#vg: neverwinter

[zesstra-dnd]

Another thing neverwinter does get right, wing mounts

[rivensbane]

neverwinter gifs ➵ [1/?]

[arcanistvysoren]

why andromeda did not feel like a Mass Effect game to me

So I finished ME:A, and around me I see people enjoying the hell out of it. And I hate to be a downer, but I am also bursting at the seams with opinions, so I feel compelled to share my thoughts and be a voice of dissent, because my own experience with the game has been generally underwhelming and disagreeable.

The fact is: I was really looking forward to Andromeda. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt and looking forward to the change in status quo. The problem is: they didn’t sell me the galaxy.

ME:A feels like the illustration to the “look at it, it’s got anxiety” meme. Because, “you fucked up a perfectly good galaxy is what you did.” The only reason we’re in Andromeda is because they’ve made terrible writing choices that have been rehashed a million times by now, but I guess it’s time to bring it up again: the three color-coded endings. That split the galaxy into three alternate futures, so you can’t feasibly continue your franchise here, unless you admit to the fuck-up and say, this ending is actually the only canon one, and we’ll continue on with it. And they didn’t do it. They stuck by their color-coded endings, and instead transposed the entire narrative not only 600 years into the future, but also into a different galaxy altogether, effective cutting themselves off from Milky Way.

Except. They also cut themselves off from 90% of their own lore.

The Milky Way galaxy had a rich history spanning for centuries. We’ve spent years setting it up, curing the genophage, and helping the quarians settle on Rannoch, and both these all-encompassing problems that concerned entire species were introduced as barely anything back in ME1 where it was just part of their cultural background, nothing to be done about it. And by ME3 it was a cathartic resolution for two races. It was poignant. It mattered.

And I wanna see them settle Rannoch with the geth. I wanna see the krogan flourish on Tuchanka. I wanna finally visit Palaven and walk on Thessia when it’s not in ruins. I miss places we’ve visited. I miss the elitist corruption of Illium that pretends it’s classy, and I miss the unabashed, unashamed depravity of Omega that doesn’t pretend it’s anything it’s not. I wanna see more. I miss knowing all the clusters, and opening the galaxy map, and you have a new mission, and that moment of recognition, of “Oh, it’s Argos Rho, I recovered Wrex’s armor there in ME1, and now I’m fighting a geth dreadnought in ME3.”

The Milky Way galaxy had an impossibly intricate history that is important to me. The symbiotic relationship between the hanar and the drell, and the symbiotic relationship between the volus and the turians, and how it affects them culturally, and politically, and financially. There were volus tycoons, and salarians and their STG and how many secret missions they undertook, and asari justicars, and asari monasteries, and asari matriarchs, and all of the turian legions, and all of the Spectres and their shadow assignments, and the human colonies, and the battles between the Citadel space and the Terminus systems. There was a plethora of cultural lore to expand upon.

And it’s gone. It’s buried. Because the devs are never going back to the Milky Way, and they took all of that amazing lore, and just tossed it aside, and for what? The Andromeda is empty. The angara have virtually no history: most of it has been lost to the war with the kett, and they have been recently biologically engineered, so there is barely any history there to begin with. There is no political weight there, no historical weight, it’s just barren. All the races, all the species exist as blankslates. There’s no more turian military, no more krogan wasteland, no more salarian espionage, no more volus financiers, no more asari dominating over other races by sheer political power and their centuries-spanning age. And that was the part that mattered to me, personally. That was the part that made it a Mass Effect universe, and just plucking all the races and transporting them into another galaxy doesn’t cut it, because it’s not a Mass Effect game to me anymore. It may be the same species, but it’s a world state that I, personally, don’t care about. And I’m not telling anyone else not to care, heavens forbid. But I feel robbed of the world that was rich and good. And there is a fair amount of stuff in the game I might have cared about, but against this empty backdrop that doesn’t tie in any way into the history I loved I find myself completely disinterested and unengaged. And, idk, maybe somebody out there feels the same.

[zesstra-dnd]

Another thing neverwinter does get right, wing mounts

[rivensbane]

neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [10/?]           castle jhareg guardian elemental

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neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [2/?]           “open lock: success!”

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neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [4/?]           temple of tyr

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neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [7/?]

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neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [8/?]         spymaster aarin gend

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neverwinter nights gifs ➟ [5/?]