Just Some Feedback/Venting on MEA
First I would like to emphasize that I am a huge fan of the DA & ME games, I have them all including DLCs :-) I'm just playing though the original trilogy again and was ruminating on the last additi...
Forum Discussion
ME:A did suffer from a lack of support but it was actually EA, not Bioware that caused the problems. I suggest digging up the article on it's production on Kotaku for insight.
I think everyone will agree the story and characters were lacking, but the RPG system, combat and open world made this game a lot of fun for me.
@AeromusPrime22 wrote:
ME:A did suffer from a lack of support but it was actually EA, not Bioware that caused the problems. I suggest digging up the article on it's production on Kotaku for insight.
Manveer Heir (former BioWare dev) was recently tweeting about the troubled development of MEA, which was quite entertaining to read. He mentioned a lot of issues, but from what he said it appears that both leadership at BioWare and EA were to blame.
The Kotaku article described the issue of procedural generation, which was the idea of the project lead who, in Manveer's word, was a massive waste of space and another word I can't mention on this forum. EA was a large contributor to the game's problems because they forced BioWare to use the Frostbite 3 engine, which Manveer calls the worst engine he ever worked with in his career, although he uses more colorful language that I can't use on this forum. Apparently a lot of devs at BioWare wanted to use Unreal Engine 4 instead because they could have ported the Mass Effect 3 systems they developed in Unreal Engine 3.
@Fred_vdp; Yeah, EA's forcing of Frostbite for all AAA games makes a ton of sense for a lot of reasons, starting with; "They already own it" and; ease of porting things to all three major platforms.
But... DICE originally built Frostbite to be an FPS engine, not an RPG one. It has lots of potential but right now (DA:I, ME:A) we, devs and players both, are having to deal with the growing pains.
@ThandalNLyman It makes sense that they want to keep using their own engine, but I wonder if it's worth it. From what I read in those tweets, it takes a lot more engineers to get certain features working in Frostbite compared to Unreal, so I can imagine it would be a lot cheaper for EA to just pay Epic Games the licensing fees. Development time would be shorter and the games would be better. They spent five years on MEA (which is as long as the development of ME2 and ME3 combined) and they ended up with an incomplete game, lukewarm reviews, and not enough sales to justify DLC development.
That said, Dragon Age Inquisition was also developed in Frostbite, and it was better all around and developed in significantly less time, so maybe this is a case of a bad craftsman blaming his tools.
