Mass Effect Andromeda - who's to blame?

incompetence, they had freaking 5 years to make this game and they screwed it up.For once EA was not to blame

@musalala: so all on Bioware? You don't think things like, maybe EA insisted they used frostbite, to prove it could run a big rpg could've been at play?

Or EA gave them time constraints that they couldn't meet? You don't think it could've been both EA and Bioware in tandem that effed this up?

I'm not saying those are emphatically true statements, but possible?

Have yet to play it but just for the heck of it I'll blame greedy cash grab. Gotta be at least part of it. :P

@SecretPolice: written all over it. Imagine if they were simply committed to making a really great product?

@TheEroica:

Such a shame as you, me, and millions of others had ME:A at or near the top of our, can't wait, must have list of games only to get by far the worst ME of the bunch or so I've heard.

@SecretPolice: I just never expected it to be tosses to the dogs like that. I mean, what does a game need to do to earn the right for a quality sequel on new hardware? I just never envisioned mass effect to be the red headed stepchild of the Bioware experience

@TheEroica:

Yeah, I've heard so much of that and now I'm not likely to play it until it's offered as GWG some future month but I doubt that will be anytime soon. lol

Well those don't seem like unreasonable demands, EA usually royally screws things up by rushing games out ala Dragon Age 2. EA wanting them to use a propriety engine instead of wasting money on an outside engine seems reasonable and they had 5 years dude there were no time constraints here . You might argue that EA should have kept a closer watch as this was a new team, but even then its not like these were greenhorns fresh outta college. The team mismanaged their time and resources and completely lacked any kind of vision for the game.

So incompetence

I keep hearing how Frostbite while being an excellent engine for FPS and even TPS games, where it's mostly seen in the EA stable, was difficult to adapt to RPG's. But I'm still unclear where the problems lie. Clearly not in the environment designs, as we got some pretty landscapes in Dragon Age Inquisition, and even more stunning vistas in Andromeda. I don't think character models are an issue aside from mismanagement in the animations, or what came down to art design choices made to appease political correct agendas. Nor anything like lighting or physics.

But of course there are other functions to an engine besides the purely visual. So in what regards could Frostbite not handle the genre specific mechanics (or requirements) of an RPG?

Whats to blame?

Their formula doesn't work anymore. Really, fans do not want to admit, the problems with Andromeda plague all their games.

And really after not working on DLC the game badly needs, I am done with Bioware outside of Austin as SWTOR still is interesting.

@AdobeArtist: open world + dozens if not hundreds of facial animations/interactions does not bold well for the engine. While DA3 had better animations it comes down to DA3 having the better coding/animators than MEA and even then, DA3 had some horrible body animations while it had decent facial animations.

Oh and people need to realize it was 5 years between ME3 release and MEA, doesn't mean they were working on MEA the whole time, in fact MEA was only made in a rushed 18 month schedule, which honestly they needed a good another 6 months of work on the game. The sad thing is 95% of the bashing MEA got was it's animations, which is not only sad and pathetic, the rest of the game was pretty decent if you weren't daft expecting the new crew to be as good as Shepards crew.

That's not entirely true, the vast majority of the bashing was the bugs the persistent and at times hilarious bugs.Death by a thousand cuts some one mentioned as there wasn't a giant bug just lots and lots of little bugs and glitches that ruined the game

@texasgoldrush: I'd take a kotor remastered all day at this point. Of course I worry now they'd eff it up.

The problem with Bioware is that the KOTOR formula doesn't work anymore. Its too formulaic, too predicable, and storytelling has moved passed RPG exposition dumping. MEA used the same formula KOTOR used, and in 2017, doesn't work anymore. Not with games such as TW3. If anything, the advances of the Mass Effect trilogy had on the industry kept the formula alive longer than it should have.

And really, SWTOR has gotten very interesting the past two years. There is going to be a huge twist, an epic betrayal (and a divisive storytelling risk) tomorrow.

Here's an article regarding Frosbite issues: Andromeda's animation problems attributed to Frostbite, understaffed departments, and last-minute changes

For Inquisition, it sounds like they basically had to curb their old design philosophy and be patient while the engine team worked on stuff they needed. They spun this as a positive but I'm not so sure that's the truth. I wonder if they had the same issues while developing Andromeda? If this game is the best they could do with Frostbite, I'd give them their own branch and tell them to keep their hands off my codebase were I managing (and I'm not) engine development.

What also surprises me is the fact that EA said they will delay Andromeda if the have to in order to fix whatever problems it has but sadly, they didn't even delay it as they said it. I'll just say EA is to blame, for not delaying it and fix the problem at hand.

Bugs and glitches in a game?? what I've never seen them before

LOL dude lets be real here, every open world game has bugs but mass effect Andromeda was really bad, critics both "professional" and user agree, hell even the most hardcore bioware fan acknowledges this. The videos on you tube focused on the bugs of which the facial animations were included. Comparing the witcher 3 and Mass effect: Andromeda is a bit disingenuous.I responded because you claimed everyone was obsessed with the facial animations which is not true

I know you're playing devil's advocate here but I've seen many people saying the 5 years they had to create ME:A was an "unrealistic time constraint" and that they needed at least another year to finish it properly. Then mention Star Citizen/Squadron 42 and it's lambasted as a scam because it hasn't released inside 4 years, yet it has a far greater scope and is far, far more complicated.

Gamers are very strange creatures indeed.

@musalala: Since you missed the point, every game has bugs and glitches, even highly praised games. Anyone who's been gaming (as in gaming and not actually complaining about dumb shit) the past few years now most of them eventually get ironed out with patches. As someone who buys 30-40 video games a year (I'm at 26 already this year), MEA's animations weren't that bad. The funny thing is most of the issues MEA had (animations, glitches and bugs) the previous 3 ME games had em, the only difference was ME trilogy had a 12/10 set of characters.

Gamers and journalist now and days complain about the DUMBEST SHIT and yea people have their opinions, but guess what, opinions are like *** holes everyone has one. A prime example of this shit is reading the comments of what people are saying for the newly released star fighter gameplay at gamescom for BF2, "this isn't what we wanted"....what...the....****, it's exactly what people wanted (space battles), we're literally getting 90% of the shit we wanted in BF1 in this game and people still FIND SHIT to complain about. The sad thing is people have such high expectations for games today it's getting to the point why even fraking play/buy games if people are just gonna ***** 98% of the time.

MEA was a prime victim of that shit, nitpicking. Hell coming from someone who loved ME 1 and 2 (sorry but the ending for 3 ruined that game for me) and enjoyed the prequel books of Saren, I knew MEA wouldn't top the first two ME games cause it was set up for success for the trilogy games cause they had an amazing protagonist, crew, story and lore, 3 games worth of that shit. Anyone that went into MEA hyping it was the next ME2, don't blame EA or Bioware, blame yourself for hoping a game would meet such high expectations when pretty much everyone from the trilogy (dev team wise) weren't on the project. It's like with the new Alien movie, everyone was expecting another Alien god tier of a movie and what happened, they ripped it to pieces.

Does MEA have flaws?, yes it does, so does every other game. Does it deserve to be put on a list like No Mans Sky?, hell NO.

The game was dead but it appears they dug up its corpse just to burn it.

Today they've confirmed there is to be no single player DLC, so if you bought a season pass for the quarian ark....oops. Effectively Mass Effect is dead. And no, it's not the fault of people like me who bought and dared to dislike the game. It's Bioware. They put a shitty, tenth rate, agenda driven team in charge of their biggest franchise so they could work on another and they've thankfully paid the price.

Right so everybody and their mother is wrong and the glitches and bugs in mass effect were not a big deal because you say so? The fact that critics and ordinary gamers were on the same page says a lot as that rarely happens.And you can't even blame "SJW politics" or whatever as bioware are famous for such things.

Look ,If you loved the game great I am happy for you but acting as though there is some hate campaign that is unsubstantiated is straight dick riding dude this game had serious problems. Also:

The funny thing is most of the issues MEA had (animations, glitches and bugs) the previous 3 ME games had em- straight up fucking b*llsh*t and you know it. The original trilogy was not as buggy or glitchy as Andromeda, janky animations here and there sure but on this level absolutely not. And this is worse than no mans sky as they were an untested indie developer, this was bioware Freaking Bioware the RPG Gods who gave us one of the greatest trilogies in gaming.

Not sure who to blame. I don't see how you can say EA rushed Bioware when they had 5 years to work on the game. Then again, EA was the one who gave this massive responsibility to a bunch of untalented hacks which many consider to be Bioware's rejects instead of the main team. I don't care anymore. I moved on after I beat the game and traded it in which was a month after I bought it. I wish people will just stop talking about this game, it broke my heart.

But every game in the series WAS rushed out the door and aspects suffered. All the games have issues caused by them being rushed out...ME1's mission and planet design, ME2's main plot, ME3's original ending. MEA suffered on the techincal side.

The fact of the matter is that overall, MEA has the same issues that Bioware games in the past did.

But The end result was not as bad as Andromeda, so even though they were rushed they came out relatively unscathed on release. Please note I'm not saying the og trilogy was perfect but they were a hell of a lot better than Daftdromeda

All the characters look like gender studies students.

I blame EA and Bioware for this debacle. EA because if you knew the game was going to be that buggy and under developed then give the developer time to craft a better experience. Then I blame Bioware. One you put multiplayer in the game which honestly since Mass Effect 3 has never been needed and is just some add-on at best. Two the story could have been something interesting and unique but yet you had to go the route of "be the hero of the galaxy". You forced that narrative to early to the story when you could have easily made this about Ryder and the initiative just trying to deal with and maintain the diplomatic relations among the planets. SMH Overall bye bye Mass Effect it was an effort but not the one you deserved. Clearly Anthem was a much greater priority.

Since you have trouble understanding and you didn't even watch the video I showed you, even other triple A games have bugs and glitches , The Witcher 3 actually had worse ones than MEA and it's still praised by the mass, hell even TW3 is in my top 5 games list. Glitches happen in games, it happens even more when you have big RPGs like TW,3, Skyrim, MEA ect ect ect. Like ME1 and ME2, TW3 suffers from the "this game is sooo awesome who gives a ***** about glitches". You can argue that well they were awesome and good so thats why they get a pass, no that's called being a ****** hypocrite, that's like saying drugs are bad then you go off and do crack.

The funny/sad thing is most of the facial animations, bugs and glitches have been ironed out by now and if Bioware delayed MEA tell say this month, people would still ***** about the dumb shit in MEA. Also critics and gamers on the same page?, are you daft? (I'd say you already were so thats a given), going by metacritic critics gave MEA an avg of 71, user scores were 4.8 and then you have gamers making memes about MEA while critics didn't so please tell me how they were on the same page. Cause a 7/10 game isn't bad at all and people are already have been labeling MEA one of the worst games this gen, which it's not even close to being the worst let alone one of the worst games.

Also sense people have a memory of a potato, here's a few bugs and glitches for the previous ME games since some how you think they didn't have any.

Then you have the numerous save glitches that have happened in all 4 games, the numerous exploits that the games have.

I did watch the videos and I even acknowledged that all games have glitches what I am challenging is the fact that the glitches were as persistent and as pervasive as Mass effect Andromeda, that the issue here, not that the witcher 3 or any game didn't have glitches. The overwhelming consensus with reviewers both professional and user as well as hardened fans is that Mass effect was far worse. In addition all these games u mentioned didn't have the other problems Mass effect had which were ( again this is the consensus by everyone) Boring characters, boring and poorly executed story, stilted wooden juvenile writing, painful tedious side missions and so on.Not to mention the hype behind a new release from one of the most revered RPG makers of all time. So yeah it was crap.Either you are right or everyone else is right but very very rarely do you have everyone on the same page on an issue. One reviewer,I think its the giant bomb guy mention,it was death by a thousand cuts with regards to the glitches in the game.

@musalala: AGAIN, I even explained it wasn't Biowares fault you or critics thinking MEA would be as good as the first two (cause honestly lets face it people are only now praising ME3 cause of MEA, when in reality the endings pretty much destroyed ME3), MEA was against thee best wrpg with a full set of cast that fleshed out over 3 games. I even used other forms of media that got the "MEA treatment" from fans and critics putting something on a pedestal that the originals set that the following entries didn't meet the hype.

Glitches and bugs are prominent in the ME games and huge wrpgs, bashing MEA for something that's been all of the games is not only stupid but if you're not gonna knock the previous ME games for having them then don't bother giving MEA shit for them. The sad thing also is the previous ME games also had bad facial animations as well Joker, Ashley, Jacob and a few others had very un life like motions, which all 4 entries in the series we see the Alien races having the superior facial animations compared to their human counter parts minus Miranda whom probably has the best human facial animations for humans in the first 3 games (lets face it the animations weren't that great in ME1).

Then you have characters/crew, no one beats Wrex, Garrus, Miranda, Liara, Shepard, Legion, Tali and Mordin. They had 1-3 games of fleshing out their characters, while MEA didn't have explosive characters it was nice to see Ryder have character even though it was too Nathan Drake for my liking but it was a nice change of pace from the gritty soldier persona Shepard had. Cora and Drack were pretty decent characters as well, I prefer Cora over any of Shepards human crew mates, while Drack isn't a Wrex (my boy), he's 1,000,000x better than what Grunt was. Peebee wasn't a Liara and her character just was too rebel for my taste, she just wasn't good nor bad which Jaal was nether bad nor good, and lastly the other two I didn't care for at all (Vetra and Liam). But you know what the previous ME games also had some meh-bad crew mates as well like Jack, Jacob, Zaeed, Thane, Samara, Grunt, Kasumi, Vega, EDI, Javik, Kaiden so you can see the previous ME games had unlikable characters as well.

To put it simple and short, EA nor Bioware made MEA fail, it was dumbass memes and critcs/people who are fraking hypocrites that made it fail.

No, Andromeda's real problem is that it was released in 2017. Had it been released in 2014, it would have been better received.

Andromeda is actually on par quality wise with the trilogy, especially post patch, however, the standards in the industry are different now than 2007-2012. People just do not want to admit this.

I honestly feel like we should be refunded lol

It has to be the developer, but in fairness fans had unrealistic expectations, like most games.

Indeed, after all not every developer can be like Nintendo, who delivered a true GOAT like Zelda