Everything that was wrong with Andromeda. A video that sums it up well.

So by the Canon storyline Shepard died as he lived at the end of his story: being someone's bitch.

I'm glad I no longer play the MET. Always doing the same shit over and over again.

I did not hate the MET. I just got sick of playing and knowing what was coming. Things like becoming a Spectre was one of the few things I wanted say yes or no to.

Edit: I played the MET 30 times by my last play though. Back in 2015.

So they say. But I still question it.

And I will always question it.

Saren sucks as a villain.
1) He's barely in the game.
2) When he's in the game he doesn't live up to hype that other characters build him up to be.
3) All the backstory that makes him interesting is in a novel and comic book mini-series and not in the game.
4) He's just a glorified lackey.
5) His plan makes no sense.

If the player didn't have the option to convince Saren to blow his brains I doubt he would be as a so called "great" villain when in game he's a stupid idiot of a villain. 

The achon starts off uninteresting but becomes more interesting as the game goes on.   Your choices have little impact on the game but the same is true in ME1.  Basically you have 2 kill choices that effect gameplay in ME1, but it has little to no impact on the main plot the rest of the choices have no impact in ME! outside a cut scene and you got those in MEA. Actually the Kett are far better villains than the reapers because they can be fought. Yeah, sure the we are the borg thing is overplayed but so is AI who went wacky. Yeah, I'll say Ryder sucks he has far less narrative control for the player than Shepard does and his narrow range is fairly boring.  Many of his complaints about what were wrong in MEA were in ME1 he just doesn't see them because nostagia goggles are on.

Sure, I think ME1-3 were all better individually in the story and character sense.  But MEA wasn't far behind ME1 in story, though it felt more behind in characters as I was bored with most your team.

Saren was a one dimensional zealot unless you worked to get a specific ending.  It was proven to me in the game that Sovereign had nearly full control of Saren because his actions were influenced strongly by Sovereign and only by talking to him because you had a high enough Paragon/Renegade you were able to shortly bypass it.  I doubt it was Saren's real choice to have all those cybernetics that were implanted in him to help give him clarity over what Shepard was saying on Virmire.  I don't remember anything ground breaking when dealing with Saren directly so I cannot really comment on the conversations.

The decisions in Mass Effect 1 did not feel like they had any more weight to them because there was no payoff for them.  It was an empty choice like picking between different types of sandwiches at a coffee shop.  If they actually had an impact or altered the game in any way they they would have had more weight then what we got in Andromeda.  Even choosing what companion to saved most of the time was moot because I never had Ashley or Kaiden in my party so I never even noticed they were missing.

I will agree it had a negative launch, but there is no proof the franchise is dead.  Just because you assume that is the final verdict based on your personal calculations of what happened after the release does not make it a fact.  It make it your personal opinion, just like mine is that the franchise isn't dead just wounded.

IMO, the Archon starts as a boring character and ends as the same boring character. There's nothing in him. He want's to kill you and wants the meridian, that's about it. I fail to see anything remotely interesting about him, they even made him throw generic banter at you at the end game (you will die blah, blah, blah...) it felt so friggin cliche honestly.
MEA story was far behind game one, simply because MEA borrows half the arc and modify it to suit its needs. I've said it a few comments back, ME1 introduced everything in the franchise, all the lore in which MEA is based, etc. MEA is set on a new galaxy and there's barely any new lore at all.
The Kett are just grunts, kill them, loot them, repeat. And they feel like proto collectors having more or less the same core: a race that collects other races and adds them to their lines as yet more grunts or cannon fodder for the player to kill them. 

Well, actually the franchise isn't dead. The team who made this game was the ME3 multiplayer team, no experience whatsoever in making SP games. It doesn't mean Bioware closed its doors or anything, they just disbanded the team that made this particular game, that's all.
Of course the DLC was cancelled, they probably predicted very low sells for any future content due to the backlash, that's why they didn't even bother.

If you ask me, they never should have given them anything more than a the multiplayer portion of the game, and even at that the team somehow managed to fuck things up, it's baffling.

This is part of why I include role playing and don't just play game. I do write-ups from the perspective of Shepard. Currently, I did this twins things (making generous use of gender swap in ME1), had one of them die at the beginning of ME2 and have continued onward. Briefly: Faith and Owen Shepard hailed from Mindoir. It made Faith rough and a bit racist. Owen was a little kinder, mostly only hating batarians. Faith became the first human Spectre and ended up killing Saren. Owen did a lot of the side missions, including all the ones involving Cerberus. At the urging of Udina, Owen is secretly made the second human Spectre was is tasked with going undercover to join Cerberus so he can take them down. It takes about two years to accomplish that. Meanwhile, at the beginning of ME2, Faith dies with the Normandy. It continues on from there, though Faith's story may not necessarily be over. Anyway, it helps make the game fresh, even though my write-ups are somewhat inconsistent with the game. Oh, since Faith wasn't especially alien friendly, Owen took Garrus, Tali and Wrex with him, which works well in ME2. Faith traveled with Kaidan, Ashley and Liara (because she looked mostly human).

ME1 was more than a decent story, it was an atmosphere. An experience. You feel like "this isn't earth" the moment you set foot on the Citadel. Its overwhelming and every little detail from the menus to the sound effects and chimes in the menus, it feels so futuristic and perfect. MEA isn't bad on those regards just extremely muted to the point where they're easily missable.

Hahaha.
 

Oh they know... I think BioWare (proper) are internally more painfully self-aware and critical of MEA's flaws than they'd ever care to admit publically which is why short of cancelling it... it was pushed out in march and buried as soon as they'd put out the dumpster fires to begin with - a logical move in order to contain the foreseeable damage to their IP and reputation. Not exactly the actions of a proud studio/publisher.

The only reason why any publisher would impose a genuine hiatus on a property is so that the press and mainstream consumers will have forgotten how poor the last one was by the time the next one is released. Having said that I can't think of any EA property in recent memory that has ever come back from a situation like this.

Ha! On an unrelated note I love that episode that gif is from.