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
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I figured development must have been troubled when I noticed tree separate lead writers in the game's end credits. That's never a good sign.
There's definitely a great game in there somewhere, but with the many flaws it ended up being just a good one. The game has some form of personality disorder where it forgets if it's a corridor shooter or an open world game. When it tries to be linear like Mass Effect 3 it does so really well, but the open world design steps in every trap associated with the sub-genre. Backtracking, fetch quests, you name it.
Sad reading. With all that i am amazed that we've got such a decent game.
As for Frostbite, its biggest fault it was that wasn't mature enough to deal with the challenges posed by an open-world RPG game and its really limited animation tools (read none, as Bioware had to build them from scratch). I just hope that this will serve as a lesson and the Frostbite devs will develop it further into that great engine that Frostbite has the potential to become. It's a robust engine for action games, but definitely needs improvement if EA wants to use it in all its games.
The fact that the team managed to put the game together in 18 months (with all its faults) is still impressive. My guess is that the Montreal team is now more experienced into how to approach a big project. Hopefully, EA will keep them together and continue to develop the franchise. And it will look closer to other open-world RPG's (preferably not from Bethesda and its junk loot and shallow quests). AA and indie RPG's in past years, though lacking the eye candy offered by Frostbite, sold quite well and offered memorable experiences. If the team can learn from those, i'd say that we might end up with an open-world AAA RPG of really high quality.
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