Would love feedback on my history of ME multiplayer!

I'm inclined to agree that new content is desperately needed, but I don't think new content is enough to salvage this game in my eyes.

First off, according to the APEX HQ app, I have exactly 112 hours logged in multiplayer matches. My manifest completion is hovering at 77% after adjusting for the most recent content additions, according to one of the manifest trackers that was linked on here ages ago. My APEX rating is pretty low relative to my play time, sitting at just over 10,700. In other words, I've put more than a fair amount of time into the game. Purely from a perspective of time spent, I have gotten more than my money's worth out of the game, and that's without getting into my Singleplayer runs in an attempt to get all the achievements.

But it sure doesn't feel like it.

I'm not even sure where the best place to start is. I will say that I like the core combat, the addition of the jetpacks has provided interesting movement mechanics, and I appreciate the fact that a large number of powers now function correctly when you are playing off-host. But, in my opinion, the jetpacks have proved to be a mixed blessing. The fact that the jetpacks were so integral to the design of the combat and levels that every single kit has to have them (or something analogous in the form of the biotic boosts) has removed some of the variety that was present in ME3, where different races had different dodge mechanics and some characters couldn't dodge at all. As a result, strictly in terms of movement, each kit feels the same. From Humans to Angarans, to Asari to Krogans, they all move around the maps in the same way.

Speaking of similarities in the way characters play, it feels like Bioware has removed some of the more niche or interesting abilities in favor of placing greater emphasis on the core powers of each archetype (Biotic/Combat/Tech). Gone are abilities like Stasis or Warp, which admittedly were not niche, rather were excellent utility powers for Gold/Platinum. As a result, you see more basic powers like Lance and/or Pull on almost every single Biotic, furthering the sensation of same-ness. That's not to say there aren't some stand-out Biotics in Andromeda, but the Biotic kits that are especially noteworthy are few and far between.

The same argument could be made for Tech powers, although not as convincingly as I feel like Tech kits are better on average than Biotic kits. The proliferation of abilities like Overload, Energy Drain, and Incinerate on Tech users in MEA at least feels more refreshing, especially considering that there are fewer pure Tech kits and more hybrids between Tech and Combat. Which makes sense, especially with Bioware doing away with the traditional class archetypes, but this decision has led to kits feeling more and more similar to play in my opinion.

One thing that really perplexes me is why grenades have been relegated to strictly Combat powers. Lift and Cluster grenades were great additions to the pool of available powers in ME3, and it saddens me to see them gone. There were also Tech-based grenades, but those were introduced in expacs so I don't think the comparison there is completely fair.

And all of this is just about the classes available in Andromeda right now. This doesn't even touch on how I feel about enemies (in short: underwhelming in terms of design), map design, changes to the gear/consumable ecosystems, or progression. I'll keep it short here and close out by saying that if Bioware's plan for more content is to drop another round of S guns on us once every few weeks and trickle out kits that are just rehashes of existing powers (see Angara Exemplar), I'm definitely passing.

Let me see if I can elaborate on this a bit more.

Platinum = good
Batarian = good
Kishock = hopefully good but haven't unlocked it

That along with the weapon and power balance changes would have made for a much better update than we were given.

Veteran bonuses = good in theory, bad execution
Weapon variants = okay in theory, abysmal execution
Upload change = better, still not perfect imo
Hack change = bad
Boss objective = mediocre
Devices change = neutral


Basically what has transpired is that Bioware has given us a poison apple in the form of 1.09. They lumped some genuinely interesting, new content in with a colossal amount of empty filler and some questionable redesigns of objectives that bring the overall opinion of the patch down quite a few notches in my eyes, and apparently the eyes of a lot of other people.

The realization that a not-insignificant number of sniper rifles and shotguns will consistently out-damage a Cobra is truly a horrifying one. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche meant when he talked about staring into the abyss.

Yeah, this lines up with my experience pretty well, although I never really got any messages from random pugs in ME3. Just some, shall we say, "love letters" from the usual suspects on PS3. I just wanted a more refined version of ME3MP, and Bioware tried to reinvent the wheel without fully understanding what made the wheel popular in the first place. Chalk it up to whatever you want - overbearing corporate influence; complete lack of direction from the project leads; turbulent development cycle; new and inexperienced developers; Frostbite being unfit for purpose; all of the above; or something else entirely, but at the end of the day, they failed to deliver a worthy successor to 3's MP.

A few months ago, I said that the introduction of the jetpacks wasn't inherently bad, but the fact that they used it's abilities as a cornerstone of map design was a problem. It meant that every character had to have access to the same movement abilities, leading to all the characters feeling similar in terms of movement. Combined with the absurd power recharge speeds and low power damage at launch, and now the vast majority of kits all played the same as well. Use power A, shoot stuff or jetpack around for 10-15s, use power A again, repeat. This was only compounded by the removal of heavy melees, since as you noted, even Krogan manage to blend in with the other races.

It wasn't fun. It was bland and mediocre at best, and while Platinum was actually enjoyable this time around (in my opinion), it wasn't enough to alleviate the monotony of actually playing the game. And I don't want to get into the whole loot pool thing as this is already turning out to be a longer post than I had intended.

I wasn't expecting another amazing experience to dump 1500+ hours into, but I definitely wasn't expecting to be left feeling cold and spent after 120. Even though my expectations weren't nearly as high as it seemed like other people's were (and I was under no illusions that the singleplayer would be any good), I'm still thoroughly disappointed with Andromeda, and no longer have any faith whatsoever in Bioware.

The most likely answer is money. They knew that such an announcement would have a devastating effect on sales, so they waited as long as they could before saying anything. A more charitable answer could be the idea that they spent weeks or months bouncing around, trying to find a way to make one DLC happen before ultimately giving up, but since we don't know what went on behind closed doors (and likely never will), I'm going to go ahead and put my chips on money.

Yes. Yes it is. This is the Twitter thread, not the Multiplayer section, so I'll keep it brief.

The grind doesn't come from unlocking stuff in the first place, the grind comes from trying to get upgrades for the stuff you actually like using. Every character now has 20 ranks associated with it, meaning you have to "collect" 20 cards for it. Every gun has three variants, each of which going up to rank 10, and they're situational at best - pointless filler at worst. Fortunately Bioware has made some changes to the way the unlocks work since the disastrous update where they added over 2,500 cards to the loot pool without any notice or warning (and out of all those cards, they only added one new character and one new gun + its three variants; the rest was all reskins of existing items), but that update by itself was enough for a lot of people to call it quits, myself included.

There's other grindy elements too outside of that. For one, they reduced XP gain by almost 75% compared to ME3, so instead of taking two hours of Gold to get a character from level one to level twenty, it now takes between six and seven hours. On top of that, since they did away with the class system in Andromeda, each character is leveled up individually - in ME3MP, XP was shared between all characters within a certain class (so if you took your Quarian Engineer to 20, every other engineer was also automatically 20 without you having to do anything). This means that it now takes the better part of 150 hours to get your entire repertoire of kits to max level instead of the eight-ish it took in ME3. And this is without getting into how character skill points are now gated by getting successive ranks of that character out of packs in the store, so you could have a level 20 character with only two or three trees maxed out. In ME3MP, skill points were not gated by character cards, and in fact character cards in 3 gave you a nice XP boost for that entire class when you got one out of a pack.

So to reiterate, the grind doesn't come from the initial hurdles of unlocking stuff as a new player. The grind comes from a combination of ludicrously inflated loot pools and a number of conscious decisions to regress from what people liked about ME3MP's progression and to double - or even triple - down on the things that people didn't like.