I'm a sucker for sci-fi so thanks to CPY I tried this thing. The premise they got with this game was really good and I really liked that the whole Andromeda Initiative turn out to be a mess of epic proportions, the problems started when they decided to take shortcuts. Each planet you are going to visit was a "golden world", an habitable planet that because of ominous reasons are now barren pieces of rocks.
The first problem arises, if all those golden planets are now inhospitable pieces of barren rock, what changed them on 600 years the trip took for the colonists to get there? Planets don't change that radically on 600 years. To "solve" this problem, Bioware took the first shortcut that really done great damage, it was a phenomenon that had something to do with an ultra advanced alien civilization that existed on Andromeda. Well, this caused a series of issues, first, it is too much you trying to make the players care about what they are seeing on this new galaxy for the first time AND reintroduce the worn cliche of the ancient civilization did it when this was exploited to utter exhaustion on the previous games.
Things get worse, well, the game is about colonists trying to create colonies on a new galaxy right? So, colonists have to build colonies, right? But wait a minute, if all the planets are useless inhospitable pieces of rock, how they gonna do that? It happens that the ominous ancient civilization just had giant magical atmospheric terraformers to conveniently make the planets conveniently habitable to humans. Why? Fuck logic!
Things manage to get even worse, because of this huge ancient ominous ancient alien civilization is so important for the plot to work, they not only decide to step on the shit but to continue until their boots are all smeared with it. Obviously, you need to interact with those alien artifacts and monuments and all the motivations of the main baddies and the protagonist involve interacting with those things. Of course, if the story is so focused on this lost alien civilization thing, they will bother to explain it right?
Nah, Bioware thought it was a good idea to keep the ominous mysterious alien civilization thing to remain ominous mysterious even when focusing so much time on it. The result is hilarious bad scenes where you interact with a dangerous alien ruin that you know nothing about and manage to terraform the entire atmosphere of a planet by simply placing your hand above some weird symbols. "Dude, logic and good sense is for suckers!" I didn't know if I laughed or felt pity.
If the alien thing wasn't bad enough, they decided it would be cool making first contact with not only one but two races. Well, basically, this is a shooter kinda RPG game right? So you need mooks to shoot and NPCs to be fetch quest dispensers right? Well, the Kett are the mooks to shoot and the Angaran are the NPC quest dispensers. It is kinda sad, you watching the first contact with the Angaran, they meet you speaking on their lenguage that you don't understand and just five minutes later they are all taking with perfect english with north american speech mannerisms included. I never laughed so hard on my life, this shit is even more gold than Fallout 3.
The designers were so anxious on getting the transformation of unknown alien race to convenient NPC quest dispensers going on that on their hurry they made the Angara look anthropomorphised to a ridiculous degree. Sometimes I wondered if a looked on the characters backs I would see the zipper of their costume and on reality they are a bunch of Andromeda cosplayers trying to fool you into believing they are an alien race. Anthropomorphism is very common on popular science fiction and derided by serious writers with alot of reason but if kept on check and you are careful, you still can do some anthropomorphism without turning the whole thing on a farce.
Mass Effect 1 writers were smart enough to have you being a captain of the alliance quite some time after the first contact and having a galactical body with rules and procedures regarding newly discovered races making the question "Why all aliens speak perfect english and have strange human like behaviors?" not so damaging to the whole fiction as you could assume the Council was active in trying to learn the new species ways. Unfortunately, Prospermeda writers weren't this careful.
Okay, the ancient alien angle sucks balls, the new races suck balls and how about the dialog and characters? Well, human beings talk taking turns with each other, someone speak something and the other person answer with what she thinks of it. Well, when you talk, you talk of your life, your opinions, the things tha matter for you, your dreams, emotions and likes, right? We don't have perfect knowledge of ourselves either and we many times are as confused as the other people around about ourselves and even if we know something for sure, we don't bother go around explaning ourselves on a psychological analytical lecture.
Well, if your characters don't have opinions, desires, tastes, dreams, emotions, well they are as thin as cardboard, they are going to talk about what? Well, they are going to talk of platitudes and awkward attempts at humor that makes you question their mental age. We don't talk explaining ourselves like some psychology therapeutic professional, we just say what the fuck we want with explaining as quick as possible as this is fucking boring. Mass Deffect Prospermeda has alot of dialog, it just forgot how to turn all that text on something that a human being would say. Honestly, sometimes I wondered if the characters had some hidden mobile phones and were just talking with each other reading aloud the messages on their twitter instead of actually talking with each other.
Not only the characters are cardboard cutouts, the text itself isn't good enough for dialog and that with the shit half assed voice over make the thing just worse, seriously, the protagonist talks like he is high on marijuana the whole game as he can't just express any kind of emotion and talks on a weird tone of voice that makes him look like he was stoned. Bioware removed all the ability to be mean with people too, you are just a goofy two shoes guy high on marijuana that can only say "I accept this quest with a professional tone.", "I accept this quest with a casual tone."I accept this quest with a logical tone.". Obviously assuming those shitty writers can figure out what a professional tone is and can make their stoned voice actor say something that looks assertive.
Now the icing on the cake, did you ever heard some internet retard claiming the gameplay on this game is its saving grace because it is "great" and the game isn't as bad as people are claiming? Please, get the used underwear of the EA CEO and insert on the mouth of this imbecile. The game on the higher difficulties is a formulaic cover based shooter that is even worse than Mass Effect 3 because it is open world nows so you won't have properly designed encounters and setpieces and you can't control your AI team mates anymore, they have the tendecy to just charge on the middle of the murderbots of doom that can vaporize your health on miliseconds.
On easier difficulties, you can do all this stuff they shown up on the gameplay trailers but as cover shooting works better, why bother? Coverbased shooting and mobility are two things that gel together as water and oil.
TD:LR: My wall of text rant isn't much about this game as I expect this to be this bad and honestly and the Bioware kid has the right to the daddy EA mercy shot at this point. I just am impressed how the talented programmers and enviromental artists that worked on this game were left behind by the incompetent writers and designers. The whole gaming industry is like this, at least the AAA portion of it, the higher you get on the food chain, more incompetent you get, it is an phenomenon for economists and sociologists to figure out.
though I can still see it in the edit. Anyway here's another chart that just shows the xbox and ps figures though it gives you the picture of the sales trend...
