The Story Behind MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA's Troubled Five-Year Development

June 7, 2017 2:49 PM

"Almost immediately, fans asked how this happened. Why was Andromeda so much worse than its predecessors? How could the revered RPG studio release such an underwhelming game? And, even if the problems were a little exaggerated by the internet’s strange passion for hating BioWare, how could Andromeda ship with so many animation issues? I’ve spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions."
posted by brundlefly (26 comments total)

This was a fairly depressing read this morning.

Overall my takeaway was: a whole lot of decisions were made too late in the process. I have never been in game development, but a lot of these games seem to be consumed by the ship of Theseus process where there are just too many moving parts that depend on other parts being the same size and shape, like a 3D puzzle, and then in the end none of the parts are finished early enough that anyone can tell if the pieces will actually fit or not. And then you have this eighteen month scramble that I feel like I hear about over and over again (Destiny, for example).

I'm currently (finally) playing Witcher 3, and I simply can't imagine how they made this game where it doesn't seem like an extruded, generic product AND it isn't on fire. They seem to have made it much harder on other developers by example.
posted by selfnoise at 3:29 PM on June 7, 2017 [5 favorites]

I don't really play games anymore, but this is really interesting. I've been away from home for a couple weeks, and my girlfriend has been playing ME:A in my absence. She says she's loving it for the awkwardness, in the same way she loves SyFy channel movies. I'm going to forward this to her, because she keeps saying that despite her appreciation of its weirdness, she doesn't understand how it got made like that.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 3:35 PM on June 7, 2017

I kinda wish the coda was a commitment to a revamped edition.
posted by oddman at 4:20 PM on June 7, 2017

What ME:A lacks is not better animation, it's a soul. That game is not horrible, some of its mechanics can be fun but it has no spirit, everything is kinda bland and stereotypical, there's never a sense of wonder, never a real sense of danger. The antagonists and the protagonists are dull, you never feel like you're exploring anything because most of the places you go to are already settled by someone else. The real problem of ME:A is that they never found a way to make you care about the game.
posted by SageLeVoid at 4:35 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

The best thing about ME:A was that I played the original trilogy for the first time in the month before it launched because I wanted to know about the lore. Ended up being unnecessary and I never finished Andromeda but that month playing Mass Effect was incredible.
posted by Memo at 4:42 PM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

SageLeVoid, that's what my girlfriend said about it too. Like, it's just not that interesting compared to the rest of the series. I think she said she reacted like "wait, that's antagonist?"
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:48 PM on June 7, 2017

if the entire game really came together in only two years, that's an astonishing achievement, in a way.

The truth: Every. Single. AAA Game only comes together in the last 18 months.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:50 PM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

I think the greatest mistake was trying to match the galaxy-wide scope of the original series (especially since the way they tried to match it was by abandoning the galaxy we had come to enjoy altogether). I wish they had gone the other direction with it. Rather than have the entire ME universe to explore and save, why not narrow our focus to something that would have felt mundane in the previous trilogy?

Imagine a murder mystery noir Mass Effect where you play a Salarian detective trying to solve a murder that the galaxy has deemed unimportant.

A game where you play a clanless Krogran who just wants to raise his family right on his homestead, but a group of human industrialists try to muscle him out to get at some precious MacGuffin, but they kill his family instead.

What about a game where you have to manage an Elcor theater on the Citadel.

They spent all this time and energy crafting this really interesting universe only to abandon it when Shepherd's story is over? Why leave all that on the table?
posted by Random_Tangent at 4:58 PM on June 7, 2017 [8 favorites]

Rather than have the entire ME universe to explore and save, why not narrow our focus to something that would have felt mundane in the previous trilogy?

I would not be surprised if it was because of the poor reception of Dragon Age 2, which did exactly that.

you never feel like you're exploring anything because most of the places you go to are already settled by someone else.

I very much agree with this. I was excited to explore a completely unknown galaxy, but it turns out I'm mostly clearing thugs and robots out of other people's backyards so I can move in with them.

But I'm still enjoying the game quite a lot, and investing way too much time into it. The Pull-Throw-Charge-Melee-Shotgun combo never gets old.
posted by ejs at 5:13 PM on June 7, 2017 [3 favorites]

What about a game where you have to manage an Elcor theater on the Citadel.

"Desperate intensity. I saw Goody Proctor with the devil."
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 5:14 PM on June 7, 2017 [16 favorites]

I'm a good ways into it, and I'll say this:

It is definitely a game.
posted by lumpenprole at 5:27 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

meh, animation issues, who cares, you can fix that in a patch.

the thing that drove me crazy about ME:A was how lazy a Mass Effect copy it was. It was like The Force Awakens, but couldn't even be bothered to remix its characters

(like how Wedge and Princess Leia combine into Poe, Luke splits into Rey and Finn, Obi-Wan splits into Mazz and Solo, Luke becomes Yoda, and Darth Vader is replaced by a guy who is explicitly pretending to be Darth Vader. Sure it was derivative as hell, but at least they recombined and split some characters and that was kind of fun for me.)

But Mass Effect: Andromeda felt like a lazy one-to-one madlib, like ME:2017, like basically another zzzz EA sequel. (spoilers follow)

You are Shepherd Ryder. You are a Spectre Pathfinder, an elite warrior / scout / law enforcer with a great deal of independence. You are dispatched from the Citadel Nexus, a giant space installation run by a squabbling, multi-species council. You fly missions aboard a stealthy, small cutting-edge vessel called the Normandy Tempest. Dirtside, you drive around in the Mako Nomad, a butch AWD vehicle. Your first antagonists are the mysterious Geth Kett, who have a strange affinity for weird old artifacts left by the Protheans Remnant. The geth kett bolster their forces by kidnapping people of other species and transforming them into husks more kett.

I know, it's an EA game, and what do I expect from the least adventurous publisher in video gaming? But still, massive disappointment, one that they won't be able to patch away.
posted by Sauce Trough at 5:40 PM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

Nthing SageLeVoid above. What I wanted from ME:A was a chance to be the Big Damn Hero (ok, to be fair, that's what I want from RPGs generally). Instead I got to be glorified tech support/house flipper/pest exterminator. The villains weren't that threatening, and I never felt like we were ever given a reason to be frightened of or even worried about the antagonist. (And that whole "profile" system where I can basically be all the classes: ugh. Makes careful squad selection pointless.)

The most positive thing I can say about ME:A is that it feels like the setup for the game BioWare actually wants to make. It feels very similar to Dragon Age II in that regard; DAII's main job was, I think, to get all the pieces in place for Dragon Age: Inquisition's storyline. That need made DAII feel unsatisfying, and to me ME:A is the same. Given Andromeda's poor reception overall, I'm not sure we'll get to see that game.

If they release a DLC chapter or another game, I'll buy it. I'll probably buy anything that says Mass Effect on it forever. But it would be nice if it were better than "fine."

Me too, Sokka shot first.
posted by Janta at 5:52 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

I really liked that Ryder wasn't Jesus-Shepard though. They are way over their head and very slowly they start learning the ropes about being a leader and a pathfinder, some of the best moments in the game are tied to that progression. Sadly, it's surrounded by a galaxy of mediocrity.
posted by Memo at 6:39 PM on June 7, 2017 [4 favorites]

I thought that it was ironic that TFA makes the point that most of MEA's five-year development took place in the last eighteen months, since this doesn't seem like an article that would take three months to write. Much of it was already known: that Bioware decided to siphon off many of the people with experience with the franchise to work on "Dylan" (and, boy howdy, do I hope that that game turns out to be really good--like, Horizon: Zero Dawn good--if they threw a wrench into the ME franchise for its sake), that switching to a different graphics engine was potentially problematic, that they suffered from key people leaving, etc. They use the same release-week GIFs that we've already seen dozens of times, even though subsequent patches have fixed a lot of those problems. (There are still a bunch left, of course.)

I think that what a lot of people are hung up on is that it's different from the original trilogy in some fundamental ways that bothers a lot of people, especially if you're of the but-I-always-play-a-rogue persuasion. I also think that there's a lot of misguided nostalgia for the original trilogy, especially because of that five-year gap. That "awesome" scene with Vigil on Ilos? That was the game deciding to dump a ton of exposition into a single conversation with an AI smack-dab into the middle of what was supposed to be a time-is-running-out run across the planet during the endgame... and that was the second time that that happened in the game (after Sovereign on Virmire). MEA is a huge improvement on ME1. (The other games in the OT certainly had their flaws, too; the endless tedious planet-scanning in ME2 and the ending of ME3, which was almost certainly responsible for EA being voted the worst company in America, twice, in Consumerist's poll, when it's never placed or shown in other years.) There are definitely things that need to be fixed in the next game, assuming that we'll get one, but I think that it will require less of a leap in quality than the one we saw between ME1 and ME2.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:35 PM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

I thought it was good (the article, haven't played the game), though like a lot of good post-mortems of tough projects somewhat stress inducing as a lot of mistakes hit close to home, either from personal experience or in a "there but for the grace of god" way.

Possibly the most interesting tidbit to me was that the 'expert' scoring predictions was way better than actual reviews. I wish the article spent some time on it and how accurate it usually was. It certainly implied that there was a bit of groupthink and/or Bioware hate involved, as memes made it cool to trash Andromeda.
posted by mark k at 9:39 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

"No Man’s Sky had not yet been announced—BioWare came up with this concept separately."

I think you'll find Elite, released for the BBC Micro in 1984, came up with this concept.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:38 AM on June 8, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm playing it right now on PC, and finding it not bad, but not nearly as compelling as the original trilogy. There seems to be somewhat of a poverty of ideas, and I'm getting a little pissed off at the way events and tasks trigger sometimes ([minor spoilers] Quick! You have to find the person with the infectious disease before it spreads! Wait! Before you do that, your ship's doctor is drinking in a bar because she's a bit sad!). Looks beautiful, but seriously glitchy at times, too.

I am finding it a bit disconcerting how young Ryder seems in this game. It may also be the one I designed happens to look rather young, but it's almost at the point where it's going to feel weird sexing up some random alien.

I'm still going to do it, but it's going to be weird.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:45 AM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also, that fucking Nomad.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:14 AM on June 8, 2017

If anyone has, I dunno, a million hours to spare, I highly recommend reading the 50-part (yes it is 50 parts that is not a joke) Mass Effect Retrospective. It makes a convincing argument that the problems with the Mass Effect franchise started during the initial development of Mass Effect 2, which after playing through the whole franchise again a couple of months ago, I would have to agree with.
posted by Automocar at 7:24 AM on June 8, 2017

I think you'll find Elite, released for the BBC Micro in 1984, came up with this concept.

Or maybe SunDog, which came out just a month later but had more depth than Elite. You could land on planets! The old Star Trek game from the 1970s had similar elements too although the detail of the universe generated was awfully limited. Anyway, it's an idea that has some history :-)

I was so excited to play Andromeda and then the reviews came out and I've never even bought it. The real shame is that the story is apparently not very compelling; no amount of patching can fix that short of a full rewrite. I consoled myself by finally finishing Witcher 3, which was hugely rewarding. Also NieR: Automata which is a different kind of game but pretty remarkable.
posted by Nelson at 8:07 AM on June 8, 2017

This somewhat typical if you start a project without a strong vision of what you want to do. And NEVER listen to focus groups, these things are useless.

And if you've got a functional animation pipeline and TRAINED artists you don't ditch it, team knowledge/expertise is the one of the more precious assets you have and peole get throwing it away because "the other thing is better". It's rarely better enough to justify the hit you'll take.

And...

They use the same release-week GIFs that we've already seen dozens of times, even though subsequent patches have fixed a lot of those problems.

You (almost?) never escape your release week GIFs. Even if the glitches are caused by driver bugs.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 10:49 AM on June 8, 2017

I still believe in that old Bioware magic, though. I hope that Dylan, whatever it is, has spaceships.

There are rumors of Elder Scrolls in spaaaaaace if you want to pin all your hopes and dreams on something.
posted by The Gaffer at 11:56 AM on June 8, 2017

Elder Scrolls in spaaaaaace

You mean Battlespire?

(If anyone actually wants to fall down the rumour rabbithole, the space game that Bethesda will probably be announcing soon is evidently called "Starfield".)

(If anyone wants to fall down an Elder Scrolls apocryphal lore rabbit hole, start with this Reddit comment on "spacelore".)
posted by tobascodagama at 1:17 PM on June 8, 2017

MY ANSWERS TO SOME OF YOUR QUESTIONS SPOILERS AHOY 100% HEADCANON/NO-PRIZE FODDER TAKE ONLY AS DIRECTED DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL:

Why are we discovering the secrets of another dead race?
Who said that the Remnant were dead? (And there is a lot more to the Remnant tech that you find than there ever was to the Protheans in the original trilogy, which was limited mostly to cryptic movies beamed directly into your head and, in ME3, the Crucible.)

Why is the Archon so dull?
Needs more hobbies, I dunno. By all indications, he's a bureaucrat gone rogue.

Why is there only one new "friendly" alien race?
You do remember that the whole point of their going to the Heleus Cluster is that it was supposed to have no sentient races occupying it, right? Just a lot of habitable planets ready for the settling?

Why is the backstory of the Angara more chariots of the gods bullshit?
Because it's more interesting than that they just sort of sprung up? I've got a theory about them being the Remnant's proxy warriors and the Kett being the ones for whomever the Remnant were at war with.

Why is Drack basically just Wrex?
That's a disappointment for me, too, although it's still fun to have someone like that around. I was hoping, based on the character art, that he'd be more like Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.

Why is the Outcast colonization of an Angaran port not a huge fucking colonialist red flag?
You mean it's not? Seriously, Kadara really is a hive of scum and villainy. Although at least part of that is on the Nexus/Initiative, since what did they think that the exiles were going to do?

It's profoundly jarring that during the various anti-Roekaar missions you wind up killing dozens and dozens of Angarans, but the weirdness of this is only barely glanced at.
Extremists gonna extreme, I guess.

And why is the Remnant mystery so contrived, even by Space Opera standards? Seriously, only the specific combination of biological and artificial intelligence can interface with it?
Again, we don't know that the Remnant are permanently gone; they set up robot guardians of their vaults and monoliths, so it's possible that the only-Ryder-can-crack-it thing was more of the same. I would love it if future games had them coming back and going, "What the ever-loving fuck?" at finding the vaults activated &c.

And speaking of which, how does it make sense that a Alec Ryder, a career special forces agent would be able to develop a groundbreaking artificial intelligence, regardless of how sad he was about his dying wife? Seriously, that's like a navy seal retiring and writing TensorFlow.
Well, why not? Consider the post-badass career of Miyamoto Musashi.

And within the Andromeda mission itself, why isn't it treated as a much bigger deal for tens of thousands of people to choose to make a one-way trip during which everyone they've ever known will die of old age?
Just as many people went out to found colonies in the Terminus Systems of the Milky Way, despite the danger from batarians and others and no support whatsoever from the Alliance. Other races had their own wildcat colonies.

And if my guess at the conclusion of the "gather all your dad's memories" subplot is right that the Andromeda Initiative is yet another Illusive Man joint I'm gonna roll my eyes so hard...
Another prediction o' mine: The Benefactor went to Andromeda/Heleus with them.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:18 PM on June 8, 2017

And why couldn't I just shoot Sloane Kelly myself? Why do I have to go through all this Reyes "Deal with the Devil" bullshit? This is the second time in a Bioware game that a potential antagonist has had the same look/hairstyle as the character I designed. Naturally, I should be able to kill her.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:36 PM on June 8, 2017 [3 favorites]