Do you prefer ANDROMEDA? or Milkyway?

Either... The location matters little for Mass Effect. The games were coincidentally better in the Milky Way, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the location. What matters is the plot, the characters, the immersion, the passion.

Say what you will about ME1, but despite all its technical issues and shortcomings, it oozed passion.
Andromeda... The only thing it oozed is a desperate attempt to get as close as possible to ME2, while trying to be open world.

At least in ME1 the player had the choice to choose having both Garrus and Wrex or one of the them whereas the player doesn't get that choice in MEA. The player has a confrontation with Wrex that could lead to him being killed. Get nothing like that with the squadmates in MEA

I pretty much agree with that.  I would add start-to-finish experience/satisfaction:  ME2 > ME3 (that ending) > ME1 > MEA.  I still get hyped as hell going through the Omega 4 relay.  The entire sequence coupled with the best music score crushed it.

Prefer the Milky Way games as the vast majority of people, but voted for Andromeda in that they already sent us to another galaxy. They need to commit and expand on that going forward, not go backwards. Going back to the Milky Way now would feel like a tired old band doing some half-hearted greatest hits tour in a cheap nostalgia grab. Not to mention that going back to the Milky Way would either require effectively just rebooting the franchise due to the ending of ME3, canonizing one of the endings or finding some impossible way to write an entire game that adapts to the radically different states the galaxy can be left in at the end of ME3.

It just seems like a gigantic clusterfuck and headache to deal with to bring everything back to the Milky Way unless we just pretend none of the previous games ever happened, and I definitely don't want them to suddenly be considered non-canon.

We like something you don’t.

I like ME1 but Andromeda is superior in nearly every way. IMHO of course.

Well, it kinda does though. I still love the game and respect its place in the franchise, but it was clumsy as hell and a lot of things didn’t make sense, and in the end, a lot of the big reveal stuff loses its impact when I reflect back on it (like Sovereign). I think Dragon Age Origins’ writing and story held up better over time. I just wish the Warden wasn’t a mute, but that’s another story. 

Plot-wise, I'll give ME1 the nod over ME:A. It's easy to just blip over stuff like Tali's magic voice recording, but when ME:A gets incoherent the player has to actually deal with the incoherence, so it's more noticeable. And both games have equally awful loot systems.

The question is whether the inferior gameplay overcomes the superior plot.

I don’t think it’s so much the number of games. ME1 came with a lot of history to fill the setting right from the beginning. What the Milky Way has is scope. What kind of makes it unfair is that this would be like comparing the Milky Way to the Hades Gamma cluster. 

100% except for ME3 being more memorable, and i'm still iffy on Andromeda's gameplay, auto-cover and the issues it caused with the jetpacking, personally the dodge rolling in 3 was executed better than dodge jetpacking, not being able to choose what companions abilities I want to use,  the ability to outfit them with specific guns I wanted gone, along with them being mostly useless in this game. In many ways Andromeda had improved gameplay, but at the same time in many ways it was also a downgrade, though the biotic gameplay was improved. 

There's a reason ME2 is the cream of the crop. The handeling of it's scenes and the score that went along with them were some of the best in gaming at the time. From the intro, to the slow build up and introdiction to characters like Garrus to that amazing ending. Andromeda lacks such execution.

As for the topic at hand, Milky Way of course. And people who say location doesn't matter don't understand how it's easier for a developer to build upon already established lore than to create something entirely new. They tried that in Andromeda, and it paled in comparison to what we already had. We had established civilizations, planets, factions, characters, politics, age old feuds and history in the OT. Untapped lands that are just being colonized just can't compete. Trust me when I say nothing new they can come up with will match what we had. Also because Bioware is a totally different company today.


The whole premise of Andromeda is colonizing, starting fresh, it's never going to match up to a galaxy with tons of established entities regardless. It's like comparing Italy's or Greece history to.......well........Sweden or something LOL. Or better yet Italy to America.