I just beat MEA this weekend. (Off-Topic)

by marmot 1333 , Monday, July 10, 2017, 10:50 (2491 days ago) @ DiscipleN2k

93% playthrough.

The worst bug I experienced: I was fighting one of the Architects and died. It respawned me in the same location, but the Architect was not visible. I could hear it. The NPCs yelled, "chase it before it gets away!" I could hear the sound getting fainter. I was never able to encounter it again. I found a bug report on the official site that was basically the same thing, but there are lots of other, more similar bugs, that made finding this bug very difficult.

Some cool stuff happens in the story later in the game, but the beginning was pretty slow. I hated how big the planet Elaaden was. Big and empty, took forever to go anywhere.

My Ryder grew on me during the course of the game, but I prefer Shepard.

I liked Jaal and Drack. Some of the character models seemed to suffer from uncanny valley more than others, like Addison and Cora.

I think the graphics are good in a technical way (long draw distance etc), but I prefer the art style of Mass Effect 3.

Mission tracking: Ugh. I really didn't like the way that was handled. I prefer a skyrim-type solution, where you can turn as many quest markers on or off as you want. Menu/UI was problematic--really hard to tell what things you haven't read, because as you scroll down a list, it marks them as 'read' as soon as your cursor goes to the next item in the list that was off-screen.

The controls are wonky--you can never be sure your character will actually grab the edge of a ledge you're trying to climb up. In previous MEs you felt solid, heavy, almost cludgy, and in MEA you're light, floaty, and drifty. Less predictable.

I've been playing the Multiplayer a decent amount, and they're making it way easier by making the player characters much stronger. (At launch even Bronze was super hard.) I think the shooting game in ME3 was more stable, predictable, and rewarding, but there are some good tradeoffs. Character mobility makes a massive difference in play, which changes the paradigm from mid- to long-term strategic play to more immediate jump in, damage, jump out.

Overall, a real mixed bag.