Mass Effect Legendary Edition is such an enormous missed opportunity

On this subject sometimes I legitimtley wonder why I love these games so much, all four of them. So many little and big things they do wrong and yet they are still very endearing and very awesome in their own way.

I tolerate a lot of this stuff for sake of its characters. It's the same reason why I don't allow the copypasta dungeons and obscenely low res NPC's of Dragon Age 2 to completely remove me from the game. 

Suspension of disbelief and its maintenance is the real work of art. When it shatters, you've lost your audience.

Art direction is the same level of deciding when a single bullet is lethal and when you can face tank so many that you could legally be considered 20% lead. I perfer the system introduced in ME2 were I can actually see the character models. That looks way better from a visual stand point then the hard suit armor of ME1. It isn't realistic but neither is so much of the game that my ability to suspend disbelief that is required for anything in the game to make sense applies naturally to this.

I'm not so sure of that. I think there were some people at Bio who were aware of problems like this (e.g. the one who wrote that entry) at least initially.

It's simply that pretty much all of the more rules based hard scifi concepts they started with were gradually overruled by dumber "someone who got paid a lot more money than me" corporate types, as L'Etoile put it, pandering to lowest common denominator tropes because that's easier to write for and matched higher's preferences more anyway.

AFAIK the fanbase at large never really asked for this and tended to overwhelmingly groan at the greater volume of obviously stupid nonsense that got added more and more as the series went on (e.g. breather masks, sexbots, cyborg ninjas, the endings).

Of course, the fanbase at this point now largely reflects the product, so I agree with you there. I simply see it more as a top down directed progression towards this point, rather than a bottom up one.

That'd be some straight up gangsta shit, right there, bro. Outta fucking Compton. The alliance colony. Talkin'bout some fly by shootin' shit. In mothah fuckin' space, yo. Shit, I can even hear the San Andreas theme playing.



Cruisin' the Terminus with your low ridin' Normandy, going pop pop pop, watching xenos drop, know what I'm sayin', ma' terran?
You'd bet this game would sell like hotcakes.

While this stuff should bother people pretty much all sci fi has weird hollywood pseudoscience or space magic. X-Wings and shuttle craft don't travel like that...try Vipers or Starfuries...but even then strike craft in sci fi don't make a lot of sense.

Does mass effect fields keeping air in make sense? No not really. Is it better they use actual helmets? Yes. But it also is kind of what it is. It bothers me when i think about it but in the grand scheme of things probably not that incongrous.

It wouldn't matter because your dumb ass already died from being frozen, boiled alive or any exposed areas bloating out and then exploding as the pressurized fluids in your body try to reach the low pressure zone that is the zero atmo around you (at least you'll probably be dead long before you explode).

masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Codex/Weapons,_Armor_and_Equipment#Kinetic_Barriers_.28.22Shields.22.29_2

The shielding afforded by kinetic barriers does not protect against extremes of temperature, toxins, or radiation.

They just ignored this because Casey thought that was way cooler than lame spacesuits and didn't even bother lampshading it. 

The whole "it's all just a contrivance based on a magic rock" defense doesn't work to defend this shitty writing. You still have to follow the rules you established, or at least lampshade why they don't apply here. This applies to any rules based work of fiction not just science fiction. Aragorn can't pull out a red lightsaber and start flinging lightning bolts at Orcs because some shitty new writer thinks Star Wars is cool. He's in Middle Earth.

But we lost this battle 10 years ago and now I gotta listen to an annoying robot tell me that -30c (not even all that cold by Earth standards) will freeze me to death in my hardsuit within a couple minutes while peepee in her purple belly button barney costume and plastic mouth covering is just fine.

The Andromeda helmet was poorly designed so that it could setup a death. That's because the Initiative decided to put safety at the bottom of the priority list. Then again that seems a common thing in the game.

Raise your eyes as far as you can. That's as far as what the glass/plastic part of the helmet needed to go. No reason for it to go all the way to the crown of the head. Look at today. All different jobs/careers that require the use of a helmet have it down close to eyebrow level. The only exception is astronauts, and deep sea divers. Might be others I'm forgetting.

As far as being able to see a characters face when they wear a helmet. Why? Does seeing their face mean/add something? As long as the helmet keeps the head protected and is sealed, it wouldn't bother me if I see their face or not.

The problem with the breather masks isn't just that they're not...lore friendly, to put it that way. It's that they're also visually unappealing, to put it mildly. Besides, a toggle options for helmets fix the issues for those that prefer to look at their characters.

Or, an even better solution would be to give some options in regards of the helmets/breathers for each squadmate. But given the scarcity of outfits and armours for squadmates in the series (and the absence of it in MEA), I never thought this approach was something Bioware seriously considered.