ME:Andromeda Cut Content

No way I'd want to give up Assault Turret, man! I agree a UAV might've been fun. I'm not sure it would really fit well with what we got on the gameplay front. I think they're mostly useful in games that allow for stealth.* Given recent Ubi games, they'd no doubt have been accused of "stealing/copying", despite the 5 years of dev time.

* I recall there being a smokescreen power during development. It was an active skill (maybe based upon power cells?) that the Infiltrator could see through. We had a screenshot with its icon, but I have long since deleted any pics I saved. That's a skill that might've looked cool, but that I'd never use. It's entirely unneeded in a game in which I kill all the things dead in three seconds. If combat were at all dangerous or stealthy, maybe it would've worked.

I mostly would've liked to have had more, in terms of locales and variety. Havarl and certainly Aya could've been much bigger. I really like what we got; I just want much more.

A lot of the ideas listed do appear in a different form.

It's not that I wanted more of what exactly we got, as in a bigger Eos or Voeld. I'd want more variety, and would accept smaller exploratory regions to make it happen. I love the Nomad, but we needn't use it on every world. I liked Havarl, but it was probably too small, resulting in a lot of backtracking through areas previously visited as new quests arose. I think bigger than Havarl, smaller than the bigger maps might be a good goal for next time. Better yet, have a few huge ones. Have a few small ones. Just give me more of them. We truly visited too few places in MEA for my tastes.

Some people like open world, and some don't. I think such games demand longer sessions, deeper investment or sharper recollection from their players. In a big open world, I suspect it's easy for many persons to forget where they stand each session. They forget how cool that last side quest was because it's been a few days and the setting/terrain all blends together. They feel disconnected from the main quest because they've stretched across a week the OW exploration that I might do in one sitting. Not everyone has enough downtime to play big ass OW RPGs. That's one conclusion I've reached, at least.

OW doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. I think it can really work for ME, but it's definitely tougher to tell a story like BioWare usually tells. I can't think of a single OW game that is widely praised for its story. Rather, I hear people describe even good ones as "forgettable". It's likely "forgettable" only because they took too long to play it, don't have sharp memories to start, and/or just don't get deeply invested in games. I'm not saying that's the issue with MEA. It was big a departure from the OT in too many areas to be well received by all. I think OW in general, though, will continue to make BioWare's job tougher. MEA did a much better job with OW than DAI, so we could say that they're clearly learning with each game.

Sorty for the long tangent. I'm getting sleepy. It's probably time to log off.

Haha! Duh! Proof of my sleepiness. There’s at least one, proving it can be done.

Preach on, brother!

I was expecting on my first playthrough to get out of the Aya port, as the outside was looking really interesting, but nope..

I really enjoyed TW3 combat system, but I guess it comes down to what you're looking for from a combat system.  I like to have more control of the character's movements and reacting to different enemy tendencies (built around a gamer's personal skill,) some prefer having a slew of powers on cooldown (more dependent on a specific class build).  Though a balance of the two is ideal...I think MEA managed that fairly well.

I enjoyed it too, and I didn’t mind that we couldn’t make Geralt our own. It wasn’t that type of rpg.

Hey sil, I have a question. How did you find those strings (the MEA ones)? Is there a way to search for a specific line by a keyword?