WotC Reveal Exodus, a New Video Game from the Decelopers of Mass Effect and Neverwinter Nights

Huh. What's funny is how Exodus seems to be cribbing most from Mass Effect Andromeda. Which ... I liked Andromeda, sure it was badly in need of another writing pass or three, but I liked Ryder, driving around in the Nomad (which given my hatred of the MAKO is quite the thing), and the gameplay was pretty fast and fun. But given Andromeda's reception, it amuses me how much Exodus feels like another attempt at it.

I liked the Secret Level well enough, though I wasn't super invested
 

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Huh. What's funny is how Exodus seems to be cribbing most from Mass Effect Andromeda. Which ... I liked Andromeda, sure it was badly in need of another writing pass or three, but I liked Ryder, driving around in the Nomad (which given my hatred of the MAKO is quite the thing), and the gameplay was pretty fast and fun. But given Andromeda's reception, it amuses me how much Exodus feels like another attempt at it.

I liked the Secret Level well enough, though I wasn't super invested
Yeah that is kind of funny, but MEA was pretty solid background concept-wise, that was never the problem (and these are far more "epic" versions of similar ideas). It was execution, both of the open-world aspects and the storytelling/characters. MEA just felt like a first draft to me (in every way), and that they didn't really analyze what made Mass Effect Mass Effect. Particularly by making the story of MEA essentially a generic/standard "hero's journey"/"zero to hero" sort of story for Ryder. ME1-3 bucked against that pretty hard. Shepard is never a zero, never a farmboy, doesn't have to "prove themselves" in the usual boring fantasy story/RPG kind of way, and their journey is pretty complex. But Ryder does, and whilst it's an actually fairly well-executed "zero to hero" story, and by the very end of it, Ryder is acting like a Shepard-tier badass (in an only slightly unearned way), it doesn't have the same fundamental appeal as the ME games, and is conceptually in a much more crowded and overdone part of the RPG spectrum (story-wise). I don't think that was a conscious reason for people to reject it, but I do think it was an unconscious one.
 


Travel to the other side of the universe, only to find the aliens are more boring than the ones in the place you came from.
Yeah there's some Kazon-Ogla stuff going on for sure, but again, I think a lot of that comes down to having to basically develop the entire game in 18 months, which just deleted the opportunity to develop complex and cool (if still quite Star Trek-y or actually I think Farscape-y is more correct) aliens like ME1-3 did.

Like, the concept/backstory for the main badguys in MEA, the Kett, you'd think they'd be absolutely wildly more diverse in appearance and physical form and capabilities than they actually are. It's a bit like how the Borg are all "We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own" and then... like, have they ever actually done that? Because I'd say "no". But here I think it's even more down to budget/development time than with Star Trek.

I was struck by, even if you chose the most conciliatory, Picard-like dialogue options, what Shepard actually says is still badass.
I mean Picard also drops some absolutely badass lines whilst being relatively conciliatory too, but yes even "nice guy" Shepard is in that "Righteous Picard/Sisko/Pike" strike zone (I wish I could include Janeway but too often the writers pushed her into less epic and more snarky lines, albeit she was far, far better off there than poor Archer - at least sometimes Janeway was spittin', I don't think Archer ever was!). Ryder at the very end of MEA is starting to get into that zone too, and you see flashes of it earlier, but because of the stupid zero-to-hero design, it's not really centered.

Re: ME5 (which as of today, is still slightly concerningly in pre-production - they actively rejected going straight into full production), I strongly suspect they learned from this because "New N7 person" absolutely has badass vibes so seems likely to follow a more Shepardian path.
 



Orange is the New Black really underscores how much Voyager let Kate Mulgrew down.
For real. The biggest problem was that the writers seemingly couldn't get a lock on her personality until like S4/5 at the earliest. Before that she's absolutely all over the road, an unbending and un-Star Fleet-esque martinet one week, a kindly aunt type who seems like she should be wearing athleisure and holding a wacky novelty coffee mug the next. As Orange helped to show, that wasn't down to any failing on Mulgrew's part, but rather just very inconsistent writing.
 

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