Most Underrated Game: One Year Later

I also bought the artbooks for Mass Effect, MEA, DA Inquisition, and the World of Thedas volume 1 & 2, plus the giant 2 volumes of Mass Effect comics/graphic novels last year.

Oh cool! I love concept art. The Andromeda one has beautiful colored illustrations on nice paper, just like the other ones. I myself am an artist, but I only do character, animals, plants, and such; so seeing these beautiful environments, vehicles, interiors, etc. is stunning and inspiring. I love the character concepts as well, and seeing the development process and see how they've changed the concept from start to final product is so cool.

Thought I'd repost this classic.

Poor Ian on the end of this snark, but the gameplay was well solid.

Damn, he tried to roast our man Tiberius . We don’t need Ian to crush a gameplay demo; we just need him to crush the design. He and the team did that. MEA’s gameplay and character-building systems are phenomenal! Mass Effect gameplay has improved with each iteration; and MEA is as good as any action game made. I’ve never played a game with better combat.

It would have broken the fluid gameplay completely? At first I was yearning for it, but then I understood the combat mechanics would'be been severely hampered.

Yes, not forced but in many cases especially on insanity you'll die if you dont strategize through it the next few steps (not on ME3 though, its quite easy even on insanity when you've imported through the games)

Yup... I think they should at the very least- have the dlc bundled or slashed heavily price wise. It’s weird going to your friend who hasn’t played the series and strongly recommending it, but saying “you need this DLC, and that one, that one for sure,” and having it all add up to the price of a full price game- especially since they inexplicably have story based dlc and squadmates behind paywalls for no good reason. >.< (still haven’t forgiven them after Javik and Tresspasser)

I really don't understand the importance people put on him anyway.  He doesn't change the outcome of the game he gives information on how one outpost fell, background on the Protheans which Liara could have just as easily done, and gives an Asari some hope on a mission. 

While I liked having the option I rarely if ever used the power wheel in ME2 or 3. I used it in 1 a lot just to get peoples barriers up.  In MEA its not needed, but it would be good to have.  Some people needed the option due to disabilities and problems they have with shooters. I can't remember who it was on the old board(maybe he is here too) I think it was Sylvis the mad or something. And he said he needed the pause game play to be able to play the ME games on any difficulty. And since you always just have the option not to use it I don't seem the harm in including it, its just all positive IMO.

It was underrated. And it was dogpiled and got a lot more flak than it deserved. But it also came out the same year as Breath of the Wild, Persona 5, Nier: Automata, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Divinity Original Sin II, and a bunch of others. That was frankly part of its problem. Last year was a crazy stupid awesome good year. One of the best in a long time. It wasn't even a like top 5 game of last year.

It also came out after Witcher 3 which has frankly permanently raised the bar for open world games and action RPGs and Bioware hasn't really messed with their core formula since like 2009 other than adding some "eh" open world elements.

A mostly mid-tier quality Bioware game with mediocre open world and severe polish issues just wasn't going to cut it. When Bioware pulls out their A game, they pull it out and I hold them up against anybody, but a B- contender just wasn't going to get that much acclaim unless it was in a year full of duds, and it wasn't.

They need to double down on what they are the best in the industry at (*cough* *cough* characters *cough* *cough*) and actually really pull out the innovation and polish on the next game. Same old formula + a bit of watered-down Skyrim just won't cut it anymore.