Ha, yes I guess you could say it has. (Although I didn't have a problem with ME3 the first time I played.) Can't wait to see what Andromeda has in store!

You made me go look up "Sarah Ryder Lego" and I was not disappointed. Here's a whole page of some German guy making custom-printed Lego minifigs based on the Mass Effect series.

Yeah, the game with its various systems, menus etc. is so enormous and complicated that they probably literally didn't have enough QA staff to test it all thoroughly in the available time. A longer wait would have been OK with me.

OK thanks, I hadn't figured that out yet. I am a bit overwhelmed by the menu system and haven't taken the trouble to figure that out… nor has it popped up in a tutorial, to my knowledge.

Among other things, Andromeda is a privately funded mission, nothing to do with the galactic government, so I think that explains a fair number of your points (including some of the incompetence).

Giggling over the idea of "Jon & Kate Plus 8 in Space". Whoever did the laugh-track edit of that clip of Ryder talking to Tann & Addison should get right on that.

In my opinion (about 8 hours into the story mission), the combat is great (jumpjet!!), and the story/character aspect has got plenty of potential once you start meeting people who weren't with you on the Hyperion. (Personally I have already got my eye on Peebee as a romance option, if she turns out to be interesting.)…

Agreed completely, Ryder seems really youthful and kind of incompetent. I hope she grows up along the way. I hope there is conflict with Cora, who was supposed to get this job. I hope a lot of things.

Oh yeah, my ManShep looked completely different from the default in that screenshot, but his smiles were always… gross? creepy? Maybe "greepy" is the best word?

Agreed, it would have been cool to see some kind of significant story reaction to the Prime Directive getting completely broken on first contact.

Hah, yeah, I mean, the first kett you encounter on Habitat 7 are actively kicking the shit out of your crewmate and start shooting even if you approach with guns away, so it makes sense in its way. But after that, it's like, we've established these guys are evil, so fire at will whenever you see them. Doesn't seem…

I went with Liara on my first run (FemShep), and she actually got more and more boring as the series went along. I now almost literally can't hear her voice without wanting to fall asleep and/or press X to strangle.

I don't know if Leviathan came out in response to that, but the one that specifically fixed the ending was called "Extended Cut" (with longer cutscenes after the big decision, mainly). As for Leviathan, you play it in the middle of the rest of the campaign so I don't really see how it could be considered a patch to…

Wish I could upvote you twice for each of these two sentiments. I got the hexagon + star stream on my Tali Ryder's right temple. It's her most unique feature (since she is otherwise pretty much the default character seen in various crappy animation videos).

Chum's Andromeda corner, part three… the bugs. I got a bit snippy the other day with an article here making fun of facial animation glitches in Andromeda, but… yeah, this game has more than its fair share of glitches. (Some possibly due to my underpowered computer, but it's pretty solid for a laptop, so I still have…

Chum's Andromeda corner, part 2: Combat.

I've had Mass Effect: Andromeda since the very first second the free trial became available, and I'm digging deeper into it now (I just finished the main Eos quest). It's finally feeling like a proper Mass Effect game— epic scale, silly side quests and all. It's different in some very interesting ways, too; if I had…

#sigh

You forgot your #humblebrag hashtag.

Great, I am going to have to acquire multiple new consoles in order to play the various games of the year. Maybe Mass Effect: Andromeda will turn out to be more awesome than expected and I will have had my chance to play a GOTY without buying hundreds of dollars of new hardware.