Polygon's open-letter to BioWare regarding their open-world-like games.

Honestly, this is so true.  Skyrim and Bethesda would be absolutely boring without the amazing mods that we can add in.

Not to mention the ability to choose your race, and make a pretty decent character.

But when I play Skyrim or Oblivion, I have absolutely different expectations than when I play Mass Effect.  In Skyrim, I'm trying to build my character up, and get the best of everything and find all these hidden caves and dungeons.  It generally has a weak main story, but the side quests are also pretty fun and meaningful, with great rewards.

When I play Mass Effect, I expect character development, a great storyline, and smaller, but more varied and detailed areas and great personalization and sidequests.  If I get Skyrim when I expect Mass Effect, it's a disappointment.  Just like it'd be a disappointment if I got Mass Effect if I were expecting Skyrim.  (Well, actually I probably wouldn't be disappointed there.)

Open World or Open World like game is not impossible. IMO, it is not "hard" to make good Open World games. What makes Open World game good is the amount of work and effort the developers pour into it; every aspect of it. Unlike linear corridor games, developers cannot concentrate solely on 1 aspect and leave the rest out.

Bethesda, they are great at creating worlds with a lot of hidden things for the player to discover. You can be simply exploring and happen upon a tiny cave that could actually lead to a huge (keyword being huge) dunmer ruins that has a mini quest in itself. Or you can read a book and discover some hidden location, go to sleep in an inn and suddenly wake to unexpected events. They are not that good at creating a strong and compelling story but maybe that is because they are a sandbox RPG.

CDPR, they are great at weaving narrative into the world. They are great at making very detail and believable worlds, interesting characters. It is almost like watching a television series, every episode (event you encounter) can develop into something larger than you initially anticipated. The attention to detail is nothing short of greatness. How you start a quest often changes how they play out. If you didnt meet a certain NPC before proceeding to the next step of the quest, the game knows and it compensates for it. They are however not as good as Bethesda in making all those interesting hidden areas for exploration.

Zelda BOTW, a "new" comer to the Open World genre (yes yes I know, they 1st Zelda is arguably Open World) makes highly interactive environments. It is like they have put common sense into the world. Set fire in the middle of the field, well you may get burn. You can play with the environment and make use of the environment like never before in other Open World games.

All the above is simply the hard work of the developers. The more effort you put into an Open World game, they richer the experience of the players. The more attention to detail you put into an Open World, the livelier it becomes.

Bioware... imo spent too much time making static maps. Hired too many "artist/painters". Paintings are nice to look at, once in a while but when you need to tell a story, you need to hire a comic artist, an animation artist. Also, both DAI and MEA, I think they are struggling with Frostbite, I firmly believe that they have very little skill/experience working with Frostbite. This greatly limited what they can and cannot do - the list of bugs in MEA I think confirms my suspicion. After all, technically Bioware is much weaker than all the 3 developers I mentioned. Because of this, they are struggling to just meet the deadline, or just to get the game to run. They do not have time to even properly test the game. Therefore it is natural that they dont have time to attend to details and polish hence all the problems in MEA.

Skyrim side quests are the worst part of the game, especially guild quests. And you are not even aware of this fact.

What's dishonest about giving a 0 to a game, that doesn't work for you? You do realize games are getting more and more expensive right? The preorder of ME2 was 35 euro and that game came out finished and working. MEA on the other hand costs 60 euro and is broken as hell. So yeah, people can give it a 0, they can give it a -10 if they want to, because these franchises need to die before EA/Ubisoft learn to release finished games.

And I like the Andromeda cast. It works for me in an inverse way of why DA2 cast worked for me. DA2 was standard bio angst on steroids. Andromeda is a step back from Bio-angst. Not a dead wife in sight, no sudden spurts of anger, nobody suffered terrible, terrible things. Refreshing, for me. Now, we did not dodge the "I have this sister" trope, but you can't have it all. Actually pretty happy that for once the main LI for a male PC are not obnoxious.... really, a great cast imo. Again, an improvement on Inquisition, where save for Dorian, the joinables were not really all that great imo.

So, the mileage really varies.

I can't agree, because I have experienced exactly three cases of misfiring VO dialogue in my 52 hr full run of the game. It was a touch annoying, but by no means a game-breaking issue. From my past experiences, for a game I started on Day 1, it was amazingly bug free.

Huh... and here I am finding Inquisition and Andromeda to have two of the better open worlds and oth are two of my favourite games of all time.

But then the throwaway mention of TW3 exposed the author... that is an open world game that suffers exactly what he says Biowate's recent efforts suffer from.

I would say The Witcher 2 also suffers from that, it through out so many quests right off the bat before I knew who was who and what the fuck was going on and introduced so many characters that I didn't know or like, combined with a shitty combat and inventory system, then people wonder why I refuse to play The Witcher 3?

ME:A I get to know who the Ryder family, Liam, Cora, and Lexi are and I get to understand the combat and how the inventory system works with out a god awful and annoying (and personally I found it insulting) in-game "tutorial" that was fucking useless all before I get to the Nexus, and the Nexus leadership (Tann, Kesh, Addison, and Kandros) are more interesting and complex than Udina and the Citadel Council ever were. I knew what the stakes are who was who, and what was going on.     

I had and I'm still having a lot more fun playing ME:A and DA:I than I ever did with Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Oblivion, Skyrim, and The Witcher 2 (I don't or care if considered "open world" or not) with or without the player made mods combined.

I think I would rather have Roach as a companion than have to listen to banter aimed at a Nickelodeon audience.  FOr the record, I'm not a big fan of the Witcher series.  I played them all for story/characters only.  I never cared for the combat.  That is the same reason I buy Bioware games.  The last two however, have let me down in those departments as more focus was placed in other aspects of the game.