It is probably too early for me to review Mass Effect Andromeda. There is quite a bit of story I have yet to encounter, nor have I drilled that deeply into some of the less obvious mechanics. However, I've landed on half the available worlds already and done the big plot thing on most of those so...
I can't help but be thinking of protagonist effect. Especially in games, there's a terrible tendency for nothing to get done unless the player avatar does it. This doesn't always mean they are recognized as The Chosen One in-story; in several of the Medal of Honor types the player avatar is at best a buck private -- what happens instead in these is that anytime a sniper needs to be taken out or a door opened all the sergeants can think of is demand that he be the one to do it.
(In other places this is a gameplay/story segregation fail. For instance, the player avatar might be just one of a squad trying to move through an area. The thing of it is, they win through -- or don't -- the moment the player avatar hits the invisible checkpoint. In many, many other cases, the story may treat the player avatar as being just one of many, but in actual play they might have done most of the fighting while the AI friendlies were still milling around.)
The original Mass Effect trilogy didn't do too badly at making the centrality of Shepard organic to the plot. First, the Commander starts as an "N7"; a top 99th percentile soldier. Then the Commander is hand-selected for elite Spectre status (a reports-only-to-the-Council special agent) and due to various events political and otherwise achieves it. So Shepard believably has both the prowess and the freedom to go to places with a problem and solve it for them. (Presuming, of course, that said problem can be solved by emptying magazines in its direction. Fortunately, the game largely delivers same.)
Later events up the Chosen One status; first Shepard stumbles across a broken Beacon left by the extinct Prothean precursor race, meaning he had first-hand knowledge about the World Threatening Problem. His success in trying to stop this threat are visible enough (eventually) that various people continue to give him the freedom to go about it his own way. Even the ending is a recap of the start; due to his abilities his squad is in the vanguard, and thus when someone breaks through to the final McGuffin it isn't that much of a stretch that it's Shepard again.
Mass Effect Andromeda is somewhat less elegant about this. In the game, another former N7 -- who also has a unique link with an extremely helpful AI -- has more-or-less created the idea of The Pathfinder, a single individual who leads the way for the colonization effort, doing the primary exploring and making many of the tough choices about when and where to attempt a settlement. Helps that he was a key organizer of the whole "colonize the Andromeda Galaxy" plan. Means he could credibly write his own job description, and largely sell people on it.
Unfortunately he dies on his first mission. Perhaps because there is no time to make a different choice, he invests that trust in one of his children, along with the special link to the AI that gives him some of his abilities.
The somewhat less believable part of this is that essentially all of the Andromeda Initiative survivors appear so shell-shocked by a series of terrible setbacks they've become unable to make decisions. Well, to be fair, the people who could make decisions did...they chose to leave (becoming yet another faction you meet later in the game). They pin all their hopes on The Pathfinder when he finally shows up -- and then, although rather less enthusiastically -- on his hand-chosen successor when he dies.
Sure, Sarah/Jack has a lot of training, and has the special set of AI codes, but even he or she is quite forthright about this being a ridiculous amount of responsibility. Still, this awkwardness is overcome by the game, both with the very probationary way they are treated early on, and their own professed worries, and, eventually, enough things that go right to win them a slow and grudging increase in confidence. It is still ridiculous just how many things The Pathfinder turns out to be responsible for.
The place where the game really falls down is with the Angarans. Long story short, they also had a cavalcade of disaster. First The Scourge, a Negative Space Wedgie that turns all the planets in easy reach down to only marginally habitable. Then the Kett arrive, slaughtering and enslaving. The first thing Ryder does is -- thanks again to the Magical AI -- start turning back on the forerunner magitech atmosphere machine-thingies that start reversing the effects of The Scourge. This is something the Angarans had been trying to do, but despite studying the stuff for hundreds of years they never made much headway in figuring out how it worked. Apparently they never had Sudoku on their planet.
(There's a gamification aspect to this. Most of what Ryder does is wave an Omni-Tool at the stuff, which is presented as letting the magitech AI do its thing. But a key part to turning on the towers is through the player playing a mini-game of Complete the Rows.)
If that wasn't bad enough, to earn the trust of the Angarans Ryder agrees to help fight the Kett. And single-handedly takes out a key fortress the Angarans had been throwing themselves against since the Kett arrived. Okay, sure; they got a rare chance at it because a code was intercepted, but how is it Ryder is in strike distance and no-one else?
In the television show Stargate Atlantis the protagonists go around doing things and shaking things up but this works for several reasons. For one, they are outsiders. That doesn't, however, give them a gift of insight to help solve other people's intractable problems. What it does, is make the Milky Way people dangerously naive. Most of the peoples they have run into have found ways to survive the Wraith incursions. Within days, however, the Atlantis crew shot the wrong Wraith and permanently upset the status quo. Now all the old ways of coping are failing.
More importantly for this comparison (the Pegasus Galaxy situation is unique) is that the Atlantis crew have...Atlantis. As in, the most advanced tech around. And this gets mercilessly pointed out by most of the people they meet. The Atlantis crew wins in places where no-one else could -- and at the end of it, the people they helped go, "Hey, if we had those cool toys we would have done it ourselves. And done it a lot better, too."
I find I can suspend a certain amount of disbelief for a the right kind one-man army. People do have a wide variety of skills and genetic aptitudes, after all. Bruce Lee's hands really were that fast. Especially in a less realistic game I haven't a huge problem going along with the player avatar being just that much better than anyone else. It does help, though, if there's an in-game reason. Otherwise you start feeling like the Only Sane Man. I had that experience in later play throughs of Tomb Raider 2013. "She's just one girl!" shout the Solarii as you mow them down. Yeah. One girl that can hit the side of a barn...unlike you lot.
This is pretty much where I was with Ryder. Her stated background in-game isn't super-soldier. She's defended an archaeological camp against pirates and slavers, she says at one point. And went hunting with her dad, I think. And okay, there's the AI boost that for various reasons only she and dad got. But past that, she's using the same weapons the Kett are using and she and her two friends are typically mopping the floor with squad to platoon strength adversaries. For all intents and purposes, it really is a world of cardboard for her. It makes you, through your avatar, feel less like you are skilled or lucky, and more like the rest of the world is incompetent.
(This is not something you could help by setting the game on "hard" mode. You'll still have to overcome the same ridiculous numbers. You'll just fail at it more often and spend more time in loading screens.)
I'm left on the fence whether it is worse to have a hero of clearly ordinary skill who wins despite the outrageous odds against it, or a hero who is so clearly superior it is hard to feel for them. Between, that is, the ludicrously lucky schmo or the unlikeable Superman. I've been reading a lot of Greek myth and particularly the Homeric "heroes" are rather notable in that theirs is a heroism of doing, not of trying. They are almost inevitably part god, and given godly gifts, and sometimes infused with even more power. Theirs is not a struggle, but a demonstration of superiority. I find this difficult to laud.
Still, one has to remember that the bulk of The Odyssey is about a man who struggles to overcome hardship. It reminds one that one of the great Spider-Man moments was not when he beat up Galactus or something, but a moment he was nearly crushed under a great weight...and refused to give in, taking an entire page to finally struggle free.
But back to the problem. Besides the way Ryder plows through opposition, and the way the alien tech proves so easy to manipulate, the number of steps and the overall effort is so very very little. This is a problem of gamification, of course. But it is also one of trying to make a game with a hundred-plus hours of play around too little plot to support it.
You can finish the Mass Effect trilogy in as little as forty hours, if you don't mind losing most of the galaxy on the way to your pyrrhic conclusion. But this is made up of one overall story arc, split into three distinct acts, each of which falls into four to six major episodes each. Mass Effect Andromeda doesn't give the same sense of overarching story and theme. It just feels like a bunch of fetch quests. If you do three similar ones, then suddenly there's a great victory and an entire alien race is calling you a hero from the stars.
You can pretty much sleep-walk through a couple of easy fights, drive or walk blindly from one pop-up quest marker to another, make no decision tougher than whether to answer a question in a manner that's funny and warm or professional but quirky, and come back to the Nexus to hear people singing the praises of the new Pathfinder who can do what they couldn't do over a decade of work.
There's even quests on the Nexus where you slide by on either the ridiculous latitude you get as Pathfinder or the magic AI. In the latter, there's a saboteur you catch because no-one else has the crypto-key to everything and a magic scanner to boot. In the former, you get to judge a murder case because you just arrived and are presumed impartial and because you are (deep breath) Dah Pathfinder no-one is going to question it.
(The Nexus is the big space station that's in-world supposed to be the meeting place and support facility for the colonization effort, and in-game functions as a hub that you actually don't need as ninety percent of the game functionality is available on your ship. And even then, I have yet to bother climbing around the ship to use the crafting stations. I just grab one at whatever alien I'm visiting at the moment. They all work the same.)
Now, this could be made workable. The big flaw is not that desperate confused and scared people -- who just got their asses kicked in what was essentially a civil war as everyone with a strong opinion went and left in a huff -- would turn to a newcomer who still has idealism, who comes in with fresh supplies and new hope, and has been vested with a reputation of being able to accomplish the impossible (a borrowed vest, but still). It is the way it is carried out in game.
The stories are awful, the underlying mechanics far too obvious ("A quest giver will appear and ask you to go to a point on the map and return. Bad guys will attack at least once.") It makes the rest of the Andromeda Initiative look stupid. But worse, it makes the local inhabitants -- indigenes that the Initiative really should have predicted when they planned this massive colonialist effort -- look worse.
You can make your Ryder any color you like (in an interesting mechanic, your choices for the kid reflect back to parent as well as sibling). The point is not that (the default) Sarah is white, or even that she's human. It is that she as the protagonist is functionally the same as the white dude in those unfortunate movies and books where apparently the natives had never figured out irrigation, or making peace with their enemies, or how to play basketball until the hero came along.
(Image from a Polygon article, showing how natural dad Alec can look even when taken far from the default appearance).
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