Some of my other thoughts are in a similar thread (Is is worth it, MEA?), and after I'd posted there, I started what is now my third playthrough. I find myself still frustrated by some of the same problems as before (I had some choice words for the inability to save in several crucial places) in what might have been design choices that were poorly made.
I'd said somewhere in the middle of my first playthrough that it's as if the developers never played the game end-to-end, so they didnt have any understanding about the annoyances. Like modules that were connected together, but no one took the trouble to actually play the game and find out that the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts, but instead, somewhat diminished by them.
Most of problems fall into one of the following categories: Plot, UI/quest, graphics, abandonware.
Plot - Well, for one thing, it's bound to never get finished, but the opening salvo on what could have been a new series was a misfire. So, if there were ongoing developments planned to make it seem less like Reapers 2.0, this was badly played as an opener. The relationships among the characters just feels rushed to try and reach a level of development that the previous characters took three games and several years to achieve. No more N7 (the one gets killed off) or Spectre (kind of a weak/bitter example of the group represented), but a Pathfinder who isn't picked for being the best of the best, or working hardest at being a Pathfinder (that was Cora) but because Dad popped off and you inherited an AI.
The UI....quest system is broken. Banter based on location and quest events keeps triggering long after. Since sometimes that is the only clue that some task is nearby (thanks for not burdening us with a quest marker for so many side quests which would have been useful), it's aggravating/misleading. You can't save your game half the time, likely because the game is silently trying to autosave all the time, which I think was a workaround for crashing, or other bugs. The "dynamic" UI buttons.... please. For the love of all things holy and right... don't make buttons move around when you are trying to click them. It's not cool, or slick, or anything else positive. Your brain spies a button and in-between committing to the act of clicking it, and actual click, it swoops away, and you have clicked some other button that took its place. Swooping is still bad.
Graphics - alright, so a lot of the release graphics issues were addressed before the development team was completely yoinked. We build shaders now, and tell jokes about when Addison looked like a clown, and my Pathfinder looked like she was constantly in a state of wide eyed shock. She still does, a bit... except now with weirdly black shaded eyeballs. You can't fix the disturbing sameness of the asari colonists though. I assume this was to reduce the amount of required resources, and they lacked customizable parts that could be randomized for each individual. Character appearance feels like a downgrade from the previous three games for both Ryder customization and NPCs.
Abandonware - if the widely reported production problems never came to light, it would still feel like the studio treated a top franchise with negligence. As if they didnt have to worry about the long run because they didnt want to continue Mass Effect, or didnt care. No quality control for what was released... we'll fix it later. Or not. Whatever. How do you release a game with such glaring problems if you actually care about the outcome?
Bioware may have fallen victim to their own success, in various ways. Surely after the ending of ME3 they realized that they could make a huge misstep when it game to the people that bought and played their games. But, no... They set their own bar for what made an excellent game, and couldn't clear it. Were our expectations of a fourth ME game too high? If any other studio had produced this game, would we be as disappointed?
As far as if any other studio had produced this would we still be disappointed?? Well, I will assume you are talking top line AAA studios and not an Indie one, but....
Story...no, If Beth, Ubi, or many others I would have been happy to see a story this to a point well written to try and mesh characters, action and exploration. Problem is Bioware made their name on doing exactly this, and this product was decent, needed fleshing out and not up to their standards.
Graphics....yes and no....the planets, most aliens and general stuff are beautiful and you can see the effort and care SOME things are given. The issue is either the engine, the use of the engine or just lack of skill in TOTAL that creates the issue. When main characters, such as Addison, and Female Ryder have such GLARING issues it creates a disconnect to the game. When you can see an obvious effort to NOT make female characters good looking, it creates a disconnect in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy game. When characters do wonky things cause the engine is borked, it creates a disconnect. And while pretty other stuff can hide some things, the obvious disconnect stuff wouldn't be tolerated in just about ANY game dev. You have a Battle Field game and your character "break dances" either in a cutscene or moving around the map and it isn't acceptable on a AAA title. When you want to cuss and jerk back from the screen because of the weird facial animations or looks of characters it isn't acceptable from an AAA dev.
Quest....yes and no...it was almost like they couldn't decide if they wanted a more Morrowwind style quest system where stuff is in your Journal and you found stuff through exploration or if they wanted a more ME2/Skyrim system where markers lead you to everything....either is fine, but require different support when doing them, and this made many quests seem broken when actually they were just not handled properly. And yeah, some were broken.
All in all, it isn't a bad game, it is actually fairly decent if you just look at it from a stand alone point and not expect ME trilogy quality from it. I agree with you in that yeah, I don't think anyone ever played it beginning to end....and I think that was because of the troubles in production. Most of this can be laid directly at Bioware's management's feet in dropping this title on a production studio that wasn't ready for it and didn't include any truly experienced oversite people to watchdog them. At the end you can tell from stories and the final game, someone came in, kicked butt enough to get the product out the door, but failed to really check the product or maybe just didn't want to delay it any. The game is a story of ALMOSTS....it is almost a great game, the studio could almost handle it, it was almost ready for release, and it almost had a chance to be supported longer.
Almost is sad, cause I can see what it COULD have been with just a bit more work and polish, plus a few DLCs.
True, the plot is the actual problem with the writing. Individual roles and scenes are well written. Funny in places, poignant in others, self-justifying when needed - for the most part, good stuff. The overarching plot is what never seems to get it together. And I think I will never get past the fact that my Ryder looks and sounds like she only just got her learner's permit (should they be letting her drive a high-tech all terrain vehicle around on unexplored planets more or less unsupervised?). In places, the writing tries too much to be 'current' and sacrifices a little piece of immersion with every line.
I've heard the "ugly women on purpose" theory before, and I'm sorry, but I lol'd, and still am. This is far from the first game in which the character generator was *one of the first things doctored up by modders due to extreme limitation of customization choices, and usually for the female characters. Inquisition had the same issues, but this gets modded out the wazoo in Bethesda games, DAO, DA2, and on and on...the eyebrows were particularly alarming this time through. But since all the human random generated toons looked either suspiciously inbred, bland, or unattractive, regardless of gender, I'm going to be on the side of 'general art department failure' and not 'SJW conspiracy'.
If you wanna stretch it to "less graphics choices/resources = works better on a console" then you've wandered out of your tin-foil hat territory and into mine.
Most of the character models had puzzling design decisions... You might be able to get away with using the same mesh for all like-gender members of a species, but not humans, and not one that shares as many facial similarities with humans, like the asari. Giving them all the same face gives it the feel of a different kind of sci-fi movie. This is backed up by the weird adaptation of facial markings by other races, when before only turians had facial tats, and asari had colorful skin striping on a variable blue base color. Now everybody has em, and it's jarring enough to be lore-breaking. Green and pink turians look like they need to be in quarantine until a cure is found.
Frostbite, as I've said before, seems to generate stunning environments. They all look beautiful and immersive. Character models must be some other module, like combat, inventory, questing, etc. And whoever was responsible for character skins/textures stopped when they got to "Hey, it's working....close enough".
Looks like the quest team, just ran out of time to chase down the problems. Un marked collection quests would be fine, if you weren't looking for a needle in a haystack made up of needles you didn't want. Misfiring banter at sites, and far too many *unmarked places to look. I call myself a completionist usually, but this game made me lose interest in completing the unmarked random tasks.
Random break dance glitches become funny memes, but so many problems in a top tier game from a top tier studio, when you know they can do better, are hard to really chuckle about.
*Edited for grammar and clarity
I will be honest....I wouldn't have given the idea the time of day, that they would intentionally make female characters not as pretty, EXCEPT for one simple fact. They obviously based Scott Ryder off his male voice actor....no it isn't perfect and yeah, he still has some funny quirks due to the AI facial controls, but he is CLOSE. Then you take Sara Ryder, and you look at her, then go find a picture of her voice actress.....NOT EVEN CLOSE. IF the art department quirked it up this bad that they were TRYING to make Sara look close to here voice Actress and got what they produced.....then yeah, they deserved to be fired. Then after I started looking into some of this and hearing some stories about how Bioware was leaning toward catering to that crowd, and I found the Day one patch changes to Sara's face. The changes weren't from making her bad to better, it was actually reverse....they actually made Sara look WORSE after the day one patch and they never reverted her back to the Day one look that I am aware. So you combine the hair styles chosen for women, the horrible creator choices for women, where you work to make a good looking character, and the obvious close resemblance of Scott Ryder and I came to the conclusion that it is a definite probability they actually didn't want women to be really pretty in MEA, and a more "Girl next door" look
And as an example of them NOT looking at total game when it comes to characters story and plot, I give you Liam and Vetra. IF you think about the back story and jobs of those two characters, their personalities are reversed. It is like somewhere in the production they had to reverse them(SJW, plot points, romance, Mars was in the wrong quadrant of Jupiter....I don't know) and no one ever went back and looked how it didn't make sense with their backstories and jobs. Liam isn't in any way shape form or fashion, suited to be either Security head OR from Crisis Response....think about how he acts....is he REALLY who you would want to be first in during a crisis?? Is he who you would want to set up your security and run a team?? Now think of Vetra, calm cool, collected, SHE is who you would want on a crises team...., but as a character I think she would have been better to have more of Liam's lines, and vice versa.
