It's disappointing, but not a surprise that ME:A is dogged in 2017 awards.

EA did choose to put Bioware's A team on Anthem and use their B team to make Andromeda. Shows you where their focus was. Anthem will have a bigger budget, higher production values etc, because it's a games as service title. They can milk gamers for far more money in it than ME......so yeah it's their fault 100%.

MEA was far from perfect, but it was still miles ahead of most games in 2017.

I mean really, games like Breath of the Wild and Persona 5 are winning awards? LOL

I agree that blaming EA is simplifying and misrepresenting the situation. The facts as I see them are that the developers made some costly and misguided errors which hurt the overall end product when they finally brought their unreasonable aims back in line with something they could actually deliver. And to their credit, they did a lot of things right, improving combat and both personal and vehicular exploration with the jetpack and Nomad. The open worlds were generally better filled with quests than many other such games, though still far from ideal.

However, the botched presentation, characters and story undermined key pillars of what people want and expect from a Bioware RPG leading to a backlash which was at once understandable and rather unfair (even the most critical initial reviews made the point that MEA had many redeeming features, but these were backslid on as critics jumped on the hate bandwagon over the year, for fear of alienating their viewers).

In summary, MEA deserved to win no positive awards sadly. But beyond some 'most disappointing' awards, it didn't deserve negative awards either (and frankly, Persona 5 was far more disappointing IMO). MEA isn't underrated, but it is overhated. I enjoyed the game generally speaking and thought Bioware and EA could have defended it in a more robust fashion. But I also don't feel like its an unjustly criticised gem like I feel about Dragon Age 2 or Obsidian's KOTOR 2 and Alpha Protocol etc.

Those games left ME:A in their dust. Persona 5 was the best pure JRPG in about a decade (if you ignore that it's part dating sim ... kinda)

I agree a lot with this statement, I think the only thing that might have been improved with more time is the facial animations anything else people say would be improved I am not sure of for those features seemed to work as intended and integrated into the game.

It's a game aimed at teenagers and it has a pretty thought provoking theme (for them) to accompany an entertaining story and quality dungeon crawling mechanics.

Being generic means being like every other game out there, it's being unoriginal. That Persona 5 doesn't have a theme to equal Planescape Torment's "What can change the nature of a man" doesn't mean it's generic, the very fact that it had one at all that resonates with current society separates it from most AAA story oriented games. 

Yepp. Would not touch those with 10000 feet pole.
Other is Nintendo so it MUST be the best (especially on the other side of the pond it seems so), and other, omg no effin way. But of course these are my feelings and foundations.

Quit or fired?

Damn shame. And I had a whole stack of celebratory gifs.

Yup, the problem lay more in the direction of flat characters, nonsensical lore changes, uninteresting enemies, overly streamlined game-play, lack of roleplay opportunity...

I agree with you somewhat.  A lot of the talent is elsewhere, but without Unreal or Frostbite, I don't care where they are. The overuse of the Infinity Engine blows for me. Divinity and Pillars are great one and done adventures because it didn't beckon me back like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Andromeda hasn't called me back because there is no incentive. No DLC, no modding, not a damn thing... Fallout 4 has me mesmerized with it's subpar writing, dopey quests and lore-breaking elements. Why? DLC and modding.