This style of large open world games being populated with nothing but terrible collection and kill filler quests can fuck off. I almost completely lose interest in a game when it has all these terrible quests everywhere. I played until act 2 of cyberpunk and tried to go find some interesting side quests like the Witcher had. Its all filler just like Andromeda. That's why I can't play any ubisoft or farcry games it all so meaningless.
I agree in general, though I will say I think a lot of times people force themselves to do it all when they don't have to. I replayed Dragon Age 3 earlier this year and ignored over half the game and enjoyed it a lot more, and I leveled up enough to finish it just fine. In fact with the DLCs, I think I hit the level cap anyway. Cyberpunk seems similar, there's lots of bullshit with little substance but there are also good side quests, and I bet you don't need to do anything you don't want to do. Though in Cyberpunk it's hard to tell what's a good quest and what isn't, since they are all random map markers at first.
Anyway, I agree in general about open world checklist design. Like I said, I hope it's more ME2 in structure, but we'll see. EA recently put out a great singleplayer game with Jedi: Fallen Order, so you never know.
My tought is that they should leave all that open world cheklisty crap out if both DA and ME.
Honestly I liked both DA and ME series to a certain extent but both Inquisiton and Andromeda fucked up by being empty MMO-s with really, reaaaaalllllyyyy boring useless quests.
Altough now that I think about it they actually were probably MMOs turned SP games.
Would coincide with EA after turning SWTOR into TOR.
They were saying that Bioware would only do MMO/F2P crap from now on, of course this was before TOR tanked and didn't deliver the WOW numbers that every MMO is chasing.
So they probably turned them back to SP games at some point.
Other than that Inquisiton was kinda good storywise, altough probably they could have developed npc party members more. That was my main gripe.
Only because it really shined trough on occasion that some of the writes actually knew how to do characterization, even the romance be it straight or gay felt like they were out of a romance novel in a good way, only problem it felt to short and underdeveloped.
I mean both character and romance stories felt bit undercooked was a shame because there were glimpses of actually good writing, as in really simple, not earth shattering but I wasn't expecting that either.
Hardly any good leisure books with decent writers, so it really stood out in game, which usually has unbearable level of cringy writing.
The same can be said of andromeda, the only problem that game was even more unfinished than Inquisiton.
The main story could have been actually good because it came over as not epic hero saves universe crap, but protag being a kid who struggles to keep shit together after your father's death and having a duty placed on his/her shoulders.
Should have explored that more, like having leadership issues and so on, instead it quickly deviated into another epic something.
Then there was the whole new galaxy, and all the inconsistencies that come with a star trek wannabe story, if you write somethning like that it is really hard to follow and keep up with. Ultimately they failed spectacularly.
In terms of game systems now that's where Inquisiton should have been crucified even tough I kinda liked the story it was just a chore to play the actual game especially as a melee fighter.
Jesus was that bad, they tried to make tactical camera with turnbased rpg combat and real time hack and slash combat working at the same time. Of course it's going to be a clusterfuck.
They should've just made the game hack and slash with polished fluid gameplay.
Instead we got something like mmo controls in a world desinged mostly for hack and slash combat, with the occasional tactical fight (only dragons and maybe final boss) designed for the old DA:O gameplay, which of course didn't work since you couldnt do anything tactical in game
just button mash and auto attack.
Combat controlls and AI were the worst in any Bioware game up to date.
Andromeda was just a buggy unfinished mess, but at least the fps combat worked mostly. I suppose they had three games to perfect it.
