The one thing I did really like about Andromeda was the environment art.
EA's "let's use Frostbite for everything" idea was terrible, though. The original ME trilogy were built on Unreal Engine 3, if memory serves. They should have stuck with Unreal instead of trying to shoehorn single-player RPGs into Frostbite. A team having pre-existing experience with an engine is a big deal in game production. Apparently, ME4 is going to be built on UE5, so that's good to hear.
UE5 has a lot of features that make it incredibly attractive for game developers. Nanite means you can throw in unoptimized models without having to author LODs by hand and the engine will just automatically tessellate them so that they draw no more than one poly per pixel, and Lumen gives you real-time global illumination out of the box, so there's no need to bake lighting into a level.
One of the hardest parts of making a game is coming up with all the art, and UE5 has massive asset libraries and photogrammetry materials that speed all that along. There are only so many kinds of dirt, gravel, rock, grass, et cetera, and game developers shouldn't have to remake all-new assets every single time.
People loved the art in Crysis 3, but very few people realize that it was a result of like, 800 people at Crytek sleeping under their desks with insane crunch shortly before the company nearly went bankrupt. Devs shouldn't need to do that.
Right, the confrontation with Wrex on Virmire was a great moment. Added meaning to your interactions through the later games, too.
One really underwhelming aspect of Andromeda for me was the squad member characters, certainly. The fun, interesting, and emotionally engaging cast of characters you bring along on your adventures is always a big part of what I enjoy about Bioware RPGs. I mean, what other major Western developer still does that, really? It's rather unique. So it's a major blow for Andromeda's cast to be so lackluster and uninteresting. And part of that probably is, as you said, from a lack of any real interpersonal conflict and tension with the player character or each other.
The characters in the first trilogy felt like actual people. The characters in Andromeda don't feel like people. They feel like museum kiosks. You walk up to them, press the red button on top of their heads, and receive perfunctory and boring expository monologues about their backstories. Liam was about halfway through blabbering all about his lovely little gasoline-fueled antique car he had shipped all the way from the Milky Way for nothing more than sentimental value before I let out a deep, agonized belly-groan.
I wouldn't put the character writing all on Drew Karpyshyn, though. He was really only the lead writer for ME1; he's credited for ME2, but he really just contributed the basic outline before leaving to work on "Star Wars: The Old Republic". I think Mac Walters deserves some credit for the strengths of ME2 and ME3's story and characters (as well as the ample amount of flaws in the writing). There's also the rest of the writing team, guys like Chris L'Etoile, Patrick Weekes, and John Dunbrow.
Absolutely, and I think this is the essential lesson, here. An RPG is only as good as its writing team. It doesn't matter what it looks like. It can have Dwarf Fortress-like ASCII art for graphics, but there is no excuse to skimp on writing.
