"Even more content", "BIGGER and BETTER"; Do BioWare's budget increase per game or are they mismanag

I don't. I loved DAI AND ME3 and I have never felt let down by a Bioware game. There is no point on raining on other people's parade just because you're sceptic.

If Iakus has been saying the same stuff for four years and yet BSN keeps rewarding him with attention, why would you expect him to change? With some commenters, the only winning move is not to play.

Honestly, the worst stuff I could say that I played from BioWare was some of the various stuff expanding Dragon Age Origins, namely Golems of Amgharherawgh and Awakening (I still think it's kind of terrible, and I do it only as a completionist formality).

The worst thing I played was ME3, and I guess it's decent but I was basically half-irritated from start to finish due to the downgrade in game-design from ME2 with the lack of interactivity and dumber dialogue, the artsy tryhard crap. It has good moments and I love the graphics and the atmosphere, but fuck. It's still the reason I can't be positive when I think of BioWare. DA:I was terrible story-wise and also had some bad game design due to the questing, but I really enjoyed the immense improvements to interactive dialogue and player agency -- I mainly just wish the main story would've been more interesting. It would've fixed half my issues with it, and I actually hope they carry over the improvements to the conversation wheel into ME:A, like being able to press R3 during gameplay and respond in the middle of combat and stuff.

Even during Tuchanka which I agree is the best part of ME3, I had issues both with the writing and the level-design. ME1 and 2 had moments when I was just sucked into the game's universe and kept playing because I felt drawn to do it and couldn't stop. In ME3 I felt like I was forcing my way through something I didn't even like just because I wanted to see how Mass Effect would end (and not just the ending itself but the whole final act of the trilogy)

I introduced Mass Effect 1 to a friend of mine who had an XB360 because i had just heard from hearesay it was great without having bothered about it myself. He started texting me about how good it was and was gushing super hard so when ME2 came out which did pull me in just when I saw the gameplay on GameTrailers, I took the plunge with ME1 and I did not understand why the plot was supposedly as good as my friend said it was... and I still feel that way. The final moments like the Ashley/Kaidan moments on Virmire or meeting Sovereign and Vigil are 10/10 amazing for me, but everything between that is kinda amateur, including Saren even if he's more substantial than TIM... but ME1 excelled for me in atmosphere and side-content. Everything was just evoking imagination about its world and the feeling of "space". When I said to my friend I liked ME1 more than the others for everything BUT the story he was like "waaat?".

ME2 was much more all around what I needed. I didn't really think too much about the main story being messy for some reason. I liked the simple "collectors bad, stop them" plot, though today I concede that all the things they set up with Cerberus, Lazarus, the Collector plot etc. was just a total offshoot and a waste of time, but for me it worked and still does. I love the world building in 2 and the characters. I just love the pacing, really good pacing IMHO

ME3 I like because like ME1 it feels like it has an arc again with really major turning points between the beginning and ending, but a lot of them were forced and cringy and most in between outside of Tuchanka was just mediocre and lacking in creativity in my opinion.

The reason I hold back my hype when Walters claims Andromeda is bigger by its numbers in how much dialogue there is, it's because he bragged about the same thing for ME3 but it felt like way less to me becuase all of it was just ambient dialogue or squaddies' "comment" style conversation with zero interactivity. Also it's just poorly designed when you go around the citadel and the subtitles overlap because there's 8 different NPCs telling stories and then you get mission objectives and are like "Wow, what, wait, what? What did I trigger?"

The class individualism is also why I considered ME2's "streamlining" of the RPG a big upgrade. I don't need miniscule stat changes just so it's worthy of being called an RPG if it barely means anything, and no matter what you do you break ME1 after level 24 anyway. Giving us stat-boosting upgrades that eventually turn into mechanically altering choices is great and IMHO more RPG than the other concept. RPG to me means partaking in the shaping of a game as a player where you define the role of your character. For Mass Effect it usually only boils down to characterization but not so much the role but giving me the option to make my biotic protagonist capable of making double-pulls vs heavy pulls is much more "roleplaying" to me than defining whether I have +2 or -2 in some stat that barely means anything.

The only thing I disliked was how they removed the stats for charm and intimidate. I actually liked how ME1 had a metagame for para/gade because you know picking the light blue option is always "the best" outcome, so having to actively choose to invest level-up points in unlocking those choices makes much more sense to me from a gameplay standpoint than simply increasing it automatically over the course of the game. I disliked how ME2 and ME3 didn't present the normal conversational choices as valid choices often enough

In Andromeda I hope there's still the opportunistic "good outcome" to certain scenarios, I just hope it rewards players that really put effort into their build like how DA:I had you invest perks into learning all conversation options related to specific subjects for example -- I'd still like the unlocking mechanic to be more sophisticated than that though, which is why I prefer ME1's way. Talking more good guy leads to "good guy points" leading to being able to spend level points on becoming the ultimate good guy. I also like all of this way more than the forced "Gray morality - lesser of two evils" crap. Even when there are two lesser evils I find games with such choices often fail to represent one of those evils as equally valid. If one is less evil, I'll just pick the lesser evil, but is that really worth cutting my dialogue choice down to that dilemma exclusively?

Hopefully crewmembers get more dialogue as well

I came into the series at ME2 and I honestly have nothing bad to say about Bioware. I felt the dialogue in both games was as natural and as realistic as it possibly could have been. In the majority of the scenarios when the characters would speak, I could honestly see it going down in that fashion. In other words very rarely did i encounter moments where I would say "aw c'mon he/she would not have done or said that".

The games made me VERY mindful of what to say and made me wonder how the other character might react, but not in a cheap way....first time i played ME2 and that suicide mission? ...I was praying that I picked the right teammates for the mission and I genuinely did not want any of the characters to die. That is great character design and development. Every character felt unique and not a generic character with just a different skin applied.

I know ME3 still gets heat to this day, but that game was great from start to finish as well and there was sense of dread urgency throughout that entire experience. Some may not have liked the ending, but the journey between ME2 and 3 outshined just about every other game (story-wise) from the ps3/360 era....i just don't see how some can condemn the entire game of ME3 when everything crafted up to the ending was done so well....they even created an extended cut to clarify some other aspects of the game, but the ending shouldn't be the deal breaker when everything else in the game was implemented with high production values.

The problem is the destination has to have a proper pay-off. The destination is so piss-poor it makes the entire journey meaningless.  The ending of Mass Effect 3 is the equivalent of having a good meal, only to find out in the end you get food poisoning.

Ah, it's been so long since I read the books or watched the movies. I'm referring to this tumblr quote that was intentionally riffing on the line and was attributed to Rickman. My bad, I mixed them up in my misremembering

www.buzzfeed.com/eleanorbate/sorry-alan-rickman-didnt-say-that-quote-about-reading-harry?utm_term=.mlrqGVEKo#.cpDAVRQoD