If you could give Bioware constructive criticism what would you say about MEA?

For people who have played the game what would you say to them or what are some major changes you would like to see in an update or sequel? I say "constructive criticism" because I'd like to avoid replies like "don't suck next time" lol. I like the game quite a bit, but there are a few decisions they made that were bad ideas and left me scratching my head.

- Add squad control back. If it's not broke don't try to fix it - I'm not sure why they'd get rid of this. Commanding a squad member to use a power and choosing that power is a fundamental part of the series IMO. I should also be able to choose their guns too. Alternate clothing for them would be good.

- A better character creator. It doesn't have to be on the level of Saints Row, but it should at least be to the level of the past games.

- Have Ryder come up with his/her own plans more often. There's too much of a reliance on Sam in certain parts of the story as if he's the boss or only smart one.

- Buff up biotics. The hard hitting powers like warp and reave are noticeable gone. It's a little annoying in singleplayer, but way more so in multiplayer, since just about all characters their feel weak.

- More new aliens. I don't want to spoil anything, but I would've liked to have seen at least 3 or 4 new species of intelligent aliens.

- Keep profiles and no classes, but get rid of favorites. Favorites just feels like a bad UI limitation. I'd much rather have a power wheel like before that has 8 to 12 powers. Having any power you want is great, but only having 3 at a time is two steps forwards and one step back.

I could name more, but I want to hear from people who have played the game at least past the prologue.

I just finished the game and for the most part enjoyed it. Sure there were bugs, some bad writing, but I did every quest I could find minus a handful of the additional tasks and I will say focus on quality over quantity. I am not a big fan of the Dragon Age Inquisition formula they are using and would like some more well written in depth quests instead of 2 dozen fetch quests.

I agree with you on the power wheel, definitely needs to come back. I have more but I will finish with I love Mass Effect, the universe, the options it has, I just wish it seemed like the people that made the game loved it too. It was just too paint by numbers in a lot of places.

I haven't played Mass Effect, but it sounds like a lot of retread ground. I know this is probably a problem from EA at least as much as Bioware, but I'd like to see this new team try more new things, not be afraid to follow in their predecessors' footsteps.

Change is good but I feel like the major changes they made like no paragon/renegade or even some kind of morality system, lack of control over your teammates, and further downplaying roleplaying mechanics are contradictory to what made Mass Effect, Mass Effect.

Please drop Inquisition as your framework for RPGs. Please let me play as a non-human, they are the only things you write decently anymore.

Honestly, let a series die. Can we not let something be complete these days? Side note: I couldn't be happier that Konami killed itself, because it added something to its classic franchises that they never had. Finality. Now the people that made Castlevania and Metal Gear are of making new IPs that couldn't look more fucking awesome. Can't Bioware do the same?

I think getting rid of paragon/renegade as a system was needed. In the past games, especially ME2, you had to pick one or the other in order to have enough points in one of them to make decisions. When I replayed the trilogy earlier this year I didn't have enough points to get Miranda to talk to me, so she never had a conversation with me again because I picked Jack's side in their argument. That was an idiotic decision by Bioware. I believe whether you shoot Ashley/Kaidan in ME3 at the citadel might also depends on points too. I liked not being tied down as Ryder. Whether I was by the book or a smartass was up to me. More dialogue choices would always be nice, but I don't want the old system to come back at all.

1. Stop making the playable character the be all and end all of everything and stop writing about ancient races/evils majority of ME:As story potential is squandered by misdirected story focus
2. An AI implant isn't "it's magic I ain't gotta explain shit"
3. Drop the Inquisition crafting system all together, better yet drop any influence from Inquisition
4. Go back to a linear mission structure, you can't do an open world worth shit
5. Pitch to EA for a budget to go to CDPR about licencing RED Engine or go to Unreal 4. Your team clearly doesn't have tools programmers capable enough to develop the tools you need for Frostbite

I could probably write 100+ points but this'll do.

@deathstriker: Sure. But when they said they were taking it out I was hoping they meant in favor of a Dragon Age: Origins system.

Don't be afraid to cut content, even optional content, that gives the player things to do at the expense of weighing down the overall experience with low quality quest design. This also includes multi-part steps that are effective at padding playtime but less so at adding anything of significance to the quest chain.

Refocus ground exploration on bespoke assets, encounters and points of interest to maintain a sense of surprise and variety. H-047c, and to a lesser extent Havarl, were good examples of this. Move further away from quest icon whack-a-mole on a cluttered map, especially when a major theme is exploring the unknown.

Fully break conventions with the increasingly stagnant dialogue wheel. Reference both the new Deus Ex games and older Bioware systems for ideas to deepen the roleplaying options and conversation structure with party members and NPC's.

Detective vision is well tread territory at this point. Either do it exceptionally well or make it incredibly trivial if you're going to include it as a mechanic to this degree.

Include some kind of training or testing mode for weapons and mods. The crafting system is already overwhelming as is, players need an opportunity to determine what they like and want to build if you want them to fully engage with it.

@deathstriker: yeah in one play through i lost wrex because i didnt have enough renegade and did a mission too early. But they could have a morality system that doesn't revolve around the "speech" skill. But it is still better than nothing, i dont feel like anything i chose to say matters that much.

As for my suggestions, for single player let the milky way die. Meaning, build some deeper lore and more species in amdromeda.

Multiplayer, dont hide max level characters behind rng cards. Its real stupid to have to wait on random numbers to get the most out of my character, especially ultra rare that i haven't even been able to unlock yet at all.

More aliens. Why go to a new galaxy if you're just going to recycle all the humanoid species?

Make it a tighter story. Not everything benefits from being an open world. 2 benefited from you only having two goals. Gather a deadly team of fighters and then defeat the collectors with said team.

If you do make it a more open world experience then actually make it worth it. Fill it with intersting content and not a bunch of glorified fetch quests.

Take risks and don't start making the same game again and again with a fresh coat of paint. Don't become the new Ubisoft. You're in a new galaxy. Just start throwing shir at the wall and see what sticks.

Direct the voice acting so that the lines sound like they're actually being delivered in the scenario.

I don't know how the voice acting was recorded but it feels like the someone just read the lines from a script completely out of context.

Some very easy things that shouldn't require much work:

- If it's true that the planetary animations aren't hiding load times, make them optional.

- If a power use button isn't on a cool-down, I should be able to use the skill assigned to it instantly after changing profiles. Going from three ready to use powers to three cool downs is bad design.

- Add an option to turn off the voice and text notifications when entering and exiting hazard areas.

Purge MMO design and all of Dragon Age: Inquisition from your memories.

Change up your main narratives please. It felt very familiar with previous bioware games, you guys are good, explore different stories guys.

Oh man, I could literally go on for pages about what I think BioWare needs to think about for the next iteration (if there even will be a next iteration at this point) of Mass Effect. But here are the highlights:

1) I would seriously consider going back to the Milky Way at this point. I feel absolutely no attachment to Andromeda and after getting through the game, I'm frankly not interested in going back. Nothing about it is as compelling as the original trilogy and I don't see how they can make it so at this point. The things people loved about the series all exist in the Milky Way, so go back to that well. And while I'm very aware that there are "issues" doing that given how the trilogy ended I honestly think it isn't as big a deal as people are making it out to be. If you tell a good enough story, you could recon the fuck out of the events of ME3 and people won't care. Now is the time to do it, too before you get too deep into a story people aren't invested in. Just let Andromeda be this weird little side story that gets forgotten over time and let players go back to where the action is.

2) Less is more. I don't think going open world was a very good idea and it certainly didn't add anything to Andromeda. It's an issue of both story telling and game quality. On the story front, it is difficult to maintain any sense of momentum when you can literally go dozens of hours dicking around between main quests. There were too many time in Andromeda when you'd get an email from someone saying "remember me?" and the answer was "Nope. I don't remember you. You were one generic NPC out of a million and I last talked to you 15 hours ago." It leads to an unfocused story with no sense of urgency or forward progress.

One the game quality front, well, if an open world means side quests of the low quality of the ones in Andromeda, then it just isn't worth it. I know "linear" has become something of a dirty word in RPGs these days, but it would honestly help a lot in Mass Effect's case. I'd rather play a great 30 hour game than a shitty 100 hour one.

3) Better companions. I really disliked most of the companion characters in ME:A. At best, I found them boring. I think the difference is the ME:A ones felt like walking tropes while the original trilogy characters felt like fully fleshed out individuals. While part of that is that the original squad had three games to grow on you, another large part of it is how they were written. One of the major differences is how the companions are structured between the games. In ME:A, you get one big exposition dump initially where that character describes their "thing." Vetra wants to protect her little sister, for example, or Cora is all about the Asari. Then you don't get any more about it until their loyalty mission down the line. In other words, they don't offer very much about themselves. Instead, they talk tend to talk about events. The problem with that is that, one, most of the event they talk about just happened, so you don't need the recap, and two, most of the loyalty missions fall flat because you don't really feel like you know the person.

By comparison, the original trilogy characters tended to have a personal story they would slowly tell you about, like a little serial. For example, in ME1 Garrus would initially discuss his life in C-Sec. Then he starts talking about Dr. Saleon and how he was this criminal that got away and how that bothers Garrus. But he doesn't tell you the whole story up front. Instead you get things up to a point, then he breaks off. Once you complete a major mission, he gives you the next "chapter" so to speak. And so on until you get the mission to take Saleon down. By talking about something personal over time like that, it gives the impression you are building a relationship with this person and that they are gradually becoming more comfortable with you. And the serial nature of their story reveals makes you eager to know what's next. One of the first things I would do in ME1 after a main path mission was talk to all the companions to see if they had anything else to say. I stopped doing that in ME:A, because I knew it was pointless.

4) Better villains. The Archon is lame. I'm sorry, but he his. He isn't threatening in either design or behavior and he has no personality beyond stock villain monologues. He feels like BioWare pulled him off the Saturday Morning Cartoon scrap pile. By comparison, the original trilogy had a lot of great villains. Saren was badass and kind of pitiable at the same time. Sovereign was scary. And the Illusive Man was a great villain even though he never really fought you. A good villain has got some interesting angle to them. Either something that makes them relatable (i.e. Saren genuinely thought he was trying to save the galaxy), or charming and magnetic (i.e. the Illusive Man) or just downright fucking terrifying (i.e. Sovereign). It helps if they've got an interesting visual design - the Illusive Man and his Star Chair or Saren and his glowy eyes.

The ME:A villains didn't have that. The character design was boring (what's with the dull cow eyes?) and didn't have any agenda beyond wanting to destroy you. Because evil.

5) No More Chosen Ones and Ancient Aliens. If your plot point is on the BioWare Bingo card, just don't do it. No, you don't have a "fresh perspective" and your "twist" isn't that clever. Don't do it. Get out of your comfort zone and try something original for a change. I had nearly every major plot point in Andromeda called out well in advance because things were so predictable. If I can do that, it's bad.

6) Overhaul the Conversation System. I could write an entire blog post on this point all by itself, but I'll try to summarize here: I can understand wanting to move away from the paragon/renegade system, but what they replaced it with was just lame. The p/r system, for all it's flaws, at least let you respond strongly to things. You could have an opinion and express that opinion and even (gasp!) disagree with your squad members. It helped to give Shepard a defined personality. By comparison, the ME:A system lacks that same strength. All your conversation choices boil down to two categories - times when no matter what option you pick you get a varying level of "politely milquetoast" or a situation where what the blurb says in no way matches what comes out of your mouth. I didn't feel like my Ryder had a defined personality. Or leadership skills. Or even that he was discovering either one of those things.

I kinda don't know what they need to do to fix that. They might need to move away from the wheel system entirely, or maybe offer the player less conversation options, so you only have a choice at critical story moments. I don't know. But they need to do something because what they've got going now is pretty bad.

7) Details Matter. One of the things I felt was sorely lacking in ME:A was attention to detail. When you're getting emails from dead characters or emails talking about events that haven't happened yet, it's jarring. And none of the new races or locations had nearly the same level of detail as they ones in the original trilogy. The Angara are supposed to manipulate bio-electric energy, but when do you actually see that in a meaningful sense? You hear about how large families are critically important to their culture, but you never see them doing things as families. You discuss their cultural rules when you arrive on their planet, but they aren't enforced in any way. I know that can be a lot of work for something that maybe most players won't care about. But for the people who are really into Mass Effect, it matters a lot. One of the reasons people got into the original trilogy was the level of care that went into establishing that universe. The codex didn't just tell you stuff about the universe, it was actually reflected in what was going on.

I feel like this was something that started to slide with the ending of ME3, but really became seriously noticeable in ME:A. They've got to get back to that level of detail.

8) Bring Back Pedantic Codex Guy. Seriously, worst omission of ME:A

Considering how big the universe/mythology is for Mass Effect, I don't see the need for it to stop. It's better than the Star Wars' universe IMO, but much like Star Wars, not every story in it needs a Skywalker, just like ME doesn't need Shepard. Something character focused like Uncharted shouldn't keep going, but there are a lot of stories that could be told here and it's not like there's some perfect Mass Effect game, it seems like each of the four games has some major flaw and different things are good about each one. I say that as someone whose favorite gaming franchise is probably Mass Effect. Calling Death Stranding "fucking awesome" seems weird when we've only seen a couple of cutscenes.

MGSV could've been great with some more story, no lame twist, and an actual ending chapter. I think it's a shame that game will never really be done. Mass Effect should definitely keep going, but Bioware should have freedom to do different projects like Rockstar does with GTA, Naughty Dog with Uncharted, and Insomniac with Ratchet.

First of all I think the devs know exactly everything that was wrong with the game before it came out but regardless my constructive criticism would not go to bioware it would go to the people who make the actual decisions i.e. EA. And what I would want to tell them is simple: give your developers creative control over the game they are making.

Release a ME1-3 collection on PS4 then kill the series.

A simpler premise is okay.

I agree with @lawgamer - go back to the Milky Way and don't be afraid to follow up the trilogy. You didn't need to get scared and run off on a completely disconnected story. Pick up shortly after where ME3 left off and try out a KOTOR 2-like premise of playing a protagonist attempting the pick up the pieces of a shattered galaxy after the Reaper conflict. A crippled Alliance attempting to rebuild their influence and patch up all the damage that was done, with criminal elements attempting to fill the voids of influence where the empires once stood. You don't need mysterious ancient alien macguffins, or some sort of impending evil doom, just the politics you've already established so well. With a scaled back premise like that, and a galaxy that's already been established, half the outline is already done for you. It's all you need.

Also, a little less teen TV drama-tier jokes.

You don't even need to retcon, you can just tell a story about rebuilding. Which is basically what Andromeda is failing to do (at least where I'm up to.)

Also, call the game Mass Effect 4, that will separate Andromeda as a side game.

Haven't played the game, but I've heard/read from various sources that a few parts of the game, specifically about uncanny valley look of the humans, were outsourced along with over-using Cyberscan as an automated tool for 3D models and whatnot.

So, my advice, maybe not outsource and automate a bunch of things and just take the time to actually craft things? Maybe, EA and Bioware upper management? Just a little more time and money to avoid your game being 2017's Ruff Ryders' Anthem?

Again, didn't play the game myself, so I'll leave all of the other critiques to you dudders. I'll just fulfill my need to mindlessly shoot things with Warframe.

Quality over quantity. It's cool that you can make these big open areas but when the majority of content in those big open areas is repetitive filler, you're just making an excuse for the big open area instead of justifying it. Same goes for the amount of dialogue and stuff, obviously it wasn't the studio's best talent working on this game, and if you can't get that team to produce the same quality of the previous games, scale it back and make something focused and worthwhile instead of bloated and boring.

Honestly it kinda sounds like they gave this game to the wrong team, or the project got managed badly. In any case, they definitely overestimated what they were capable of delivering.

I generally agree with @lawgamer. My biggest problem with Andromeda was the writing, both on a macro and a micro scale. The team seemed to come from a much younger generation than the last batch of writers, and were focused on a much goofier tone than the previous games. Ryder is younger than Shepard, but not that much so. It makes sense they wanted to play up their inexperience given the scenario, but Ryder fails to grow meaningfully over the course of the game, and their Uncharted-style quips lack the charm of a more confident rapscallion character. Additionally, the flavor of the four dialogue tones was extremely subtle to the point of being nearly unnoticeable, nothing like the big difference between the old Paragon and Renegade options. The voice direction played a part in this too, with extremely odd line delivery popping up seemingly at random ruining any emotional weight key scenes could've had. The GBEast playdate had plenty of examples of that. These problems show up on basically every character in the game (Addison and Tann are particularly bad), but it's the worst with Ryder.

Additionally, there wasn't enough focus on the smaller details of the game universe, and, as I had initially feared, an obvious unfamiliarity with the lore. The most egregious examples of that was on New Tuchanka, where not only did you have a female Krogan in power, but there was no sign of the gender segregated culture that we saw on Old Tuchanka in ME3, the highly ritualized mating practices, or the formal garb that Eve wore. It's fine if you want to say they had to abandon those practices due to the survival situation, but fundamentally altering your culture in that way that quickly would be a huge deal, and almost certainly result in hard-liners and splinter groups (especially in a tribal society like theirs), but they don't so much as reference it. In the same way, the trilogy-long battle with the genophage and it's effect on the Korgan collective psyche and their ability to maintain their numbers is only barely paid lip service, when it raises serious questions as to why you'd want to bring a species that can barely maintain replacement birth rates on a colonization mission. Instead we just get one racist Salarian bureaucrat.

Finally, the structure of the main narrative was sorely lacking. The priority missions account for something like 1/5th the game's playtime, and the final mission resolves exactly one of the outstanding plot threads: the Archon. None of the other mysteries in the game are elaborated on at all, and we don't see any major consequences to Ryder's actions throughout the game. As an example of that, the scene for reaching 100% viability on all planets (and essentially resolving the Nexus crisis) is a total joke. You get a 30-second audio clip, and the planet they rename in Ryder's honor isn't even actually renamed on the UI! They needed to focus less on making a spiritual successor to Mass Effect 1, and more on achieving a fusion of all the lessons learned through the entire franchise. We didn't need Mass Effect's The Force Awakens; what we wanted was Mass Effect's Star Trek: The Next Generation.

@slaps2: Isn't Konami making a new Metal Gear game that looks very action-y?

I hate to say it, but therw is no finality in sight.

@viking_funeral: Shit, I didn't know it, but it's dead to me anyway. Kojima or fucking nothing.

I'm generally pretty happy with ME:A and while the game does have some flaws, I feel like most of them could be fixed with the simple advice of "Take some more time to polish things." I do have two bigger pieces of advice though:

1) Drop crafting. Just drop it entirely. But don't eliminate character loadouts, in fact that should be expanded for squadmates. Crafting needs to go though.

2) Do a better job of having the writers communicating with each other; or a better job of explaining how every storyline fits together. There's lots of examples of storylines where in a vacuum the writing is fine, but are very out of place and seem poorly written within the overall game story. There are examples of just straight up bad writing (like first contact with the Angarans). But usually its more like, "Okay, I'm fine with the premise of Kadara port. But how did this hive of scum and villainy get going so quickly? And how did all of a sudden everyone, including the Angarans, know about it?" There needs to be more connective tissue to everything.

One problem is that, like DA:I, the game is supposed to cover a decent amount of time, at least a couple years, but there's almost no indication of that in the actual game. It mostly pops up in the codex, where there's references to things like Peebee having spent "months and months" studying something on the Tempest, and the fact that a lot of the game storylines only make sense in the context of a longer timeline.

Brad's initial assessment of the game holds true as far as I'm concerned: it's as if Bioware followed a checklist of what their fans think a Mass Effect game is, and ticked as many boxes as possible. As a result, many of the game's narrative and gameplay aspects feel contrived, especially so considering the events of this game are somewhat divorced from what happens in the trilogy. I think Bioware's first order of business is to stop trying so hard to appease their fans.

This is not exclusive to Andromeda, but I think Bioware should focus on a couple of core gameplay pillars like dialogue and combat, and build fewer, more refined systems and mechanics around them. I strongly believe that a leaner game with a linear, tightly-paced narrative has benefited their games more so than the open-ended structure of Andromeda and Inquisition.

If they ever make another Mass Effect or Dragon Age, I hope they consider nothing to be a "sacred cow." In other words, make Dragon Age 2, but better.

More weird aliens.

Hire more staff <100 people is not enough for AAA development otherwise none of Bioware's problems can be fixed without severely reducing their next games size, scope and dialogue.

Let me play as a god damn alien.

Don't try to exceed your means, be that budget or general time constraints. I'd rather play a less ambitious game than a half baked one.

Drop the idea of basing all of your games on the same template. Using that template to stamp out Dragon Age and Mass Effect games like they're widgets on an assembly line can't be a good idea in the long run. I can see it breeding laziness and stagnation.

Open worlds are awesome, but only when they're justified by interesting things to see and do. These open worlds feel like an excuse to drive around in the Nomad. Don't get me wrong, the Nomad is great, but that's not enough.

The series as a whole feels like it's on a pendulum. It started out on one side with a great story/characters and relatively shit gameplay. Over the course of the series the pendulum has swung to the other side with a relatively shit story/characters and great gameplay. We all know you can achieve both a great story and great gameplay so what's the problem?

This is a post-Witcher 3 world we're living in now. The bar has been raised. Step up or step aside.

One of my coworkers is an aircraft buff. He saw my desktop wallpaper of the Tempest and said "Your plane is upside down. The wings are usually on the bottom." Now that's all I can see: the Tempest is upside down. And now that's all you'll see too, reader. Sorry.

I don't think any of it is particularly bad. Or more, there's too many things wrong to mention because they are all minor but there's a billion of them. The whole thing just needs more polish.

"be like witcher 3" is hardly constructive criticism.

Echoing a few previous comments here... Andromeda was a premise filled with infinite narrative possibility, and they squandered it. The writers seem more comfortable living in the pre-established fiction of the OT than creating their own, so don't force it. Just go back to the Milky Way.

Stop taking narrative and personality control for the protagonist away from me. Focus less on Nathan Drake style snark and quips that don't really land and focus on giving me the chance to build a character through dialog and decision making. Like in the first two games.

Bring Drew Karpyshyn back. The series went from Next Generation writing quality to Voyager quality writing when he left.

Constructive criticism, you guys.

@blackout62: Yes please this games feels like a MMO most of the time. Just like Dragon Inquisition.

@ripelivejam: If they move over the team to Poland and give them a Polish Wage they could have done way more with there 40 Million :'D.

(Witcher 3 costed 81 million or 306 million Zloty.)

As for the game itself get a higher budget (thanks EA) scrap that MMO Design your making a open World RPG not the next world of warcraft ( i hate the cartoon looking models thanks again World of Warcraft) Get back the doctors or Casey Hudson. Maybe just make 2 Really big planets instead of 5 shitty ones (pointing at the witcher Skelliga and the Novograd Area or GREAT !) don't fill your map with pointless dumb quest your not a MMO ! There Where a lot off people pointing out that Gravity is a thing depending on the planet go weird on that one make a fun mechanic around ETC. Maybe don't have a evil villain, just the point off survival alone might be a neat idea. ( maybe a Civil war that is not afraid off showing the horrors of it ?) in a few words just be Creative and don't stick to your typical market research template or you might be making the next FUSE.

@adamlcook: That is really the best, most simple way to put it: quality over quantity. I also really liked it and spent a little over 100 hours on it doing everything minus several task missions, but I feel that that is a good way to put it. Yes, it'd be nice if the visual issues were taken care of, be it technical glitches, some low texture quality work in a few spots or a not-so-steady frame rate in spots, but from the perspective of what you're doing as a player, I'd say condense it. Make there be twice as many worlds to explore, but make them twice as small as the large ones they have; give them, even more, detail than they have and put more significant missions in each one that deals with character and story development. That might be more quantity, but still, quality really matters and where you explore and what you do in them. I enjoyed Andromeda, but there were too many fetch-quest tasks that felt tedious and not rewarding in the way Mass Effect has always mattered. They basically took the worst side missions of the past three games and put a whole bunch in Andromeda.

Hire a new writing team. Now, that might not sound very constructive, but hear me out. A lot of people used to come to Bioware games for story-driven experiences first and foremost. They've certainly tried to make the combat more "appealing" in recent years, with some hit and miss results. ME combat was a great improvement, where as Dragon Age went real downhill after that first one.

Now, when was the last time Bioware released a game with a truly great story? Characters in ME: 2 were terrific, but the overarching story itself.. Not so much. I'd say Knights of the Old Republic, which was released in 2003. That's a loong time ago.

I also really, really (really, REALLY) like Dragon Age: Origins (2009), but again, it's definitely yet again the case of the characters being engrossing rather than the overarching story.

Rather than "building" on their previous concepts and "expanding" the universe, pretending to be open-world games, which clearly results in broken messes and clearly unfinished games (I'm looking at you DA:I), they should probably focus on nailing what made them big in the first place. Get that down, and a lot of the shit around it can be forgiven. Personally, I'd gladly play ME:A, warts and all, if I actually were interested in its story, which I'm not in the least bit.

i haven't played andromeda, nor do i have extensive knowledge of game design- but as a recovering superfan of the series, i'd offer the following to ea/bioware:

scale the fuck down, and take it slow. let's roll back the stakes. you've already put the sweat-equity into lore and universe-building. lean on that to tell smaller, more intimate stories (c-sec security; turian/human first contact; political struggles in andromeda). i don't need to feel like a saviour, and i don't need a big bad to threaten all life to have skin in the game.

to me the story and universe has always justified the less-than-stellar mechanics, and never the other way around. sci fi works best when it's used as a medium to explore specific aspects of humanity- whether it's culture, philosophy, the ethics of technology or the definition of morality itself. deal in those sorts of complicated, smaller stories- because i can't relate to and don't care about CHOSEN ONE stories.

Human companions don't have to be boring garbage just because it's a series about (boning) strange aliens.

@ntm: Absolutely, it was very similar to the first Mass Effect where you had a 50 or so random ice/volcanic/blah blah planets that you would drive a round a while pick up a few minerals and then kill a base load of guys for a data pad. Andromeda was open world for open worlds sake, instead of open world to fit the narrative. I missed the planets from 1-3 that were there purely for story, sure they were linear but they were so well done it didn't matter because it was a fun ride where the characters interactions and decisions made the differences instead of the filler of crushing rocks for science etc.

-Give us more interesting things to do on each planet. I'd rather have quality things to do over fetch quests in terms of making every planet 100% viable. I thought SWTOR's system of having a main storyline for the character that takes you to each planet which then had it's own story was pretty awesome. Do that.

-I'd like more Space things to do. I don't need ship to ship combat (which hey if you can do that awesome) but it would be cool to search wreckages in a space suit or maybe doing some up close research on the Scourge. I mean EA did it already in Dead Space and this is also a Sci-Fi game.

-Play as an Alien. I want to be Krogran damn it!

I actually don't think the writing is abhorrently bad. You can definitely tell David Gaider left part of the way through and the games writing has suffered with the lack of Drew Karpyshyn has definitely been a detriment on the series.

It's funny because Mass Effect 1 already had missions like this.

Yep it sure did.