Fears for ME5. Obviously there may be spoilers!

Hey, don’t go all height-challenging on me.

Ice Dwarf no!  Planet Yes!

Once a planet, always a planet, I say.

And who gave those doofus’s at NASA any say, anyway…….

I can see where you coming from. Keep in mind that both Milk Way and Andromeda to not rely on Shepard or Ryder Twins

Sure, but in Andromeda we didn't get two different things. We got the same thing twice. The paragon/renegade part was important as it delved into a ethos which would make Shepards feel different based on how you played them. Outside chit chat in the trilogy you almost always got 2 different choices through the renegade/paragon divide even if they weren't interrupts or hard coded red/blue. Ryder never felt different. I'm pretty sure they even stated that as a design goal, Ryder was more defined.

I can get behind the approval score. In fact that is one thing that Bio did very well in DA. Plus it'd get rid of that stupid BFF default setting that squadmates had in the MET. That got annoying very fast.

It has no depth.  Choosing a mood has far less depth than a ethos.

I'm not too fond of the Paragon/Renegade system because more often than not, I end up making decisions to fill the meter because I'm worried I won't have enough to make certain decisions. In Legendary, I used a cheat to fill both meters so I'd have free range to roleplay however I liked and it was so much better that I decided I'm going to do that evety time from now on. Shepard ends up feeling more like a person in the way she thinks and the way she reacts to each situations. It also better reflects her character and profession since she was an N7 Infiltrator so sometimes the mission calls for force, sometimes it calls for diplomacy and sometimes it calls for terrible choices. It makes for much deeper roleplaying experience (and character development) when I actually have to think about what decision my character would make and why instead of feeling pressured to nearly always lean my roleplaying to one way for arbitrary reasons.

I don't mind the idea of the Paragon/Renegade system, but the meter filling is just not fun. It'd much rather have it be something like a reputation that is based on my actions - which could also explain why it unlocks certain dialogue options since you're playing into your reputation: for example, Tela Vasir believes you would be willing to shoot the hostage because your reputation might imply you don't care about the value of life. If you haven't made that kind of decisions (that she would know about) you either can't make that bluff or your bluff just fails.

The reputation doesn't need to actually reflect your motivation of your actions because people make their own assumptions. If you let the council die because you believed it was important to focus on Sovereign, there are people who assume you did because you don't value alien life or because you were politically motivated. I liked that. It made sense. Throughout the games, Shepard gets this kind of thing from both aliens and humanity.

I am dreading a lack of proper science fiction writers, though to be honest BioWare has had that problem since ME 2 with the departure of Chris L'Etoile and the rise of 'Rule of Cool' Mac Walters.

With each subsequent game, DLC, animation, novel, and comic the setting has steadily moved away from exploration of ideas present in more mature sci-fi literature to MCU-post ENDGAME levels of wackiness.

Look at how a character like Legion (Chris L'Etoile) was written, exploring the perspectives of how a machine collective intelligence would view the universe versus how Peebee, Liam, or Jaal (IDK who wrote them) were written, with characters that could be summed up in one word as "plucky", "idiot", and "stoic" respectively.

There's no desire to flesh out the setting with a basic sense of scientific background from the current writers that I have seen. Rather its all about jumping from one bombastic scene to the next with jokes and quips thrown in as filler.

If I could be in charge of hiring writers for the series moving forward I would want:


Callum Stephen Diggle - He's the mind behind Humanity Lost, an amazing graphic novel with very unique alien societies.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Author of Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory novels that explore AI, aliens, and genetic modification in-depth.

Peter Watts - Author of Blindsight a sci-fi novel that explores themes of truly 'alien' life and the nature of intelligence versus consciousness.

Callum and Peter I would have as major writers, with Adrian as lead writer/director.

Mac can go back to character writing, as it's obvious that is were his skillset is best suited.

Those are prett ymuch mine as well.

I've started reading the first page of threads so many times and wondered how this user called "Deleted" seems to be everywhere. I haven't gone on a liking spree though before realising my mistake. I think the clickable area of the last word in the title and the last page number are too close together if the title happens to be long enough to be right above the last page number. It's a user interface design issue and totally not a sign of senility or anything.

Hopefully the new lead writer can maintain a cohesive science fiction story.  

My only fear is that it will have the same character designs/animations as Andromeda.