See, this is what made me more angry with Andromeda than if it had been a total crock. There were occasional flashes of competence in the game and even, dare I say it, quality. Like bouncing around with the jetpack while shooting at bad guys was surprisingly fun. And a couple of the quests (Cora's loyalty mission and Liam's loyalty mission spring to mind) were actually good and interesting. In the latter the battle in the gravity-shifting room was also really fun. The writing had some good bits too as well at times; the scene where Peebee tries to get everyone else to help clean up the ship after she's wrecked it and they all, one by one, make excuses was rather good. Unfortunately, the plot as a whole was so relentlessly stupid. The villains turned out to be pointless generic bad guys with no real motivations or character. The space corruption that travels all over the place was never properly explored, and the whole lost artefacts waiting for their masters was totally unexplored. Oh, and that new species, the angara? Bore-ring. For fuck's sake, it's a new galaxy. Let's have some properly weird aliens for once rather than yet more bipedal vertebrates. And character development was a totally alien concept to the developers, clearly.
It could have been so much better. Have no villain, but instead, Ryder having the mantle of "Pathfinder" thrust upon him and a plot about him rising to that challenge and trying to embody the values that such a person has to live up to, and whether the colonies live or die depends on how well you, the player, embody those values.
But... yeah, it wouldn't surprise me that there was some sort of collusion in the "hack" that led to this mess becoming public knowledge. They knew that if they released it onto an unsuspecting public they'd end up being utterly panned and a laughing stock. By leaking it in advance they can do a PR offensive and soften up the public by giving the access media stories about hackers and a narrative about Russian bots or -ists and -phobes all ganging up on them.
