Adressing the 600 Pound Gorilla in the room

The most enjoyable thing in DAI for me was Trespasser, when they finally threw out their worthless open-world and focused on qualitive story delivery. Unfortunately after Skyrim's success EA saw W3 success so they aren't going to give up on open-world that easily. I just hope combat and story will compensate me for the time spent on Nomad driving and lithium gathering.

Honestly, the only reason I'd give ME1 an edge is because of its setting, but not in the way it executes its story or characters, which I'd say DA:O is vastly superior. But then, I feel that in general, Dragon Age has always been superior in terms of character focus over Mass Effect, whereas Mass Effect has generally been technically superior in terms of actual gameplay. 

It wasn't just EA seeing Skyrim's success.  It was also the people on the boards demanding that BioWare make Dragon Age more like Skyrim "because Bethesda's way is the only way to make a "true" RPG" and all the other things that "must" be in the game.  They removed all direction from making Dragon Age: inquisition to try and cram in everything people wanted while forgetting the golden rule of "people don't know what they want".

So perhaps one of the more common worries about Mass Effect Andromeda is that its going to be 'Dragon Age in space' or 'as wide as an ocean, and deep as a puddle.'  The idea being that the series going larger, and more open world, will cause the game to have worse content in terms of side quests, story quests, and over all deep philosophical 'fun.'  

But, I am not as concerned.  Why?  Because of BioWare's history.  

Dipping back very deeply into the time tunnel, way back in 2007 BioWare released a little known RPG known as Mass Effect.  And it was a pretty good game which started an amazing franchize.  But Mass Effect 1 tried to do two new things which BioWare had never done before.  1. Introduce a voiced protagonist for an RPG. And 2. Introduce shooting mechanics into a BioWare RPG.  And...well the first one was lacklustre, many of the replies did not match the dialog prompt, and felt disjointed from the tone to where...even now...I often look at the sceen like...what just happened?  And, the shooting mechanics...were quite bad and clunky at times.  But, this was the first time BioWare had ever done gameplay like this before.  Then when Mass Effect 2 came out both aspects of ME 1were vastly improved.  The dialog prompts had weight and meaning, they usually matched what was on the wheel, and the combat was smooth, fluid, responsive, and the enemies were far better designed.  Then in ME 3...the role playing did take a step back admittedly, but then the gameplay was a further improvement of the system set up in 2 and 1.  

So, fast forward into 2014 and BioWare released Dragon Age Inquisition.  And I did not hate the side quests as much as some people would, there were quite a few of them I enjoyed quite a bit in fact, but I also know it was not the best and had weird fetch questing and an unhealthy obsession with ring collection.  But this was BioWare's first RPG to go more or less open world.  And it also went through its fair share of development issues, they were learning how to do a lot of new things.  So, I think, MEA will really, really, really, be an improvement on the basic formulae.  

More evidence? Because BW has been here before.  They have released games with amazing side content (Origins, ME 2), and the rest of their games have still had pretty good side quests.  Only Inquisition had so-so story telling from the side quest perspective, and even then there were a few gems.  And plus, they do tend to look at other people's gameplay a lot.  Which is why I have said numerious times I feel Witcher 3 will be a lot more of an indicator on how ME A will do then DA I.  

Thoughts?

Oh, the countless dialogue options that led to the same line in ME1 was also deep and varied, and the Fallout 4 precursor of "1- Of course, I will. 2- Understood 3- Sighs, fine " types of one liners that also led to the exact same response.

No it wasn't.

See what I did there?