could use a few gifs here but if you were making many comparisons your review (or article) would end up looking like a Daily Mail article (often more pictures than text.) In a video you could have what was happening being shown in the background while you are making your point in text over the top. Here you not only cut out many additional words (by utilising visuals,) but you have things occurring simultaneously (text is a very linear field, something happens then afterward you address that. Video you can have things happening simultaneously, the video doing one thing, the text doing another.) This is similar to having 2 narrations happening simultaneously. 

In comparison to video text is limited -> you have to describe everything as opposed to sometimes just showing it, you have to describe things one after another instead of showing one thing and describing something else on top. The very idea that text is just as good a medium as video for conveying content is so flawed, it's really only true for people who don't know HOW to use video. And by that I mean just videoing yourself talking, and things like that.

It should be noted this was a very obvious problem with ME1 ... which was one of the games the Andromeda devs yearned to emulate. Pity they didn't address the many, MANY flaws that game had while doing it.

And what if it does? Why is looking like that a problem?


The inefficiency comes in because I typically won't need to watch what's going on in the background. I've already seen it, right? (I'm not going to watch a 90 minute video of a game I haven't played under any circumstance whatsoever.) That's why clips and text are better. If I need to see the clip I play it, if I don't then I don't. Also, the clips have to expand to match the relatively slow spoken text, so you can present the case with a lot less running time even if someone does watch everything.


You don't have to describe everything, just the key points for the argument. And you have to do that anyway.

Your argument seems to rely on comparing incompetent writing to competent video work.