In terms of size and scope alone, ME:A is a gigantic leap forward when compared to their predecessor.
Few are arguing that, but "size and scope" don't make a good game, and I think we're well beyond the point of acknowledging that.
"This is our BIGGEST game ever!" we hear from some game's marketing team for the 100th time. "Just one zone is bigger than all our previous game's zones combined!"
"Look how big Far Cry's map is!" "Look how massive Just Cause 3 is!" "Look how vast the sky is in Skyward Sword!" "Isn't Skyrim just enormous?" "This Assassin's Creed is the largest yet!"
Dragon Age: Inquisition was truly the game that broke my "size and scale = good" bubble. You can have the biggest, most expansive, most staggeringly vast world map ever, and it doesn't do it a lick of good if the stuff within it is padded, unfulfilling fluff content.
It goes on forever... and yet I can't recall a single good quest that I did here.
It's one reason I kept retreating from "bigger" Zelda games with "larger" oceans and forests and fields and skies - which were vast but mostly empty and without engagement - and returned to the compact and focused worlds of prior Zelda titles (my copy of Breath of the Wild is in the mail...)
Look at all this nothing! Weeee!
I know it's the proverbial poster-child for everything good and perfect, but I do think of games like Dark Souls, where every element of the world is engaging and created with finesse and purpose. It's not the largest, but there's rarely a single moment in that game you're not actively engaged with navigating its treacherous terrain and fending off its lethal occupants.
Until I know for sure, I have my doubts that Andromeda's "huge scale" will come with "huge satisfaction" on top of it. DA:I was just such a colossal disappointment in having such a vast and gorgeous world hampered by almost nothing worth DOING in that vast and gorgeous world (yay, more shard collecting. My favorite...)
Big, open-world games are like playgrounds, and if there's nothing fun things to do there, it doesn't matter how big the game is if you're not having fun and the majority of your time is spent on fetch-quests, just getting to points of interest, or doing chores and inventory management.
I'm not just pulling that out of the blue either; Bioware has struggled with this even with the games I ultimately love. Replaying ME1 now and, well, driving the Mako across vast, empty planets and then hopping back into the menu every five minutes to turn ammo mods into omni-gel, or slowly scanning planets for minerals in ME2 just so my characters won't die in the end-game, or trekking all over the barren wastelands in Dragon Age: Inquisition to do such compelling tasks as "herd the goat back into its pen" and "fulfill the requisition request" while tripping over elfroot didn't make for the most compelling gameplay experience.
I hope Andromeda learned some valuable lessons from those games, because being "bigger in scale and scope" means nothing to me whatsoever.
