In my opinion, you need five or six plus hours to actually start to like the game. Before that, I feel that I was stuck in wanting to like the game but unsure if I was going to. The game does not lack polish. It lacks proper leadership in the making of it. The planet environments are great, characters from 2005. What has to be first time writers and inept people doing the hiring of the voice actors. Can you say 70% of the lines phoned in? I have begun to sort of enjoy the game and I think the game is a solid 7, but that's as good as any game is that has the EA logo attached to it. I blame nothing on bioware. I blame it all on EA. Just look what they do to everything they snatch up. It all becomes mediocre. This game is six months from being finished, and unfortunately, because of lack of real leadership at EA, it will now never see it's true potential.
Agreed with so much of the above. I was hooked on the story by about 5-6 hours in, but the execution is just disappointing.
It feels like a game that's ready for closed beta, not launch.
I can't lay all the blame squarely on the shoulders of EA (but I'll give them at least 80% of it). We know EA is behind the shift to Frostbite and all the nonsense that's come with that. And I have very little problem believing that BioWare might well have asked to push back the launch to have more dev time but was given a big, fat NO from EA higher ups.
But the bad writing? And the bad VA work? That I lay at BioWare's feet. They've always managed to put together well written and voice acted dialogue, even when they were an indie. IMO, there's no excuse for the quality of either of those things in ME:A.
