"Weeding out" individual sorts of fans from BSN would most likely involve heavy handed moderation of the posts and deleting any post in which they didn't like what was said.  Since they are obviously not doing that here, on what do you base this accusation that they are actively trying to weed out whatever specific group you're representing by using the term "us"?... Is it that they are not writing the game to specifically cater to that one group's very exacting tastes?.  Does not customizing anything to your specific desires mean that they are arbitrarily trying to weed you out?  Don't think so.
 
I'd say they are just ignoring BSN... and they have lots of justification for doing so.  Employee's driven into therapy by hostile fan reactions is no trivial matter.  It's BSN "fans" who ultimately "nuked" BSN.  The "fans" must "own" the blame for that.

Cannot like this post enough.

It'd be great if they announced backwards compatibility for N7 day as of N7 day. Greater if the announcement and compatibility came sooner though. I completely understand why Bioware is so tight lipped about info on the new game, given how far their forum has fallen (read: invaded by falsely entitled whiny assed idiots that only post to ****** about games that most people that play them greatly enjoy). Still I'd love to play through the new games on the current console hardware.

Besides, with how much fun the multi-player is, releasing the sequels on the current hardware would be an excellent and probably contagious primer for the next installment until it's released.

Meaningful and robust weapons modifications would be my hope. Not so much an upgrade system as a customization system. I want my shitty assed rifle to feel like MY shitty assed rifle.

For those advocating a barter system, happy planet scanning. Credits for me, though.

Telltale or Rockstar. It's my hypothesis that Rockstar is building up to making a true blue wRPG, and probably sooner rather than later. A sci fi setting doesn't quite fit their MO, but neither did a western and look how that turned out.

How long is asari childhood? Do they mature at the we same pace as say a human then slow the aging process at physical adulthood? If not then pubescence could be decades long prospect. If that is so, then that could go a long way to explain why. A decade of terrible twos? 30 years of teenaged angst? No thanks. Not in my house.

I don't know if a reboot is necessary. It was a big galaxy before the reaper threat emerged. Lots of room to tell stories in that setting already. And maybe stories of a different sort than another party based RPG, perhaps. Imagine a shooter concerning the Turian black ops. A stealth action game involving the STG. An adventure who dun it set on Omega.

Love'me or hate'me, the endings aren't the end. Even if it weren't for all the new directions Andromeda is opening up for the franchise, there was already lots of places to use for additional content.

So the question is Mass Effect or Dragon Age? My answer is the same as to whether I like blondes or brunettes.

Yes.

I'll admit I wasn't blown away by the novels and comics we have gotten so far, but I think there's still tremendous potential for material in both of those mediums in the hands of the right creators. Whoever it is acquires writing talent for Halo's novels and comics, EA should try getting them to do it for Mass Effect.

I'd like to have more nuanced controls for dialogue. Currently it's move joystick to chosen dialogue option and press enter. I'd like to change that to first moving the joystick to your chosen dialogue then pressing one of three buttons. Each button conveys a tone for how the chosen dialogue would be delivered. So now when I say "no" I'm not also locked into (but I can if I want) saying "go **** yourself." Or if I say "yes" I'm not also declaring my everlasting love and absolute devotion across this and all other planes of existence.

Subtle change to the interface. HUGE change to the game with enormous amounts of resource commitment to pull off well, but I think it could be very entertaining and if it every happened.

Cost me $60 and tax. Haven't ordered the season pass. More so because of Destiny than the Division. The game is pretty good so far, but I won't get behind another "always on" shooter without giving it plenty of time. If it looks like it'll be worth it, I'll get the pass. Not before though.

**** Destiny.

Borderlands 2's season pass is still the gold standard for such an offering in my book because of the enormous amount of content it included at a fair price. I feel that had the content from the ME sequels been packaged in season passes, I would have had a similar opinion. The problem with that is a situation like Destiny. A season pass so skimpy, you're expected to purchase even more content to finally have the whole game.

Seeing as Borderlands appears to be the exception and not the rule, I'd rather not risk a season pass situation with ME. Obviously not a call I or any of us will have a hand in making, but I think once the to cost for the game gets over $100, the DLC plan, however it's structured, gets a little dicey for both devs and consumers.

I try to keep any foreboding, uninformed, myopic, or otherwise unduly entitled expectations for a product I've absolutely no contribution to making to myself. Mainly due to my own revulsion when I read it, but also because there is an overabundance of entitled ingratitude all over this forum already.

That said, I'm really hoping for robust and exhaustive planetary exploration this time around. It was traded off for a far more rewarding combat experience in the sequels, and I'll make no argument about that being a wise trade, but I'll admit it was the planetary exploration in the first game that really set the hook for me with Mass Effect. The first time I touched down on a new world was a definitely a "Holy ****, I'm Captain ****ing Kirk" moment for me.

I'm using the word hope because the more accurate descriptor for my feeling, expect, is a level of entitlement, I'm not at all comfortable with using. The only thing I can reasonably expect is for the devs to do their best to make the game that they want to make be the best game that they can make. I've enjoyed the results so far so I'm very hopeful that trend continues.

However. The setting does lend itself to the experience of exploration. A lone vessel of the best and brightest remaining of a burning Milky Way on a one way trip to an entirely alien galaxy with the hopes of galactic civilization resting on their shoulders. Unless they are leaving the frying pan and inadvertently jumping into the fire, they should be very interested in getting the lay of the land so to speak.

Still, if exploration doesn't play a significant role, well if the rest of the game is great, like ME2 & ME3, my disappointment at its absence won't keep me from enjoying it.

DAI is ME1 with more resources for the developers to work with. So if you liked ME1 you should like DAI at least as much. Try a parallel playthrough to see what I mean. Play an hour of ME1 then and hour of DAI.

The hate DAI gets is almost entirely unwarranted, if you are fond of ME1.

Mass Effect 1,2, & 3 along with ALL of their respective DLC playable on next gen consoles being included with a season pass of ALL the DLC that will be released for MEA.


And DAT ass.

Why would anyone who is a fan care if someone who was even tangentially associated with the craptastic ME3 endings left?
More's the better.
Still got one big one to go, however...
Ask yourself that if you were in the industry, and you went to a gathering of peers and everyone was casually comparing notes and exchanging rumors, if there is any banter about "how good the writing, direction and content of ME3 is, and especially it's endings."
EA stock tanked by fully a third to the tune of a billion plus in market cap following the ME3 endings fiasco.
I'm surprised, and it bodes ill for Andromeda, that anyone who was associated remains.
Edit (sp)

All of that is bullocks. You just throw **** up on the wall and see if any of it sticks, huh? A billion dollars? Do you even math?

Ah, but that's where you're wrong Killroy. We haven't even got to the punchline of this joke yet. When this game comes out and is mediocre at best, when the butthurt starts to flow, Cinco will be laughing.
 
And while Cinco is laughing, EA will be laughing as well watching those duckets roll in from all the knobs who bought their latest dreck. And that's the biggest joke of all.

So let me get this straight. You're purpose here is wait around, for months, to observe disappointment? Wouldn't talking to your parents or lover be a more direct means of observation?

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I'm sooo disappointed if Bio implements this crap mechanic.  Dropping an armoured vehicle with no flying capability from space and it doesn't go Splat! once it hits firma terra? Its aerodynamics is like a  bloody brick. No sci-fi writer that I ever read and I read 3,000 + books ever... ever wrote nonsense like this.

 

Give me a break Bio... talk about lazy and quick fix game design.   All that awesomeness Bio is talking about is starting to be like DA:I marketing spin.

 

Bah.. and that's how I feel.

No splat:

 

http://youtu.be/ORp9eJEoMpQ

They should have done that already, because if there's no lead as of now, I think the game might be in trouble.

I doubt that they are without leadership. More like they are declining to offer information. A theme, it appears, that is likely to include MEA , if not all Bioware projects going forward. We probably won't hear anything about this game until it's done. That might be a good decision. It certainly worked for Bethesda with Fallout 4.

Probably not, but what I consider an arsepull is in many ways a lot more liberal than most. I think most stories, in lieu of 100% dedicated concrete facts, are more concerned with connecting with the audience than they are with establishing or maintaining their rule set. In general, I place quite a bit of ME's writing in this category, the whole trilogy included. 
 
In Bioware's case, aside from the benefit of leaving the endings behind, they might like the idea of Andromeda because it could let them maintain their favorite elements of the ME universe while connecting it to a new technology and races, which Mass Effect couldn't really do otherwise. And I suspect more than a few people are curious to see how this pans out. 
 
That kind of revamp could turn out great, like Bryan Fuller's Hannibal or turn out sloppy, like Heroes Reborn.

Before the reveal about the story taking place in Andromeda, I'd a notion that the rest of the Milky way was going to be explored. Another thing the relays did, or rather the reliance on the relay network did, was essentially shut off any attempt to explore the rest of the galaxy. Although the network spanned the breadth of the galaxy, only a very small portion of the star systems could possibly be accessed.

Think of the network in the same way as all the different flight paths on earth. Sure they all pretty much cover the planet. But in using that network of flight paths, we fly over the vast majority of it. So if we apply that understanding to the relay network, it means we've missed out on exploring the majority of the Milky way.

I've wondered if perhaps there is, or are, other relay networks in our own galaxy. Networks that never intersect with ours or others, that are inaccessable by any other means than the network itself or millions of years of sustained ftl travel. That could mean that the reaper threat us very much still ongoing, only for a parallel galactic civilization that we have no clue about and they us.

Not the direction they chose to go, but it might have been interesting to explore more of our own galaxy only to stumble across a revelation like that.

Here is a lore consideration. Why do the mass relays exist? They exist to make the cycles more efficient by channelling organics down a particular avenue of technology. The reason is that in the early cycles the catalyst learned that organics could be unpredictable in terms of what they could think of technologically. While the relays are intended to funnel organics down technology based on the "mass effect" it isn't space magic or hand waving to have the travel to Andromeda be none mass effect related. Wormholes are a real life theory today it isn't all that unreasonable to think that some researcher figures out how to use them 200 years into the future.

Since the trilogy already stated that mass effect technology is not a "natural" progression of technological development it isn't crazy pull stuff out of their ass to have the technology that gets us to Andromeda be something entirely new. We are told organics will develop technologically in unpredictable ways. Is it so far out of the realm of possibility that one of those example of unpredictability happen in Shepard's cycle?

I'm inclined to agree with this. A combination of "old"(mass effect), emerging (quantum entanglement), and new (worm hole creation) technologies will likely be how the trip to Andromeda will get explained.

I see much in these posts that amount making assumptions about our genera and it's rather limited experience. Then much extrapolation of these assumptions. Probably why most of our sci-fi ends up with aliens that look, talk and think like us.

Conversely, and interestingly, T. Metzger, author, writes much about sentience, intelligence and consciousnesss in his books.

Another author, this time in fiction, P. Watts, bases an alien on Metzinger's concepts in "Blindsight". The Scrambler, as he calls it. Mind-blowingly alien.

And not an opposable thumb or brain stem in sight.

I hope MEA explores some of these concepts.

 

I read the synopsis and a few reviews. The book sounds rather interesting, though the inclusion of a vampire seems somewhat out of sorts. Still, I think I'll pick it up. 

The waiting would be easier if we had backwards compatibility for the rest of the trilogy already. 

My point stands. To put so much stock into opposable thumbs seems a bit silly to me. It is debatable which species is more intelligent between elephants and Cetacea. Octopi have a completely different kind of intelligence than either of those two (and ourselves). Also civilization =/= intelligence; it is not a correlation coefficient. As far as how important civilization making species is to making a story about technology, space and social dynamics is a matter of debate. I am hoping for big things from BW on the front of different species/environment/group dynamics/social hierarchy. I would like to have playing ME:A kinda like playing a game that has some elements of what its like watching a nature show.

I actually meant our hands, not just the thumbs. Thumbs are not all they are cracked up to be, we agree on that. Koalas have four of them. It's how we use those thumbs, along with our other attributes that makes us what we are. But tentacles would be far more useful than hands if they were practical out of the water.

As far as intellectual performance between an elephant and an octopus, you're right, it is apples to oranges. Give the them both the same problem to solve, the octopus will do it faster, but the elephant can teach its family to solve it.

So far as why civilization is so fundamental to the discussion we are having, at the risk of putting to fine a point on it, this story takes place in space. If we encounter a species that for all intents and purposes is on the same societal level as the elephants, then they are for all intents and purposes likely to be categorized as elephants are: as animals. Not a whole lot of narrative pressure there. Best to move on to something more pressing.

If I were to say Elcor=Elephants what would you say? Elephants have ginormous brains that are also quite complex in structure. They also have characteristics of being gentle, caring, compassionate, helpful, good problem solvers, use of tools, highly communal, social, live in groups, have developed emotions, can know it is themselves when they look into a mirror and can paint realistic works of art. This is a species that lives on earth, has high intelligence and has a body structure that looks nothing like ourselves - and people love them. I see no reason why the writers can't incorporate species' of sentient creatures that look nothing like us and have a very different form of intelligence like, say, an octopus.

Elephantidae is an excellent example of my point. They are obviously intelligent. Their family has existed far longer than our own. And they have a dexterous (read crafting capable) appendage. Yet no civilization. I think it's because they are quadopeds, that they have just the one crafting appendage (we, mostly have two), and most importantly, that they are herbivores. The consumption of meat provides for a far faster metabolism. That faster metabolism allows for far greater mental processing speed, if not capacity. So elephants can understand many things, but are not nearly as quick whitted as say a dolphin or an octopus.