ME: Andromeda - Tale of Two Ryders

I am currently in the process of playing through Mass Effect: Andromeda on the Personal Computer, a game that I haven't touched ever since my first attempt of completing it back in 2017. In case you have forgotten, ME:A was generally hated by the fans of the series. I played around 20 hours of it before I got distracted, which is something that occurs often with me. The game had broken facial animations and I remember during the sequence when a new spaceship given under my command was supposed to land on the dock failed to actually load, resulting in a hilarious cutscene - all of these have been fixed since then. I never thought that the game was horrible outside of the aforementioned things and the sound mix in which some NPC conversations are quite difficult to hear. It was the case of Dragon Age II, in which it is another BioWare game that I personally enjoyed a lot but is misunderstood by many. There was just no way that a Mass Effect game that doesn't include Command Shepard and his lackeys are going to hit the same because that character's journey across 3 massive games were indeed legendary. I can always appreciate games that branch off into different narrative territories and I can see the creative approach behind Me:A to separate itself from the original trilogy. The only time this game gets any kind of positive public recognition is when Electronic Arts finally made Me:A available on Steam in 2021 because you know... Steamoroids.

ME:A was never a bad game. It just wasn't launched on Steam.

With my new playthrough, I have yet again chosen a male Ryder - I know I have better successes at completing games when I play female characters, but I want eye candy - and I still have a screenshot of my old character that I took from a 2017 broadcast on Twitch so I just want to compare the two. I wish that I had saved all of my broadcast videos back then like I am doing these days because it would have been fun to compare the state of the game then and now. So, which of these two Tchaddeus Ryders is hotter?

2017 Ryder.

5 years later... 2022 Ryder.

These are actual, unedited screengrabs from my broadcasts and yes, I like playing around with my screen compositions over my 10+ years of streaming. When creating characters in the same game, I normally would end up with the same exact face, so I made a conscious effort to ensure that the end result is different. Now I must admit, that first Tchaddeus Ryder made me weak in the knees but, from certain angles, he would look quite derpy. This new Ryder, whom I thought was handsome enough, cen be consistently hot at any given moment. Now let's hope that he can keep me engaged until the end of the game with that promise that he will be making out with some lucky crew member - I mean he will be making history in this new Andromeda galaxy.