I greatly appreciate the main plot vs the rest in this game vs Inquisition.

I kept saying it all along. Andromeda is way closer to SWTOR in that respect than to Inquisition, and it makes all the difference between standing on the edge of the huge map littered with diamonds of pointless quests and asking yourself: WHY? And enjoying exploring as you do cool and interesting things. Also the side-quests in Andromeda is a huge improvement on the forgotten pieces of paper scattered around the realm in hopes that the Inquisitor comes along and decided to help out by some unfathomable reason. And the areas have more depth than Inquisitions' shallow caves with anticlimactic killing of a small contingent of random strangers for every quest (as opposite to killing the same random strangers outside the cave that is not a part of the quest).

Maybe that too. But I really love the planet hopping more than realm travelling. There is something about that going to Tempest, opening that Galaxy map that makes me swoon. So, yeah...

Every now and again there's still too much padding though. It's really a shame when an otherwise interesting objective is over-quantified. "Pieces of the turian ark are scattered about. Could you scan them?" for example. It's interesting because it's such a big story-thing with the Turian ark but the objective is just needless padding that reminds me of how Zelda Wind Waker stretched out its collection of the Triforce of Courage as part of its main quest because Nintendo had to cut an entire dungeon out of the game (or 2 even) so they had to replace it with something to fill out the game-time.

It's the same thing once you get more Galaxy map based quest objectives. It's almost as if some EA playtesting dudes looked at it and said "how can we maximize the time spent in this feature?".

I think there's some sort of employee quota for producers to keep people playing the game which informs the EA servers of how good the attach rate to a game is, so that's why you'll see Mike Gamble say things like "Keep that disc in the tray!" or "When you're done with SP try MP, we're having a good community!" on Twitter. He's doing his job (as much as I actually do believe he appreciates the community building of MP).

They need players to meet their EA estimates because that's how employees live up to expectations as producers and whatnot. This is the thing that's been happening since DA:I, but it feels like BioWare looked upon it as a creative restraint this time and said "so now that it's all padded, how can we make a satisfying context for it?" Because they truly do a better job with this at keeping the player informed of why he'd doing something and why he should care. In DA:I a problem I had was often that I had no clue what/why I was even doing a certain objective. In this one they're a bit more creative with it and they are especially better at ensuring there's some kind of memorable moment at the end of a questline. Sometimes the most boring fetch-filler crap ends up in an important-feeling scene that reveals something akin to the Father Kyle or Luna VI missions in ME1.

Still, I could do without the padding but EA gonna EA.