Finally had a few minutes to work my way through part of the podcast and my main takeaway right now is I REALLY wish one of the Allies would give Andromeda more of a chance, especially now that we are in more of a "dry" part of the year. It's one of the more fascinating (for both good and bad reasons) releases I can remember. I'm not debating the awfulness and how hilarious the GIFS were at release, but they in my opinion largely painted this game as an unmitigated dumpster fire. The animations were comically bad (been cleaned up a lot since release), but were so overblown if you actually sat down and played the game. They were basically an easy way to dunk on the game, especially with Zelda/Horizon and other much more polished games released near this time.
First off, I'm not advocating in any way that Andromeda is some sort of "secret" masterpiece, far from it! It's a "swimming in 7's" game that is wildly flawed that has dizzying highs and lows. But if you enjoyed the OG trilogy at all, I certainly would recommend this game without hesitation especially for the current price point and the amount of improvements (It's insane the launch day decisions they made and later omitted that were in this game) that in my opinion, make this a Mass Effect-ass Mass Effect game. In my opinion, it easily has the best combat of the series, a decent story and I think the characters were very strong as well (remember if you're comparing them to the OG trilogy characters, they had three games to develop).
If you have any interest in playing Andromeda now, you're getting a significantly cleaned up and better version than those that played it at release got. So many massively needed quality of life, graphical, bugs, and common sense improvements have been made to this game.
A major tip to anyone that does decide to play Andromeda:
-Basically SKIP everything in the "additional tasks" folder. This game is insane. They just vomit up these almost completely worthless tasks that do little if anything to the story or give any worthwhile rewards. This game like lacked an editor, everything got in. I think I beat this game with 99% completion and largely 60% of the game (the additional tasks folder) I'd say to skip without hesitation.
This was a bad thing about Andromeda, but with hindsight I think anyone playing it knowing this in advance would have a far better time. The loyalty quests and main story are decent, and without the easily avoidable filler, I think they'd be even better if you didn't slog through the shit to get to the "meat" of this gmae. Why they wanted to make an 80-90 hour Mass Effect game, I have no idea, but playing all the "important" parts of this game should only take 30-40ish hours, I'd guess.
ABOUT THE DLC STUFF FROM THE POD:
In my opinion, this was far worse than GTA's non-DLC awfulness. Not a spoiler, but at the end of Andromeda they practically bash you over the head with what the DLC will be. It's different knowing exactly what it was going to be rather than just a vague promise of "single player DLC coming."
I'd read a book about Andromeda. The amount of batshit insane decisions made at basically every level of this game is astounding. Just such a bummer that this all had to happen to what was my favorite series of games.
