Going back and replaying older BioWare games.

For example, DAO, I can only speak for myself but I did not know there were different origin stories. I played it once. It was not until a friend was playing DAO that I saw that there were not only different races, but completely different beginnings to the story. After seeing that, I went back and replayed multiple times. Origin stories were a great idea and vastly increased replayability. The data said most people did not venture in to different origin stories, but it doesn't tell you why. BW came to the conclusion that alot of people were not interested in them, but BW may not have gotten the whole story about it.

around all those tall people-you could hardly see your character. Too often you could only see the top of your dwarf characters' head. It was a bad camera angle.

Wayback Machine comment, but hot damn that's the reason one of the best Nexus mods for DAO was 'Skip the Fade' - you pick the outcome, you get the bennies, you don't have to go through that horrible, horrible slog. I was no fan of the Deep Roads either (DAI's big Deep Roads addition was handled waaaaay better), but the Fade was THE WORST.

Meh the fade never bothered me. I've also never used a mod to skip an area, boring or not. It would ruin the experience for me.

When hobbying as a beta-tester for TSLRP, Skip Peragus was essential for us - that mod didn't touch that sequence at all, and did touch everything that followed.

Shortly after 1.10 was released I went back and started to play the older BioWare games starting with Jade Empire, I don't think it aged well and had to stop playing before my good memories of it disappeared.  After that I went to Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 and I realized the parts of Dragon Age: Origins that were mostly like Andromeda the open world parts being The Deep Roads and The Fade were the two areas I hated the most in the game and looking at my old saves of Origins any game I abandoned, I abandoned inside The Deep Roads.  The areas I liked the most in Origins were the ones that were maze-like which were like the layout of the dungeons in Dragon Age 2 and even then those areas were quite small.  I think those dungeons were designed well in Dragon Age 2, they just needed to have more design variants.

I have recently just sped through Mass Effect 1 for I forgot how short the game could be and found that after a planet or two I would just drive directly to the objectives that were pre-marked on my map and ignore the exploration of the planets themselves.  I didn't even really find the planets we could land on to be that much of an open world for they were all pretty empty with a couple of resources for the collection quests, but other then that nothing important was there.

Now to the point that relates to Andromeda, I know there were technical issues with Andromeda, but would you think BioWare has a weakness when they try and do full open world style with their games? When playing Andromeda I found the times I had the most fun were the areas that were the more structured for it had more scripted moments that allowed the characters to develop while staying on the mission instead of the background conversations we had on the open worlds.  Now the only exception I would say I had to that argument was on H-047c for I enjoyed how the different party members reacted to my driving and suicidal tenancies there even then I would consider that the least open world part of the game since you could only drive to the protected areas.  I could also see the possibility of less technical issues for I find open world games generally have the most problems at launch regardless of developer/publisher.

Personally after going back and playing those older games I think I would be more accepting of a more corridor style game if it brought back the character and squad development or at least removed the feeling of there being less if that is the case.  While having maybe a couple of more open areas of the game, but being smaller then being a large chunk of the game relying on the trappings of being open world.

Anyway, just my two cents after replaying some of the older games and seeing how I felt after playing them compared to Andromeda.