Bioware can't patch what sucks about ME:A - article

- Barriers:  I never said he said Fallout 4 did it better.  I'm saying complaining that they used a blue shimmering barrier to mark the end of the map is an incredibly nitpicky complaint.  I was comparing it to Fallout 4 having an impenetrable barrier you can't run through that just says you can't continue further.  A lot of open world games have some way to mark the end of the map.  The blue barrier lets you know, 'oh hey, I can't continue that way.'  Better that than hitting an invisible wall and stopping all momentum.  You must admit to have an entire section on this is nitpicky to the extreme.

- Powers and Favorites: No the author says in the article you can only use three powers and makes no mention of the fact that you can have favorite set ups to have four sets of three powers.  That's leaving out information to deceive the audience and influence a point you are trying to make.  ALL powers have cool down periods.  What difference does it make if you use a power, switch favorites and then wait for the cool down?  It's over in seconds and you can use your power again, only if you switch favorites you now have a new unique power to use.  One separate from what you just used.  If you only use a power once in an entire firefight and are done with the battle before the cool down has occurred.. well I'm not sure how you do that because I use the same powers many times in the same fight after they cool down.  If that's the case for this author, why is he even complaining about powers being limited if he uses them so infrequently like you said you do?

-  Weapon Equipping:  Oh please, you are honestly going to say there are TOO MANY items in a container you loot it's THAT much of an inconvenience to scroll down to the weapon that usually always are placed as the second item after "Take All?"  Really?  That's the argument?  "ME3 had weapon loadoutstations all over the place"  ...And MEA has the forward stations which act as the same exact thing.  Like I already said, it's not a great system.  You should be able to compare and swap out weapons in your inventory on the fly like you could in ME1, but if you want to lay this blame somewhere, you have to blame ME2 because that's the game that got rid of that where you select your loadout and you are stuck with that for the mission.  Chastising it in MEA as if it created the system is ridiculous.  Should they have implemented a better system?  Yup, like I already said.  Were they the game that made it like this?  No.  They weren't.

- Inventory:  Again, like I said I agreed with the author on the point that there should be storage facilities on the ship to store equipment you might not want to get rid of but want out of your inventory.  However, the author goes out of their way to make it seem like the inventory is such a hindrance to new players because it limits everything you can have and you can only have one set of equipment.  Don't believe me?  Here is what they say:

"And if you think you’re going to craft a couple guns and give them a test run, you’d better be careful; all those guns tie up your precious inventory space, whether they’re equipped or not. Yes, despite having an entire ship at their disposal, the Pathfinder prefers to carry every single item they own on them at any given time. No chests or storage lockers in Andromeda. The game frustratingly unfriendly to the idea that a player would like to own more than one set of armor, or more than a few different guns at any given time, which puts it at odds with its own loot caches and reward drops throughout the game. "

Again.  Really?  Particularly what is in bold.  That is demonstrably false.  I had beyond a plethora of assault rifles, pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, attachments AND armor sets without going over my limit, particularly when you use the cryo pods to increase your limit, I was never even above 105 items.  And yes, I did sell old equipment.  By the time you level to have Level V gear... why would you still be keeping your Level I?  They are very intentionally making it seem to the readers you can have one to two weapons in your inventory at a time in addition to a single armor set or you will have reached the limit and you are constantly at war with inventory management.  You aren't.  That's a lie and it isn't just poor choice of words.  It's intentional deception.  Nevermind the fact, this is EXACTLY what many people wanted when they complained the inventory system and management was removed from ME1, though MEA's is FAR more manageable.  Never once did I loot a container and be unable to take everything because my inventory was capped.  100 slots as it gives you at the base is a lot of space.  Sure there is some inventory management, but for someone reading this article without having the game, they now have an idea in their mind that they are constantly going to be at war with being over stocked and miss out on loot because inventory is so rigid.  It's false.

- NPCs and Graphics:  No again, it wasn't "poor choice of words" from the author.  It's intentional.  There are no games out there with as many characters rendered like MEA or Fallout 4 or The Witcher or, as you said, Dragon Age or Grand Theft Auto or..... I could continue.... or ANY open world game where the NPCs are as well textured or detailed as playable characters, companions or major story characters.  The author intentionally chose three random low-res background NPC character faces from MEA and compared them to three major characters with high res, hand crafted modeling in DAI.  That's not a poor choice of words.  That's, objectively, misleading the readers.
No.  You're wrong.  Are you genuinely trying to tell me here that you can't tell the difference between, say, Cora and a generic human on the Nexus?  You are being untruthful.  Again, you can't tell the difference between Drack and a generic Krogan on New Tuchanka?  Okay, then.  Again, I don't really believe you.  You even prove my point with what else you are saying when you say the same "generic" face is reused for unimportant characters in DAI.  So why didn't the author use these unimportant characters to compare to equally unimportant characters from MEA?  To deceive the readers.  The main Tempest crew do not look like generic NPCs you see on the worlds, Nexus or colonies.  That's a fact and you are free to Google search images if you can't remember from the game.  


Finally, that's fine.  You can think what you want.  I addressed as counterpoints major points of the authors article that they were using as points to say that the game is not very good and saying that they are wrong.  I'm also doing it on a thread on an unofficial forum.  They posted an article on a website.  I'm not nitpicking what they are saying, but a lot of what they are saying is, objectively, either false, uninformed or yes, in the case of the generic background NPC to major character graphic comparison, wildly and intentionally deceptive to the audience.

Like I said in my other post, despite loving the game myself, I will freely admit there are problems with it.  There is some cringe worthy dialogue.  Asari all have the exact same head model other than Peebee.  Animations in some areas are bad.  However, this particular author loses credibility because they are intentionally deceiving the readers of their article with false information, facts and features of the game they leave out and complain about not being included AND making ridiculous comparisons that are false.

Apologies for my misinterpretation of your post.


The existence of another race in the cluster would have diluted and/or complicated the process we went through with the angarans, the Roekkar, learning about the Jaardan, etc. I understand that you don't like that the angarans are the only new (non-kett) species we meet, but that's the environment BioWare chose to develop for this game.


The "Milky Way people" that the angarans were already working with were not representing the Ai - they were exiles. I'm trying to figure out how that first contact could have come about - should the Pathfinder randomly land on some already occupied planet? How would Ryder gain permission to land sans a working translator?

Without the Nexus Uprising, expulsion of exiles, and previous attempts to place outposts, the planets would have been truly barren of anything but kett - and remnant structures. Cruising around scanning flora and fauna, mapping, taking geological surveys, etc. would have been fun for about 5 minutes. The existence of the failed outposts on Eos adds quite a bit of content there. Mechanically, the equipment taken from the Nexus and adapted for other uses is what gives us the Milky Way research points we use to develop some of the crafted gear. Kadara Port is a lively place with lots of conflict and plenty to do - that would not have been possible if Ryder had been the first Milky Way resident to visit the place.

I also think that BioWare tried to avoid the sense that our character would be engaged in colonialism and any of its more distasteful aspects.