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
There is a good game there.
The memes and some bugs were distracting, but the wailing exceeded justification in my view.
@adrest4 wrote:There is a good game there.
The memes and some bugs were distracting, but the wailing exceeded justification in my view.
I'll have to agree with you. It's hardly a bad game, and it's definitely above average. It's just not "great" which is I guess generally what you get, and what everybody expects from Bioware. So I can also understand, from a Bioware and Mass Effect fans perspective, the massive concerns and disappointments. And from the devs perspective, I can only imagine how hard it is to work with such a high expectation on their shoulders. Especially with all that happened during the development process.
Thanks OP for posting this article though. Was an interesting read. Really good to have insight of what exactly happened with ME:A.
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.
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.
