The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development
For people interested, there is a follow up to the famous Kotaku article: https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
Forum Discussion
Now that is a very very sad story of a game that should deliver so many great things, a game that could pave the ground for a much better successor but simply will get abondened...
I know how it is working on projects with a lot of ambitions but being stalled by many different issues (usually caused by politics and severe lack of leadership - or too many different leaderships, like with ME: Andromeda).
If the Frostbite engine won't be upgraded to do facial animations properly, the next FIFA title will define "shitstorm".
EA, don't abondon your own IP. You come so far, just finish what you started!
@Phoenixflieger wrote:Now that is a very very sad story of a game that should deliver so many great things, a game that could pave the ground for a much better successor but simply will get abondened...
I know how it is working on projects with a lot of ambitions but being stalled by many different issues (usually caused by politics and severe lack of leadership - or too many different leaderships, like with ME: Andromeda).
If the Frostbite engine won't be upgraded to do facial animations properly, the next FIFA title will define "shitstorm".EA, don't abondon your own IP. You come so far, just finish what you started!
It is indeed sad... u mentioned all the things i typed down in my initial message, but i ended up deleting all of it... I didn't wanna mess up the mood here on forum. But now that u said it, i agree.
Too many bosses wanting 1.000 things done differently. And of course forcing that stupid frostbite engine on them just cause they wanna use "their" engine and want to have "their" frostbite logo on the front page. It's all $$$ and publicity. That's what happens when someone takes over and no matter what, they want to leave their fingerprints on the work at any cost.
And in the end who suffers.... those who actually worked and put their heart, talent and effort in it... and then someone else comes smashing down everything they've accomplished. Sad!
If i could buy Bioware ... i would let them work however they want... whatever way works best for them, cause they proved they CAN do it 🙂
The DAI team did part of the job already, but like the article says, even that modded Frostbite was missing tools the MEA project required, and had other limitations like insufficient map size and lack of animation rigging. There's also the shift in the tech used mid-production when it should've been decided and locked ages ago in the pre-production phase. I'm talking about when they were told to shift to Maya instead of 3ds Max.
I'm not with/against either software (I learned my way around in Maya, personally; seen the interface, but I haven't had any up close and personal run-ins with 3ds Max so far). True, you don't exactly have to re-learn everything from scratch, but enough to call it a setback. For example tell one person who used MS Office all his life that "starting tomorrow, you'll be using LibreOffice," there will be a change in performance.
And yeah, good points for deciding against the full procedurally generated content... we saw how that turned out (I'm looking at you No Man's Sky).
Considering that EA is getting a lot more games put out by the Frostfire engine, having it's logo be on a big name property IS important. It might not be the best choice always, but trying to expand what your own tools do to make even more games out there is not inherently wrong.
