Re: Mass Effect Andromeda officially dead...

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@SycrJohnny wrote:

 

I Agree with most of what you say... Except of the races and amount of planets thing...

I'm getting technical here, but, this just a cluster not a whole galaxy as the other ME had...
I theory, is rather difficult that you have habitable planets in a cluster, not to mention lifeforms... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_life)
So I think that having 1 species and 5 planets is not that bad, we could have some more planets, but not too much...

The problem was the lore behind that race... I mean, I finished SP story twice, and the Angaran lore is really poor... I mean, we have more MW species new lore that the local one... Then there is the first contact situation... like it was the first time we encountered the Angaras... but later on we find that they were already in most of the planets that the Nexus races already know, like Kadara, Eladeen... And the Fauna was terrible, there were all the same animal species in all the planets... Like the animals could do space travel...
That is definitively poor writing... too much inconsistencies.

I would love to have more games on the ME:A series to explore the rest of Andromeda... Find new species... New planets, and maybe know the Kett origin and more (trying to avoid spoilers.)

But, sadly, EA told us that we can get that, so...

Another interesting link on extraterrestrial lifeforms https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2016/01/25/what-are-the-odds-that-aliens-exist (edit)

Fair rebuttal. BUT, what about the fact that we had turians, humans, krogan, quarians, batarians, and asari in ME 1-3? So I think we're already past the point of believable habitability. Even if it was scientifically unrealistic, it made the world seem a lot more interesting.

Fair point again that it's a cluster and not the whole galaxy. My comments in that regard were mostly aimed toward the fact that ME:A originally was supposed to have a procedural (not sure if that's the right word?) universe like Star Citizen, THEN apparently they decided to do 30 planets, THEN when they couldn't get that right, so it was cut to 5. I'm sure the actual process was a lot more complicated, but the game did not feel like the sprawling space adventure it was originally meant to be.

And of those 5 planets, two were hot deserts, one was a cold desert. Not much interesting going on scenery wise. Havarl was barely a planet.

When the game released it had issues. It still has some of them, particularly in the area of audio and lighting.

The big improvements that were made with some of the patches prove that the game had issues on release. Now I didn't encounter too many of the bugs that other described but let's be honest, BW is notorious for such issues. I remember DA:O had memory leak issues, even though not everybody was affected. BW denied these issues existed and years later suddenly there was a patch with the fix in it. So it did exist.

I don't care what people say, when the game released the game had issues and the patches were sorely needed. Maybe some people didn't care much about the horrendous facial expressions but it is what sunk this game on release. The media had a hayday with it.

But the problem here is not that BW maybe fell flat on their face a bit with this game release, but the simple fact now that they aren't going to be supporting this game any further. They just dropped it like a bomb, cleaned up the mess a bit and left.

It's hardly a sign of commitment to the franchise and the fans thereof.

Of course Bioware's the biggest victim of their own successes in the past. Clearly they don't want fans. They want people just to buy some stuff on impulse and then be quiet. They don't want a solid fanbase and have a continuous interaction with them. I guess they're not that kind of company and it's why I also switched to spending the bare minimum on them. I think they don't understand that people can really be into things and how it affects them when you basically show them the door. I totally get that some people feel like they've been shoved aside as fans. They invested into these games financially and emotionally and then this happens.

Clearly a one way street type of relationship going on here. They never did know how to handle criticism though. It's always been an issue for some reason and it never changed. Something odd in their business culture somehow I reckon. Reality is though that unless something major changes there, we're likely looking at the end of an era when it comes to BW. They seem ready to go for some new ground and are perfectly happy to throw the fans that got them where they are under the bus.

It does all sound a bit heavy, but really, isn't that where it's at? I get that people overreacted, but isn't this BW overreacting in return? And who pays the price for that?

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@DoctorMcBatman wrote:

Fair rebuttal. BUT, what about the fact that we had turians, humans, krogan, quarians, batarians, and asari in ME 1-3? So I think we're already past the point of believable habitability. Even if it was scientifically unrealistic, it made the world seem a lot more interesting.

Fair point again that it's a cluster and not the whole galaxy. My comments in that regard were mostly aimed toward the fact that ME:A originally was supposed to have a procedural (not sure if that's the right word?) universe like Star Citizen, THEN apparently they decided to do 30 planets, THEN when they couldn't get that right, so it was cut to 5. I'm sure the actual process was a lot more complicated, but the game did not feel like the sprawling space adventure it was originally meant to be.

And of those 5 planets, two were hot deserts, one was a cold desert. Not much interesting going on scenery wise. Havarl was barely a planet.

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Again, ME 1-3 was a whole galaxy... a galaxy is made of thousands of clusters, and those have hundreds or thousand of stars with more planets...

In that probability, yes, ME 1-3 had a lot more probability of having multiple life forms that ME:A had with only one cluster.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Contents)

Now, there is no information of a "Heleus cluster" in the Andromeda Galaxy, and we know that Andromeda is way bigger that the Milky Way... But we can generally assume that a cluster is smaller than a whole galaxy.

Remember that in ME, the only way to travel between clusters was using the Mass Effect Relays, which created way faster travel paths that warp speed could (this is all in the ME Lore).

Now, to get facts Straight... ME 1-3 had a lot more species than that... you are forgetting Elcors, Hanar, Drell, Rachni, Volus, Yahg, Batarians, Vorcha and Raloi, for mentioning the "present races"... This does not surprise me considering the size of the world of ME...

Regarding the planets...

 I think that Havarl could be bigger, a lot bigger, as well as Aya could have something else to explore, like noveria had in ME1.

The Nexus was really poor IMHO... They could be a lot more imaginative on the Areas, some more substation places... there were 3 regions, and 2 more that where from the Hyperion...

I mean... there is a lot of missed opportunities to expand the game if you want to be thorough, but I think that the game itself has enough to explore anyway... But the history cohession between the places and the stories within... that is what should have been polished for me... If the narrative was good, I think that the amount of worlds would be really enough.