VG247 Article - How Bioware is losing its heart

Well how about this meaning. Next to Andromeda, Mass Effect one is tier 1 polish.

"But to return to the question of reflecting player actions, Mass Effect Andromeda isn’t at successful at disguising the overall hollowness of player choices and branching in-game. There are fewer decisions that feel meaningful immediately and especially in the longterm, and again, this feels like an accessibility compromise – focus groups don’t like fail states, and having a party member leave the group in Dragon Age Inquisition (or even die, as in earlier BioWare games) because of your actions can be interpreted as failure rather than part and parcel of forging your own unique story. Mass Effect Andromeda’s reduction of consequences to angry confrontations next time you wander onto your ship undercuts the illusion of meaningful choice BioWare has been so good at it in the past."

You know, this part stands out. For all its faults, Mass Effect 3 did a fairly remarkable job selling you on a galactic wide invasion, where saving everyone was impossible. Even small backstory stories like the teenage girl asking the Turian when her parents were coming and him being unable to break the news felt crushing because you knew. Subtle moments like that are missing from Andromeda, and often times "renegade" Ryder is written like the writers don't want to offend anyone whereas Shepard just didn't care. The latter is far more relatable. Yes, some of the dialogue was comically silly in just how evil you could be, but kind of writing has heart. The writers are having fun with Bond one liners (Mass Effect 2 LOVED those) and it worked.

Article is a little old, but it captures my feelings on the matter:

www.polygon.com/2017/4/18/15324366/mass-effect-andromeda-open-world-bioware

How does the combat encounters in ME2 and ME3 not fit into this?

I think its more prevalent in MEA because MEA is a bigger game.  I do wish there were more mini bosses throughout the worlds though to shake things up.  We need more mechs.  I would like to be driving through elaadin to have a drop ship ambush me with 3 or 4 mechs.

Nah madam, it's because most of the original devs left lol and it shows in this game. 

I pretty much agree with your points on ME1 and ME2

Saddly, it seems the good steps taken in MEA are not only overshadowed by the triology (nostalgia, to be expected) but by other aspects of the game itself.  Sure you can explore more, but there arent more things to do. You get to be something else than a soldier, but you will exclusively shoot your way through. You get a more relatable character, but less story to shape him/her. You get unique flavored romances and friendships, but the game is so long they actually feel more lacking.

Maybe a change of format to coop-multiplayer is the only way to reconcile the multiple goals the franchise now has to reach. Im not playing Bioware for the multiplayer, but ill wait for the next IP to see. But I cant help thinking what could have been MEA if it had been designed from the ground up to be what it wanted to be : interesting exploration stories, interesting gameplay mechanisms for playing an explorer-not-a-soldier, different ways to shape up the world around you...

A couple of ways. You are right about the 'bigger game' angle. Open world games, for better or worse, pad out their areas and runtimes with random or placed encounters with little or no attached story content (though games like MEA will grace them with a designation like 'tasks'). Since the areas are bigger, these types of encounters make up a larger proportion of (completionist) game time. Much less of ME2's and ME3's content fits into this category, since most of the things you do in an area have some small story attached (though ME3's overheard fetch quests stray into 'task' territory). Since they're smaller, more linear games, they only include spaces when they're telling a story there, and since spaces are small, they don't fill them up with so much cookie cutter content.

The second way they don't fit into the same mold is because all encounters are hand-crafted. The devs design each room, corridor, etc. to have a terrain that changes how the battles play out. Consider fighting on one of ME3's more open multiplayer map missions vs. fighting down a corridor on the Citadel, or the floating platforms on the Collector ship vs. the tower bridge in Thane's loyalty quest. The terrain creates more differentiation between encounters. In open area maps, devs can't focus all that attention on terrain for each encounter, especially when many encounters are random anyway. Makes the encounters more same-y then designed encounters. Plus, having a specific objective when fighting (e.g. 'destroy the geth trying to kill Tali') changes the flavor of an encounter, so it stands out more than some monster you just stumbled across.

Anyway, that's my two cents on how ME2 and ME3 don't fit that mold, adjusted for inflation.

Interesting point about "aren't more things to do." I think that's really the crux of the game's problems, much more so than things like wonky animations.

I like the length though, it just needs fleshing out, although fleshing it out with more quality content to that length is obviously an expensive business. The story is supposed to take some time (not sure how much, but I'm guessing in the months at least), and for once it feels like it. Maybe they wanted padding, maybe they wanted the player to have more of a feeling of wanting to live in the universe. It's probably the first ME game where I feel a player house would make sense at any rate, because of that.

I miss Mass Effect 2 now, everything in that game was perfect.

Bioware lost their freedom when they sold the business. In a sense, losing their heart seems to me to have been just a matter of time.