The Witcher 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda thread

Return to Crookback Bog is a side quest... agreed.  Family Matters is not.  Tamara's reaction in Return to Crookback Bog is still underwhelming as a side quest... compared to Grissom Academy (which is also a side quest).  I have already said that the MET has much smaller games... translation - fewer main quests, fewer major side quests, fewer minor side quests, and fewer fetch quests and incidental encounters than TW3.  Still, one has to compare apples to the apples.  Major quests only to main quests.  Bloody Baron is a main quest, as is Family Matters... so it should not be compared to Grissom Academy, which is a side quest.  Return to Crookback Bog can be compared to Grissom because both are major side quests.  Family Matters ends with either killing the miscarried child or turning it into a lubberkin.  If one doesn't to Return to Crookback bog, then the baron must just hang around in his bedroom waiting to play qwent for the remainder of the game, I guess.  Is that more satisfying than resolving the geth/quarian war?  Does that lubberkin even come back into play later on in the game?  If so, I've not read about it.  It certainly doesn't protect Crow's Perch after the Baron leaves.

There are a gazillion minor tasks in TW3... most people (from what I've read) don't complete them.  To say that ME3  It  has more fetch quests is ridiculous.  Percentage of the main game vs. fetch quests between the two are probably similar, but I actually think TW3 has a higher percentage of them than ME2.  I don't think any of the games have it such that the majority of the content are fetch quests.  As for your comment about me having not done yet several contracts in Velen... True.  I also suspect, however, that I've not done many many of the "?" markers yet (which are unlikely to involve anything much more than "task" or "random encounter" content and I also have not touched at least 2 major areas of the map (Novigrad and Skellige)... but I suspect that the percentage of minor task stuff is similar overall to Velen.

I've seen lots of evidence online of people becoming overwhelmed by TW3 and simply not finishing it... so I really do feel justified is saying that the length of that game is a detriment to it and it pulls the player completely away from the story.

As for the part I've bolded... I see that as part of the problem.  With everyone handing out so many  side quests, the game is too long and too many side quests pulls the player away from the main story.  A common complaint about ME1 is that the sense of urgency gets muddled amid all the planet hopping Hackett has Shepard doing.  This is the same in TW3.  With all those contracts and side quests going on and dodging back and forth between towns that, at that time in history, would have taken him entire days or longer to travel between, the he is in ernest pursuit of Ciri becomes ridiculously unbelievable.

There is no equivalent between Witcher 3 and ME3 when they're so different in design. The closest I can say is that the non-vital parts of the Bloody Baron quest which happens after getting his daughter I believe, is like going to Grissom Academy.

In ME2 and ME3 I do not consider Loyalty missions or the ME2 companion missions as "side missions". It's optional and technically side-content but it's presented like Loyalty missions and have as much polish and cinematic design in them as a main story mission. The fetch quests and the "Indoctrinated Hanar" quests on the Citadel are side-missions in ME3. Those are what I consider equivalent to contracts and other "secondary" quests in Witcher 3. Except, the High Stakes Gwent tournament and the "who will be king" questline on Skellige I would consider to be among the Grissom Academy level questlines in the variation of quality you see across different types of quests.

The fetch quests of ME3 are like the treasure hunts of TW3 basically but in ME3 there's only a handful of real side-missions and over a dozen low-effort side quests and in Witcher 3 there's an abundance of real side-missions (that are all much better btw) and quite a chunk of low-effort additions.


There's that and also the Jondum Bau mission which is tonally out of control when the friggin Hanar and Drell homeworld is at stake and you lose it to the Reapers if you don't have Kasumi after Shepard makes a lame throwback to the "you big stupid jellyfish" line.

At the moment i am replaying TW3, and after 15 hours i can say without a doubt that TW3 is far superior to MEA in EVERYTHING.
For a God sake, how you can even compare those dumb MEA side-quests to TW3 side-quests ?

I don't know how people play with the question marks on. It destroys any sense of exploration. That goes for just about any open world game.

*shakes fist at Ubisoft*

Haha, I see. I'm the opposite. All the side content of open world burns me out after a while. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love roaming around wasting dozens of hours smelling the flowers, but I'm so EXHAUSTED and relieved when I finally complete such games.
I never play an open world game twice. In theory I love all the different characters I can play, different choices, but once I've seen the entire map for 100+ hours I can't stand it anymore. This is a real shame about DAI because I've meant to do more romances to see the extra content and side with the templars. But I can't just run through the game in a dozen hours like I could with the trilogy, focusing on the parts I want to do differently. It took me 140h to complete DAI I believe. Spent even more than that with W3 (plus another 50h or so in the DLCs alone). These games eat up so much time, and time is something I never have enough of working full time. My ideal RPG is around 40-60 hours of tight narrative and not too much grindy combat, unless I REALLY like the combat. This is where DAI failed me hard. Combat was boring and the high respawn rate infuriating and distracting from my enjoyment of the beautiful maps. W3 combat I liked so much I gladly cleared all the bandit camps.

HZD was just right for me. I still spent 85 hours with it, ten of those at least in screenshot mode taking 400+ pictures, oops! I did all the collectibles, everything there was to do. And I enjoyed it all, even though the rewards were not worth it. I'm sure one can do all quests and clear the entire map in 50 hours. And that's a nice number. It's not too long. I much prefer limited but interesting side quests to 200 extra fetch quests just to keep the player busy.

And this is why I see a lot of potential in such streamlined open worlds for developers like Bioware who are all about the narrative. HZD had a nice balance.

They can be turned off in the menu and the exploration is more organic. To me it made a huge difference to just explore and run into stuff. Some events are fixed, others appear contextual to story events or time of day. I've played the game twice and probably missed 30% of the random events and quests. 

Writing is writing... what's the reluctance to compare main quest to main quest and task to task rather than side quest to main quest and task to side quest.  Your premise is always that Bioware writing sucks... but you're not willing to compare, say, Priority Tuchanka to Bloody Baron.  You keep bumping up ME2's side missions into being main missions.  The first batch of recruitment mission in ME2 are main missions.  I'd accept that all the recruitment missions are main missions even though one can get away with not doing some of them... which sort of makes them equivalent to the non-essential elements of the Bloody Baron (like Return to Crookback Bog).  ALL of the ME2 loyalty missions are clearly side missions.

As for the Jondum Bau mission... Shepard does not have to utter the "stupid jellyfish" line (I never select it).  The mission takes on different tone if the ME3 file is not an import (where Kasumi isn't recruited at all)... and Kasumi is DLC.

I think that after Skyrim some people realized that the design "you have to do a lot of side quests to buff up your stats and equipment if you want to hope to beat the game" is too video-gamey, and so in TW3 the side content is pretty much optional - the xp for main quests is so much more.

(and yes, even if you skip Novigrad, it is eventually required, for some magic trinket and some curse words, so it's a part of the main quest, too).

There are so few games that come out that I really want to play I like to relax with one that will take a decently long time to get through. I can totally understand your position though, which is why it can't be easy for Bioware to try and cater to everyone. It seems we will just have to fight each other for the future of our games, I propose:   

 I'd shoot myself in the head if I turned all of them off...I hate looking for shit on a map that is hidden. IN MEA I ignored everything that didn't have a quest marker.

I think the Bloody Baron Quest is fitting in that it can't be resolved in a tidy way. Tamara is driven to a fanatic cult to find the guidance and sense of family she wasn't getting at home, from either of her lousy parents. I've known people like Tamara. People who have made disastrous decisions in adolescence because of a broken family life. Fortunately, the guy she attaches herself to is a decent fellow. You do see some of this layered ambiguity from Bioware, but I experienced most of it in DA:O, not Mass Effect.