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
@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.
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.
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