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
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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.
@adrest4 wrote:There is a good game there.
The memes and some bugs were distracting, but the wailing exceeded justification in my view.
A lot jumped on that bandwagon, based off those few vids and screenshots without even playing the game. Andromeda was wrongly smeared - a lot who would very much enjoy the game are avoiding it now because of that smearing.
If you were more MP-oriented, the MEA experience was much poorer. Campaign is fun, but it just feels like a 10 year old game in many ways. It does not even compare well to Mass Effect 2. Your are correct to be amazed and maybe happy that they put anything out.
See my other posts. I did not have the details, but I pretty much outlined the kinds of problem BioWare had. They are classic "software project gone wrong" problems that lead to a "Death March Project" (Google it). The really sad thing is that there is a ton of published information on how to avoid all of those problems and quite a few consultants who would have helped them turn it around -- if they would have been willing to listen. Would they have release the game on time? No, but sanity would have returned to the process and when the game eventually was released it would have been much better.
So sad. The Devs were heroic and everything fell apart around them because of poor leadership.
@lexandro_Albion wrote:Personally I found ME2 to be the weakest of the trilogy in terms of content and playtime. The decision to go "linear" in design and the complete removal of exploration for me was a major detraction.
Agree that ME2 has one of the shorter playtime but the quality is there, the story telling the build up... It was the game that put ME and this genre on the map for me(I used to play only D&D hack and slash RPGs like baldurs gate/neverwinters night, elder scroll series). I played ME much later so ME1 combat and graphics were dated. ME3 was the best game for me minus the last 15mins or so. So on my personal scale of Mass Effect games for me: ME3 is first, ME2 second, MEA third, ME1 is the least enjoyable but can be excused as its made a decade ago and I respect it for being the first and the pioneer for such an awesome franchise.
@lexandro_Albion wrote:
Personally I found ME2 to be the weakest of the trilogy in terms of content and playtime. The decision to go "linear" in design and the complete removal of exploration for me was a major detraction.
I actually liked how this was handled in ME2. The planet anomalies that led to side missions were like an egg hunt. In contrast, ME3 gave you those on a platter. I also prefer it over ME1 where the bunkers/caves on uncharted planets were copy/pasted and MEA where the exploration led to mostly uninteresting fetch quests.
A lot jumped on that bandwagon, based off those few vids and screenshots without even playing the game. Andromeda was wrongly smeared - a lot who would very much enjoy the game are avoiding it now because of that smearing.
That is very true.
Fred_vdp schrieb:
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.
I also Agree on this, they tried too much. The game is simply too big, the open world quest are too often meaningless.
@VladVonCastein, and don't forget that ME2 had Miranda and Jack. I found them to be pretty much the most memorable and enjoyable characters in any of the ME Games. Damn, now I need to replay ME2. ;-)
@angrybunnie wrote:@VladVonCastein, and don't forget that ME2 had Miranda and Jack. I found them to be pretty much the most memorable and enjoyable characters in any of the ME Games. Damn, now I need to replay ME2. ;-)
..Jack the badass * super biotic that found that she had something in Common with Shepard and banged him on the table in his Apartment after the citadel party...I miss Jack...
