Finding a repair station to craft a functional pistol after the one you landed on broke your fall during a mishap. Scanning the environment to solve a puzzle rather than just to confirm that the world is full of foreign lifeforms. While Mass Effect: Andromeda has the extra layer of its many exploration elements, these could’ve been integrated into set pieces on Habitat 7: racing away from an electrical storm in a Nomad tank, only for it to crash and leave your team scrambling. It still takes over an hour to get back on your ship, leading the charge against the invading Reaper horde, but it never feels like you’re wasting time. Ironically, the best example of BioWare cutting to the chase is Mass Effect 3, keeping the plot rolling with just the relevant information until you’re finally back in action. Was the abandoned colony in Mass Effect 2 memorable at all besides Tali’s cameo? How about being told to unite the humans, elves, and dwarves in Dragon Age: Origins? Did we really need to spend hours upon hours stuck on Taris in Knights of the Old Republic? RPGs can absolutely be some of the most complex experiences on the market, so you want to ease players in, but it’s no coincidence that there are so many fan mods for each of these games that skip the dull moments so that players can get on with the meat of the experience. However, this issue isn’t unique to Andromeda. However, not only does it take several hours, but its environment is trivialized opposite the acidic Kadara and windswept wasteland of Elidaan, each with more interesting subplots. If Eos only took an hour or so, that’d be fine. For instance, Andromeda throws you into Habitat 7, a gorgeous world full of mysteries, only to yank you onto Eos, a boring desert planet that mostly just trains you for the rest of the game. Instead of swiftly integrating players into the action or opting for a careful slow-burn experience, each of these games opens with a big, explosive event, then immediately pumps the brakes the moment things get interesting. Three crucial points must be addressed: making exploration more meaningful, streamlining features, and addressing BioWare’s perennial problem of protracted opening sequences. However, there are specific ways to improve upon the Andromeda formula in the case of a direct sequel or a soft-reboot successor harnessing Andromeda’s blend of gameplay. Last week, we dug deep into the heart of Mass Effect: Andromeda and why some of its maligned aspects were actually crucial to its core goals.
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