Re: Is it true that Bioware is cancelling Mass Effect?

It had nothing to do with bsn.boards.net being impatient and I'm pretty sure you know it.   You have some very personal issues against that forum for whatever reason, but that is not fuel to just make every post you make about them now is it?   There is plenty of information now out there published in various locations that should clue you in on some of the reasons why it reached the public in the state it got to us in, but i can tell you now i wasn't impatient for it, but i was very much eagerly awaiting its release.. just as i would any big title that is in the series of games that i really enjoy.

I've summarised SOME of the info that's out there about mass effects development period, but i'm only going on what i've read here and there, please do your own research to find out more.  In fact I encourage it.

Mass Effect was supposedly 5 years in the making, it is no secret whatsoever that they had a model for procedural generation of planets in mind when they were first putting the game together, and wanted a truly exploration feel to the game, as well as realise many of the things they wanted to do when they first started the mass effect project in the first place.  With resources stretched to make certain things work, and that includes the hard task of making the frostbite engine work within this type of game, time marched on and various issues crept in.. map size for one.. major hurdle, they wanted large maps and they were trying to make it work and naturally this delayed the product yet more.   Then there was the supposed attrition of staff members, the two main bioware studio's being at odds over timescales which in a main was likely down to team sizes being too small for the size and scale of some of the development requirements etc..

Anyway, long story short, 2014 was apparently a very very trying year for ME:A's development, and in 2015, had to make a call on the actual fun aspect of the procedural generated system and by then and had to then build the planets manually instead, and also drastically as we've seen reduce the number of planets you can actually visit down to small amount that made it to the final game.

They were running to a likely imposed deadline by then, the game had been 'in-development' for that long and they had to get a product to market.. at the end of the day money and time had been spent by the bucket load, and the fans in general, NOT JUST BSN.BOARDS.NET, but probably everyone who had already been eagerly waiting 5 years had already been told by then that the game was due to be released by a certain point not knowing of course the troubled development the product had had, either. 

So we got what we got by release date, by then it was likely tied in, and probably they would have liked just a bit longer to polish the game a bit more, but just like anything you can keep polishing but do you ever achieve the shine you are truly after.

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@CassandraSaturn wrote:

BSN.boards.net were responsible for this game being published like this. they were impatient for it to come out.

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Is that an assumption or is this backed by developer comments? I strongly doubt a major publisher would purposely release a game in an unfinished state because of commenters on an online forum.

According to this poll on the BSN forum, the vast majority of players believe that in hindsight the game needed a delay: http://bsn.boards.net/thread/12365/willing-delay-andromeda-months-needed

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@Skauron wrote:

Mass Effect was supposedly 5 years in the making, it is no secret whatsoever that they had a model for procedural generation of planets in mind when they were first putting the game together, and wanted a truly exploration feel to the game, as well as realise many of the things they wanted to do when they first started the mass effect project in the first place.  With resources stretched to make certain things work, and that includes the hard task of making the frostbite engine work within this type of game, time marched on and various issues crept in.. map size for one.. major hurdle, they wanted large maps and they were trying to make it work and naturally this delayed the product yet more.   Then there was the supposed attrition of staff members, the two main bioware studio's being at odds over timescales which in a main was likely down to team sizes being too small for the size and scale of some of the development requirements etc..

Anyway, long story short, 2014 was apparently a very very trying year for ME:A's development, and in 2015, had to make a call on the actual fun aspect of the procedural generated system and by then and had to then build the planets manually instead, and also drastically as we've seen reduce the number of planets you can actually visit down to small amount that made it to the final game.

They were running to a likely imposed deadline by then, the game had been 'in-development' for that long and they had to get a product to market.. at the end of the day money and time had been spent by the bucket load, and the fans in general, NOT JUST BSN.BOARDS.NET, but probably everyone who had already been eagerly waiting 5 years had already been told by then that the game was due to be released by a certain point not knowing of course the troubled development the product had had, either. 

So we got what we got by release date, by then it was likely tied in, and probably they would have liked just a bit longer to polish the game a bit more, but just like anything you can keep polishing but do you ever achieve the shine you are truly after.

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This is the timeline I've seen reported elsewhere as well. Who knows what exactly went wrong, but we know something clearly wasn't going well with development in those first 2-3 years. Who's fault that is... hard to say. But it's NOT the player's fault (this comment isn't aimed at you, but at those who say the players are the reason for ME:A's failure).

ME:A as it was released, regardless of bugs, regardless of lack of character customization, regardless of weird animations, etc. was NEVER going to be a great game. It's a fine game, and that's that. It's worth buying and playing, but it's not what it should have been.

Well, I don't think that the Mass Effect franchise has the status of cancelled. ME:A is finished as far they're concerned. No dlc and only support for mp is what it is cause I guess they still want people to spend money on gear packs or whatever.

I think I saw an interview with some EA guy who said that ME as a franchise isn't dead but what that means is unclear. 

They still made plenty of money with the release it seems and they're happy to leave it at that from a financial point of view. What's unclear is when they might pick up ME again and in what form. Will the ME:A story be continued or have they concluded that this story line isn't successful?

I've got this feeling that ME:A across the board didn't get near the impact ME1-3 had with Shepard at the helm. It would be a weak premise then to continue on. The next question is then will they use ME:A as background still for a new hero within this new setting or will they completely abandon the whole of it and start fresh with a completely new idea making ME:A more of a "we tried, we failed, let's move on and do something completely new again" type of thing.

Clearly they wouldn't want to invest big into a new game within the ME:A scope if people aren't really excited about it. Of course there are still some unfinished story lines within ME:A so that could be...problematic.