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.
@voteDCI hear ya. I did last a lot longer but I pretty much agree with all your points. Once I figured out my sniper build, which ruled, I never felt like playing anything else to be honest so I just stuck with that. So I didn't get the replay value from trying different classes cause when I did my second playthrough and tried something else it was just easier to go back to sniping and sod the rest.
It seems that Anthem will be the next evolution of ME combat. Instead of jump jets you get flight jets and you can also switch classes/javelins on your character. So not sure that game will hold my attention for that long. Probably will wait with buying it and see what people think first cause after Andromeda and seeing where Anthem is going I've become rather wary of what BioWare is doing.
And right there, you nailed it! Bioware obviously put all of their major resources and muscle on Anthem. ME Andromeda played to me like a game with a lot of promise. But completely under performed because the devs were forced to cut too many corners. Based on what I have seen of Anthem so far, That game could suffer a similar fate. Because it doesn't seem to have an anchor story that will generate interest in sequels. Maybe Anthem should have been ME-A Anthem. And connected back to exploration and settling of a new Galaxy. IMO ME-A drifted all over the place because Bioware was drifting all over the place. There were many things I liked about ME-A, that have already been stated by others. I was disappointed by too much repetition in combat and discovery. A strong sequel could easily fix this franchise. Just like ME2 improved ME1.
