Saren was such a fantastic villain. I originally played the Mass Effect games out of order, so I already knew what was supposed to happen with him when I played ME1, and yet I found myself trying to convince him to shake off the indoctrination anyway. It just felt so compelling to believe that he might be redeemable, or at least that I as Shepherd would want that for him. Sovereign and Harbinger were also fantastic villains in their own right.
And then the heroes, oh my god the heroes. It’s tragic that the BioWare that could write Liara, Wrex, Mordin, and Tali is dead.
The Mako sections in ME1 weren’t really “open world”, they were just bigger hallways in many cases. IMO none of the core Mass Effect games was particularly open world, since they were based on missions. They were all more of a “hub and spoke” design, where you travelled from one hub to another and then those hubs would have local missions you could go on.
At the end of the day, all of the ME games have pretty environments, but the pretty environments aren’t the thing that keeps me coming back to the series over a decade after its launch, the writing is.
How exactly is a game with by your own admission weak character and story writing a return to form? BioWare’s killer advantage for a long time was their excellent character and story development.
Shadowheart felt like a huge liability right up until I unlocked spirit guardians. Then suddenly she becomes a beast. Before that I was just bringing her along to cast Aid and then healbot for the whole day.
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
Black Friday mobs are a thing every year. A huge chunk of the US is living below the poverty line and is willing to supplement their economic situation with insane fanaticism
I think it does what it sets out to do really well. The only thing I view as a shortcoming is that it left me with very little desire to replay it, though I’ve heard that there are lots of different branching story options at different points, mostly based on if your character chooses not to do something that the game implies you’re supposed to do.
It’s not a “fun” game, but it’s engaging and short enough that I think anyone could get through it without getting bored, and I think the metacommentary that you experience from playing it is worth it.
Duskers is fun but I feel like it would put it over the top of it was even more scriptable, like Screeps or Bitburner. Whenever I played it I always imagined I might be able to get to a point where I could write code to play the game for me, but I don’t think that was really the design goal of it.