The key to the future of Mass Effect is in its past.
Item 4: Secondary Planets Are Boring and Samey
BioWare’s solution: remove nearly every side planet from the game.
Here’s a perfect example of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The first Mass Effect had a bevy of extra planets to explore for side missions and to find opportunities to level up and find cool little secrets (did you ever find that prothean pyramid that transports Shepard’s mind into the past where he/she experiences an entire lifetime like a classic episode of Star Trek: TNG?). Problem was, the planets were largely lifeless, and the structures seemed like copy and paste design run amok.
This is one of the few visually interesting worlds.
So instead of working to make these secondary locations look and feel as fleshed out and important as the main story environments, BioWare replaced them with a boring (yet oddly soothing) planet probing mini game. While it is true that some of these planets do indeed feature locations that you can travel to, they are on a much smaller scale than the first game.
My solution: Just…just make the planets more interesting, dig?
This was one of the most head scratching decisions to me. No one was asking for there to be less to do in Mass Effect, they just wanted it to be more interesting. Here’s where I’d love for the team at BioWare to totally swipe a page from No Man’s Sky.
No, wait, come back!
The algorithm used in that game is undeniably impressive, but clearly has its faults, especially when it comes to populating each world. So instead of having eighty billion planets to explore, let’s come up with twenty, but make each one feel fleshed out and lived in. Coming up with alien lifeforms would go a large way towards making these planets more interesting. If memory serves, there are only a couple planets in the first game that have anything resembling animals on them, and if Andromeda is really supposed to be about exploring a new system I would hope that we have plenty of critters to find and catalogue.
No Man's Sky has some good ideas to exploit.
Of course, it would be nice to have some of these planets have well defined settlements. Sure, we’re going outside of known citadel space in this next game, but that shouldn’t suggest that there wouldn’t already be other lifeforms living and thriving on some of these worlds. Let’s just make sure that these settlements look original and unique. While I can totally get behind the argument that all the structures in the first Mass Effect look the same because they are all pre-fabricated buildings, as a game player I want more interesting things to explore.
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