Mass Effect 5: 10 Perfect Ways Bioware Can Save The Franchise

9. Lose The 'Dragon Age Inquisition In Space' Approach

Take my hand, Bioware, and say it with me: "I cannot make an open-world game".

Good, good.

We all know you tried, and we all see which parts of the competition you're trying to ape, but hundreds of fetch quests, completing basic, badly-rendered puzzles and following glowing objects around doesn't constitute entertainment, fun or poignance, okay?

Bioware seem to have looked at the likes of Bethesda, Ubisoft or perhaps Rockstar and thought to themselves, "So that's all you do? More of everything?", only the end result in their case is a complete mishmash of time-wasting goals that don't feed into any sense of progression. Mass Effect Andromeda's planets felt more like giant square landmasses peppered with game design straight out of an early 2000s MMO (one that isn't Warcraft).

Now, it can be satisfying to just gorge on 'Mission Complete!'-style pop-ups like continuing to graze through a large popcorn bucket halfway into a movie, but this approach nearly always turns to sheer boredom for the vast majority of players. We need narrative thrust, a reason to care, and set of locations that don't just look like you gave up halfway through and said, "That'll do."

We need planets and play-spaces as hyper-detailed as the franchise's lore codex. Nothing less will suffice.