Both Mass Effect sequels and Picard are fine examples of the recent abundance of things where the fan base (or the Internet as a whole) having earned a reputation for being inclined to complain about anything new is often used as an excuse to try and discredit the opinions of anyone who dares to point out what was a fairly disastrous drop in quality of the new thing compared to the old. Maybe there’s bullshit in the field but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also apple trees, and maybe you’ve fixed your gaze on the wrong one.
I was cool with ME ending in 3, and Shepards fate, though the specifics of the end were an eye roll, story wise. There was more wrong with Andromeda than franchise fans screaming about a lack of Shepard. Generic tasky repetitive questing and plain oatmeal level companions (imagine Mass Effect 2 with 10 Jacobs). I gamed when gaming was a lot of reading (see Baldurs Gate & Neverwinter Nights), so I don’t complain about graphics, I figure it will sort itself by the next patch and it usually does. Story “punch” and companions matter though, and Andromeda didn’t deliver there. Andromeda was more like Fallout 4 than Mass Effect. It wasn’t new in that sense, and that was the real problem.
Andromeda’s gameplay was clearly better than Mass Effect 3. Yes some facial animations were clearly worse, and were since updated, but it didn’t actually affect gameplay at any point.
And considering the original end of Mass Effect 3, before they changed it after the backlash, anybody claiming things went downhill in Andromeda are out of their damned mind.
There’s a lot I can say about the direction they went with Picard, especially considering the massive difference in the Borg they showed across 2 directly adjacent seasons. Like freaking whiplash.
Andromeda’s gunplay was better but the gameplay as a whole was worse. The switch to an open world system wasn’t handled well, you ended up with too mooch filler and not enough interesting story.
It felt like every side quest in ME1-3 was a little story in its own right that was worth exploring, with interesting and unique characters and plot twists. Andromeda was shallow by comparison, repetitive and not worth the time investment.
I completely agree about fans ruining things and the facial animations thing was way overblown, but let’s not pretend that Andromeda was unfairly punished for minor issues and that fans are entirely responsible for it, there core game missed the mark on several fronts.
The gunplay was excellent though.
Agreed 100%, I got Andromeda at a heavy discount after more than a year after the release and I was still extremely disappointed. The animations are the least of the problems that the game had, it was just an soulless formulaic empty open world with terrible writing and horrible characters and dialogue.
If it weren’t a mass effect game it’d just be a commercial flop and nobody would remember it in a month. Since it was, people were disappointed instead of being apathetic. It was by no means unfairly judged though, it is a bad game.
