People need to stop praising ME1

MET was able to give you that context for 'rachni, the thorian, and even the geth' because TMW - and its history - was known to us. We knew the history of the quarian's creation of the geth, and we knew of the rachni wars. The thorian was little more than a plot device and boss battle, designed to absorb knowledge from dead protheans so we could gain the cipher.

I admit that I'm not happy about the fact that all of the wildlife we encounter is insta-hostile - but that seems to be an open world thing, and apparently developers think they need to provide frequent combat situations. Killing them also gave us resources to craft gear.

Also, I was hoping to encounter new, vastly different species to study, perhaps to capture for study, and possibly find out they're actually sentient. I could also enjoy meeting pre-spaceflight species, perhaps in a stage where they don't yet believe in extra-terrestrials.  But that isn't the route BioWare chose this round - perhaps they'll do more of that in a future installment.

We don't yet know what transpired in the Heleus Cluster. The mystical magical space telescope seemed to pinpoint multiple golden worlds, but they've gone to crap when we arrive. Then there's the remnants / Jaardan apparently trying to terraform the cluster and make it habitable. It may have been teeming with life pre-scourge. There's still quite a lot left to discover - in the Cluster and perhaps beyond.

Played it 19 times. Loved it, still do.

One huge improvement MEA has made compared to ME1 (and in fact all 3 games) is in how femryder moves in an environment compared to Femshep.
Loving me that rough ground animation.

ME1 is so awesome. I can't stop praising it.

wouldn't know as i ve yet to play andromeda.
I am about to however as i am finishing horizon.
For the record: i ve played the hell out of all past bioware games.
I even loved Da2.

That still doesn't paint Andromeda in a better light.

So Shepard asked questions that he/she should logically know in-universe, at least the first game deigned to expound on the nature of the setting and clue us into the ins and outs of the various species present.  Andromeda plops us into Heleus and then just has us run into other blue skinned humans who are all instantly relatable to us. What's more, the little bit of explanation we do get is so watered down, as to not offend our human sensibilities apparently, that nothing more abstract or 'alien' is touched on.

There's no in-depth explanation of what the Remnant or their creators are, or what their purpose is, we just have SAM figure out how to turn the monoliths on and then joke about how it's all like magic. No one's discussing theories about the nature of the structures, or how our reliance on a technology we know nothing about is inherently risky. There's no intellectual thought given to this arguably alien element to the setting. Nah, just flip that switch on the magical space robots and then get back to finding those ingredients for the movie night; the real goal of the narrative. Even ME 1 gave us some working theories, in-game, about what the Reapers could be once we discovered them. Andromeda seems to be actively avoiding any such exploration in favor of cuddling up with your romance choice.


The Heleus Cluster may only be a small part of the Andromeda galaxy as a whole; something I actually appreciate about keeping the scale of things more in line vs. the size of the galaxy at large; but that doesn't mean that we should just accept only one human-like alien and a myriad of mindless animals. Look at the original trilogy: The Asari and Elcor were from the same cluster. The Hanar and the Drell similarly developed in close proximity to each other. Wildly different forms of life evolving simultaneously practically next door to each other.

It's assuming a lot saying that only one form of sentient life could possibly develop in a single cluster and that such a limitation is somehow more realistic. Space is big, even in a small smattering of a local star cluster. Look at other franchises like the Traveller setting for instance. That universe has almost ten separate alien species all developing their own empires and seats of power prior to making contact with each other; all within the same 0.1 percent of the Milky Way.

travellermap.com

The problem with Warhammer is that it started out as satire that got more serious over time, and nowadays more often than not it comes across as a genuine glorification of the things it used to satirize.

For me personally, the most important aspects of an RPG (at least a western one) is personalizing a character, and having it recognized by the game.  This takes many forms, from as minor as begin able to play a male or female character to as game-changing as "choices with consequences"

So that covers a lot of things:  the character creator, outfitting, weapons loadouts, character classes, skills and powers, dialogue options, personality options, relationships with NPCs, missions, both the order in which they are done and how they get handled.


So the more of this that gets stripped out of a game, or implemented poorly, the less like an RPG it feels like.

That's a pretty good definition, but it makes ME1's design look fairly bad. At low and high levels characters of a given class tend to play the same, with similar abilities and similar gear. (DA:O warriors and rogues had this problem too, until DA:A made divergent high-level builds workable.

Yes, but at least ME 1, tried and offer an explanation for some of those things. With Andromeda and the Remnant Vaults it's just brushed to the side and given the whole: "It must be magic lolz" as a logical answer. There's no investigation option for Ryder to pick when exploring the ruins, even Shepard got an opportunity to ask about the Reapers and state his/her stance with them despite Sovereign's non-answers. 


And how is the Traveller example incorrect in it's math? The entirety of charted space in that setting is about 480 parsecs wide (1 parsec = 3.26 light years so 480 parsecs times 3.26 equates to:) 1,564.8 light years  or so; barley more than 1% of the Milky Way's width. Even if we were to half that and say that the Heleus Cluster in Andromeda was only 782.4 light years across (which would only take 65.2 days to cross with their FTL methods of 12 light years per day) you still would be comparatively covering about five to six alien empires in the Traveller-verse with that same amount of distance.

You had characters in-game postulating several theories about them though, even if they mostly turned out wrong. That's the difference, there was this addressing of the unknown that is not present in Andromeda, the characters in the current game don't ask questions about things like that. At most you get Ryder asking Jaal how big his family is, or stating how the Remnant vaults are pretty big.

This is getting into issues of personal taste, though. I don't personally miss people soeculating without enough data to resolve the issue, but YMMV.