@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:
@thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:
I called Andromeda playable, yeah, it just wasn’t very good storytelling. I even enjoyed playing it when the head of the space station looked like a two dollar whore, before the patches, and I still think the story was better than FO4 or Skyrim.
Okay, I'll bite.
Why wasn't it "very good storytelling"? What QUALIFIES as "very good storytelling"? What are you comparing it to?
As a boilerplate, I am notoriously easy to disappoint, whether I read too much into things or just have high standards.
What I want from a story is something done well. Take Star Wars, the original. It was little more but the standard Hero’s Journey, but it was done with passion and consistency and brought a sense of epicness to the table.
With video games I look for what the game seems to be promising and I judge whether or not it delivers. In the case of ME:A, it promised the exploration of something completely new in a vast and, at first, lonely place.
What we got was none of that. The stakes were taken from “fight to establish a foothold” down to “never mind, you’re just talking to people and solving their problems again”.
I was excited to find my character nearly falling to their death. I was even willing to ignore the magic and waving at ancient technology and glowing data streams, an effect that I believe was used exactly once more in the entire game even in the exact same situation, like the cutscene people and the game design people were rushed and didn’t have time to be consistent or tie the pieces together or something.
I was excited to find a Nexus barely functioning, but then it turns into a standard hub. Unlike ME1 and 2 and certainly 3, there was no sense that my character was involved in making things better. I felt like the car mechanic who brought a spare battery.
Ryder was more involved than Hawke, but like DA2 it was more smaller stories with only some impact, almost no stakes.
As an introduction to the world it was fine, but as a prequel, not as a stand alone story.
We all know why this happened, it was just bland, it was fine, it was okay. It was not tight. It was not impactful. And it was not consistent.