Raga wrote:Someone With Mass wrote:
Not to mention that it kills any sense of urgency when you can just put the story aside no matter what it's about to do in order to tackle some simple side missions or go exploring for several hours. Fallout 4 taught me that one.
I think the logic here is that Bethesda's are kinda *the* "do whatever the hell you want in a big map" games and they know that. I think their logic would be "if you want the narrative to have urgency, then focus on the narrative. Everything levels with you so you don't have to grind and you can play after credits so all those side missions will still be there. If you want to piddlefart around then do so." And I don't really want them to put me on rails just to have narrative urgency. Narrative is nice and all, but unlike with Bioware that's really not the major reason I'm playing Bethesda games.
I think it happens more when the narrative isn't able to keep me interested or willing enough to follow it. Most of the time, it was "Oh, that mission is at the other side of the Commonwealth, but my mission to kill Harry McDoucheFace is just around the corner. I'll do that instead." and then I sort of forget about the main story because of other distractions and after a few hours of random encounters with Deathclaws, raiders and whatever, I've had my fill.
The problem is that Andromeda tries to do something similar and the story suffers from it. I can't for the life of me tell you what happened in the story in a way that isn't convoluted, because the memory of it is mixed in with the dozens upon dozens of side missions.
Meanwhile, I can pretty much recollect all the dialogues of Mass Effect 2's main missions in high detail because they had a straight path and didn't bombard me with side missions that didn't contribute to the main mission in any way every time I returned to the Normandy.
