Well, it’s tough to describe the experience without spoilers, but I’ll try. I too loved the first three, and felt they got better and better with each iteration, though I was certainly one of the many who were very disappointed and let down by the ending of ME3. I honestly wasn’t bothered about whether Shepard lived or died at the end , but the undeniable fact that the ending relied not at all upon any of the decisions you’d made in the three games leading up to it, unlike every other part of the saga, really bugged the shit out of me.
Still, the overall experience was one of my favorites in my entire videogaming career, so I was very excited to learn there’d be a new Mass Effect. I was a tad nonplussed at the early reports of facial animation problems, especially the videos that compared the 2007 Mass Effect to the 2017 Andromeda, but frankly I don’t play these games for the graphics. Still, it was concerning, and actually indicative of the fact that, although Bioware started development of Andromeda five years ago, most of the actual game was created in the final 18 months or so of that time. You should check out Jason Schreier’s largely spoiler-free article about this game’s development over at Kotaku. (EDIT: ninjaed by @LockeCJ!)
Technical issues aside, I got this nagging feeling while I was playing the game that may have been related to whatever it was that set off those sexist jerks Jason mentioned in his article that figured “SJWs” ruined the game. I dunno. I just kept feeling like the Mary Sue element of the Andromeda story was strong. Much stronger than in previous ME games, anyway. The game felt… well, too easy, not in a combat sense (for the most part, the combat’s just great), but almost as if all my decisions had consequences that… well, didn’t make a hell of a lot of practical difference. Even if I made decisions that certain NPCs strongly disagreed with, they generally seemed to get over it awfully quickly. At one point, I reverted to an earlier save point just to briefly pursue an alternate plot decision, and while I was there, I redid a certain heart-to-heart conversation with one of my potential love-interest crewmates. Unlike my first trip through the conversation, on my second pass I knew I wasn’t going to pursue her, so I took the conversation in a much less sympathetic direction, just to see what would happen. She seemed slightly taken aback for about three seconds, then chirpily smiled and told me I was right about my opinion, blithely thanked me for the fresh perspective, said it made her feel much better, and carried on just as cheerful as before.
Basically, there are plenty of ways to die in this game, though only the ones that happen several firefights past your last checkpoint are particularly inconvenient (stepping off a cliff, for Christ’s sake, doesn’t even take the trouble to kill you; it just fades to black for a second and respawns you a foot or two back from the edge). But even though there are plenty of FPS-style deaths in store for you, it sure seems that it’s really hard to actually fuck up and make any genuinely wrong decisions in the game. In retrospect, I don’t even know if it’s ever possible to kill off any major characters through making a “bad” decision… or at all. I was waiting for a Kaiden-or-Ashley moment, and for me at least, one never came.
Instead, I kept collecting congratulations from countless NPCs for doing something no-one else had been able to do. Most of my successes felt wholly unearned, unlike the older ME games where I often had to really weigh a decision before committing to it. Andromeda really felt like a ME-flavored RPG designed for people who have never played an RPG before, and there are two or three difficulty settings easier than the one I played on. (And I’m kinda terrible at shooters anyway.)
I dunno. So much of the game feels to me like a misallocation of resources. There are a zillion different guns and lots of crafting to do, but it all feels like a waste of time and energy. (I built and leveled up a Black Widow sniper rifle and never gave another moment’s thought about gun crafting.) There are several different “profiles” that kinda work as skill-loadouts, but you can switch between any unlocked ones on the fly at any time, so you never feel locked into any given character build. So that removes any potential interesting tension there. I just picked the one that let me snipe the hardest and left that profile on, all the time. Unlike the old ME games, I never bothered to learn any biotic skills for my character, nor even any melee ones. I just plain shot my way through the game, which never seemed remotely difficult except for when fighting one of the “Architects,” which are big robotic bosses that show up on occasion (there are maybe a half dozen in the game, and I fought four of them in total). Those guys are just extremely time- and ammo-consuming slogs, and they don’t make a hell of a lot of sense either.
I never touched the multiplayer game. There are missions you can undertake in two ways: either play them yourself in multiplayer, or send a “strike team” to do the mission for you, and either way if you succeed, you get… I dunno, loot, I guess. I always sent out a strike team, which nearly always was successful, and I kept getting money and loot thereby that I never bothered to spend. That whole economy side of the game just never seemed to matter. By the end I had many tens of thousands of credits and ungodly amounts of XP, and nothing that I could think of to spend any of it on. Except a snazzy red paint job for my Nomad. I did buy that.
Anyway. It’s worth playing, it really is, but man, you really do get the feeling that Bioware sunk way too much time and effort on the wrong parts of the game. But I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to your opinion of it.
And it’s a really smooth experience without all the “I need mana” and “not enough hatred” and “you can’t afford your medical bills” and whatever.
