In one of his books, Clifford Pickover mentioned SF stories about sentient space clouds, sentient pancake-like creatures due to their planet having enormous gravity, not to mention the alive planet of Solaris.
The new aliens in
Andromeda made me lose any hope I had for the game. It's not a 60s TV show with guys in rubber suits or heavy makeup; this game is made using computers than can render anything a person can imagine. The fact that the kett and the whatever-the-fuck-they're-called are humanoids with bilateral symmetry (like 99% of Mass Effect's aliens) absolutely screams
UNCREATIVE and
LAAAAAAAAZY.
I wouldn't say uncreative or lazy. It just
caters to different tastes. For a person who likes the sci-fi genre, the first game had something right going on. It had some worldbuilding, diverse alien forms and established relationships among alien species. Humans weren't the center of the galaxy. Robots didn't have cameltoes. You visited places and saw how their various inhabitants fared, how they struggled with their problems, how chains of causality with roots in the past affected their present situation. You had an interesting enemy (Saren) who tries to fight indoctrination and stall Sovereign's plans (and might have even partially succeeeded). You had an incomprehensible larger threat (Sovereign) and had to find a way to stop them, and while it was clear fro the get go that fighting a Reaper fleet is about as useful as nipples on a breastplate, the later games abandoned that notion and had Shepard in the third game running around gathering forces to do the exact very thing that was established in the first game as futile, not to mention shoot Reapers in the face with nukes.
Mass Effect 2 abandoned the cliffhangers of the first game, which was Shepard finding a way to stop the Reapers. It was supposed to be a quest of exploration and putting knowledge to good use. But now, especially when the Reapers have revealed themselves, Shepard is somewhere in the fringes (hunting Geth), no one does anything about the Reaper threat, and then we die and become Cerberus'
Fernando and we hunt...the Collectors?? Who are abandoning colonists? And where the fuck are those colonist exactly? I hardly remembering interacting with any one of them at all. Why are they colonizing? Why doesn't the council give a shit? How Cerberus, a bunch of fucktards from the first game became a superpower? Why have humans gained 100 levels in Council Power? I guess the game was too busy shoving Miranda's ass in front of the camera to answer all of this.
The third game was too much of a brainfart to even talk about. Cool gameplay tho. Bang Bang!
And here we are now. You are called the Pathfinder™. Because you need to have a unique moniker in case your ADD audience loses focus. What about being some random fuck who gets in messy situations for a change. Next: "I don't need an army. I've got a Krogan." Uh-huh. Some fanboys jizzed, I guess? Then we have a guy, probably an antagonist, called Kett Archon? Perhaps he was created by merging two Kett Dark Templars. Oh, and Thundercats-aliens. Yes, that definitely takes the cherry. I can see so many good directions for this new game.
But honestly, even if Andromeda is half-decent, I am too bored for cheap sci-fi games suitable for ages 0-99. These years I am more into games like Dark Souls where shitty ropleplaying is as straightforward as it can get, ie nonexistant.
