Just Some Feedback/Venting on MEA

I honestly can understand the shortcomings, and I have seen them, but when I went into the game I had my thoughts, but cleared them out to remain neutral on the overall concept of the story. I’ve come to learn if you sit down and play it, and DO NOT compare it to the ME Trilogy, you can find more joy in playing it. But if you decide to compare it to the ME Trilogy, you will always feel let down. Maybe try playing as it was meant to be played, as a stand-alone not related to the original trilogy and maybe, just maybe, you might find some joy in playing it. You can read some of my blog posts about this game over here: www.thewarravenblog.wordpress.com

It started wrong with the teaser.

If they didn't put Alec in his N7suit in the ghost riders teaser 

The expectations would have been more realistic

To my mind the issue is two fold....

1)  Bioware tried to do too much.  They introduced, developed and wanted a good bond with MANY places and people, which just isn't possible in the story setting they have created.  Double the cutscenes or more and maybe, but then you would be playing more character game and less FPS.  They SHOULD have just limited the number of characters and scope of the development of the game to a tighter and more limited menu of people especially and places possibly.

2)  They fell into the trap of number one for the same reason people really blast MEA.....people are comparing and expecting all the development seen in the 3 GAME SERIES in a single game.  If people remembered what ME1 was like, especially the writers, and only compared apples to apples, then the characters and places compare better.  ME1 still had a better story and characters but again, I think this was because the writers fell into the trap along with players.  They should have just introduced the area, a more limited group of characters, hinted at a broader scope and left it there.  Honestly....I would have loved to be able to play the arrival of the Nexus to Andromeda and let THAT be the start instead of handling it in books.  Can you imagine if they treated it a bit like DA series, and you got to play someone like Sloane, and get to make all the choices about the uprising, being kicked off and having to settle Kadara.... Then game 2 was the Ryder saga, and thus you  have an interesting continuation to the saga.....  Let Ryder twin be the third game...trilogy complete.

I just wanted to say i have to disagree with the poor graphics statements. Facial animations ? yeah they are a bit off but if we are talking actual in game textures, lighting , color reproduction and all that stuff then no , the graphics are really really good IMHO . Being a Audio/Video addict lol i love how the smaller details made it in this game . The fact it goes even further by supporting a full RGB color spec with HDR and Dolby Vision is even better. Look at how the shadows and brightest to darkest areas in the game have an amazing smooth gradient to them. Eye adaptation is done perfect , Banding is pretty much no existent , Color gamut is ....Ahem...lol sorry was getting a bit into AV geek stuff there. In short I was very impressed with the game graphics and will have to respectfully disagree with the poor graphics opinions some have. 

As for the game itself , in short i really like it. I enjoyed the tie ins and how it is a side story to the original Trilogy. The fact that a way smaller team work on it and it is only one game compared to 3 id say it turned out well. Yes it wasn't as deep if you will as the first 3 but i still got attached enough to the story to be driven to keep going and complete it. Only grip i had was the random spawning data pads...look if some one sets or drops the pad down how in the heck does it randomly move around all by itself. If i missed the pad at one camp by the time i got to the other one out of say 8 of them i found the pad was gone and probably spawned over at a place id already been earlier. I swear if i had had a hammer and some nails those side quest would have been a lot faster. :P

Agreed.

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@daguillon2000 wrote:

"I hope that whatever comes along for the next installment of DA addresses the shoddy treatment of us gamers but I don't hold out much optimism."

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The solution is to not be an early adoptor. If you let them lose on the money they traditionally get during a title's release, they will hear you loud and clear.

Like you, I got duped into a pre-ordering this steaming pile of garbage with nothing more than the ME franchise name to motivate me. Never again!

I'm letting ALL EA's titles mature on the shelf before I commit my money to them. And by then I can purchase for a fraction of the cost. Companies like EA really need to lose revenue streams before they start listening to their fanbases. Money talks.

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@AeromusPrime22 wrote:

ME:A did suffer from a lack of support but it was actually EA, not Bioware that caused the problems. I suggest digging up the article on it's production on Kotaku for insight.

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Manveer Heir (former BioWare dev) was recently tweeting about the troubled development of MEA, which was quite entertaining to read. He mentioned a lot of issues, but from what he said it appears that both leadership at BioWare and EA were to blame.

The Kotaku article described the issue of procedural generation, which was the idea of the project lead who, in Manveer's word, was a massive waste of space and another word I can't mention on this forum. EA was a large contributor to the game's problems because they forced BioWare to use the Frostbite 3 engine, which Manveer calls the worst engine he ever worked with in his career, although he uses more colorful language that I can't use on this forum. Apparently a lot of devs at BioWare wanted to use Unreal Engine 4 instead because they could have ported the Mass Effect 3 systems they developed in Unreal Engine 3.

@Fred_vdp;  Yeah, EA's forcing of Frostbite for all AAA games makes a ton of sense for a lot of reasons, starting with; "They already own it" and; ease of porting things to all three major platforms.

But... DICE originally built Frostbite to be an FPS engine, not an RPG one.  It has lots of potential but right now (DA:I, ME:A) we, devs and players both, are having to deal with the growing pains.

@ThandalNLyman It makes sense that they want to keep using their own engine, but I wonder if it's worth it. From what I read in those tweets, it takes a lot more engineers to get certain features working in Frostbite compared to Unreal, so I can imagine it would be a lot cheaper for EA to just pay Epic Games the licensing fees. Development time would be shorter and the games would be better. They spent five years on MEA (which is as long as the development of ME2 and ME3 combined) and they ended up with an incomplete game, lukewarm reviews, and not enough sales to justify DLC development.

That said, Dragon Age Inquisition was also developed in Frostbite, and it was better all around and developed in significantly less time, so maybe this is a case of a bad craftsman blaming his tools.

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@Fred_vdp wrote:

That said, Dragon Age Inquisition was also developed in Frostbite, and it was better all around and developed in significantly less time, so maybe this is a case of a bad craftsman blaming his tools.

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Oh, I think that's a big part of it.  And I'm sure that having to develop on Frostbite caused difficulties for a team not familiar with it.  But as you pointed out, DA:I is proof most of them could be overcome.

While none of us have the full picture, the partial one we do have paints a pretty miserable scene of ME:A's development process.  The, (by all accounts enormous) waste of time trying to auto-generate worlds that no one actually playing the game wants or cares about, the treating the story itself as an after-thought, the 2D character development because "not enough time"... The list of mostly unforced errors by BioWare Montréal is pretty long.  And the majority of them had little or nothing to do with the game engine per se.  (Although the infamous, and hilarious, facial animations may have.  :eahigh_file: )