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
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.
