To all Hardcore ME-players!

^ Not surprising, its the long-awaited followup to one of the most beloved series in recent memory, if not ever. It was pretty much inevitable that ME:A was going to suffer from the weight of expectation. One reason why I'm not sweating the early reviews.

Anyone here who have started to play today?

I love it and I'm a ME1 hardcore fan.

I suppose it depends to what do you consider the best ME of the original trilogy. For me ME1 was always the best. I never liked too much ME2 and was ok-ish with ME3.
People complain about the open-world but that's precisely why I liked ME1 in the first place. Sure it's not perfect but I would NEVER go back to ME2 and ME3 shooting galleries and close environments. Open world also revitalized the combat adding verticality and making sniping remotely interesting.
I'd suggest to buy the game and see it for yourself. If you liked ME1 you'll love ME:A.

I'm confident ME:A is a good fundation to which BW can build on.

It's a total dissapointment when it comes to story, dialogue, characters and combat.

Not a single character is memorable. There is simply no characters that you click with, there is no conflict, personal issues to solve, their own goals, everything is perfect and everyone gets together minus the Asari and then again even that isn't serious. There's no Garrus chasing Dr. Heart, Tali looking to find something to bring back to the Flotilla, Liara trying to prove herself an adult, Wrex and his people, no issue of similar severity is raised.

Dialogue is changed as if to copy Fallout 4's ridiculous 4 ways to say yes. With their attempt to not make choices binary, they made them unary, Ryder is bland a character as it gets. Whereas Elder Scrolls have rich and deep lore to cover for and explain away a blank slate character Bioware doesn't have that and didn't put effort into that. Why is this teen now in charge of 100 000 people and colonization of a new Galaxy and not Cora or someone else? Well because blood relations, your dad did all this things, surely knowledge and skills are genetical.

The classes lost their meaning. The ability to switch classes out mid game and just change them whole, becoming all classes in one character is ridiculous, lore and immersion breaking. The game devolves to simple number crunching instead of playing a class. There's this high armor enemy that would be hard for addepts to deal with, ah well, just change into engineer, blast him with incinerate and cryo then change to soldier for some damage extra and then switch back to adept once it's done to be cool. Stupid, senseless and further prevents attachment to a character you're playing.


It's as if Bioware tried to create Skyrim in a singleplayer MMO world with MMO quests and questline and then served it to us with no explanation on what and why aside from "Welp" and a shrug