Upcoming AAA/AA CRPGs or story-based RPGs (updated 15/04/2025)
- Thread starter Ruin Explorer
- Start date
Ulorian - Agent of Chaos
Legend
ME2 was the best of the series and is an all-time classic. ME1 was still really, really, really good and three was well above average. I would say no bums in that lineup.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
ME2 was a fun game, but it was very predictably structured, and had fewer RPG elements than ME1. But ME3 completely fumbled the landing, which is why some people prefer the idea that the story ended with the first game.
To break it down further, ME1 had an ending which was pure action movie gung ho heroism. "let's drive the car through the mass relay" was straight out of Fast and Furious XXXVII ...in Space. And fans of the first game were looking for something similar but bigger from the finale. Instead it took a lurch into a completely different genre - grimdark philosophical hard SF. Pretty much The War of the Worlds ...in Space.
Then there is issue of the Reapers. In the first game they are presented as Cyber-Cthulhu (Picard says hi). Incomprehensibly alien. Then later games go on to explain them and make them comprehensible. Thus, they became diminished.
To break it down further, ME1 had an ending which was pure action movie gung ho heroism. "let's drive the car through the mass relay" was straight out of Fast and Furious XXXVII ...in Space. And fans of the first game were looking for something similar but bigger from the finale. Instead it took a lurch into a completely different genre - grimdark philosophical hard SF. Pretty much The War of the Worlds ...in Space.
Then there is issue of the Reapers. In the first game they are presented as Cyber-Cthulhu (Picard says hi). Incomprehensibly alien. Then later games go on to explain them and make them comprehensible. Thus, they became diminished.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
"I didn't like it, so everyone needs to pretend it never existed."
Seriously, are people still playing that old song?
Seriously, are people still playing that old song?
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I don't think anyone is telling anyone else to pretend it never existed. They just prefer to think that themselves because the ending spoils an otherwise enjoyable story.
Ulorian - Agent of Chaos
Legend
This post reminded me that I had purchased Andromeda at a fire sale price some years ago, but had never installed it. Having just finished Avowed, I thought 'why not'.
My review after 20 minutes of playing: I like it! Visuals good, characters I've met are likable, story seems interesting. The checkpoint system, I can do without. Like many other adults out there, sometimes life calls and I don't have the luxury of playing for another 20 minutes until I get to the next save checkpoint. Game developers, please stop doing this...
I reserve the right to have my post-game review take a different tack.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
You are right, MA: Andromeda is an enjoyable game. It's just narratively weaker than it's predecessors. And is occurred to me that one of the narrative issues might point towards how Exodus will work. It beings with you everyone just being thawed out of cryosleep in the new galaxy, but very quickly you complete a few missions and the galaxy is full of established human colonies. And the protagonist hasn't aged a day. To tell the story of settling a new galaxy it really needs Foundation style time jumps of hundreds of years. I suspect the idea is that Exodus will use time dilation to work this into the narrative in a more convincing way.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I hate to defend Andromeda, but this is pretty inaccurate. "Full of" is literally what, six (correct me if I'm wrong) colonies (the rest are alien), most of which appear to be pretty tiny, like dozens to thousands of people (the arks contain 80k each IIRC, and most are still onboard), and they're all "out-of-the-box", as in constructed from materials/supplies brought with them - mostly containerized parts like we'd create a Lunar or Mars colony with. The big cities and so on are local aliens.
You don't need time skips of more than months for any of that to have happened. And times skips of months are implied (or even directly stated, I forget).
The protagonist doesn't age visibly because the beginning to end of MEA is like, what, less than 2 years? Maybe less than 1? The protagonist is in their early 20s. More time passes in ME1-3.
I felt like the game made this pretty clear, but maybe it didn't.
That was intended to happen with the sequels, one of the designers said so actually 2 years before MEA came out. They wanted to restart because they felt like skipping the human colonization era in ME1-3 was a missed opportunity (hard disagree personally), and then yes to continue forwards in a Foundation-esque manner. (I think that's one of very few times designers even mentioned sequels to MEA).
They've really complicated it by making it so the galaxy is already full of weird post-humans in Exodus, but yeah they're pretty clear they're using large time skips to tell the story.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Did you speak to anyone? They all talk like they have been living there decades. Certainly quite long enough for all kinds of social problems to develop (which only you can solve). That's when you were there yesterday and it was an uninhabited rock.
payn
Glory to Marik
I think that was an unfortunate side effect of going, "open world". To which the developers took to mean mean ass loads of fetch quests.
