Mass Effect Andromeda: Shitstorm Edition - RIP Biowear

....And you faggots thought this train-ride was over.

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So put yourself in the shoes of Manveer "White People Are Responsible for All My Problems" Heir. Your most recent game was a failure roughly on level with a biblical plague, people have made absolutely clear that your politics are about as welcome in their midst as a fire in a nursing home, and if anything, you've only gotten worse since. How do you chase this?

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By starting your own dev studio, of course, with the established goal of "building a black and brown future":

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....He seriously deserves his own thread at this point, if only for the idiocy this is going to lead towards.
Could you imagine if someone of his position was white and had "building a white future" in their bio? Jesus how the Sparks would fly!
Imagine all this started because he got buttblasted over white women finding him repulsive. Even Chris took rejection from girls better than this clown.
God he's a fucking incel too.
 
Imagine all this started because he got buttblasted over white women finding him repulsive. Even Chris took rejection from girls better than this clown.

You ever notice that this is a running theme with the black identitarian crowd?

Francesca Ramsey, Munroe Bergdorf, Manveer Heir - all exclusively dating white people. The fuck is even up with that? Tender misanthropy?
 
You ever notice that this is a running theme with the black identitarian crowd?

Francesca Ramsey, Munroe Bergdorf, Manveer Heir - all exclusively dating white people. The fuck is even up with that? Tender misanthropy?
Imo to be a true zealot you've got to have a doubt that your mind is trying to silence. Since they're so focused on whites instead of real positivity about their own people, makes perfect sense to me they have a huge fetish for whites. Same as how so many feminists have rape/rough sex kinks or priests are sexual deviants or "big is beautiful" advocates almost never want a big, beautiful partner.
 
EA is releasing their Origin exclusives on Steam now, including this shitpile. You still need Origin to play them, making their presence on Steam totally useless, given that Origin sucks big fat donkey balls and there is absolutely no reason to have it on your computer unless you like taking it up the ass from EA. My guess is that the 'Rona made their now-penniless subscribers, all two of them, cancel their Origin Access accounts, and now, EA is desperate for some dosh.

I figure now is good a time as any to deliver a big steaming dump on this game. It's never too late to criticize this giant pile of soggy cardboard.

Mass Effect: Andromeda had reasonably solid core gameplay and pretty environment art, but that was it. That was all it had going for it.

The facial animations were execrable, because they didn't do mocap or hand-animations for most of the cinematic sequences and dialogues. They used a conversation system about on-par with Oblivion for sophistication, and they had a trained monkey line up the phonemes and expressions with the dialogues. Every character was wooden as fuck. There are all of two fucking Asari models in the game, they reused faces out the ass, and Peebee's stupid facial markings look like shit. When this game was released, it even had a bug where characters' iris textures were flat because they used the wrong material settings, making them look even more unnatural and corpse-like.

The plot is a bullshit rehash of the assimilation plot from the original trilogy, except instead of the bad guys turning you into cybernetic abominations, they inject their gooey alien cum or whatever into you and you become the living embodiment of bone spurs or something. It's like, totally the Borg, except biological instead of cybernetic. The main antagonist, the Archon, is a cardboard standup with no discernible motive other than chewing the scenery. He is both impossible to like and also impossible to hate. He is neither charismatic nor is he that much of an asshole. He's just bland as fuck.

That's not even the worst of it. If that was the worst of ME:A's sins, it could largely be forgiven.

The dialogue system is dog shit and railroads you along a predefined, linear path. There is no player choice at all. The "emotional" or "logical" choice amounts to "sound like Kirk" or "sound like Spock". There are no actual repercussions for picking one or the other, unlike the Paragon/Renegade choices that defined who Shepard was. The quests are shallow, poorly-written Korean MMO-level bullshit fetch quests. They actually padded the length of this turd by slipping a Sudoku minigame into it.


But the fucking writing, oh sweet fuck. Never have I wanted to strangle a bunch of video game characters more than my own party in ME:A. Their characterization is a big, sick joke. They treat you with nothing but fawning obsequiousness from beginning to end, no matter what boneheaded shit you do or say. Not a single one of them has the balls to berate or criticize you for the silly decisions that the game railroads you into. There is no sense of conflict. None. All of the protagonists have such an accord, they may as well be a fucking hive mind. When consulted, these characters don't have anything to say about you, really, but they have plenty to say about themselves, and they will burble on narcissistically for hours and hours on end, telling you all about it. It was around the time Liam Kosta told me all about his car (that he had shipped from home and which he will never see, much akin to the vain and useless gesture of shooting a Tesla Roadster into space) that my eyes started rolling back into my head.

There is no conflict with your party. At all. Even the Krogan fucking simps the fuck out when it's clear he's started raining on their parade. The fucking Krogan. One of the most warlike species in the whole goddamn universe, and Drack speaks the one, single word of dissent in the game, and everyone's like "Take your meds, grampa", and he's like, "Well, okay".


There is no scene with equivalent tension or moral stakes to Wrex threatening Shepard with a gun in the first game over the matter of the impending destruction of a cloning facility that could help his people with their fertility problem. None. Zero. These hive mind motherfuckers do nothing but lick your taint whenever they get the chance. The moment you walk into the room, they're like, "Oh, Pathfinder! Ohh! Ohhhhhh!" *sploosh* "I've always wanted to suck your dick, Ryder! Now, I finally get the chance! Omgobblegobble!"

I know SJWs are conflict-averse, and they love writing narcissistic, Tumblr profile-writing, safe-space-having knob goblins like these, but Jesus fucking Christ. I can just picture the writers sitting around in a circle, focusing their chakras or doing yoga or whatever the fuck it is that SocJus drones do, and then, they all collectively resolved not to make the party "toxic", and in so doing, stripped any ounce of humanity from them that they may have otherwise had. At several points throughout the game, I couldn't help but wonder, where the fuck is my crew? Where the fuck are my bros, like Wrex and Garrus? Who the fuck are these brown-nosing assholes who are utterly incapable of independent thought? Where is the sense of conflict? Why are these people kissing Ryder's ass and showing him or her all this respect when Ryder did absolutely nothing to earn it and, in fact, inherited their position through nepotism?

Mass Effect: Andromeda failed in some very fundamental ways, for an RPG. It failed to tell a story that was in any way interesting or original, and it failed to have characters who were believable as people.

The only way that BioWare could atone for this fucking cock-mongling shitshow of a game would be if they made a sequel that was tonally the polar fucking opposite of this, with everyone swearing nonstop and making threats of bodily harm towards one another like they're in an Armando Iannucci sitcom.


Eat shit, BioWare.
 
The dialogue system is dog shit and railroads you along a predefined, linear path. There is no player choice at all. The "emotional" or "logical" choice amounts to "sound like Kirk" or "sound like Spock". There are no actual repercussions for picking one or the other, unlike the Paragon/Renegade choices that defined who Shepard was. The quests are shallow, poorly-written Korean MMO-level bullshit fetch quests. They actually padded the length of this turd by slipping a Sudoku minigame into it.
I really hated that aspect of the game. To me the whole point of Mass Effect is the choices (yeah, I know, they don't matter in the end), each dialogue choice would shape your character. On ME:A there is no choice, it's all about muh feels. It's a big problem, because in the game there are certain stories that should have had more than one path, I'm thinking of the side mission related to the hack of the omnipresent AI/SAM. Playing that mission really disturbed me because I couldn't understand if it was there because the writers couldn't be bothered to write two paths (one "pro" and one "anti") or if the writers all saw the AI as something good for mankind (which is a bit scary). To me, the people who were against it were right, I mean I've played the ME trilogy, but in this side mission there was no opportunity for Ryder (you) to either side with them or be indifferent. Hell, you never got a chance to say "no" about having a fucking AI chip in your head or even question the necessity of it.

The plot is a bullshit rehash of the assimilation plot from the original trilogy, except instead of the bad guys turning you into cybernetic abominations, they inject their gooey alien cum or whatever into you and you become the living embodiment of bone spurs or something. It's like, totally the Borg, except biological instead of cybernetic. The main antagonist, the Archon, is a cardboard standup with no discernible motive other than chewing the scenery. He is both impossible to like and also impossible to hate. He is neither charismatic nor is he that much of an asshole. He's just bland as fuck.
Indeed. The plot was a let down and it was really sad to see how empty and boring the Andromeda galaxy was. The Milky Way was rich of alien races, cultures, vistas. Here, there are only the Angarans and the Kett (both looked like the result of someone trying Zbrush for the first time). An entire galaxy just for 2 alien races? Really? Also the Remnant stuff was so boring too, I mean it's like Bioware played Halo and copied the Forerunner aesthetic and the plot of Halo 4.
The whole Andromeda Initiative is another shitty world building. How in the hell did TIM get the money and resources to create this expedition? Bioware turned Cerberus into a big bad villain in ME2 and 3 but that was never the point of Cerberus or TIM.

But the fucking writing, oh sweet fuck. Never have I wanted to strangle a bunch of video game characters more than my own party in ME:A. Their characterization is a big, sick joke.
Another thing that I really didn't like was the background of the characters, more precisely what pushed them to leave the MW for Andromeda. For most of the characters it's: "been there, done that". WTF? The Milky Way galaxy is huge, there are so many things to see and/or discover. Why do 90% of the characters speak like Joss Whedon characters? Why is everything a joke to them?
The only character I liked was Drack but Bioware wrote him like a cuck.
The Ryders were unlikable. I hate the [current year] writing, like giving everything to the main protagonist because he/she is the protagonist. The Ryder sibblings never earned it. Shepard became a Spectre because he earned it, through hard work.
Also speaking of the Krogans, I really got pissed at that entry:
MEA - learning social interactions through pop culture.png
The writers thought that it was cool to use in-universe pop culture to basically teach male krogans not to rape.
Everything is a joke to these writers, but no one is laughing.
 
Imagine all this started because he got buttblasted over white women finding him repulsive. Even Chris took rejection from girls better than this clown.


Lana K suggested a lot of this stuff is missplaced rage over your job, can't talk shit about your cunty organization so you lash out in other directions. Bioware has had a couple of scandals on how they treat their staff like shit and are gradually becoming EA. So king curry thunder was most likely Curryserf, saw his bosses where white and couldnt see the forest for the trees. I'm genuinly curious how he'll act now he has power my guess is if he's succesful he'll perpetuate the cycle since he can't clock it's systematic. Then again he's the sort of guy to sperg in public how much he hates differant ethnic groups so success is a big if

Also speaking of the Krogans, I really got pissed at that entry:
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The writers thought that it was cool to use in-universe pop culture to basically teach male krogans not to rape.
Everything is a joke to these, but no one is laughing.

One of the weakest aspects of Andromeda is how the neutered the Krogan and other races were, Krogan were unapolegtically not us in the last three games. Also arnt these guys still suffering from the Genophage because pretty much any Krogan sex ed should be a ruthless desperate breeding program not a lighthearted punchline.
 
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Having played 12 hours of the game on release day and deciding "Nah fuck it" fairly quickly I decided to finally give it another chance to draw me in the other day. Waited for my PS4 to drag down every update over my crappy internet connection, started the game and was instantly hit by the seasick camera glitch that was a day 1 issue with the game so NOPE.
 
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The world building is really weird in ME:A. There are several arks, one for each council race and yet, when the human one arrives, there are already a lot of humans on the outposts throughout the galaxy.

One of the weakest aspects of Andromeda is how the neutered the Krogan and other races were, Krogan were unapolegtically not us in the last three games.
It was a dumb idea to turn the Krogan into a [current year] society on ME:A. The writers kind of forgot that the Initiative left the MW during ME2, so there's no cure for the genophage and I doubt that anybody cared about it in the Milky Way outside of Maelon. So it makes no sense for the Krogans to change their society drastically in the blink of an eye.

Also arnt these guys still suffering from the Genophage because pretty much any Krogan sex ed should be a ruthless desperate breeding program not a lighthearted punchline.
Indeed but in ME:A they've slightly retconned the genophage. Apparently they can have more babies because "scientists altered their genes while in cryo during the 600-year journey to Andromeda". It's as dumb as it sounds.
 
Indeed but in ME:A they've slightly retconned the genophage. Apparently they can have more babies because "scientists altered their genes while in cryo during the 600-year journey to Andromeda". It's as dumb as it sounds.

Doesnt that mean things are going to escalate as they did during the Krogan? The cure in MA3 came with the caveat of a Krogan reformation and an eventual staggered birth rate. Consent workshops are the least of your concerns when these fuckers start breeding and everyone else in the low thousands a few gens in and that's before you get to the fact these things are in their element in the settings enviroment, they're very hard to kill and live for Hundreds of years. Urdnot Wrex predates the enlightenment.
The fluff implies they've bumped their birthrate up by around 4% rather than full restoration but the math implies this is a power keg when you consider the low pop levels of everyone else.
 
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EA is releasing their Origin exclusives on Steam now, including this shitpile. You still need Origin to play them, making their presence on Steam totally useless, given that Origin sucks big fat donkey balls and there is absolutely no reason to have it on your computer unless you like taking it up the ass from EA. My guess is that the 'Rona made their now-penniless subscribers, all two of them, cancel their Origin Access accounts, and now, EA is desperate for some dosh.

I figure now is good a time as any to deliver a big steaming dump on this game. It's never too late to criticize this giant pile of soggy cardboard.

Mass Effect: Andromeda had reasonably solid core gameplay and pretty environment art, but that was it. That was all it had going for it.

The facial animations were execrable, because they didn't do mocap or hand-animations for most of the cinematic sequences and dialogues. They used a conversation system about on-par with Oblivion for sophistication, and they had a trained monkey line up the phonemes and expressions with the dialogues. Every character was wooden as fuck. There are all of two fucking Asari models in the game, they reused faces out the ass, and Peebee's stupid facial markings look like shit. When this game was released, it even had a bug where characters' iris textures were flat because they used the wrong material settings, making them look even more unnatural and corpse-like.

The plot is a bullshit rehash of the assimilation plot from the original trilogy, except instead of the bad guys turning you into cybernetic abominations, they inject their gooey alien cum or whatever into you and you become the living embodiment of bone spurs or something. It's like, totally the Borg, except biological instead of cybernetic. The main antagonist, the Archon, is a cardboard standup with no discernible motive other than chewing the scenery. He is both impossible to like and also impossible to hate. He is neither charismatic nor is he that much of an asshole. He's just bland as fuck.

That's not even the worst of it. If that was the worst of ME:A's sins, it could largely be forgiven.

The dialogue system is dog shit and railroads you along a predefined, linear path. There is no player choice at all. The "emotional" or "logical" choice amounts to "sound like Kirk" or "sound like Spock". There are no actual repercussions for picking one or the other, unlike the Paragon/Renegade choices that defined who Shepard was. The quests are shallow, poorly-written Korean MMO-level bullshit fetch quests. They actually padded the length of this turd by slipping a Sudoku minigame into it.


But the fucking writing, oh sweet fuck. Never have I wanted to strangle a bunch of video game characters more than my own party in ME:A. Their characterization is a big, sick joke. They treat you with nothing but fawning obsequiousness from beginning to end, no matter what boneheaded shit you do or say. Not a single one of them has the balls to berate or criticize you for the silly decisions that the game railroads you into. There is no sense of conflict. None. All of the protagonists have such an accord, they may as well be a fucking hive mind. When consulted, these characters don't have anything to say about you, really, but they have plenty to say about themselves, and they will burble on narcissistically for hours and hours on end, telling you all about it. It was around the time Liam Kosta told me all about his car (that he had shipped from home and which he will never see, much akin to the vain and useless gesture of shooting a Tesla Roadster into space) that my eyes started rolling back into my head.

There is no conflict with your party. At all. Even the Krogan fucking simps the fuck out when it's clear he's started raining on their parade. The fucking Krogan. One of the most warlike species in the whole goddamn universe, and Drack speaks the one, single word of dissent in the game, and everyone's like "Take your meds, grampa", and he's like, "Well, okay".


There is no scene with equivalent tension or moral stakes to Wrex threatening Shepard with a gun in the first game over the matter of the impending destruction of a cloning facility that could help his people with their fertility problem. None. Zero. These hive mind motherfuckers do nothing but lick your taint whenever they get the chance. The moment you walk into the room, they're like, "Oh, Pathfinder! Ohh! Ohhhhhh!" *sploosh* "I've always wanted to suck your dick, Ryder! Now, I finally get the chance! Omgobblegobble!"

I know SJWs are conflict-averse, and they love writing narcissistic, Tumblr profile-writing, safe-space-having knob goblins like these, but Jesus fucking Christ. I can just picture the writers sitting around in a circle, focusing their chakras or doing yoga or whatever the fuck it is that SocJus drones do, and then, they all collectively resolved not to make the party "toxic", and in so doing, stripped any ounce of humanity from them that they may have otherwise had. At several points throughout the game, I couldn't help but wonder, where the fuck is my crew? Where the fuck are my bros, like Wrex and Garrus? Who the fuck are these brown-nosing assholes who are utterly incapable of independent thought? Where is the sense of conflict? Why are these people kissing Ryder's ass and showing him or her all this respect when Ryder did absolutely nothing to earn it and, in fact, inherited their position through nepotism?

Mass Effect: Andromeda failed in some very fundamental ways, for an RPG. It failed to tell a story that was in any way interesting or original, and it failed to have characters who were believable as people.

The only way that BioWare could atone for this fucking cock-mongling shitshow of a game would be if they made a sequel that was tonally the polar fucking opposite of this, with everyone swearing nonstop and making threats of bodily harm towards one another like they're in an Armando Iannucci sitcom.


Eat shit, BioWare.

I agree almost entirely. The really frustrating thing is, there's occasional flashes of competence and even, dare I say it, quality. Like Cora's loyalty mission had some glimmers of character development where she has to consider whether she's the species she was born (human) or the species she grew up with (asari). But alas, they were quickly stamped out. Liam's loyalty mission with the gravity changing room was great fun. I think there also was some good writing with Suvi, the navigator, where you could discuss her belief in God and either go along with it or go full euphoric fedora-wearer on her. That was some quite nice dialogue.

Unfortunately, all these occasional glimpses of what the game could have been are squashed by the fact that the player is shoved into being a boring invincible Jesus. Shepard wasn't boring, and certainly wasn't invincible. In fact, his/her failures were just as important to his/her character as the successes and the bit where you first meet Kai Leng in ME3 and failure is the only option was actually really nicely written. But... no. You have the choice between playing a plank, or a she-plank.

Your point about how the mantle of Pathfinder is thrust onto the protagonist is very true. Rather than lining up to worship the PC, how about making it so that Ryder has to live up to expectations? Have someone, Cora maybe, explain to them what it means to be the Pathfinder and the values that, as Pathfinder, they have to espouse. Then let the player do as they see fit without let or hindrance, but failure to live up to those values (and often you will have to arsehole one value to live up to another) may result on colonies failing or dying. After all, that's what Richard Garriott did back in Ultima IV. He'd done three games of killing a big bad evil overlord and destroying an existential threat to the setting. So for the fourth one, he made the PC become the Avatar by being the change they wanted to see.

Here's another thing. How are we supposed to believe that the Initiative's first contact with the angara is when they first fly to Aya, their main base, yet once you get to the stinky sulphuric acid planet (I forget it's name) you see angara mingling with and trading with human, turian, asari, and krogan exiles? This is stupid.

How would I have fixed Andromeda? Well, here's how:

1. No new aliens. There are ruins, but they're all dead. Maybe keep the Remnant. A central mystery could be whether the Remnant are the robots that turned on and killed their masters or whether they're just waiting for their masters to return. I'd prefer the latter myself. They are just mindlessly doing their thing and when they accidentally run over or machine-gun a colonist, to them it's just pest control because they don't recognise that anyone other than their masters are sentient beings. Perhaps that Scourge could be the by-product of their masters having gone... wherever they've gone.

2. The big bad is the harshness and unforgivingness of Andromeda. The Initiative are stranded on undeveloped planets, most of which are death worlds or dead worlds, with supplies running out. They have nothing to rely on but the stuff they came over with and their own resourcefulness. They've been in stasis for 600 years. It'll take at least a decade or two to terraform the new worlds. They also have a limited number of people. Probably a few thousand at best per species. They haven't received anything from the Milky Way in all that time and aren't going to. Maybe the characters will realise that the Reapers were right, and it is in the nature of all civilisations to destroy themselves. Maybe the Reapers actually won. How does one stay sane or thrive under such conditions.

3. The game is divided into chapters with a time skip between each one. This allows for the player to see how their decisions affect the viability of the colony long term. This could also allow for the player to have longer term romantic encounters which actually feel meaningful and maybe even (gasp!) have children. Which would dovetail really nicely with the callousness of the dead-and-death world setting as well as be both a hope spot and an examination into how things change when you have skin in the game.

4. Any and all "representation" and "inclusivity" would be introduced organically rather than literally a character coming up to you and saying, "have I mentioned I am trans today."
 
Your point about how the mantle of Pathfinder is thrust onto the protagonist is very true. Rather than lining up to worship the PC, how about making it so that Ryder has to live up to expectations? Have someone, Cora maybe, explain to them what it means to be the Pathfinder and the values that, as Pathfinder, they have to espouse.
I still think that Cora should have been the Pathfinder, at least for half of the game.
1. No new aliens.
I kind of disagree on that point. I would have added a bunch of new alien races and cultures but you wouldn't be able to establish first contact or talk to them unless you had explored their solar system, learned bits of their language via journals, paintings, carvings, etc. The player's choice of outposts (military, scientific, colony) would also have an impact on a quadrant, some of the aliens in the area would either trust you or see you as a threat. That could also lead to some side-missions (playable or not) where you could lose an outpost.
Your second idea is pretty good. Way better than "let's do a Sudoku to activate the Forerunner Remnant structure to make that planet habitable for us and who cares if there were other aliens before".
 
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I agree almost entirely. The really frustrating thing is, there's occasional flashes of competence and even, dare I say it, quality. Like Cora's loyalty mission had some glimmers of character development where she has to consider whether she's the species she was born (human) or the species she grew up with (asari). But alas, they were quickly stamped out. Liam's loyalty mission with the gravity changing room was great fun. I think there also was some good writing with Suvi, the navigator, where you could discuss her belief in God and either go along with it or go full euphoric fedora-wearer on her. That was some quite nice dialogue.

Unfortunately, all these occasional glimpses of what the game could have been are squashed by the fact that the player is shoved into being a boring invincible Jesus. Shepard wasn't boring, and certainly wasn't invincible. In fact, his/her failures were just as important to his/her character as the successes and the bit where you first meet Kai Leng in ME3 and failure is the only option was actually really nicely written. But... no. You have the choice between playing a plank, or a she-plank.

Your point about how the mantle of Pathfinder is thrust onto the protagonist is very true. Rather than lining up to worship the PC, how about making it so that Ryder has to live up to expectations? Have someone, Cora maybe, explain to them what it means to be the Pathfinder and the values that, as Pathfinder, they have to espouse. Then let the player do as they see fit without let or hindrance, but failure to live up to those values (and often you will have to arsehole one value to live up to another) may result on colonies failing or dying. After all, that's what Richard Garriott did back in Ultima IV. He'd done three games of killing a big bad evil overlord and destroying an existential threat to the setting. So for the fourth one, he made the PC become the Avatar by being the change they wanted to see.

It was very jarring. All of a sudden, there were all these people who looked up to Ryder immediately after his or her father died, with absolutely no reason whatsoever to trust their command. After digging into the lore a bit, and taking note of how Ryder's entire team had SAM implants, I was almost expecting there to be some big reveal that SAM was literally manipulating the Pathfinder team members to be more compliant with each other through their implants to increase their chances of survival, given how bizarre and conflict-averse their behavior was. Even with as hackneyed of a plot as that would be, it would've been a real heavy-duty mindfuck, and it would've flipped the characterization from terrible to kinda ingenious.

Or, as you say, they could've shown Ryder earning the respect of their team, which would've been much, much better.

The colonization aspect of ME:A was a punch in the gut, it was so terrible. By that point, I'd long been familiar with survival games and RPGs where you can build your own structures and colonies. Fallout 4, for all its flaws, had a somewhat decent city-building mechanic. ARK, Empyrion, Space Engineers, Rust, Conan: Exiles - they all did "building stuff" better than Andromeda.

The colonies in Andromeda are entirely static. Rather than braving the harsh elements and surviving in spite of the odds, each planet is terraformed instantly at the press of a button by ancient alien machinery so advanced as to practically come across as magic, stealing any sense of accomplishment you might have had, and then a colony gets plonked down and becomes the hub of a bunch of terrible, soulless, plot-free, MMO-grade quests. Where is the sense of struggle? Where is the sense of overcoming a challenge by applying logic and reason and working around the limitations each world has? Nope. We get none of that. We simply sprinkle magic Remnant pixie dust on a planet, and the problem is solved.

This isn't science fiction. This is shamanism.

Here's another thing. How are we supposed to believe that the Initiative's first contact with the angara is when they first fly to Aya, their main base, yet once you get to the stinky sulphuric acid planet (I forget it's name) you see angara mingling with and trading with human, turian, asari, and krogan exiles? This is stupid.

The exiles felt like one big plot hole. They gave us a seedy criminal element made up of mutineers, but they did it in such a way that there are more criminals than there are targets. Who the fuck are they stealing from? How can they maintain such lavish excess? Why are they not eating their own shoes?

What made it an even worse cop-out is that their behavior is explained away as brain damage from cryosleep sickness in a side quest. That seemed like it should have been significant enough to be a main quest thing, perhaps with Ryder looking for a cure. Instead, it's never brought up again. Wow.

How would I have fixed Andromeda? Well, here's how:

1. No new aliens. There are ruins, but they're all dead. Maybe keep the Remnant. A central mystery could be whether the Remnant are the robots that turned on and killed their masters or whether they're just waiting for their masters to return. I'd prefer the latter myself. They are just mindlessly doing their thing and when they accidentally run over or machine-gun a colonist, to them it's just pest control because they don't recognise that anyone other than their masters are sentient beings. Perhaps that Scourge could be the by-product of their masters having gone... wherever they've gone.

2. The big bad is the harshness and unforgivingness of Andromeda. The Initiative are stranded on undeveloped planets, most of which are death worlds or dead worlds, with supplies running out. They have nothing to rely on but the stuff they came over with and their own resourcefulness. They've been in stasis for 600 years. It'll take at least a decade or two to terraform the new worlds. They also have a limited number of people. Probably a few thousand at best per species. They haven't received anything from the Milky Way in all that time and aren't going to. Maybe the characters will realise that the Reapers were right, and it is in the nature of all civilisations to destroy themselves. Maybe the Reapers actually won. How does one stay sane or thrive under such conditions.

3. The game is divided into chapters with a time skip between each one. This allows for the player to see how their decisions affect the viability of the colony long term. This could also allow for the player to have longer term romantic encounters which actually feel meaningful and maybe even (gasp!) have children. Which would dovetail really nicely with the callousness of the dead-and-death world setting as well as be both a hope spot and an examination into how things change when you have skin in the game.

4. Any and all "representation" and "inclusivity" would be introduced organically rather than literally a character coming up to you and saying, "have I mentioned I am trans today."

This! All of this. No magic Remnant pixie dust fixing things and people sitting around in prefab colonies like they're at a damn Starbucks. Long-term planning. Real stakes. Real consequences. Limited supplies. Frayed nerves.

Colonization is a difficult and very messy business. Ryder should be crawling through the dirt and whimpering as he or she clung for dear life to the last bright orange Peli-case full of rations. The Pathfinder team should be shaking from hypothermia and hiding in a cave, shivering and rubbing their hands together around a hastily-built campfire.

It should be like Jamestown, Virginia. We shouldn't even need an alien empire to fight. The environment itself should have been portrayed as a mortal threat.

I mean, think about this for a second. Did this game even remotely resemble what was promised?

 
The whole Andromeda Initiative is another shitty world building. How in the hell did TIM get the money and resources to create this expedition? Bioware turned Cerberus into a big bad villain in ME2 and 3 but that was never the point of Cerberus or TIM.

He invented the paper clip.

Doesnt that mean things are going to escalate as they did during the Krogan? The cure in MA3 came with the caveat of a Krogan reformation and an eventual staggered birth rate. Consent workshops are the least of your concerns when these fuckers start breeding and everyone else in the low thousands a few gens in and that's before you get to the fact these things are in their element in the settings enviroment, they're very hard to kill and live for Hundreds of years. Urdnot Wrex predates the enlightenment.
The fluff implies they've bumped their birthrate up by around 4% rather than full restoration but the math implies this is a power keg when you consider the low pop levels of everyone else.

Step 1: Allow the Krogan to explosively breed, tame the frontier with their ruggedness.
Step 2: Install "Terraforming infrastructure" on all the planets.
Step 3: Neuter all the Krogon again, have all the scientists insist that it is a mutation of an Angaran disease, shrug and say it will take millennia to fix.

Though really the fact that they had a 100% new galaxy to take over should theoretically mean you have plenty of room to expand, and the fact that they apparently have the technology to go to a new galaxy means that Krogan expansion shouldn't have been an issue anymore. The main problem in the milky way was that they had no room to expand for the land and resources they needed, forcing them to fight with other races over useful planets. Now that there is an entire universe to expand to, and there shouldn't be any problems unless they manage to fill it up to the brim. You'd still have to deal with being outnumbered by Space Orks and crossing your fingers that they don't decide to invade your land and crush you like a twig, but you'll have that problem even if there arn't hordes of them.

Really the fact that the MW races can now travel indefinitely throughout the universe should be a bigger deal.
 
It suddenly occurred to me that the people who would find Pocahontas an extremely toxoproblematic myth of a colonial oppressor courting a hot native would also happen to be the exact same people who draw their OC Ryder romancing Jaal on Tumblr because he's "a sweet piece of alien ass".

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Lana K suggested a lot of this stuff is missplaced rage over your job, can't talk shit about your cunty organization so you lash out in other directions. Bioware has had a couple of scandals on how they treat their staff like shit and are gradually becoming EA. So king curry thunder was most likely Curryserf, saw his bosses where white and couldnt see the forest for the trees. I'm genuinly curious how he'll act now he has power my guess is if he's succesful he'll perpetuate the cycle since he can't clock it's systematic. Then again he's the sort of guy to sperg in public how much he hates differant ethnic groups so success is a big if

I doubt that very seriously. We have documented proof that he was still seething over being rejected by white women years before, and his twitter shows he hasn't relented in his anti-white sentiment years after being driven out EA and AAA gaming in general. What's most likely is he was bottling all this up since a teenager, seen anti-white SJW bullshit being actually encouraged on twitter, and went all on in it.

Unfortunately for him, he sperged out so hard that even turbo SJWs in EA wanted him gone and other large gaming studios wanted nothing to do with him. He did to his own career and life what his countrymen do to their designated streets.
 
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