The late 70's/early 80's sci-fi vibe is something they talked about themselves during development. Seems pretty obvious to me, especially the use of color and sound. 90's sci-fi was dominated by X-files and a general grimdark look, which the original ME doesn't match in my opinion. In all honesty though it was surely a mixture of different styles in the end, I don't think it clearly stood out as very similar to any classic show or movie.
If you want to be aggressive and arrogant about your opinion it generally helps to actually make some points, yes. This isn't that strange a concept.
As for what you said, the sidequest and planet surfaces are definitely pretty simplistic and lacking, that's common knowledge. The story and shit can still be good despite that however, and is. I don't think the characters deserve the scorn you're giving them. Ashley space racist was a very subtle and convincing look at racists who don't realize they're racists, Garrus was the best Dirty Harry type in games for a long time, Wrex and Tali had interesting racial attributes and origins. That Kaidan dude was pretty boring, but hey you can kill him off. Tali is kind of bland waifu but they did nail the naive scientist vibe relatively well. Honestly characters are one of the few things Bioware still do well, on average.
It is one thing to be inspired by 70s SF and you design some enemies and ships based on it and completely different to have 70s vibe. Bioware also said that DA3 story will be heavily influenced by PST but do you really think it will be so or its just marketing speech.
If you want to have 70s vibe you need to have following things:
Colors, large palette of bright colors, everything needs to be colorful, with heavy use of red and orange.
Sound, authentic pew pew sounds for lasers and AIs need to have booming metallic voices.
Robot design, robots need to be "primitive" with slow robotic movement.
Weapons, laser guns with thin long barrels and plastic toy look to them.
Ship outer design, heavy cubical, spherical and triangular models that resemble anything but an airplane.
Ship inner design, loads of clutter, very narrow walkways and rooms to invoke claustrophobic feel and mandatory walls paved by panels with loads of blinking lights.
Character design, character never wears armor and only wears casual clothes, even then the less clothing the better.
I dont agree with you about characters, on paper they go from interesting to cliched but all of them in game itself, in my opinion, are just bland. Maybe if they made more interactions between then, like Ashley getting in arguments with Garrus, remember in BG2 you could have companions kill each other or refuse to be part of party with your certain decision. Here I just feel that noone really cares about anything. The story was simply boring, so boring I dont even remember much of it, bad guys want to destroy universe, you need to save it and everyone is pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
3 identical locations? no, just no, where the fuck do you get this?
Aide quests feeling the same? no, tons of different sidequest about all sort of things. Not a lot of new mechanics, ill grant you that tho.
Randomly generted planets? no, stop being a fucking retard.
Achievements? who the fuck gives a shit about those?
Characters had decent depth, there were no cardboard cutouts and even some of the stereotypical ones had more to them than that.
So no, you are wrong, go play the game again and come back with a list of actual flaws you try hard retard.
Relax man, youll pop a vein and I dont want you to spill your Mountain Dew all over you computer.
Even DalekFlay and every sane person agrees that planet exploration and side quests are horrible. You ever heard of a program called Terragen, install it, generate random terrain and in a minute youll get same looking terrain as any planet from ME.
The locations for story missions are different but most side quests are located in few identical locations, like a mine or warehouse.
