Re: The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development

It was a really insightful article.  I still think that MEA is a good game.  Looks like it could have been an amazing game if a few things happened differently during the development period.

I'm so glad they abandoned the procedurally-generated worlds thing.  That doesn't sound fun at all.

---

@Gilcrist wrote:

It was a really insightful article.  I still think that MEA is a good game.  Looks like it could have been an amazing game if a few things happened differently during the development period.

I'm so glad they abandoned the procedurally-generated worlds thing.  That doesn't sound fun at all.

---

Yeah it didn't do a whole lot of good for No Man's Sky if I remember right and for a rather story driven RPG it would've been destructive I think. It just seems that certain people should not forget to temper their enthusiasm and think for a minute before going wild on such an idea and having to throw it out mid-development. I think SWTOR also had a lot of that going on during their development and taking it outside of the BioWare range, look at games like Guild Wars 2 and Sacred 3 that just had nothing do to with their predecessors anymore upon release.

I get that things can change during development but you don't have to try to get a name for it. In this case though, it's definitely a good thing they dropped the idea. Sadly the game that was made in the end suffered for the loss of time and resources.

Oh well, it's all water under the bridge now. They just need to keep on improving it and add DLC so that in a year or two ME:A will appear in articles like "Who'd have thought that ME:A was going to end up being a gem of game" and such. It's a goal they can still achieve and strive for. There is still a fanbase out there and it'd be crazy to just give up on that. 

---

@Gilcrist wrote:

It was a really insightful article.  I still think that MEA is a good game.  Looks like it could have been an amazing game if a few things happened differently during the development period.

I'm so glad they abandoned the procedurally-generated worlds thing.  That doesn't sound fun at all.

---

Of all games to do this to, it has to be Mass Effect... Sigh...  Anyway there's a fairly good youtube presentation of this article, saves me the time reading it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYDJNf4LyBs

The second I saw the "procedurally generated worlds" in that article it all made sense. They spent damn near ALL their time dicking with that instead of the actual game going into it, looking at what happened with No Man's Sky, you'd THINK they would not be * enough to try something like that.

Anyway, BW Montreal was up for the task but is the LOWEST form of BW and it's been shown in this game, and the article basically states that they had to have their game rescued by the other sections of BW and then complained about it saying "they messed the game up not us, we were on task." blah blah..like a bunch of fkn high school kids.

EA literally just needs to purge Montreal and cut it off like a diseased finger.

---

@VladVonCastein wrote:

---

@Gilcrist wrote:

It was a really insightful article.  I still think that MEA is a good game.  Looks like it could have been an amazing game if a few things happened differently during the development period.

I'm so glad they abandoned the procedurally-generated worlds thing.  That doesn't sound fun at all.

---

Of all games to do this to, it has to be Mass Effect... Sigh...  Anyway there's a fairly good youtube presentation of this article, saves me the time reading it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYDJNf4LyBs

---

It is a shame but you gotta figure that basically the game was made in the last 1.5 years of the process. Thinking about it some more I just am mostly amazed I guess at how little vision they had to go forward. Just some lose ideas that didn't really connect. It's like they were brainstorming for 3 years and then realised they actually had to make a plan.

It also seems more like a BioWare than EA issue at that point.

I have played several games over the years where it's had generated content. In a game like Mass Effect, it would be a nightmare. Procedural generation its a horrible idea for ME, simply because the vast majority of the game would be random. Not being able to return to an area you liked, not being able to find a specific item/NPC or location because its random every time gets tedious extremely quickly.

Games like this need bespoke areas and worlds to give it a real life setting so we can suspend disbelief and become immersed in the story. If its always random, you never get settled in, never learn the most efficient ways to play, and almost always never get RNG in your favour and can easily result in players going round in circles and getting lost extremely frequently. ME has always been action RPG with hand crafted worlds. Deviation from that and it wont be ME anymore, and fans would leave in droves.

We have already seen what happens when players do not get what they expect with MEA. Imagine the shitstorm with P/G worlds and broke quests. It would be 10x worse.