I loved the game too. Over all I had a great deal of fun with it, and found the story quite good over all. and the combat the best of any ME game, I was disappointed in the swapping from one class to another, and felt is was a good Idea, but not implemented properly.
Most of the people I chat with, and know complained more about the Ugly characters than the game play. Bioware has bent over back wards for some small feminist movements to the point of enraging a lot of there main player base ( a small voice to silence the Flag ). Take that for what it is, but it is something that has hurt them.
The other thing is Mass effect 3. Those that invested as I did nearly 5 years in a character creation, and became attached to that story, and the person they guided through it have a very bitter taste in there mouth at the way that game was ended. There fore I believe most anything ME attached, that Bioware released was attacked with a great deal of malice, and if even the slightest thing was out of place Bioware, and the game were going to be trashed.
For my part I thought all the games main animation bug's were weeded out, I do still see the occasional head spin around back wards, but not in a long time. I had to in order to get a good looking character resort to Modder's that came up with fixes and improvements for the armor, and the face creation.
Many other I think feminist orchestrated things that were in the game had to be solved by modders too..
Bioware just does not listen to there true fan base, and what they really want in a fantasy anymore in the respect of the look and the presentation of the characters and people you play, and play with during the game.
Small loud mouth's that prey on the fact that everyone has to be politically correct pushed agenda's through that in many way's did a terrible number on ME:A. And the true fans who spent more time playing the game than posting lost.
I love the game, there were points I was dissatisfied with, but they did not keep me from playing it through at least 3 or 4 maybe more times.. It was, and is a great game
While I played after all the patches were out, I can understand glitches being annoying but Ive never had anything game breaking. I enjoyed this one more than the previous games because of the open world and rpg system despite the weaker characters and story. I really dont get all the hate for it.
The reason I see for people hating it is two fold. First a group of people were still hurt over how ME3 turned out and thus had zero desire to give any break to MEA when it came out. The second reason I see, is that people are comparing MEA to the ENTIRE 1-3 series and all the development that was in them. By the second point, people don't compare MEA to ME1 and say look at the similar character development, but instead look at the entire series and say how shallow the new peeps are compared to Ashley, Liara, Tali, or Garrus of ME3. I also happen to think that Bioware itself fell into the second category as well, forgetting that you don't need to bring EVERYTHING into the game including world building, all in one game.
@mcsupersport wrote:The reason I see for people hating it is two fold. First a group of people were still hurt over how ME3 turned out and thus had zero desire to give any break to MEA when it came out. The second reason I see, is that people are comparing MEA to the ENTIRE 1-3 series and all the development that was in them. By the second point, people don't compare MEA to ME1 and say look at the similar character development, but instead look at the entire series and say how shallow the new peeps are compared to Ashley, Liara, Tali, or Garrus of ME3. I also happen to think that Bioware itself fell into the second category as well, forgetting that you don't need to bring EVERYTHING into the game including world building, all in one game.
I think this sums it up pretty well; I was a big original trilogy fan, but felt burned by the ending (though mostly by how easily it could have been made better with a little more planning), so I was a little skeptical of Andromeda, but was cautiously optimistic about the concept, as exploration was something I always wanted more of from Mass Effect.
However, as I prefer to play on PC i wasn't an early adopter as I was in need of upgrades which got delayed, and delayed some more, to the point that I only finally completed the game for the first time this week, so I have the benefit of having missed all the early technical difficulties, which probably made those who preordered the game more critical of what else was wrong with it.
I on the other hand, really enjoyed it.
I kind of get some of the criticism of the characters, in that a few of them feel very derivative within the series itself, while others didn't grow on me right away; for example I found Liam a bit annoying, and Cora's backstory felt very gimmicky, but then I would actually say they had two of the best loyalty missions (and the loyalty missions were all good). Drack didn't really feel much different from Wrex, but but that's both a good and bad thing, as he was one of my favourites, alongside Vetra.
I do feel like the cast lacked any "normal" characters, as everyone has some kind of hook to them; in ME1 Garrus is basically just a frustrated space-cop (albeit an alien one) while Ash is pretty much just a soldier, which meant she grew as a character because of what happened to her, which is something Andromeda doesn't really have. I often feel like in big, high stakes stories it's good to have a character in a similar situation that you can compare yourself to.
Related to this is that there was also a slight issue with Andromeda opting for the "chosen one" trope; in the original trilogy Shepard is a solider, an N7 sure, but there's nothing otherwise special about them as such, they're just stubborn and refuses to die, whereas being a pathfinder you often feel like you're only special because of SAM. This is further compounded a bit by most of your achievements being based on Remnant tech, so a lot of what you do doesn't feel like you deserved it, because really it was all the work of mysteriously absent old yet advanced aliens whose stuff you could only use because of SAM.
None of these are reasons to hate the game though; when you look back honestly at Mass Effect 1, it's actually a pretty rough game. What it does, it does really well, but it was far from perfect, and it seems strange that some fans of the series couldn't give Andromeda a bit of leeway in order to recognise what it does do well, especially given the mammoth task it had to achieve in transplanting as much as possible of what we loved about Mass Effect into a setting free from the burden of the original trilogy's irreconcilable story.
I thoroughly enjoyed the game; was there stuff I wished they'd done differently? Sure, but I could say that about the other games as well.
