Mass Effect News Thread

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.