Hey guys.. so... I've been misspelling Kett this entire time. That's my bad and totally on me. It's Kett and not Khett. I've fixed it in the faction entry and will be using the correct way from now on. I don't know why I did that or what part of my brain decided to google translate it that way. Big whoops on my part.
Second String - Blue 42
Right, so the director has been kidnapped by some random, clearly human, operative in N7 armor. And now, the only people remaining are the second string of leaders on the Nexus. I pondered on the last part whether or not to just get rid of the Nexus leadership from the vanilla game. Much like the game's premise, they're not terrible concepts, it's simply the tone and direction of their scenes that are god awful.
Foster Addison is the worst offender, not just because of her meme face but because her dialogue and your ability to respond is handicapped hard. She challenges you with no way to challenge her back. She insults your dead father and tells you to prove yourself when she has failed at her job for the last fourteen months. She's constantly complaining and offers no solutions for you. And Tann's only lead is go look for new planets. And if those planets aren't good enough, find a way to fix them... the whole planet!
Tann doesn't know that the vaults can fix the planets and I'm not sure any of these guys have read your report from Habitat 7 because if they did, they would be tasking you with learning more about the vaults and not just, "go find a new path, PATHFINDER."
There's no influence mechanic with any of these characters so really, their disapproval is all flavor and no substance. It's not even indicative of your progress like in Mass Effect 3 (multiplayer matches can increase your game's world state. A concept with flaws but has payoff). Kesh and Kandros are the nicest and are the only ones who actually do anything. Tann and Addison have these big important jobs but can't do them because of low morale, low resources, and a vague plot structure that isn't about anyone particular thing yet.
For the purposes of this rework, they can stay but not without some real overhaul. It doesn't have to be extreme, just nudge their dialogue and direction in such a way that allows the player to come up with an actual plan and use multiple leads that they gleam from their areas of expertise. This makes them useful and shows the player a glimpse of what they do for the story.
Old Faithful
Our new quest structure is as follows: the Nexus has multiple problems that need to be tackled by your crack team of problem solvers. Regular commandos or whatever they have on hand aren't suited to the job because the Initiative is a scientific expedition and your team is specifically trained to navigate new environments and sift through mountains of data to gleam advantages.
We have three main problems that correspond to three planets that were supposed to be the destinations for our three missing arks. While the old Bioware formula has been done to death, it's success is fairly earned for a reason. An open structure to different branches of plot threads allow the player a degree of choice. It allows the player to experience different aspects of the story on their terms but presented in a way where the developer can guide them towards the intended direction. It's a careful balance and while that may be superficial, it's important for video games to allow the player certain degrees of agency while keeping them focused.
Problem #1 - Rock and a Hard Place (Quest given by Strike Ops Leader Kandros)
For what it's worth, I actually enjoy the quests the game gives us with regards to finding the arks. Within these constrained missions, it feels like the writer and game designer were able to fine tune what they wanted the player to experience without getting distracted by the open world fluff.
This is our quest to locate the Turian ark. Kandros requests that you help search for/deal with the Exiles. Fresh off their mutiny, the Exiles have managed to make use of Remnant tech to establish their own outpost on *Eladaan/Eos/Kadara. And just like the Hyperion ark stopped at Habitat 7, the Turians decided to fly by their new home and didn't like what they saw.
*They're both desert planets with Kadara being more mountainous with the occasional patch of green and sulfur pit. Let's just combine them into one planet where both the Krogan and the Exiles decided to run off to post mutiny. We'll call it Elios (like the pizza!). It'll set up interesting conflict between two factions that have already fought but now have a common enemy in the Nexus. Plus if the game ever got green lit for a sequel, you'd have potential for a Terminus systems 2.0
In this scenario, the planet would have been initially planned to be used for the Turians. You can imagine how the Turians might feel about not only having Krogan in their spot, but a bunch of deserters who decided to mutiny the current leadership. Taking back Elios from these type of people is in the Turian job description (or at the very least, it should become a new holiday).
We can also move Drack's recruitment to this planet to put him a little closer to home and vary up potential playthroughs.
In this plot thread, we uncover Sloane's motivation to mutiny on the Nexus was partially fueled by her discovery of the Reapers. This information would be vital to the Initiative because of its potential to not only cause widespread panic but possibly re-frame the entire expedition. An innocent jaunt to parts unknown could become a desperate and lawless race for survival.
Your job here would not only to be to make Elios habitable (not to mention deliciously fresh from the oven) but to try and negotiate between three factions that absolutely hate each other. The Turians are in orbit and secretly brought weapons to bombard the planet if needed (because they're the Turians, of course they did), the Krogans will threaten to detonate some Remnant fuel source they found, and funny enough; Sloane is a trying to establish a neo-government outside of the Nexus.
Ideally, you should probably only be able to gain the approval of two out of the three factions here after meeting their leaders and doing various quests to understand how each third lives and what their plans are. Your finale would end similar to the conflict between Sloane and Reyes in the original game (a diplomatic meeting to settle things but you've secretly planned to undermine some combination of the three parties involved while they talk).
I'm open to allowing a three-way peace treaty but only if it's more like what happened in Dragon Age Inquistion where you black mail and coerce all three parties into a temporary alliance (spelling possible instability for the future).
Your final choice on Elios (besides what toppings you'd like) would revolve around the use of the data confirming the Reapers existence and near extinction event happening in the milky way. It's something of a nod back to the original games and offers the player a chance to choose how they wish to acknowledge what came before them. The conflict might be millions of light years away but that doesn't make it any less of an interesting dilemma for sci-fi explorers.
Those are more or less the broad strokes I had to rethink for our first plot thread. As an honorary mention, I'd like to quickly go through some things from the original version of the game I liked and disliked.
Sloane: I don't much care for Sloane. She reminds me too much of Aria from ME2. A character that the writers clearly want us to respect or be intimidated by but we don't see them do all that much. Instead of having her just insult and berate the player for being from the Nexus, she should be reaching out and trying to absorb as much of the Nexus' resources as possible to do things the way she envisions. For someone who led a mutiny against terrible leadership, she's pretty much just a bully on Kadara.
Reyes: You'll notice I didn't mention Reyes at all. He came to Andromeda to be someone but also wants to be the head of a super secret clandestine organization. Reyes uses code names but then constantly gives his real name all the time. If it's not his real name then who is he? According the the writer, he's either your regular joe who just so happens to run the Collective (unrealistic) or he's a compulsive liar and can't be trusted since he can manipulate events on scale with the Shadow Broker. And the writers have the gall to create a romance with someone like him. I wanted to like Reyes, heck, I even chose him over Sloane in all my playthroughs. But there's just not enough depth to this guy who seems to act more important than he actually is.
Morda: This sorry excuse for a Krogan leader. She's unreasonable, boring, whiny, pretty much the exact opposite of any leader the Krogan would choose to be in charge. This confuses me mostly because Bakara in ME3 held such a commanding presence as the first female Krogan we ever met. To fall to this level (and also that terrible cutscene fight) is just bizarre.
Avitus: Our Spectre who possibly becomes a Pathfinder. I like Avitus a lot. He's one of the few people in Andromeda who feels like he knows what he's doing. A retired Spectre raises a lot of questions (in a good way) but having an emotional connection to the story creates a nice parallel for the players to be invested in finding home and building meaningful connections to this new story.
That'll settle it for this part! Tune in for whenever I break down what I'd like to do for the Asari and Salarian ark! And I've also been updating my retrospective playthrough on Mass Effect Andromeda if you'd like to catch up with my thoughts there as well.
- Gabe
Writer, Let's Player, Proud member of Huffle N' Stuff
@GabeNStuff
 |
| ... Hike? |
Second String - Blue 42
Right, so the director has been kidnapped by some random, clearly human, operative in N7 armor. And now, the only people remaining are the second string of leaders on the Nexus. I pondered on the last part whether or not to just get rid of the Nexus leadership from the vanilla game. Much like the game's premise, they're not terrible concepts, it's simply the tone and direction of their scenes that are god awful.
Foster Addison is the worst offender, not just because of her meme face but because her dialogue and your ability to respond is handicapped hard. She challenges you with no way to challenge her back. She insults your dead father and tells you to prove yourself when she has failed at her job for the last fourteen months. She's constantly complaining and offers no solutions for you. And Tann's only lead is go look for new planets. And if those planets aren't good enough, find a way to fix them... the whole planet!
Tann doesn't know that the vaults can fix the planets and I'm not sure any of these guys have read your report from Habitat 7 because if they did, they would be tasking you with learning more about the vaults and not just, "go find a new path, PATHFINDER."
There's no influence mechanic with any of these characters so really, their disapproval is all flavor and no substance. It's not even indicative of your progress like in Mass Effect 3 (multiplayer matches can increase your game's world state. A concept with flaws but has payoff). Kesh and Kandros are the nicest and are the only ones who actually do anything. Tann and Addison have these big important jobs but can't do them because of low morale, low resources, and a vague plot structure that isn't about anyone particular thing yet.
For the purposes of this rework, they can stay but not without some real overhaul. It doesn't have to be extreme, just nudge their dialogue and direction in such a way that allows the player to come up with an actual plan and use multiple leads that they gleam from their areas of expertise. This makes them useful and shows the player a glimpse of what they do for the story.
 |
| This would have been a good time to go back to weapons without ammo... |
Old Faithful
Our new quest structure is as follows: the Nexus has multiple problems that need to be tackled by your crack team of problem solvers. Regular commandos or whatever they have on hand aren't suited to the job because the Initiative is a scientific expedition and your team is specifically trained to navigate new environments and sift through mountains of data to gleam advantages.
We have three main problems that correspond to three planets that were supposed to be the destinations for our three missing arks. While the old Bioware formula has been done to death, it's success is fairly earned for a reason. An open structure to different branches of plot threads allow the player a degree of choice. It allows the player to experience different aspects of the story on their terms but presented in a way where the developer can guide them towards the intended direction. It's a careful balance and while that may be superficial, it's important for video games to allow the player certain degrees of agency while keeping them focused.
Problem #1 - Rock and a Hard Place (Quest given by Strike Ops Leader Kandros)
For what it's worth, I actually enjoy the quests the game gives us with regards to finding the arks. Within these constrained missions, it feels like the writer and game designer were able to fine tune what they wanted the player to experience without getting distracted by the open world fluff.
This is our quest to locate the Turian ark. Kandros requests that you help search for/deal with the Exiles. Fresh off their mutiny, the Exiles have managed to make use of Remnant tech to establish their own outpost on *Eladaan/Eos/Kadara. And just like the Hyperion ark stopped at Habitat 7, the Turians decided to fly by their new home and didn't like what they saw.
*They're both desert planets with Kadara being more mountainous with the occasional patch of green and sulfur pit. Let's just combine them into one planet where both the Krogan and the Exiles decided to run off to post mutiny. We'll call it Elios (like the pizza!). It'll set up interesting conflict between two factions that have already fought but now have a common enemy in the Nexus. Plus if the game ever got green lit for a sequel, you'd have potential for a Terminus systems 2.0
In this scenario, the planet would have been initially planned to be used for the Turians. You can imagine how the Turians might feel about not only having Krogan in their spot, but a bunch of deserters who decided to mutiny the current leadership. Taking back Elios from these type of people is in the Turian job description (or at the very least, it should become a new holiday).
We can also move Drack's recruitment to this planet to put him a little closer to home and vary up potential playthroughs.
 |
| Speaking of numbers darkening skies... |
In this plot thread, we uncover Sloane's motivation to mutiny on the Nexus was partially fueled by her discovery of the Reapers. This information would be vital to the Initiative because of its potential to not only cause widespread panic but possibly re-frame the entire expedition. An innocent jaunt to parts unknown could become a desperate and lawless race for survival.
Your job here would not only to be to make Elios habitable (not to mention deliciously fresh from the oven) but to try and negotiate between three factions that absolutely hate each other. The Turians are in orbit and secretly brought weapons to bombard the planet if needed (because they're the Turians, of course they did), the Krogans will threaten to detonate some Remnant fuel source they found, and funny enough; Sloane is a trying to establish a neo-government outside of the Nexus.
Ideally, you should probably only be able to gain the approval of two out of the three factions here after meeting their leaders and doing various quests to understand how each third lives and what their plans are. Your finale would end similar to the conflict between Sloane and Reyes in the original game (a diplomatic meeting to settle things but you've secretly planned to undermine some combination of the three parties involved while they talk).
I'm open to allowing a three-way peace treaty but only if it's more like what happened in Dragon Age Inquistion where you black mail and coerce all three parties into a temporary alliance (spelling possible instability for the future).
Your final choice on Elios (besides what toppings you'd like) would revolve around the use of the data confirming the Reapers existence and near extinction event happening in the milky way. It's something of a nod back to the original games and offers the player a chance to choose how they wish to acknowledge what came before them. The conflict might be millions of light years away but that doesn't make it any less of an interesting dilemma for sci-fi explorers.
Those are more or less the broad strokes I had to rethink for our first plot thread. As an honorary mention, I'd like to quickly go through some things from the original version of the game I liked and disliked.
Sloane: I don't much care for Sloane. She reminds me too much of Aria from ME2. A character that the writers clearly want us to respect or be intimidated by but we don't see them do all that much. Instead of having her just insult and berate the player for being from the Nexus, she should be reaching out and trying to absorb as much of the Nexus' resources as possible to do things the way she envisions. For someone who led a mutiny against terrible leadership, she's pretty much just a bully on Kadara.
Reyes: You'll notice I didn't mention Reyes at all. He came to Andromeda to be someone but also wants to be the head of a super secret clandestine organization. Reyes uses code names but then constantly gives his real name all the time. If it's not his real name then who is he? According the the writer, he's either your regular joe who just so happens to run the Collective (unrealistic) or he's a compulsive liar and can't be trusted since he can manipulate events on scale with the Shadow Broker. And the writers have the gall to create a romance with someone like him. I wanted to like Reyes, heck, I even chose him over Sloane in all my playthroughs. But there's just not enough depth to this guy who seems to act more important than he actually is.
Morda: This sorry excuse for a Krogan leader. She's unreasonable, boring, whiny, pretty much the exact opposite of any leader the Krogan would choose to be in charge. This confuses me mostly because Bakara in ME3 held such a commanding presence as the first female Krogan we ever met. To fall to this level (and also that terrible cutscene fight) is just bizarre.
Avitus: Our Spectre who possibly becomes a Pathfinder. I like Avitus a lot. He's one of the few people in Andromeda who feels like he knows what he's doing. A retired Spectre raises a lot of questions (in a good way) but having an emotional connection to the story creates a nice parallel for the players to be invested in finding home and building meaningful connections to this new story.
That'll settle it for this part! Tune in for whenever I break down what I'd like to do for the Asari and Salarian ark! And I've also been updating my retrospective playthrough on Mass Effect Andromeda if you'd like to catch up with my thoughts there as well.
- Gabe
Writer, Let's Player, Proud member of Huffle N' Stuff
@GabeNStuff
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