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Artist's commentary
Andromeda
News of the latest addition to the Mass Effect franchise hasn't been kind, but from what I've read a lot of it just seems to be people piling on subjective or unnecessary criticisms to a fairly good product. The majority of players went into this game with expectations from the original trilogy, when their agendas weren't met it just resulted in a lot of nitpicking.
I took my time finishing Andromeda with an Insanity playthrough, coming out of it I really only have 3 legitimate criticisms.
- The game lacks polish. Mechanical bugs, lack of intuitive UI at times, infamous awkward animations... this is all busy work you'd expect a triple A title to have figured out through play testing.
- It does not improve much upon the original trilogy. It's impossible to not make the relative comparison, in a sense Bioware had a shot at this game 3 times to get everything right if not better. Andromeda plays much like a giant expansion pack than the next big step forward for the franchise. I personally love that it's more of an action game though, however there are also those that miss the niche "tactics" quality of earlier titles.
- It's too big. I say this because it probably created more problems than it solved in the grand scheme of production. Not that I don't appreciate the ridiculous amount of juicy content, but someone had to tell Bioware less can be more. The sheer scale of the game was almost overwhelming for me as a player, (and I just played Zelda: BOTW + FF15) I can only imagine what it was like for the development team. The studio was likely under pressure to make Andromeda as big as possible but quantity never reassures quality and ironically created more problems than it solved.
At the end of the day though, Andromeda still did everything right that I wanted from a Mass Effect title and that's what matters! A large scale sci fi epic, full of delicious geo/racial political issues, some of the best overall writing in the industry (especially in the cast of characters) and an immense world of cultures / planets to explore. It's also a shooter where I get to use space magic, I love it! Really my best advice is, don't let expectations ruin your experience. It's a good game!
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