My Fear for the future...

The one point I will concede is that ME:A is not actually that bad all told. It slipped up in some major areas like presentation (most notably facial animations etc) and the main story is atrociously poor. Yet in many ways, it does what DAI tried to do and improves it across the board. The Nomad is fun to drive, the banter is good, the sidequests have more substance to them and the terraforming aspect gives you a legitimate reason to be there doing any of this.

And yet, it still pales next to the older games, because the tone is too light throughout and the narrative though strong at first with the need to colonize and rescue the project, never develops into something more meaningful, due to the woeful sub Halo style story with the dreary Remnant and Kett. The cast are unfairly maligned IMO, but they needed greater drama both from outside menaces and internal, rather than just being happy campers all the time.

MEA does a lot of things right, and those decrying the loss of the past would do well to remember that the formula was getting stale and if experiments like DA2, DAI and MEA don't get everything right, they are at least trying. To that end, I prefer MEA to ME3 which felt tired and unambitious in its dogmatic adherence to old formula. But there is plenty still to do. The game has shot itself in the foot with a very dull campaign and any dlc or sequel must provide a more credible and sensible story than the hokey antics of the Archon and his cronies. We need real intensity, real suffering, triumph over genuine adversity etc.

And we absolutely do not need Cerberus or the Reapers. New series remember?

This was a very wobbly start, but if Star Trek had stopped making movies with The Motion Picture, we'd never have got Wrath of Khan. Think about that - a world where WOK was never made... Can we afford to let this series end so soon and let something like that happen?

So I recently finished Andromeda. I really liked Andromeda.

Bioware has been a tale of two games recently.

DAI was a game i personally really liked, it was critically acclaimed and financially successful, to the tune of being called the fastest selling launch in Bioware history.

Yet it was a game with repetitive meaningless fetch quests, a huge disconnect between story and optional content, and occasionally lifeless open zones.

Now Andromeda has been a game that has been critically panned, general perceptions on the forum aren't strong, at least compared to Inquisition, and may even be a financial failure.

Yet its a game that had far more effort put into its side quests. They were often fully fleshed out stories or part of a larger story arc.

It would be.so easy for bioware...and especially ea...to go backwards. To say'gamers must prefer repetitive fetch quests to story content given how they feel about Andromeda. But yey that means less money. 'And i don't want bioware to go backwards after all the lessons they have learned.

With the exception of Wrath of Khan, the reboot Star Trek movies are better than the originals.

*runs and hides*

Yet they act exactly like collectors, just mindless drones. They even come to life in the same way as collectors did- via genetic modification\indoctrination, but this process in MET was at least more subte and needed some time. Now it's literaly one injection from some big-ass syringe and Angara changes into the Kett right away and starts attacking you, so he doesn't have mind of his own anymore. That's the Kett for you.

Anyway, ME2's main villain actually was a reaper who was using the collectors, now we got Archon who was using his own mindless canon fodder + the cardinal. 

You're obviously free to have any preferences you want, but the actual difference between collectors and MEA's kett is very small and has very similar mechanics\concept.

They have good writers. So where does the discussion go from here?

Yeah, there are alot of similarities to the Collectors in the Kett. The Kett just have more backstory with info on the Senate, and dissension in the ranks quest, and other things that point to them being more than simple mindless drones. This wasn't tapped into all that much in ME:A, but it hints at more going on than what we've seen so far.

Which is why I call the Kett "Collectors done right." Collectors done "better" might be more accurate, though. IF Bioware uses these threads to create more plot points in any future sequels, the Kett could really shine. That's obviously speculation, but what we got in ME:A already gives more backstory stuff to the Kett than the Collectors ever had, which makes them more interesting to me as antagonists.

Honestly, at this point, I can't even care less how they chose to do sidequests. I like Andromeda more than Inquisition, and Andromeda is basically an exact copy of the Imperial Agent story structure in SWTOR.

Wait what? Imperial Agent was the one story in SWTOR I actually played through and I loved it to bits but I'm having real trouble comparing its story beats to Andromeda. 

You should run and hide.

I will find you. Ridiculous fucking post holy shit.

With the exception of Wrath of Khan, the reboot Star Trek movies are better than the originals.

*runs and hides*