You can't change companion weapons or armour

But mircromanaging teammate is not really what made mass effect a RPG.
I do love customization, but I hate to lose time for something that is meaningless, in the case of the squadmate gear it is for me anti-immersive to take decision for them (and so anti-rpg) and a break of pace.

Let's take an example : Witcher 3
Witcher 3 had a ton of personnalization for your character : sword, armor, potion, elixir and bombs. You can even pimp your horse because he has a big role in an open world rpg. I took a long time in the late game creating a good build. What talent fit my playstyle ? But when it comes you to the crossbow it is meaning less. The crossbow (and it is not an image) does not do even 1% of the damage of your blades. Underwater they one shot everything, in normal combat they can put a flying monster down and that is all. Your crossbow just need to do at least 1 damage to do the trick, so having it doing 25 or 50 damage does not change the fact your blade can do 10 000 damage.
So you can have multiple crossbow, bolt with special effect like explosion or bleeding (the only useful, and gamebreaking one). But ultimately your crossbow always shoot the same way, and always do no damage at all, you even have 4 useless talent upgrading your crossbow. For those who doubt me just look on youtube the achievement requiring you to kill 15 enemy with a shot in the head...pure pleasure, just hit opponent until they have 5% life, then go somewhere they can't reach you and shot at their head multiples times.
If i'm saying that it is because you can add as much customization as you want in a RPG, but if it remains meaningless then why bother ?
Would have witcher been more fun if you could choose Yennefer and Triss Gear ? Would it have been less fun without the crossbow customization ?

That is why I did not like customization of squadmate, they do not do much things, and changing constantly their equipment for small result was really breaking the pace of the game. At least in DA games your teammate can be as strong as your character, so gear them up is important. but overall taking control of a character that is not mine is really breaking the immersion and an anti-rpg thing for that reason.
Choosing the gear for my own character is a very basic thing to do. After all I should know what is the best gear that match my ability. But shouldn't NPC be able to do the same thing ? Do I really have to tell Garrus that the black widow i just bought is a good weapon, isn't he an expert on that matter ? If he is more confortable with another sniper rifle shouldn't he take the one he is the most confortable with ? I don't control their answer, motivation and decision, but i should choose what gear is the best for them ? How is that a RPG thing ? A tactical one sure, but clearly not a RPG thing.
Having a conversation option where a squadmate explain me why he is using that particular weapon for whatever reason : proficiency, recoil, feels is way more a RPG thing that having an entire system based on "No Garrus, take that weapon, you don't know anything about weapon and I guarante you it will improve your DPS by 7% even if you never use that weapon before".
Having multiples armors is another issue.

I think this statement is unfair. Not all RPGs have micromanaging or customisation of squadmates and for those that do it is possible to like a game even if a part of it annoys you. I've never been a big fan of inventory management, DA2, ME2 & ME3 were great for me cos I didn't have to spend ages comparing pants or putting characters in ugly armour cos it was the only way they'd survive a fight, but that doesn't mean I hated DA:O, ME1 or DA:I, it just meant that these games had a bit in them that I didn't like too much and that affected my enjoyment slightly. 

As you say, I don't need to enjoy 100% of everything in a game but that doesn't mean I can't criticise that parts I don't like.

And what is wrong with games being more accessible? Should certain genres of games be secret clubs that only people with intimate knowledge of the past 20 years of that genre be able to play? I played Baldurs Gate years after it came out and it was almost incompressible to me in the beginning because I didn't know about the DnD system it was based off.  Should all games come with such a large barrier to entry that those who over come it can beat our chests and say how awesome we are because we were able to decipher the levelling system?

Also as a heads up Jim Sterling gave BOTW a 7 so it's no longer the highest rated game on Metacritic, Zelda fans responded by DDOSing his site, so maybe the fact that it's a Zelda game that people had to pay €400 to play (switch console plus game) helped people overlook some of it's flaws. And it does have flaws, for me it's degradable weapon system is far more annoying than not being able to customise how squadmates look in Mass Effect. 

Good.

Good idea, next let's remove combat from RPGs, it's such an outdated feature pressing buttons for repetitive animations to kill a generic monster.

That's not what he said, and I'm not sure why you are feeling so hostile.

She suggested that you could have the option to skip those parts if you were just there for the story. She didn't want the combat to be eliminated completely, just a way to not participate in it. Its an Interesting concept, and making your game more accessible is not necessarily a bad thing, but there has to be some structure to what you are developing and presenting. Personally i would never play an RPG that didn't have a proper combat system, and fun combat to take part in. Which is why i am on the fence when it comes to Torment Tides of Numenera.

The question is - If you could play Andromeda in a story mode that just advanced the plot with pure dialogue and no fighting, and it was optional, would that be a bad thing? Then again i am one of those crazy people that think the Souls series should have a casual difficulty option so that more people would dare to play them. Then the Souls fans would stop screaming "git gud" all the time. 

There’s a polish movie called Miś (“Bear”, 1980). It’s a cult classic in Poland because it’s a display of the absurdities endured by polish people during the Polish People’s Republic period. I don’t like it that much because it’s more of a loosely tied bunch of comedy skits rather than a coherent movie, but there’s a scene in the beginning and at the end that I really cherish.

In the beginning of the movie an episodic character has a daughter. When asked about the name he intends to give her, he chews on his tongue for a while and then hesitantly says that he likes a certain word that he wants to use as her name. The word is ‘tradition’.

When the movie nears it’s end, we see an old-timer looking at the man with his infant daughter. The old man says something along these lines to the father (translating on the fly):
“- She cannot be called this way: ‘Tradition’!
- Why not?
- Why not, you ask? Because you cannot call anything ‘tradition’. You cannot enact it with a special resolution. Who thinks otherwise shines like a blown out candle on a Sun’s court. Tradition is an oak which has grown for a millennium. Let no one compare a little sprout with that oak. Tradition is a fortified wall of our history, it’s the Christmas carol, it’s the Christmas Supper. It’s people singing, it’s our fathers’ speech, it’s our history that cannot change. And all of this that is new, it’s our daily reality in which we live.”

I believe a similar argument can be made for the word ‘iconic’. By now it really makes me both laugh and die a little inside when I see this word used by BioWare employees to cover for the blatant lack of features in Mass Effect: Andromeda. You cannot customize your companions to preserve ‘their iconic look’. You cannot even turn helmets off and on in Multiplayer, to preserve the ‘iconic look’. Peebee will always have her Hamburglar face paint, because it’s ‘a part of her iconic look’. And now we learn that our companions will not EVER (well, save for the cutscenes that belong to ‘iconic’ Avenger rifle and iconic Reverse Carnifex, of course!) change weapons and their damage will just scale with their level. Coupled with the dumb companion AI (that makes them lie and have awkward seizures for better part of the combat) and their main role as a combo setup/discharge machines one might ask why they even bothered with those characters being a part of your team rather than just be there in predefined setups during the course of the missions (it’s kind of the case for Loyalty missions anyway). Seems to me they’re there to display their iconic, immutable looks.

But ‘iconic’ is a status that is earned, not proclaimed. BioWare cannot make anything ‘iconic’. It’s up to the audience to decide what is iconic and what is not.

Let’s imagine for a minute that we’re on the set of first Star Wars. The proud costume design team spent months on creating Darth Vader mask, with a huge, elephant-like trunk in the middle of it. Suddenly someone (let’s say, an assistant) comes up to George Lucas and says ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea George! What if the mask was more like a skull with a triangular breather instead of this 5-foot long trunk? Wouldn’t it look better?’. Now let’s imagine that George Lucas becomes red on his face and angrily yells “Are you out of your mind? Darth Vader is an ICONIC character, you cannot just change this design! Get out of my face and never come back on this set.”

Of course this scenario is absurd, because we’re on an imaginary set of the first movie. Nobody in the world knows Darth Vader yet, and the shape of his visage is not set in stone and deeply ingrained in the pop-culture. Nobody knows the dark secret of his fatherhood over Luke that is yet to be invented. Right now he is just one of the characters with a blank slate and nobody can predict if he will gain any popularity at all and if audiences will want to see more of this character in theoretical future installments.

If, however the same assistant came up to Richard Donner about a year later and said “Listen, Richard, I know that this Superman outfit has a history, but wouldn’t you think it would be a little bit better to have it in purple? And maybe with a giant “8” instead of an “S”, so he looks more like a magic 8-ball and everything checks out.” the ‘iconic’ argument would have some footing, just as the decision to fire our fictional late 70’s assistant.

The same goes for video games. There are a lot of iconic designs in the industry, including BioWare titles. But they aren’t iconic when they’re fresh out of the shop or even before that. They earn iconic status by being parts of successful products or even a series of them, and by being distinguishable enough to be recognized the very moment you see them.

When we’re talking cRPG games - and ME:A still will (I guess) reap all the industry RPGOTY awards that belong to AAA devs - we’re talking a realm which always was a harbor to a motherload of content when we think of character designs, weapons, pieces of armor, etc. Cutting features and mechanics that are at the core of the genre and then shielding yourself with preserving ‘iconic’ designs is absurd, because there isn’t an iconography yet in place. Let’s stop pretending it is not anything other than cutting corners and content wherever possible. With less companion armor sets (total of 6!) there’s less assets to be produced (just one Krogan armor to model for Drack, same for Jaal, etc). With less companion weapons to be aligned with companion models it’s just less work for the lousy animators that apparently don’t know how Carnifex looks like and which end is the front. ME:A doesn’t have anything iconic yet to preserve. Becoming an icon takes time and effort that I just cannot see in decisions like dumbing down team mechanics to the point of me questioning the validity of it’s existance.

I’ve written before that I sometimes feel like this game is designed with cosplayers rather than players in mind. From the viewpoint of cosplayers (that I don’t intend to trash talk because it really takes a lot of time and effort to pull it off) all of this makes sense. There’s only one proper way of doing the character and they can master it. But as a player I just cannot see anything other than removing gameplay mechanics, and it hurts even more because those (customizing team) are probably one of the only features with any relationship to strategic thinking left. It’s also painful to see the ‘iconic’ answer being flaunted left and right when it’s ultimately not true when it comes to BioWare games. Their characters always had their most popular designs deeply ingrained in the general consciousness of their playerbase. Wrex wears red armor, even if he could wear different types of it in ME1. Everyone has pretty much the same picture of Bastila Shan in mind even if she could use different robes or colors of lightsaber in KOTOR. The list could go on.

Please, BioWare, stop using this word. It does not mean what you think it means. The audiences will decide if Cora and Liam have iconic designs (in my opinion they don’t). Right now the only iconic thing I can see is your usage of the word ‘iconic’ to cover for what I recognize, with sadness, as a lack of effort.

I think QQ posts on BSN are iconic.

I don't share that idea, but her suggestion was to have the option to skip for those interested only in the story part, not cutting the combat completely. 

OP, when making a long post full of drivel that doesn't get to the point, always add a TLDR.

Also, there is already a thread to whine about not being able to customize the squadmate looks, even if its been like that since 2010. You would think anyone super annoyed by it would have stopped buying BioWare games 7 years ago, but it doesn't seems to be the case.

On top of that, I you don't role-play squadmates, so I don't think customizing squadmate is a feature associated to role-playing at all.

Adding this to the discussion already running.