Fanbase Phenomenon: The Latest ME is Always the Worst

ah I didn't play MW because I was a little too young for it and never got around to it later. But I could see that.
I played Oblivion though and tbh Skyrim just felt like a fancier version of it. 

There are very few lengthy side quests and decisions to make that don't just affect the main plot and result in War Assets and a lot of autodialogue in comparison to either ME1 or 2. Shepard talks a lot on her own and it's okay with me but it did feel very different. And it feels like almost all conversations are about the war or Reapers, with the exception of a few (the conversation with Eve was top notch). It makes sense because the war has arrived and people aren't going to be shooting the shit all the time, talking about their childhoods or homeworlds. But you don't get as much interaction with the characters; it's all business all the time. The Citadel feels kind of dead, there's barely anything happening, except for overhearing fetchquests, the worst part of the game. It's hard to describe but I guess it feels, like, "lonelier" gameplay? Easy to RP that in as Shepard being isolated and troubled.

Level scaling made levelling up pointless (the main quest was easier to complete at lower levels than at higher levels.)
Level scaling giving common bandits excellent armour was ridiculous.
Reduction of skills (axes are blunt weapons)
Combat being twitched based.
Pointless mini games (dialogue.) The lockpicking mini game thing made picking most locks with only a few points of skill possible ... if you had good hearing and other things IIRC.
Randomly generated loot reduced the enjoyment of exploration.
Dungeons were poorly designed.
No levitation
Main quest was horrible.
QUEST MARKER IS FOR NOOBS. WANDERING AROUND ALL DAY TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO GO BASED ON VAGUE DIRECTIONS IS THE ONLY WAY TO LIVE!!!

And a bunch of other stuff. It was a long time ago xD. Morrowind is definitely more of a challenge and a more hardcore RPG experience. That being said it's only for people who can stomach this sort of stuff:

MEA is definitely the worst one.

My signature.

(edit: ohh the cavetrolls are back ^ )

The truth is, Bethesda never deviated from their recipe. If you like an eleborate story, don't go there and don't expect that to happen, but if you love exploration, you're in for a treat. The only difference being, with Morrowind it was a novel concept. With Oblivion, not so much and with Syrim it could get old in places. I never felt that way, not even with FO4, which is arguably their weakest game. Certainly in the Fallout series. I knew what to expect and bought the game, knowing what to expect. Some meh story experience and mechanics in dire need of modding.

Things are different with Bioware games though.

I think what has been overlooked is starting conditions and expectations, which were not equal between the games.

-ME1 was a breakout hit people weren't necessarily expecting, from a new franchise perspective, although goodwill for the devs was at a high after KOTOR. In many ways ME was KOTOR - Star Wars.
-ME2 continued that upward trend generally (not sure what blowback there was on the forums as I wasn't around back then) and a loyal, edging towards obsessed, fanbase continued to develop.
-ME3 rode that crest even higher right up until the last 5 min where literally everything went to shit.
-BioWare lost massive cred over their handling of the resulting fiasco.
-ME-A started at a significant low, both in terms of franchise and developer loyalty and trust and merely came out mediocre. That's why it seems worse than it actually is.

Frankly I'm surprised by a few things I'm seeing here. Like people disliking ME2, or that there was significant resistance to it when it first came out. "They changed it so it sucks" is true on some level for just about anything, and while I wasn't on the forums for ME1-ME2, I was on the forums for ME2-ME3 and recall no complaints about changes in game mechanics. Every complaint I saw was mostly character based (mostly "why is/isn't this character here?"), until the endings, which I suppose you could argue overshadowed everything else. Now, retrospectively it's obvious ME2 was a giant procrastination of story that directly led to the last minute clusterfuck of the ending, but when it first came out? When people first experienced it? I assumed everyone's reactions were similar to my own- fully hooked and hypnotized by the characters and setting.

I've described the ME schtick before as a magic trick, and I still think the analogy holds, especially for people like me where this is our first or greatest RPG played. The trick is simple: get you invested in NPC relationships by allowing you to select responses and have the NPCs "react" to your selections. It's kind of insane how effective that simple trick is at not only building immersion but getting the player fully invested in the product. But the thing about magic tricks is, they only work as long as the magician has you bespelled, and your attention focused on where he wants it- at his fluttering, distracting hand movements and not at the assistant subtly ducking out of the box and behind the curtain. Because as soon as the spell's broken and you start noticing these things, the magic fades. It fades on its own and it fades as you start to analyze what's going on. And once you figure out how the trick is done, you're not going to be amazed by it again.

The blunders with the ME3 ending made a lot of people snap out of their enthrallment and it provoked/accelerated a lot more analysis of what's behind the curtain than would've been done otherwise. So for this reason as much as the other more direct one of fan disappointment, did ME-A absolutely need to dazzle and shine, and come up with some new tricks. It didn't, hence why it seems like it put on a worse show and got booed off stage, even though technically it didn't do that bad (and at no point did it fall on its face as badly as it did at the last show's final fanfare). Granted the five years of wasted prep didn't help, going by the reports of Andromeda's development cycle and frequent non-starts.

Since we're giving them, here is my not-very-neatly-arranged and not-as-in-depth-as-they-could-have-been thoughts on the Mass Effect series including Mass Effect: Andromeda. I prefer not to rank or score games but here it is:

ME1 > ME2 > MEA >>>>> ME3

ME1: Despite its plotholes, I like ME1. It tried to do some interesting things with its setting that was sadly dropped in the later installments. It faltered in sometimes like with humanity supposedly being the underdog when they really weren't. Back in ME1, however, I think it was easier to read that as something humanity believed and not a claim by the setting itself. On that subject, humanity was more interesting and felt like it had "characterization" to it like the other races. In the later trilogy, I consider humanity to be bland and was completely unable to be invested in them because all of the interesting parts had more or less been discontinued. While it's not to my preference, I don't mind the combat and other mechanics terribly.

ME2: Despite its many story-related issues including the whole plot, I did enjoy the game. It featured some interesting characters and did feel like it tried to have a look at them even the ones like Garrus whose ship dialogue was lacking. His loyalty mission compensated for this well, in my opinion, and prevented his post-ME1 character change from going unexplored.

MEA: MEA was in disappointing in aspects although some of them were a Sins of the Franchise variant. That being said, I enjoyed the game on a consistent basis and am going to go back to it when I have the time. The characters weren't as well-explored as they should have been and because of that it felt like we missed out on what could have been some interesting moments like more of what it was like for Jaal to grow up the way that he did. The same for Vetra. Also, things about Cora that was unrelated to the asari and being a commando. Despite this, I did feel like they were good characters and that they just needed a little more exploration of their depths, something a second game could have done. There were problems with the plot but that belongs under Sins of the Franchise for the most part because I see so many things in MEA that I saw in the original trilogy. I disliked that the kett and angara weren't more explored.

ME3: No, it's not the ending. I didn't enjoy the ending but I modded over it and that's the end of it as far as I'm concerned. No, the reason I rank it is so low is because of how much the game feels like a chore for me to play through. It feels like I'm forcing myself through the majority of the game just for the few moments that I actually enjoy. When I replay the game, I usually just reload the saves around the parts that I like instead of doing a full playthrough. In many respects, ME3 is the culmination of some of the things I disliked the most about the trilogy: The auto-dialogue, the inconsistent characterization, the poor story planning and so on. 

For me it is:

ME1 >>> ME2 >>> ME3

I dont list MEA cause I dont see it as a true and serious ME game worthy of being part of the franchise. To me it is a really bad fan fiction.

lol I know the type.

ME1 is garbage from a gameplay, mechanics, and controls department. ME2 was significantly better, albeit still clunky.
If you can't see that, then the only logical conclusion that I can come to is that you are a casual player. Nothing wrong with that, but calling the improvements made to the ME franchise after ME1 "more dumbed-down, streamlined Battlefield clones" is ignorant... at best.


I'm not saying ME:A is the best ME game, ME2 and ME3 trump it by a decent margin, and the barely functional state it came out in is absolutely inexcusable, but all of the REEEEEEEEEEE'ing about how ME:A is "teh wurst gaem evar!!!!!!!!1" is just trite overreactions by the loud and whiny.