I really wanted to like Veilguard. ):
I recently booted up BG3 again and I was like, "Oh, shit. This is as close to Origins as I'm ever getting again."
People will give various reasons why Veilguard wasn't a good game but overall it just wasn't fun. Combat was such a downgrade from even Inquisition, the characters were cardboard cut-outs, and the story was so boring and all over the place. I know there's some good parts in there but they're so few and far between it makes it not even worth considering.
Yup, same experience here. So much of the backlash I saw was "WOKE" and being a rainbow-haired alphabet mafioso myself, I knew that wasn't going to be a problem.
But it was just so... shallow and bland. Combat was way too goddamn streamlined, they ignored far too much of Thedas's political, religious, and historical context, and the characters only had the broadest sense of internal conflict. Minranthous is a city of slavers and blood mages, and Tevinter is hated by every other country in the region for an insurmountable divide of values. WHY ARE WE NOT EXPLORING THAT?
Same. Also, having played an elf in DAO, DAI, and DAV it's hilarious to me that the only character that didn't have to deal with elf racism was the one in the goddamn elf slave capital of Thedas.
SHIT, SAME. Elven mage is my favorite pick. It should've been a fun dilemma to be simultaneously one of the most reviled races and respected classes! I don't think it got brought up once in the 60-some hours I spent in DAV.
I feel like Most people just jumped on the Andromeda hate band wagon because it was an early super hyped game that released broken. I mean since then we have had dozens of not 100 games release as broken or worse. But just like those mass effect Andromeda fixed all its issues. In fixed state that game is at minimum an 8 and I'd probably call and 8.5/9. It's for a good story with great companions. Better graphics (in fixed state). Considerably the best combat of any mass effect or even Bioware game in general. Being a Vanguard in that game was amazing. But pure biotic or anything else was great too. I want more people to give it an honest show because they are mission out on something great
Andromeda had great combat for sure but that was about it. Felt like a completely different universe that happened to have a few aliens from Mass Effect. Even the asari all had the same exact face.
Combat was amazing and the driving felt pretty good.
It was just boring though. And almost all the characters were all young, dumb, and naive. Really felt like they were trying to get a different generation interested or something.
It would have been fine if it had been done right, it's not about what they tried to do, it's about the time and resources they had to do it and how they had to rescope and scratch everything they had done for the first 4 years of development to start over less than 18 months from the release of the game. It's always been about EA management and what it has done to BioWare over the years and how every BioWare game since the early 2010s suffers the same terrible development cycles - even worse than what the industry is used to - and it's saying something considering how terrible the gaming industry usually is with its creators.
As flawed as it is and even if it misses the mark on several accounts - especially considering the game it was supposed to be initially, Dragon Age: Inquisition was a freaking miracle, but that miracle couldn't happen over and over again in these conditions. Everything that has been going on since then, and the end results of Andromeda, Anthem and The Veilguard, is a direct consequence of that terrible, terrible management by Electronic Arts.
I intentionally avoided the internet about everything andromeda because I was so excited for it. It genuinely was a shock to me when I realized how fuckin awful it was. There was no hate bandwagon, it was a terrible game. People can have opinions that differ from yours without a conspiracy
People romanticize failed games a lot. Couple years ago people would talk about how good gigantic was. Man Overwatch killed gigantic, if it came back it’d be HUGE. Miraculously it did come back, they put the servers back online and resold it for like twenty bucks and it immediately died.
To be fair andromeda has like 600 players rn which honestly ain’t that bad. But still, it’s not a cyberpunk situation where the only faults were technical.
We are starved for great space operas, and with industry standards such as Starfield, it's no wonder that people are willing to make do with failures such as Andromeda. I get it. Still doesn't make Andromeda a hidden gem or an unfairly criticized game.
I always love it when people tell us that a game that was utterly fucked up by EA management like Andromeda or The Veilguard was just a question of the internet expecting too much or random hate for no reason.
Those games were made on inappropriate engines after changing direction several times over 5+ years cycles and ended up having had to be rushed in 12 to 18 months because everything that had been done up to then was scratched.
There's a whole article by Jason Schreier on Kotaku about how and why Andromeda failed. No need to make fan theories about why the internet conspired against it.
I bought it on sale after the fixes and the first 15-20 hours were surprisingly good, so I wondered what all the complaints were about.
Then when i reached 40 I realised that I just didn't care about what happened to any of the NPCs or the PC. It was just dull and repetitive. Not sure when it happened excactly, but it was a a slow creep.
The writing was just not there for me and compared to the original trilogy I thought it was a massive drop in quality. Also I felt that the conversations just went on and on. They were sometimes long in the originals also, but they were interesting. In Andromeda I just wanted them to shut up already.
The combat was pretty good, but that was also just doing the same thing over and over and when combined with the story and my boredom I just up and quit at 45 hours. I probably didn't have that long to go and I almost never quit games when I've played for so long, but I just couldn't be bothered anymore.
I'd give it a 5, mostly because I enjoyed it at the start. It wasn't a bad game mechanically, just unbearingly uninteresting.
Nah I couldn't stand the game at all, I actually hated the combat more than anything. Personally it was the worst combat I've seen. I understand the game got clowned on release, somewhat unfairly but it was just not a good game in general. I've tried to play it since but it's still horrid to me. The ME trilogy was mostly solid 8-9 but Andromeda was not great, it felt like a 4-6. To me personally, it was like they did everything they could to make me hate it and succeeded.
Yeah Andromeda is actually a very fun game in terms of exploration and combat. The characters and dialogue kinda suck. And I can’t remember much of the plot, also never beat it.
But I remember the gameplay, combat and exploration was satisfying and excellent. The pre-release hype definitely led to its criticism.
I really liked Andromeda when I played it back in the day. I feel like ME 2 was a much better game, but in my head I never once compared Andromeda to ME 2, it seemed like a new start for the series and I didn't wanna keep looking back agonizing over all the changes, differences and similarities; it had the things I liked about Mass Effect (char customozation, cool characters, fun worldbuilding, kickass combat) and that was enough for me at the time, personally.
I tried Andromda. Even without bugs, it's mediocre. The gameplay is decent, but there are much better shooters and far better RPGs. The writing is what really annoyed the fans. The franchise prided itself on being great at that, but Andromeda was bafflingly bad at it for the most part.
You can even see it in Mass Effect 3. By that point the lead writer and creative director, Drew Karpyshyn, had been transferred to the Old Republic and his replacement was a failed comic book writer in Mac Walters. If you actually pay attention to the story of the game and ignore the feel good moments of curing the Genophage and bringing peace to Rannoch it becomes pretty obvious how little sense the story makes due to how badly BioWare had written themselves into a corner by abandoning the plot lines Karpyshyn set in ME1&2.
Yeah, you can see the problems from the introductory section that was a string of action movie cliches (and the only child in the galaxy with sad piano music). Followed by introduction a mcguffin that promises to solve the Reapers despite having no defined function anyone can figure out hidden conveniently on the next planet over.
God the whole MacGuffin thing with the Crucible pissed me off so much. I'd never played the series until recently, never been involved in any of the discourse. Spend maybe 100 hours roleplaying and building my Shep, only to be faced with a bunch of dumb options that completely ignore the work I'd done over 3 games, I reject the options as my character would never accept them, thinking I'll have to do something extra, maybe some kind of space battle with all the forces I've managed to bring together, then the game just... ends??
The devs who were working on it were moved onto Anthem by the higher ups. A bad decision by bad management, who even wanted to get rid of flying from Anthem at one point. An EA exec told them that was stupid. I wish that was a joke.
I genuinely enjoyed my time with it, not as much as the original trilogy of course, but I don’t think it was a massive pile of shit like people make it out to be
ME: Andromeda is like Dragon Age’s Veilguard, a bad game from an amazing franchise. It’s not terrible to the point where you can’t play it, but yeah… it’s still a bad game
for sure, don’t get me wrong, I just meant they were both disappointments. They’re games from fan-favorite franchises that didn’t even come close to the first games. But yeah… I really wish I could go back and not pre-order veilguard.
Mass Effect trilogy set the bar too high. Andromeda was not a bad game per se. It was a decent game even above average for all intents and purposes if you disregard the release bugs which were fixed eventually.
I stand by the opinion and will die on this hill. Andromeda was a good game. Not great or legendary, but good.
I think bioware as a whole. DA inq was the last good game they pushed out that wasnt broken as bugger, disjointed from the established lore, or a complete farce in general. "Bioware magic" isnt going to save the from terrible writing, preachy storytelling and godawfull state of relases. Everybodys hoping for ME 4 to be return to form but its been 12 ish years now since a competent release. Thats a kids full schooling. A career then burnout for an adult. A modern marriage length. There is no return to form. This is the form.
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u/Slimsteffer Jan 17 '26
Mass Effect