Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the first successful attempt to marry cinematic aspirations with the traditional branching narratives and simulationist world-building of CRPGs. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins had a very similar mission statement, offering a spiritual successor to BioWare’s earlier Baldur’s Gate titles long before Larian took us back to the titular city (and its surrounding areas).
Andromeda was a mess, and not for the reasons most folks like to ding it for. It was both trying too hard (all those references to other games, like Conrad Verner’s sister and Zaaed’s son) and not trying hard enough (all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).
Andromeda was frustrating because they had a lot of potential - I almost wish had had just truly been bad instead of mediocre. Mediocre is more of a letdown.
This has been my biggest complaint as I’ve been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.
When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.
The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I’m doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.
I remember before it came out, when they boasted that each world would be bigger than all the areas in Inquisition, and I had a sinking feeling, because Inquisition had so much bloat. Andromeda was just more for the sake of more, instead of the side missions being tight missions that gave you extra information about the lore or the world.
It reached a point where whenever I found one of these random rule of three quests in the open world where you kill random whatever enemies and SAM says you need to find more data, I would laugh and say, “welp, that’s a quest I’m never finishing!” and ignore it. I had so much better things to do with my time than drive around the world and hope to come across the next two clues that would pop up in randomly chosen spots. It was a time-waster, and Mass Effect had never had those before. So much of the game feels like it’s designed to take up time to increase play time numbers.
I didn’t even finish it. And you’re right, a mediocre game doesn’t teach the developers any lessons.
I forced myself to finish it. It’s just mass effect 1 but awful. That said, if they just wanted to restart Andromeda and pretend the first one never existed, I’d give it a shot. There’s so much potential in the idea but it was squandered in every possible way