Hey, wassup. Summer has basically ended, leaving us with the oncoming torrent of new releases that won’t let up until the end of the year. Personally, I’m excited for Divinity Original Sin II next week. That game, alongside Etrian Odyssey V and Mario Odyssey are probably my most anticipated games of the year, though honestly I still have a lot of Zelda that needs playing somewhere along the way too. In any case, I thought I’d start off the new school year off right, not by extolling the virtues of something good like Zelda, the XCOM 2 expansion, or Nioh (which I got the platinum trophy for because it’s so GOOD) but instead by exorcising myself of one of this year’s most notable failures.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

If you had asked me around 7 years ago who my favorite game developers were, I think Bioware would’ve probably topped that list. Alongside Nintendo and the long-defunct New World Computing, it’s fair to say that few other individual development studios are as responsible for my tastes in video games as they are. I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic when I was 12, which then led me to Baldur’s Gate II and (by proxy) numerous other role-playing games, including the old-school ones that I’m still a weird lunatic about to this day. Before KotOR, Dungeons and Dragons-style mechanics, and the concept of “player choice” were both foreign ideas to me. Certainly, it’s easy to look back on that game now and pick apart its binary morality, shallow mechanics, and occasionally goofy writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it (alongside the Paper Mario games and the Might and Magic series) was a formative experience for me and RPGs.

But of course, things change. I’m willing to acknowledge that my tastes in video games have changed in the past few years, often contrary to Bioware’s own changing (corporate-mandated) design ethos, and a lot of that simply has to do with the part where I like the kind of crunchy, mechanics-heavy RPG that simply does not exist in the AAA space. If you’re wondering why I said “7 years ago” in the last paragraph, it’s because Mass Effect 2 came out 7 years ago and was probably the last Bioware game I’d consider to be “great.” I will defend Dragon Age II as an interesting failure and I still like Mass Effect 3 overall in spite of how utterly stupid its original ending was, but both of those games represented a slip in quality that the company has never quite managed to recover from. Critics liked Dragon Age Inquisition a lot, but personally it left me (and seemingly a lot of other people) rather cold with its faux-MMO world design and bad combat. It’s one of the few single-player RPGs from them I've quickly dropped, alongside such stellar epics as Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, and the pre-built campaigns for Neverwinter Nights (note to self: I should check out Hordes of the Underdark at some point.)

I think there’s also a part of me that has gotten a little tired of Bioware’s writing style. I could accuse them of simply getting worse at writing and really digging into the pandering, adolescent power-fantasy aspects of their games, but that’s something that’s hard for me to personally quantify. It’s been a hot minute since I played Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age Origins, and while the nostalgia voice in my head tells me those games were much better written than their successors, I’m not sure how true that is. Let’s just say that I’ve found myself relating more to Obsidian’s slightly more complex, slightly more adult brand of writing over the past few years. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention a general fatigue with the overarching, encompassing “Bioware Formula.” It varies slightly from game to game, but is epitomized by their love of making the player protagonist “the special,” fighting against a decidedly bland world-ending threat alongside a quirky cast of archetypal characters (an increasing number of whom you can bone down with) with the occasional *IMPORTANT CHOICE* along the way. That’s certainly a gross oversimplification, one that ignores nuance and the basic fact that most stories are kinda the same, but I hope that you have an understanding of what I’m saying. Bioware is unique in their devotion to their particular template, one that they’ve arguably been using in one form or another arguably since Baldur’s Gate II (and inarguably since Neverwinter Nights.)

So yeah, now that you know where I stand, let’s talk about Mass Effect Andromeda. Chances are, you’re already aware of the game’s lukewarm critical and word-of-mouth reception, the story of its troubled development, or the part where EA wants to bury it as quickly as possible. I would love to say that these aren’t reflective of my experience, that I could offer something positive or contrary to the current prevailing deluge of negativity surrounding this game, but… I really didn’t like it. It’s bad, and I find the “Direct-to-Video” analogy a lot of people have been throwing around to be incredibly apt. The only reason I finished Andromeda, rather than dropping it like Inquisition, was a combination of morbid curiosity and masochism (the same masochism that made me stick with Bound By Flame until it broke me, in case you were wondering.) It’s a bad, bizarrely inept game that can be bad and inept for a very long time if you so choose, though I had my fill after slightly more than 25 hours. Someone who beelines through the main quest could probably do it in less than 15, but I felt the need to check out a decent chunk of the noteworthy side quests, including all but one of the crew loyalty missions. Unless you have a concerted interest in seeing the franchise commit seppuku, I would recommend you stay far away. There have been so many great games this year; you don’t need to spend your time on this one.

As someone already fatigued with most open world games, Mass Effect offers the worst kind of take on open world design. It’s a bland series of large, mostly empty zones filled with trivial trash mob encounters and a bunch of repetitive, boring side activities that aren’t all that fun the first time you do them, alongside the occasional NPC fetch quest and the even more occasional NPC quest that’s actually involved (which, it turns out mostly involves running between the handful of inhabitable planets in order to talk to one NPC or go to a random spot and fight a handful of mooks.) None of it is all that great, but at the very least the shooting is surprisingly decent. Certainly, the AI is dumber than a pile of bricks and the way skills are laid out actively discourages you from too much experimentation (I mostly stuck with the same 3 for my entire playthrough) but that doesn’t really change the fact that jumping in the air, dashing backward, and shooting an enemy in the head with a sniper rifle while hovering in the air is pretty fun. It would be more fun if it was remotely challenging or tactical on the default difficulty, or had more variety in its encounters, but it’s the best thing in the game by far. Yes, they removed the tactical pause and therefore the last vestige of classical RPG-ness that the series was hanging onto, but I think expecting the RPG mechanics in a modern Bioware game to be remotely interesting is probably asking too much at this point. It’s a decent shooter, and that’s honestly not the worst thing in the world.

Of course, the only reason the adequately entertaining combat asserts itself is because of how it contrasts to the rest of the game… which does not come off all that well. I know I spent the first 3 paragraphs setting up my feelings on Bioware as a developer, but I should really emphasize that Andromeda is even a step below their previous disappointing output. I might’ve bounced off of Dragon Age Inquisition for various reasons, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t have its charms or merits. They certainly cocked up the open world design and combat, but I still liked most (not all) of the supporting cast and found the writing (mostly) decent. Comparatively, there is an amateurish, hackish quality to Andromeda’s writing that I think can be most closely be compared to something like a SyFy channel original series or a particularly bad episode of Star Trek (probably Enterprise, or something.) Even at its best, Bioware’s writing isn’t exactly the complete works of Shakespeare, but it usually works as pulpy sci-fi or fantasy fare, and for years there wasn’t exactly much better out there. To give a broad summation: most of the dialogue in Andromeda is either super on-the-nose attempts at exposition or exceptionally bad attempts at snark. It’s as if the writers were big fans of something like Firefly, but didn’t understand how to write Wheadon-esque dialogue and tone it down in more serious situations. As a result, everyone is either constantly (and unfunnily) cracking wise all the time or rattling off super obvious character or plot details in a way that tends to violate the rule of “Show, don’t tell.” There was a brief period early on where the writing was stupid enough to take on an ironic quality, and I was enjoying it in the same way I enjoyed the writing of RPG masterpiece Bound By Flame. That didn’t last very long. Unfortunately, for all its faults the quality of the writing and voice acting wasn’t bad enough to sustain those feelings for more than a few hours and after a while I mostly just wanted everyone to shut up.

The quality of dialogue is further aggrieved by the situations you are put in and the characters involved in those situations. Andromeda’s core themes of going to a new place, exploring the unknown, encountering new species, dealing with the challenges of colonization, etc, are all squandered one by one as the story takes on the challenge of carving out a new space for more Mass Effect via the most generic and tired storytelling tropes possible, justified in the sloppiest manner possible. Ancient Aliens and their brand of inexplicable space magic are a bad, lazy plot device, something I thought we learned pretty well in 2012. There are fewer alien races to interact with (The Quarians, Hanar, Volus, etc all seemingly saved for a DLC mission that never came) but the returning aliens have had all of their edges sanded off. I’m not just talking about lore inconsistencies, I’m talking about the Asari, Turians, Salarians, and Krogan all becoming far more bland and straightforward than they were in the original trilogy. That’s okay, because at least they’re still more interesting than the new alien races, the Angara and the Kett, both of whom are as boring as their C-tier, rubbery designs would suggest. The Kett especially make for poor main villains, with their incredibly played out motivations and mustache-twirlingly evil behavior. The main quest doesn’t have a whole lot to redeem itself, actually. There are a couple of side quests that offer a glimmer of much more interesting scenario writing, but those are often few and far between.

I don’t really know how much more of my disappointed rambling you need to read, so I’ll end on this: The supporting cast is usually a pretty safe bet in any given Bioware game, assuming you’re on board with their style of companion writing. There will always be always be a handful who don’t resonate depending on one’s tastes, and there will always be those who everyone kinda hates (your Anders and your Mission Vao types) but in my personal experience I think most Bioware companion writing is more hit than miss. In Andromeda…? After doing almost everyone’s loyalty mission (unfortunately for Liam, I’d have to do too much work to see what his is like) I like Drack, and I think Vetra’s probably alright too. They’re both archetypes you’ve seen before, done better in other Bioware games, but in a game where most of the writing is tee-balling its way to the finish line, those two stand out as actually being able to hit the ball unassisted. The rest of the cast seems to confuse being snarky or acting like a sycophant with having a personality or being likeable. I could probably go on about every single member of the Tempest’s crew, about how much I dislike or am indifferent to most of them, but this thing is already 2,000 words long and I’m sure you can read or watch half a dozen other breakdowns that can explain exactly why Peebee is the worst. I’ll just say that they’re a pale simulacrum of much better casts and move on from there.

I can’t really express to you how much of a bummer Mass Effect Andromeda is. I will be that weirdo who still claims that Baldur’s Gate II is Bioware’s best RPG, but the original Mass Effect trilogy holds a pretty high place in my personal estimation (ME2 especially.) It’s a close fight between Andromeda and Jade Empire for the bottom of my list (let’s be real: Sonic Chronicles is barely a Bioware game), but I think Jade Empire emerges slightly better if only because it came out 12 years earlier and is only like 15 hours long if you decide to do everything. I don’t think people would be nearly as harsh on this game if it was developed by someone else (like, if this game was published by Focus Home Interactive and developed by some B-tier European studio, I think people would be way more forgiving), nor do I especially relish being one more thumbs down condemning this game to the pits of hell. But endlessly negative, potentially hyperbolic reception or not, I will stand by saying that you should not play Mass Effect Andromeda (unless, like me, you really needto know for yourself.)

Random Endorsement

My dark descent into the anime hole this year naturally was also accompanied by me taking a look at the magical and mostly questionable world that is “Anime Youtubers.” I’ll be blunt in saying that I find most of anime youtube just as insufferable as video game youtube, but there are a couple of big name ones I find decently entertaining or informative. Among the best of the lot is probably Super Eyepatch Wolf, who makes very thoughtful, very well-reasoned videos without coming off like he has his head up his own ass. Bonus points for the accent.

Nice write up!

The new alien concepts and storylines were the most inexcusable part. Squadmate writing was closer to the Citadel DLC-level of cheesiness, but I can tolerate it. Fetch quests were super dull but I learned to ignore them. Weird animations at least have been patched. But the aliens are unfixable.

The remnant (and SAM) were basically space magic hand waving away actually interesting problems. The Kett "twist" was so obvious it just made Ryder seem stupid. The Angara are actually fine, but their first official contact with us was so uneventful (the computer panels on their home world also were displaying letters and Arabic numbers???).

I will say ME:A did one other thing well (aside from combat): the ending fight tying into decisions and completed quests. A couple lines or bit of animation for each force/faction that you recruited through the game. It wasn't mind-blowing, but fans would have been very satisfied if that was the ending of ME3.

:(

KoToR is ridiculously overrated, KoToR 2 is pretty good though. Also Baldur's Gate and Planescape are probably overrated too considering they're nearly unplayable at this point due to archaic design; whereas you pick up Final Fantasy IV/VI or whatever and they still play like a charm. Jagged Alliance 2 is still decent, so engine not necessarily the issue. Western RPGs are just not so great unless they come from Eastern Europe.

Nice blog!

Mass Effect as a whole feels like this representation of the course of BioWare over the last generation, with the first one being very much the janky, RPG-ass RPG you would have expected them to make, to the second one whittling down a lot of the RPG elements and streamlining everything (likely to chase some sort of mainstream), to the third one basically feeling like it was 90% of the way to just being a military-sci third person shooter. I feel like you could even look at stuff like the armor and weapon designs to see that shift; I remember a lot more curves to the weapons and bubble-y designs to the armor in the first game, while in 3 everything was all harsh lines and the kind of space marine armor plating that wouldn't be out of place in, like, Gears of War or something.

I often wonder if I would like the trilogy as much if I replayed it now (or if I were playing it for the first time) as I did when the games came out. I imagine the jank with the first one has only gotten worse with age, and even removed from the ending, I really didn't like 3 all that much, mostly due to that shift in tone. It's made me think that maybe I only really like Mass Effect 2. Still, for a setting with so much potential, it's sad to see it go out like this.

Also, Super Eyepatch Wolf is a cool dude.

I don't know if you picked that Simpsons analysis on purpose, but I think something similar happened to Bioware.

So I basically went through the same thing with Squaresoft and the Final Fantasy series that you went through with Bioware. Fwiw if you want to see creators recycle tropes probably no genre is more guilty than JRPGs which also seem to take the Hero's Journey to save the whole world and a young boy from a small village as the protagonist as must include tropes in every game.

When I played those games they felt like the pinnacle of video game storytelling of their day, and in retrospect I do actually think they were (at least on console) compared to their peers. Square was king of the world in PS1 days.

But what happened is kinda threefold

the original creators gradually left the company (Sakaguchi, Matsuno from Square among others and the Doctors from Bioware), their replacements were pretty inferior and perhaps most importantly their competitors got better. By the time FFXiii came out, its' structure felt dated compared to its new peers.

So to me, outside looking in, Bioware definitely got worse (Andromeda especially since it was handed to the B team) but I also think our standards are higher now. Story telling in other high watermark games is a lot better than it was in 2010. Back in 2010, you didn't have Witcher 3 or Last of Us or pick any game you think has a great story in recent memory. That's the new benchmark and Bioware didn't seem to even try to hit it in favor of recycling old favorites. I sometimes wonder if this happens to game companies because devs have to spend so much time making games that they end up stop gaming themselves so they no longer have their finger on the pulse as much as they used to.

for me I can still enjoy those games but I also like old games. Kinda like when FF Xiii hit, They definitely don't feel like a best in class/GotY type stuff anymore. So you just kind have to take them for what they are now, not what they were then.

there is hope, but it requires the right hire and a renewed commitment to excellence. I feel like Tabata is trying to do the right things with FF going forward, so Bioware can turn it around if they want to. With their focus on Anthem though and EA's influence, sadly I'm not sure that they do.

I think the next game company/series this will happen to is Betheseda. You started to hear the complaints with Fallout 4 about the jankiness and the storytelling and I think those criticisms imo are fair. They need to really step up their game with Elder Scrolls Vi or they risk a slide into irrelevance as well.

@doughnutwarlord: Yeah, there's a pretty drastic shift from Mass Effect 1's very obvious 1970s/80s sci-fi influences (especially with the heavy synths and film grain) to where Mass Effect 3 ultimately ended up. Like you, I'm also not entirely sure how I'd feel if I were to play through these games again. My experience with Andromeda made me vaguely consider it, but the prospect of having to slog through the clunky combat and janky technical problems of Mass Effect 1 was enough to make me consider otherwise. I do still kinda want to replay Dragon Age Origins one of these days... with an option to replay Dragon Age II to see if my apologism for that game is warranted.

@fredchuckdave: Some of the Western/Japanese split can be put down to the fact that Japanese RPGs were made for a wider audience on consoles, while Western CRPGs were made on computers for Dungeons and Dragons nerds used to drawing their own maps. I'd argue there are still things about those SNES Final Fantasy games that don't come off super well, but in general, yeah, I'll agree they're far more accessible. I can still play the Infinity Engine games just fine, but I'll acknowledge that my experiences with those games is probably not reflective of the average person coming to them for the first time almost 20 years later. I'd have to disagree about Jagged Alliance 2 though. Back when I was playing weird old computer games on a regular basis (and occasionally blogging about them on this site) it stood out as one of the ones I was never able to crack. I thought about giving it another shot this year when Mento blogged about it, but I got as far as reading through the endless debates on which version of the 1.13 patch I should use before thinking better of it.

@slag: The Simpsons video was purely coincidental. I just figured I should post something from Super Eyepatch Wolf that would be of interest to a wider audience. There's certainly a lot that can be said about the fall of Bioware, how much of the blame can be pointed at EA's direction and how much can be attributed to the simple decay that any long running creative institution experiences. As you've said, their competition has also gotten a lot better. A decade ago, when Western RPGs were mostly dead, they were one of the only shows in town. Obsidian was playing second fiddle, making technically disastrous (but better written) sequels to Bioware's licensed games, Bethesda had Oblivion, and there were a couple of small Euro studios making weird stuff like Two Worlds or The Witcher 1. Things have changed, to put it lightly. I know there's some level of debate over how good a lot of the kickstarter throwback RPGs are, but even on the mainstream front I feel like The Witcher 3 has raised the bar for big-budget stuff significantly.

In a lot of ways, Anthem feels like the final break from their origin of making Dungeons and Dragons-ass RPGs to just making a straight up Destiny-esque cooperative loot shooter. Even if that turns out alright, I dunno if I can ever take another game from them seriously. I really don't care about the inevitable Dragon Age 4, and now there are other, better options for me to get my fix. I'll never say I'm totally done, but they're going to have to do a lot to win me back.

Andromeda is one of those games I really want to play to see the disappointment for myself (because Mass Effect was totally the series I became a hardcore fan of last gen) but at the same time don't want to give much money to actually play, so I'm waiting until it's inevitably twenty bucks on Black Friday.

Still though, the direct-to-video comparison that has gone around a lot, which I think is totally apt, has made me think a lot about how the average person thinks critically. I don't mean for this to come off as condescending as it may sound, but: Andromeda has a small following of defenders, who really do believe Andromeda is every bit of a Mass Effect game as its predecessors. Those people look at the critics of the game and are bemused by people saying this feels different in any way. Andromeda has actually been fascinating to me because of this; its a good example of how some people can't seem to distinguish what basically feels like a knockoff in comparison to the originals. I don't know, it's a roughly-formed thought that I would probably have as the basis for a blog post if I ever get around to playing it myself. There are just a lot of people who don't think that critically about something when they play it. It's not that they're dumb or something, they just don't pick apart media like that, they look at ME2 and Andromeda lined up together and think "I dunno, it looks the same to me." Maybe it's just me getting lost in my own head, but thinking about how I would explain the qualitative differences to someone who is a much more casual fan of the series (or even just games overall) is an interesting challenge to me.

Like, those evil aliens are a great example to me. The design of them is just terrible. All of the new designs I've seen from this game, frankly, feel designed by someone dramatically less talented than previous character designers of this series. They're just so ugly and inconsistent looking compared to the established races, like there's no real vision there. I've been playing a lot of No Mans Sky in the last couple weeks, and they look damn close to the randomly generated monstrosities you come across in that game. Even the "good" aliens look boring as hell. The original trilogy wasn't without its flaws, I thought the Protheans looked pretty dull for instance, but I think any of the original races look miles more interesting, memorable, and distinct among the genre overall, than the Angara or the Kett.

I think criticizing MEA and Bioware at this point is beyond "beating a dead horse". That's like going on a movie forum and saying "you know what, I don't think Suicide Squad was a good movie" lol. Of course you're allowed to say it and you're not wrong, I just don't see the point. As someone's whose favorite video game franchise is Mass Effect, MEA was underwhelming, bad in some key areas, and a mistake, but I'd blame EA a lot for that when looking at the bigger picture.

EA had Bioware's A team work on Anthem so EA would have "their own Destiny" and they put the Bioware's B team on MEA with not enough experienced people or time. Bioware is still to blame, but more so EA IMO for being so shortsighted in undercutting one of their bigger franchises so they can have a Destiny clone ASAP. I still don't think MEA deserved ALL THAT HATE. I think they got more hate than real world issues like the oil spill, Clinton cheating in the election against Sanders, and other stuff that actually matters. Even though I don't like the game, seeing people dog-pile so much was ridiculous. MEA, MGS5, Overwatch, and Destiny 1 getting 25% of that overall hate each sounds more reasonable to me.

@marokai: For what it's worth, I got Andromeda for $20 new less than 4 months after it came out. I think it was a Gamestop deal, but that was the line I was willing to pay and when it reached that line I picked it up.

I've spent a lot of time reading criticism and was briefly an English Major, so I can identify with being the asshole who over-analyzes everything and annoys his friends and family whenever I pick apart something that they enjoyed (Like, Rogue One, for instance.) It's just how my brain works at this point, and sometimes I need to remind myself that not everyone has that background or mindset (or desire to over-think their entertainment.) It's a little weird in this bubble of the internet, because I think most people who post on games forums are fluent in "the discourse" and certain things tend to be viewed as almost objectively true.

Yeah, I'm well aware that I'm not the first person to dump on ME:A, nor is my opinion especially original. To some extent, this blog is my own personal attempt at justifying the time I spent with Andromeda (and also to keep my writing skills sharp, etc etc) more than it is any sort of hot take on a game that people have been virulently against since those .gifs of bad facial animations started popping up before release. It's why I titled this write up the way I did and used the word "exorcise" in my little preamble. I hope, at the very least, that I was able to convey my personal perspective on the game without coming off as yet another member of the dogpile.

And, to be fair to real world problems, I do get angry and talk about a lot of that stuff. I just don't think video game forums are a great venue for that.

I wasn't saying people should talk about those things on here, I was just talking about hate on the internet in general.

Wait people really think Kotor is overrated ? If you play it today it's probably not as good as it was at release. But still i think KOTOR is a masterpiece in western rpg design. From the whole Raven story to the i am gonna blow up this planet story line to some interesting companions i think the game is a masterpiece compared to recent Western RPG's like the new Dragon age where the golden rule is quantity over Quality.

As someone who's replayed ME1 more than six times (once as each class), most recently last year, it's really not all that janky, at least on PC. If it's the accuracy/bullet cones that get on your nerves, there are ways to build your character to mitigate that as much as possible. In fact, I think a lot of people's troubles with ME1 come down to poorly prioritized builds and a couple quirks of the combat system. The reality of it, though, is that there's really a "correct" way to play ME1, especially in terms of equipment, and anything else just ends up feeling bad. Let me know if you decide to try it.

Interesting that you'd say that, since the design of the Protheans was seemingly retconned between ME1 and ME2. Look at the statues on Ilos compared to the way the Collectors and Javik wound up looking.

As a massive fan of the Mass Effect world (I love the games, but always felt they weren't exploring their full potential), the whole Andromeda saga has been a bummer to watch. It's incredible how much of a dip in hype it took, after all this waiting no less.

Nonetheless, I was waiting as much as possible to consider finally getting it, but EA/Bioware's message that the game's single player side will no longer be patched, in addition to the game costing $19,99 at this point, I bought it *shrug*. Don't know when I'll play, but I will... eventually.

@gundamguru: Those statues are truly bizarre looking and I'd honestly forgotten all about them. They look weirdly similar to the husks.

@marokai: I personally forgot about the similar figures in Shepard's vision.

It always made me wonder if the Protheans resembled the husks or the husks the Protheans. Husks were later revealed to be Reaper technology, and that begs the question when and why were the statues built, and if the resemblance was coincidental or intended as some kind of warning. That's probably my favorite thing about ME1, so much was open to interpretation and wonder. When they started closing off the threads in ME2 and 3, it never was as cool as your headcanon.

@soulcake: I feel like a lot of that sentiment comes from people who really like KotOR 2, or old-school CRPG nerds who view that game as the beginning of Bioware watering down their games for the sake of mainstream appeal right as the PC RPG was dying. I don't know what I'd think about it, other than a sinking, underlying suspicion that it might not be as good as I remember it being.

I've played through ME1 and ME2 within the past 2 months and still very much enjoy them because the universe is well-realized, the characters are good, and they're (mostly) fun to play. The overall story is... fine. Not terrible. Not great. Good enough to hold my interest.

The thing is, unimaginative writing is pretty much the C(omputer)RPG norm. Of the mainstream RPGs released over the past 20 years, how many took any real narrative risks? Planescape? KOTOR2? Fallout: NV? There are others that have good quests or good bits of writing and dialog, but mostly the plot is just some variation of "Big Evil is trying to destroy your world. You are good and must stop Big Evil".