If ME:A really is an exploration game with a linear story on the side a la Inquisition...

God, I hope not. I have tried to rerun DAI multiple times and I can't get back into it because of its poor story. Comparatively, I am on my 3rd death march playthrough on Witcher 3. It REALLY didn't help that DAI had atrocious PC loading times for even my hefty rig so it really took away from the exploration bit.

But I do think, as BW has stated, they have learned lessons from DAI and I do think that they will fix their issues and make an even better game for us to moan about.


It's the circle of life, simba.

They said they're aware of them. Don't forget ME:A was well into development while DA:I shipped and people discovered things to criticise. If ME:A was designed from Inquisition's template from the outset, addressing the issue of DA:I's design will mean BioWare's had to retract or re-design aspects of Andromeda that were decided before in the last year or so.

I wished this time BW modeled their game after The Witcher 3! Because they keep taking from other games (those that "inspire" them this time) the wrong parts. DAI was modeled after Skyrim. Like someone looked at the game and said: hey, we are making every single side quest with a separate cut-scene, heavy animation and carefully selected voice acting. Yet, Bethesda gets away with one-VA-for-all, un-animated NPC interaction (and atrocious animation in general) and no game-plot to speak of. And sells it's games much better than we do! Let's do the same.
Completely ignoring the fact, that Bethesda games are appreciated for different elements - world building with surviving elements and modding capability. The rest is only tolerated and often criticized.

If this time "inspirational game" was W3 - there is a chance BW can take the best of two worlds.

if I had to be honest I like the game more than I tend to vocalize. I don't think DAI's format is doomed to fail I just think placing ME:A in the same format is a warning sign that this may fall in the same traps as that game did. If they actually give you a payoff for building a future for humanity vs doing a bad job of it then they've already found a meaningful way to use the format.

I like DAI,

Yeah, but do you love it?  Would you call DAI a masterpiece given the way they integrated the story into the openworld, the ratio of fetch quests to quests with interesting story, or the amount of resource gathering required?  Would you really want MEA to be reduced to DAI in space?  Don't get me wrong, I liked DAI too, but I didn't love it.  And I certainly wouldn't want a cut and paste of it in MEA.

This is what DA:I was supposed to be to according to developers, and there are shimmers of that concept in it, but they overshot in many ways. The story was almost beside the player-freedom. The narrative framework was made so everything even dumb side-objectives somehow helped build the inquisition, but they never made the "Building the inquisition" and Skyhold pay off, though I'm sure that was the original intent to do so but maybe it got cut since David said there were big cuts made. But it was also in other areas where the narrative structure was bonkers. The story peaks in act 1 dramatically because it's the closest we get to a high-stakes, high-action point where the Inquisitior is really struggling and your inquisition is in danger of falling apart when you lose your grounding temporarily. And then there was the Breach. I thought the entire game would be hinging on closing this thing, but we put it into slumber early on and essentially hinder it from threatening us further and then replacing it with Coryphennus was kind of a downgrade.

Aside from those things the narrative was also bonkers because main story focused too heavily on combat and levels and missions despite telling us the Inquisition also had diplomacy and spying. Where was that in the gameplay other than making cookie-clicker decisions on the War Table? Where was those ME1/DA:O moments where you dialogued your way out of a combat-encounter or persuaded a bad guy to drop their blade? I think many said Jaws of Hakkon showed most closely how the game was supposed to work at large, as well as the cut pre-alpha demo from 2013 that showcased meaningful choices and better environmental storytelling, but I still think it lacked those BioWare moments of using the dialogue in a meaningful way mechanically.

For ME:A I just want the DA:I like open-world design where the story is more freely explorable to work so that building settlements on planets feels like it matters and in the final mission you're not railroaded into a pre-constructed story but instead it checks for the colonization effort flags in the game's variables; have you made 10 human colonies? Did you succesfully negotiate with the Asari Ark to make a multi-species colony on Planet X? Did you kill all thresher maws on Planet Y? And then those things actually show in the final mission that they matter in some way. Maybe the colonies you made help persuade some Kett bad guy that they can join you to defeat some looming Remnant threat or maybe allow you to inhabit a certain planet if you share it with them "now that all thresher maws are gone from that area" or something. IDK, just something more than "Launch final mission: Beat bad guy by default, credits". I did like the scenario of which Dragon you had with you created alterations in DA:I though. I just wanted something more than simply showing up in a random location where the bad guy is and then start fighting.

Sometimes the story in DA:I was really loosely stitched together because it had to respect the non-linear exploration too much. The central plot was segregated and had a lot of really vague dialogue, because they had trouble accounting for the loose timeline i guess. There were also timeline problems where the inhabitants of The Hinterlands would keep going "Oh, look at the green rift in the sky!" but the Breach was nothing but a little blub after having closed it, and the dialogue was meant to reflect the threat of it when it poured out demons all the time. I also disliked how the main missions made time-skips. You launched a mission and show up right in the thick of the action most of the time with your Inquisition forces. I guess they tried to avoid the "repetitive environments" thing from DA2 but I wanted to go up the mountain a second time before closing the Breach instead of pressing X to close the Breach in a cutscene.

Then there were also a lot of scenes that were never properly made, like discovering Conner in the Mages mission where you open a door and they go "NOOO, CONNOR!" and there's nothing in the room at all. And all the meat of the story had been written in text in various notes. It's as if they had already made the cutscenes, sometimes with placeholder dialogue and then had to account for all the unexplained things in text they had made in the final stages of production rather than iterating on the cutscenes. The pivot in the non-cinematic camera was unprofessionally moved next to nothing so turning the camera around put the characters completely out of focus, and the same when closing rifts; both main mechanics you'll see for several hours in total.

There were just so many things in DA:I and too many of them didn't really live up to the ambition BioWare had set for them because there was simply too much I think, so hopefully Montreal with a bit of help from Edmonton and Austin and probably even more writers do what DA:I couldn't with Andromeda. I just really hope that happens so we can get a game that's actually great and not kinda so-so.

TL;DR: Listing things that didn't work in DA:I that will probably return, and hopefully work as they should, in ME:A

DAI was released in November 2014. The problems with the open worlds were clear from the start and were criticized for months. Even if they need some time to take them into account, it'd leave more then a year and half, at this day, to improve on DAI.
That's without considering that DAI was their first open world approach for a while, with a new engine never used to make rpgs, and with oldgen limiting the development. They might've know already the open world they created wasn't perfect and decided to improve in Andromeda even before the game came out.

Oh I've put a stupid amount of time into DAI for sure lol. I complain or bring stuff up because I love BioWare games, simple as that.

I think DAI also had a hell of a hurtle of designing for 'the new gen' (XB1/PS4) and spending a bunch of time getting Battlefields engine to play nice with an RPG. Then realizing, and hitting the hard reality that 360/PS3 just couldn't handle a bunch of there ideas (that's development for you -.-) and it just cuts into things.

So many things they had in mind that ultimately got cut just because it couldn't work on the old systems. Shit that happened with Mass Effect 1. Anyone remember how armor was supposed to get damaged/dirty during missions and clean up when you got back to the Normandy (or the option to clean it on there)? Cause I sure as hell do, and I remember them sadly telling us they couldn't do it - not enough RAM.

Hell the only reason you can't stow weapons in ME2/3 is because they added more animations in to combat (like jumping over cover) and it ultimately mean they didn't have room in the RAM (again, damn you ram, damn yooouu!) for the non-combat walk/run animations on missions lol. Ahh man so much of MEA feels like they looked back at the original ME1 dev documents and where just like 'man we can actually do all this shit now'.

We got armor getting dirty finally guys. Dirty armor is happening, it's just taken 10 years.

Whenever the Austin team is borrowed I get worried. I think they're terrible from having played the Descent DLC. Everything they make is literally MMO-design and the story of Descent was a lore-nerdery piece of rubbish where none of the Inquisition characters had any personality. All the new enemies had this static feel to them when you stunlocked them unlike the main game - it just felt like WoW or SWTOR to me.

 I doubt they'd affect the game that much this time since they're not in full control of the game/dlc. 

Nah that was just ME1. ME2 and 3 both forced you to keep weapons out the entire time on missions. Anytime you went into a non-hostile area it had to 'load' (even if it was just a fade to black) to put the weapons away. ME2 was when they introduced A LOT of new stuff that caused that issue. Such as actual manually snapping to cover. I think they had cover to cover transition if you where close enough... I forget if they actually did or not.

Anyway pretty sure they confirmed awhile ago on twitter we can stow weapons again like ME1. They got plenty of RAM now, they're not tied down to 512 anymore. Sides, hard to do an open world game if you can't walk around in explode more and then go into combat ready with drawing weapons cause a fight broke out. That'd just be weird.

edit: Hah just remembered a silly example of ME2 'weapon out' mission. There was a side mission where you found some long lost ship that had crashed via scanning a planet. So you go down to find something, I think you go in solo to just explore the ship. Literally no enemies, no combat, but you still where forced to have your weapon out the whole time because the cover system only worked with the combat animations lol. So your full combat ready go mode, 'climbing' the ship by going into cover, then climbing over heh.

Ahh man this is just one of many reason im looking forward to the dynamic cover system. Having to snap into cover just to climb something is dumb.