If only we had moments like these in andromeda....

I know that those moments were 'supposed' to be the big moments, but for me they just weren't.  The game didn't make me feel anything in those moments.  Yeah I'm a fan of ME1, but I hated ME2 and thought ME3 was only half what it could have been because of ME2, so I'm not exactly looking back on the OT with love and adoration. 

I do wonder if we could find someone who had never played the OT and MEA was their first Mass Effect game if they had the same kind of feels that people had with ME1.  Is it just the familiarity with the Mass Effect universe that made it all sort of 'been there done that'?

From the Your Mileage May Vary department: I always thought that the world-building from ME1 was a bit weak relative to DA:O's. The Alliance's relative power didn't make any sense. Humans still have just the one large planet and a handful of colonies with only a few million people on each; the asari, turians, and salarians should vastly outnumber and outproduce humans. Not to mention the technological stagnation which seems to have hit the galaxy. And the silly Council decision made things even worse, though thankfully the consequences were retconned away.

Even ME3? 

ME3 is a great game with many great moments, the only problem with the game is that it was not an RPG.
Shepard was on auto dialogue most times.

The point I was making since this all stems from my original post is that there were many wonderful moments in that trilogy and even within each game that captivated. I used that video as an example of some of them because they were nicely compiled. But each game had  several instance that had a great feel to it. Here, I personally don't find any. I was excited when Ryder was on Eos and let the initiative know they had a place to settle, someplace viable after his hard work. That was a huge thing. I thought it would sort of feel epic or like this great accomplishment each time. There were so many things we accomplished and so many things we learned but almost every one of them was handled poorly with regards to the writing. 

Each planet becoming viable should have felt like a huge accomplishment instead okay, we can use this turf now. 

The discovery about exaltation

And that right there is the best example I can think of to summarize all of it. I do like the game. I really do. But I don't think it has anywhere near the replayability and of the other series had because the choices are weak and not really compelling; because the characters are been there, done that in a different trilogy; because they stole major plot points from their own previous material. This isn't about animations. This is about the story. That ability to capture people. While I will admit that they present some amazing ideas:





We you look at all of that in that last spoiler, it's sort of flabbergasting that they could have delved a little deeper, just a little, into ANY of ALL of that to make this story even the slightest bit more compelling than what we had, but they decided to be greedy and hoard it all for DLC and future games and instead just give us shitty little teasers with a crappy loser lazily written enemy. That's sad. It deserves calling out. They were rebooting the series. Even ME1 had Saren who gave us a fuckton of insight into Sovereign by watching what happened to him, by his fear and decision to side with him, but his shame for his own choice. He was the kind of boss we needed. Someone compelling. Someone that creates some understanding about who his people are at bare minimum. It's like they don't even really know because they have not thought it through. So we got a mediocre story with not much compelling us aside from a bunch of teasers that we probably will have to wait two years to get the answers too. That's just sad... and shameful.

And most of those great moments had to do with previous games. The character arcs started there and finished in Mass Effect 3. How is that fair to compare to Andromeda?

I actually think it is a bug. Sometimes when I was driving around the planet there was some music at first then it just disappears for some reason.

If you want to use ME1 then as the template, let's do that. 

We had:

1. Ash/kaidan decision. That was huge for us as gamers. Even if you didn't care about either, you get what the ramifications are. You have spent some time with each. They are in your squad. This in no way compares to - 

2. Virmire - That was such a huge turning point. You begin to see that so much more is going on here. Krogan are lining up to fight for this enemy. One of your crew will turn on you and try to kill you over it. Loyalty has a huge impact here. Wrex died for me in many runs because I never talked to him that much so I didn't do his loyalty mission. But even if I had out of the gate and knew I could indirectly cause his death, that would have been a very interesting run to do. What do we get here that is even remotely like that? Not a single thing. We don't see any huge impact of anything. The closest you might come would be Roekkar perhaps. I will do that in the run I am making now to see if it matters much or feels like it does. I suppose you could say maybe not getting the pathfinders to change that one thing but I already did that and I was like 'okay, so that was a little bit of a bummer. Oh well.' 

Virmire was huge because of the horror and consequences of it beyond Wrex. There were krogan lining up to follow Saren. And there were geth who were already following him. The two greatest issues going on in the galaxy right then (krogan and god forbid they can procreate again at the level they did while they still appear to be a war prone species, and the geth who drove their own creators off their home world a while ago). Right then you realize that things are pretty frelled. You can destroy the facility but as a player you don't know what lies beyond. Is this the only facility like this? What is the motivation? How big is this? Just this pocket of geth and krogan or has it reached well beyond (which we do discover at the battle of the citadel it has reached far enough beyond to become 'the battle of the citadel'. 

The closest we come to Virmire in my opinion is Kadara and the whole situation with the outcasts. And yet, even that becomes rather black and white.




If the writers were smart, they would have made Sloane a hell of a lot more compelling than she was. They squandered potential there that could have really given you a whole different perspective on things. Instead of making them rioting criminals they could have made them a lot more grey than they did. 



Then there is Saren vs Archon. Saren was complex and his choices has some logic behind them. Crazy logic, but you could see a whole big picture because of it. And in the end, he was capable of seeing otherwise. That is a complex character. Archon? Cartoon character. Wylie e coyote.

Sloanes character actually irked me. I was expecting someone that was former nexus security leader to be more of a people person, one that had more Justice to them, not some criminal that forced people to pay for protection as you said or someone that really showed no interest for the people, there was various instances of murders occurring and people brought it up that Sloane didn't care whatsoever . I was wanting to see why she went vs the nexus but it was ruined to me since she pretty much is a criminal. It doesn't make me have sympathy for her choosing the life of exile as I can't support someone with a criminal background and I can honestly support the nexus on not being upset over it, I mean tann did say it was no loss since she turned traitor, I could disagree had they not given Sloan  the criminal background to her. I pretty much view it as a lesser version of Aria.

I would've liked the option to remove Sloane from power - without allowing her to be shot in the back. Unless I missed something, there was no redeeming quality about her and that made her very unlikable. I may have given Kadara to Reyes, if not for that crappy move he made.

How about "Reuse" then. They reuse the same plot point from a previous trilogy and the only new twist is we... gasp... get to see it. Oh wait, we did see it or almost saw it, with the asari. Far more compelling with a character we had some personal connection to running through the quest with trying to find her sister only to discover she had already been turned.