[MEA Spoilers] I finished my Trial. Here are my *mostly* non-spoilery thoughts.

Great write-up and I agree almost completely, but I'd like to add some emphasis to this bit:

I'm gonna tentatively put the open world exploration in the cons. There's a lot of driving around useless areas in the Mako 2.0 from what I've seen. Not a huge deal, but the stuff I'm driving to is so good that the exploration is a let down.

I am so triggered by the Nomad. I've been doing smaller side-quests on Eos before doing the main quest and having to get in and get out of your Nomad every 100 feet is a chore. Then driving to and from actual mission areas is a chore. There literally isn't anything good about the game being open world whatsoever. I want to shoot the Nomad into the sun and have levels that are built with a beginning, middle, and end that have scripted story points and excellent pacing. . . because while I'm having fun, I'm not in love and that's because there is a good story here, but it is being poorly told due to the fact that it splits up a ton of little stories on a huge map. When you do that, you can't create dramatic tension with thematic music designed specifically for that level or super-short cut-scenes that let you not only hear your squad but see their faces and body language. The game loses far more than it gains by having open-world "exploration".

/r/masseffect Thread