Mass Effect Andromeda Skepticism thread

Part of the problem here, as I see it, is that the complainers tend to dump on people for just saying the like the game or they prefer this or that about ME3 over ME1.  Comments like "and you can enjoy bad games, dude." are insulting and out of line because it implies that the gamer being addressed can't tell a good game from a bad one when in reality they can... they just like different things in a game than the person who is flinging the insult about; and when that person tries to assert that they are indeed entitled to like what they like... someone else cuts and dumps all over them as well.

Some of us genuinely hated the multi-tiered, repetitive dialogue wheels that just interrupted the flow of the game to stick a pacifier in the mouths of the players to make them believe they were imputing something... when in reality those dialogue choices resulted in Shepard saying the exact same thing or at best essentially the same thing in a slightly different tone and those choices ultimately had zero impact on the progression of the game itself.  In the meantime, they drastically slowed the gameplay and provided frequent immersion-breaking interruptions.  The multi-tagged "Investigate" options were another useless, useless way of making the player feel like they were inputting something.  Personally, I prefer to have an NPCs just give me the entire info dump in one chunk... instead of having to click on 3 or 4 options to "pry" the information out them... all for 10 or 20 XP.  I also don't need 4 different ways to tell a NPC I'm going to accept their simple fetch quest or a choice that makes me think I can turn it down when all it leads to is the NPC "forcing" the quest into my journal anyways (e.g. Hostile Takeover - ME1).  I also don't need 4 different ways to respond to a thank you from an NPC for having done that simple quest.

ME3 may have (and I repeat, may have) swung it a little far in the "simplified" direction... but in all likelihood adding in more dialogue choices would have not resulted in any more meaningful choices being added to the game.  Tags to manage actual choices were already being max'd out because Bioware was bringing forward so many choices from the previous two games (particularly from ME2 where any of the 12 squad mates could have lived or died and contingencies for any of those events had to be built into ME3.)

ME2 did probably strike the best balance for dialogue among the three games, but liking ME3 better in no way makes anyone a gamer idiot who can't tell a bad game from a good one.  I genuinely liked ME3 approach to the dialogue.  I did not feel that it really limited "my Shepard" and I still was able to make plenty of relevant choices throughout the game... and make every replay I've done of ME3 so far (and I've done quite a few of them) different from the previous ones.  I'm still unlocking dialogue I've not heard in any previous playthrough I've done... just by doing something in a different order or because I make a different choice earlier in the game.

Yes, I want more choices available to the player... I want more REALLY RELEVANT choices available to the player that make real in-game differences.  I don't want to waste my time clicking on dialogue "pseudo-choices" that are ultimately just pacifiers to make me think I'm doing something different when I'm actually not... and I have as much right to complain about dialogue wheels that are too much as people have to complain about autodialogue.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with your post. You have as much right to complain about too much irrelevant dialogue wheels as another about too much autodialogue.

Personally, I also didn't like a lot of irrelevant investigate options or too much dialogue wheels that expressed little to no effect. But I understand the concerns of others when they said Shepard went too far off the rails. 
For example, in the third game you were "forced" to be friends with a lot of your squadmates. You just didn't have the option to be mean to them anymore, while in the first two games, you could (especially the first, where you could be a prick to pretty much anyone). 
Say, Garrus: He is my favorite squadmate of all time, no question, I can't not like him. But there were people who thought he was forced down on us as best bros. And I can't disagree. While I don't see myself roleplaying as anything less than big time friends with him, I understand completely why people feel this way. It should not! It should be your decision whether to be friends with him, or hate him, or just use him as a meatshield. 
Liara, I'm not even gonna start.

Also, you can't deny that in a trilogy, where at first you have the power to build relationships in previous games the way you wanted, having them suddenly changed or forced down your throat in posterior games is a big letdown, frustrating and maybe infuriating.

You can be a complete heartless bastard/bitch in the first game and then your heart grows three times (like the Grinch) in the last one.
You are forced to care about the kid on Earth (hell, you know the Reapers are coming and there's gonna be immense death and destruction, but you start having nightmares about one kid you literally never met before, while you sent your squad to their deaths a hundred times and maybe lost your entire crew earlier).

You can literally doom the krogan, lie to your (possible) best mate Wrex, sacrifice the entire quarian race or the geth, see Earth and Palaven burning, but you are forced to have a nervous breakdown the moment Thessia falls to the Reapers.
Somehow you thought you were going to end the war there and destroy all the Reapers attacking the planet in one fell swoop if you knew what the catalyst was.
You are forced to be mean to Joker post mission (you can avoid talking to him, but you really should just have an option not to). You are forced to say you failed in your fight against Kai Leng, while you completely owned him in gameplay.

You destroy thresher maws, gunships, reapers, spectres, asari commandos, matriarchs, krogan battlemasters, Wrex (twice!), banshees, Shadow Brokers, your clones, an asteroid full of indoctrinated people single-handedly, without ever taking a hit, and suddenly you can't fire and destroy a gunship on Thessia (hell, you can kill about 4 harvesters that were trashing asari gunships literally minutes before your fight with Leng), and you are forced to "lose" that fight just for the sake of humanization of Shepard. Because people complained their protagonist was a robot to Bioware.

You want your Shepard to stumble, cry, have PTSD, be a human after all, that should be your choice. You want him/her to be a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine, it should've been your choice too. It really doesn't matter if it's realistic enough for some people, as they would argue one way or another, but if you're playing a character in an even remotely choice-based RPG elements game where you already defined him/her before, you must have your personalized experience. It should be YOUR experience, not what others tell you or think it should be. 

That is all to make my point: you should've never been FORCED to any of that, but you also should never NOT have those options, either. It was perfectly possible to accommodate this into ME3.

That's one way. The other is don't talk to him.

Do I sense a contradiction here?

I don't remember that mission being mandatory at all, Shepard can just choose to ignore it. He can even explicitly tell Hackett that the negotiation is a bad idea.

It will fail because the whole thing is a damn cop-out.

I suspect the game will have a hard time telling a meaningful story in the grand scheme of things, and then I'm not even talking about the lore problems they're creating.

I for one am greatly disappointed they're going in this direction.

I was waiting for my "ONE MORE STORY" about "the Shepard".

God fucking damn it.

As I recall, when you recruit Tali, you can't really be a "complete bitch" about it.  You can tell her you think she's not ready and she'll argue with you once and then you instantly capitulate.  That's not being a "complete bitch" in my book.  Later on, you can be somewhat critical of the Quarians and the geth; but again, it's way shy of being a complete bitch and there is no long lasting animosity as a result of the conversation.  Heck, you can even use those lines in ME1 and romance her in ME2 (if you're a MaleShep).

Ditto about the renegade lines with Pressly... they are not all that strong and Pressly doesn't hold a grudge over them.  Even the strongest renegade lines don't deter Garrus from "thanking" you for taking him aboard and he'll even warm up to you quite a bit and become quiite a renegade himself if you let him shoot Saleon; and Wrex will even warm up to you more if you talk renegade with him.

Conversely, I can think of nothing more "prickish" than "arranging" to have a squad mate die on a mission.

... and I still like ME3's system better.  Sure, certain lines in all the games could be more effective... but I like the simpler system (shorter dialogue wheels and more autodialogue) for things like "investigate" info dumps and picking up and delivering quests.  For one thing, it avoids the repetition of some things - like Nihlus telling us 2x in a single conversation that all our civilizations are based on Prothean tech or Juliana Baynam telling us where her daughter is 2x (on two different levels of that dialogue wheel)... or Shepard having to appear like a total idiot to the likes of Simon Atwell to find out more about the consequences of the asteroid falling into Terra Nova...i.e. the "What if it lands in the water?" line.

Well, now if you are arguing how the NPCs react to us being rude to them, that's another story, of that you will never have any control really.
And now you are commenting if the rudeness is strong or not, that's also another matter. And it was not my point.


The point is, at least you COULD say these lines. Not in ME3.

Read again.

Yeah, me neither. Who would really want them to fail, except out of misguided spite? I want them to make a great game. Because gaming is my hobby and I like playing great games.

Oh, have they introduced character customisation? Am I still stuck being an old gray haired witcher? More than one choice of voice? Choice of gender? More interesting weapon choices than a sword and a silver sword (admittedly I have used a lot of axes) Party companions? No? Then I guess it's still just average tier.

(*chuckles)
Read again what I posted. 

Agreed so do I