'I dislike or hate the game' (General feedback)

So far, I´ve completed Eos, Voeld and Havarl and I am about 30hrs into the game. So this is more like a first impressions post than it is a review. I am sorry for the long ass post but apparently I had to get that off my chest.

And there`s spoilers ahead.

Pros:
The game looks good

The open skill tree allows for more freedom and finally is a step away from MMOish caracter classes

Many cutscenes

So-sos`:

Combat: It´s obviously a huge improvement from ME3 and for the most part it´s faster, relies on mobility and quite fun. On the other hand it´s fairly one sided. Rushing in and/or moving from cover to cover seem to be the only options. There´s no stealth mechanics (except maybe that cloaking tech skill I haven´t looked into yet). When you come within a certain range, enemys imediately start shooting at you.
Plus the AI is quite stupid. At least on normal and hard your crew is constantly running in front of your aim and enemys let you shoot them from behind without even turning.

Cons:

Mediocre story: I recently finished the Moshae rescue mission and the story started picking up a little but beforehand there was nothing that really stood out to me and I am yet to see some consequences of my actions.

Stereotype characters: There is no one in the entire game who`s up there with the likes of Thane or Mordin, with whom you can bond like you could with Garrus or who is as entertainig as Joker was.
The game fails to make me care about them and I don´t see anyone starting some kind of interesting character developement (maybe when I tried more loyalty missions).

No connection to the main character and his family: You are supposed to set up the main character and his core relations in the tutorial and like in DAI you failed. And I am not even asking for some prologue as long as Origins or Mafia3, you simply could have implemented a scene similar to the Shepard – Ashley hospital scene from ME3 with Scott sitting next to that cryo coffin talking to Sarah and remembering childhood. „Hey sis, do you remember that one time back on earth when you played dead and everyone fell for it...“ and so on and so forth.
Same with Alec. After his death you could have had several people come up to the main character, telling him old war stories about his father. What he did for them, how they still look up to him and whatnot, making Scott realize how little time he actually spent with his father and what a stranger he really was. Have him reflect on that, needing time on his own, have some crew member offer a shoulder, stepping in as a supplement parent. Take your goddamn time with it!
When Frodo thought Gandalf had died, he was heartbroken. He didn´t go: „Oh well, he occasionally visited me and my uncle, I barely knew him. So, I want everybody ready by the hour, let´s get that ring to Mordor.“
On top of that I don´t feel any connection to Scott Ryder. He comes accross as a goofball who barely grew out of puberty and doesn´t take anything seriously.
Awful voice acting: No effort whatsoever. Life- and emotionless.

Awful dialogue: If it is Liam going: „Maybe he´s angry because I shot him in the face“, Bain and Scott arguing about nicknames while taking down Kett baracks or Scott proposing to ask the Kett for the direction while rescuing Moshae. It´s a lot of inapropriate dialogue that instantly sucks any kind of atmosphere out of the game. If the protagonists don´t take the story seriously then why should I?
More often than not the oh so fabulous dialogue wheel that is supposed to step away from paragon/renegade decisions and introduce more layers to your character really only ammounts to choice A or B in the end. And so far the only thing it does for me is water down the character and prevent you from giving him an edge. Sometimes the dialouge doesn´t fit the description in the wheel.

Animations: Sorry, my face is tired.... But it´s not just the faicial animations. While talking to people, they do weird movements like using a console when there is none or they don´t move at all.
There´s also no daily routine for Npcs. The game is supposed to make you feel part of the story not moving lifeless dolls around and making them talk to other even more lifeless dolls.

Borderline stupid writing and quest design: The one quest about the first murder in Andromeda amounts to letting him go or exiling him for murder. Well, how about dropping the murder case and punishing him for attempted murder instead?
One of the very first quests on the Nexus where some guy is sabotaging relays ends with you confronting him and: doing nothing really, because you obviously trust his reluctantly stubborn word that he´ll turn himself in.
One quest on Voeld is about some Milky Way inhabitants who hunt down fish that is of some cultural importance to the Angaran people: 1) The Angarans on Voeld are starving and freezing to death and yet no one even consideres to eat the fish themselfes. Besides they can´t even specify or prove why these animals are important. 2) The hunters are just hired mercs and don´t doing it for food but because some Angaran scientist pays them to. 3) First thing they do when you come along is shoot at you because it´s not like you are 600 years away from home in a hostile galaxy where everything went to shit and there´s only a limited number of colonists that might have a better chance of surviving by working together. Let´s just kill each other over the cultural importance of some fish. Whose culture? No, not ours. To us it´s just fish.
Some other quest regarding Angaran matters – it might actually be the same one – where Jaal who is assigned to your team to have an eye on you flat out says: I can´t decide. You (alien who does not know my culture and we don´t trust, because we have made bad experience opening up to the Kett) decide what´s best for my people.

Angara: There was the chance of introducing new aliens who could have been anything. Basically they could have been really different and strange – as in alien. Considering it´s a whole new galaxy and all. Maybe, just maybe it would have been a great fit for a space-exploration themed game. Instead we got some wannabe Twi`lek who simply behave like humans. Except they are very emotional. Well in theory at least because the game doesn´t bother showing their emotionality. It rather contradicts itself by scenes like the one with the Moshae who states that emotions should never get in the way of science.
How about some missunderstandings between you and any Angara when you go for the professional dialogue option, because they are so used to showing emotions that is has become a way of comunicating and they can´t figure you out when you stay composed. But I guess the vanilla approach is far more exciting...look, there are blue ones and purple ones too.

No attention to detail: Whether it´s technical: My first encounter with an architect was on Voeld and my team went: let´s kill that architect. My second was on Eos and my team went: Holy shit what is that. Or after I finished Voeld, Jaal said: now Evfra will trust you, let´s call him – so I did. And after I finished Havarl Jaal said - now Evfra will trust you, let´s call him – again.
Design: all the sensors, antennas or drillers Ryder places on Eos are twice his size. I guess he must have pulled them out of his behind. Explains the silly running animation.
Or the Angaran strike team that accompanies you to rescue the Moshae is armed with N7 assault rifles. Or Tann gets his shiny new office but the broken energy relay stays broken.
Story: Why can you sell your stuff to Angaran vendors for Milky Way credits? Why did the Initiative even bring credits to Andromeda(or waste a server for that)? - you could have implemented barter, leading to a quest where you have to establish some kind of trading agreement.
Why do you suddenly understand what the Kett or Angaran are saying? I overheared someone somewhere saying something about a translator, but there was no build up to it. You could have had a way more interesting first contact with the Angaran, trying to communicate, factoring in their emotionality and finding common ground there. Or a quest decrypting Kett code. Or a sequence of Sam and Ryder actually learning Angaran.

World design: I liked Habitat 7 and Havarl, but Eos and Voeld are the khaki and white versions of one and the same boring and repetetive crap. Kett camp, remnant site, wreckage, repeat. And if you approach something there is always a Kett shuttle passing by, dropping the same 4-5 hostiles all over again. Thank god we have all that kryo or fire or whatnot stuff standing arount. It really has no narrative purpose or reason behind it but it looks really cool when it explodes. And thank god the Kett are stupid as fuck, otherwise they would send their whole infinite shuttle armada at you for a change of strategy.
Although the whole go there scan this or that fits the narrative of the game far better than it did in DAI, it is still the same MMO type fetch quest that doesn´t even complement the atmosphere of the planet. If you can`t fill an open world with life then just leave it. A day and night cycle and a dynamic wheater system for a start maybe? Sand storms or avalanches could present some diversion in itselves.

Character creator: Someone got hit by the ugly stick.

Summary: I get the story they want to tell and the atmosphere they want to create. Habitat 7 was a nice example of stranding on an alien planet and having to find your way through not knowing what is going on. They even tried to flesh out the relationship between Ryder and Alec or Scott and Sarah to some degree and of course the game has it´s moments here and there but so far the execution has been horrible. Even the tense moments like Alecs sacrifice or Fisher getting shot fall short. Be it because of bad voice acting, silly animations, stupid dialogue, uninteresting characters, insulting writing or a combination of the above.
To me the game feels lifeless and when I get home from work I have to force myself to play on. I am still hoping that it´ll get better but to be honest, the best it can probably achieve at this point is a nice little cliffhanger for Andromeda 2.

Can someone tell me what happened to Bioware? When I want a vast open world with lots of stuff to do but without a good story or any memorable characters I play Bethesda. When I want a shooter I play Battlefield. Thats not what Mass Effect used to be about.
Here´s hoping that they get their writing team back on track or sell the franchise to CDPR or Telltale. If they deliver another insulting product like DAI or this one I´ll probably call it quits.

Dialogue is so bad I found myself skipping conversations (even when they have important quest information). I don't often do that even when I replay other BW games for the tenth time - and this is my first playthrough. I hate Ryder's and other characters dialogue and just can't get into the story and my character because of it. I'm bored. I wanted to like MEA, but right now the negatives far outweigh the positives. At least the beginning of the game had some promise and there's been many brief good moments, but overall I'm disappointed. Just trying to finish the game and then I might finally play the Witcher 3 and see if it's as good as everyone says (I bet Gerault can't be as annoying as Ryder is most of the time, hah...)

>forgettable

One word that pretty much sums up this game.

I feel ya.

I am not emotionally invested in anything happening in the game. But I don't hate it. On the contrary, I am enjoying it, combat is fun, there is loads to do, etc. But once I get my fill of messing around in it, it will be deleted and prolly never reloaded to my computer again.

The ME triology? Played it so much, I know almost every line...and will likely keep going back to it again and again.

It's the same with books and music. Some albums are just magic, others are just...yet another album. But I still love to read new books and listen to new music. So it's all good, in the end.

One of the coolest random games I have played recently was Primordia. Tiny game, point and click, pixelated graphics, great voice acting. Immediate emotional investment in a well-told story. For me, it was a gem. Not every game can give that awesome feeling, and no game will ever give it to everyone. For me, the ME triology right at the top of my gem pile (well...after DAO)

The same thing that made it so powerful to begin with.


The intangible spirit of Mass Effect.

I started up a second playthrough to collect some trophies that failed to unlock despite meeting the requirements, and I have to say I completely agree with the OP. I don't care about the Angara, the Kett are completely forgettable as an enemy and I still cannot explain their motives or methods beyond "they hate you because reasons", and the Remnant are just generic space robots. At least the vaults are still cool, even if I already know the solutions to all the puzzles.

What really kills it for me, though, is the blatant lack of inspiration on the worlds we can actually explore. It seems like they just went down a checklist of "Desert planet, jungle planet, snow planet, temperate planet", which would be fine if the environments they created actually felt alien. But no, apart from Havarl, all the biomes feel like they wouldn't be too out-of-place right here on Earth. And to top it all off, all the wildlife you encounter on these planets are just reskins of each other.

It's not an awful game, but it is stingingly mediocre. If this is the best Bioware can do with five years to work on something, they'll be dead and buried before the end of the decade.

Kett don't simply kill people. They abduct different species and genetically alter their DNA to reproduce.

I disagree about Wrex. In ME1, he was one of the few that actually seemed to have a distinct personality, as did Ashley. Everyone else was basically a walking combat mannequin by comparison.

ME1 has great living breathing atmospheric environments! i love ME1

and Saren, such a complex character, the archon.... who?

ME1 is unique, you really are in unknown planets, you can cut the atmosphere with a knife, and the characters, it's true, i cared about them as soon as i spoke to them
even Nihlus
the atmosphere in Ilos, is superb, top notch

the decision to save Destiny's Ascension or not...
epic ship, epic name

The Archon isn't the Reapers, though. He's basically Saren, and the Kett we see are basically the Geth. The actual Kett Empire, is the "overarching" villain of the Andromeda series, like the Reapers. And at least they actually feel like a real villain (empire expanding its territory and influence) than the Reapers (Murder Machines cause... Reasons you wouldn't understand.)

Keep in mind ME1 is my favorite bioware game and it's what I visioned ME being when bioware showed it off, Andromeda represents that view better than the action shooters that were ME2+3 regardless of its own flaws.

I really don't recall people feeling attatched to ME1s characters, as you said, they were essentially codexes. Do we not remember people harping on about Ashley being a racist? Or how boring tali was? Or mass effects nudity getting on the news in a negative way? Plus you contradict yourself when you said you cared for the races but then say ME1 had a lifeless environment to them with soulless characters, how the hell do you care for that? ME1 had my interest by its story plot and science as well as its exploration aspects, the characters were flat out boring and if you go back to look at the reviews back then you'll see very few ever mention the characters being a positive to the game plus how it had contradictions to itself (ultimately we need need to accept mass effect contradicting itself as it's done it every game so lol).

ME1 was great for its time, but I doubt many but the hardcore fans would go back to play it, it's so clunky in various instances where it hasn't aged well at all, it'll carry the same issues as DA:O. Truth be told Andromedas characters can be argued being better than ME1, and it already has been argued. I'd only agree on the story itself being flawed, but there are still characters I enjoy where as I skip dialogue when I replay ME1 because of no interest (+ I've played it twenty times over by now), I don't do the same for ME2 or 3 cuz they put more emphasis on the characters after ME1. The exploration aspect being brought back as well as a few other features that add to the RPG elements is why you'll see me prefer Andromeda over ME2+3 as it resembles "my view" of what mass effect is just as ME1 did.

I thought Akksul (and the whole sitch with the Roekkar) made for a pretty compelling, complex antagonist ala Loghain.

But I think there are several other factors that contribute to the view that ME1 was superior to MEA (nostalgia glasses aside):

-- The quality of the cutscene animations probably detracts from the drama and storyline.

-- There is *so* much content. Individual storylines don't have as much impact when:
---- You have multiple ongoing storylines open at any given time.
---- Lots of time passes between steps of a particular storyline.