It didn't take long before the tell-all articles started showing up on this one. It looks like a classic case of executive meddling, with plenty of blame to go around. Kotaku's Jason Shreier reports. Interesting takeaway for me that the bulk of the game was thrown away and redone multiple times, with most of the work on the shipping game coming in the last 18 months. You can kinda feel that in the plot, like they had to squish and stretch and existing story outline to fit the final game's layout. It also looks almost like a Destiny-level project management screwup. I'm still reading through the whole thing, but it's a fascinating in the can't-look-away-from-a-trainwreck way.

Not a great surprise, really. I think the underlying problem is that it sort of seems like BioWare is chasing other developers' popular games and ideas (open world! procedural generation!) rather than being confident in what they're actually good at. That, and EA forcing them to use an engine that basically sucks at what they're trying to use it for (and as someone who thought the environments were really 'blah' I'm not even sure it's very good at that).

Classic case of executive meddling? That's certainly not what I took away from the article. It seems like Andromeda's issues really came down to insufficient pre-production work, uncontrolled scope changes, issues with Frostbite, and (the evergreen reason) miscommunication between members of the project team.

In any case, it's fascinating to read this after Waypoint's expansive Halo oral history. A lot of the problems that kept cropping up for Bungie seemed to be in full effect at BioWare. Maybe it's because of the inherent large scope of games set in space? It's a shame regardless because I quite enjoyed Andromeda for what it was. Hopefully we see some DLC come out, but I have my doubts.

@lawgamer: It seems to be another case of independent simultaneous invention. For whatever reason the video game industry, similar to other entertainment media, all seem to get the same idea at the same time. Supposedly the procedural gen period was from before NMS was announced. It is weird that we got Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, and then Andromeda all setting out to do similar things around the same time.

I was more thinking of the mandate from EA to use Frostbite with that. An engine that had never been used for RPGs before.

@freedom4556: I suppose that's fair, although since DA: Inquisition also used Frostbite it seems a little much to say that was the root of Andromeda's issues.

@darth_navster: Maybe, though it sounds like Edmonton did a lot of the grunt work there, and Montreal and Edmonton had something falling out during the latter stages of pre-production and that was compounded by all the staffing turnover.

True, in which case the execs didn't meddle enough! ;-)

Well according to the article, and assuming it's accurate, it sounds like EA forcing frostbite on the devs, directorial changes late, too many teams too far apart, and an understaffed animation dept, really were the main culprits for the troubled development.

The game is pretty damn good anyway in my book. I've had very few issues playing through it on XB1, and they are still patching it and making the game better(1.08 due any day). I guess it's a miraculous thing it shipped as it is, but I pray they don't shelve the franchise for long. It reminds me of the oh-so ambitious ME1 and all the potential it showed, but with some issues and rough edges. I hope Bioware learns from the mistakes and enables a dev team to make a better sequel, and a third for a trilogy.

A couple things in here that stand out:
Lack of funding for an ME game speaks to executive incompetence at EA.
Failures in the planning stage and inability to make difficult decisions either means their senior staff were not sufficiently good managers or means that the structure was insufficiently clear for people to take the lead
The mismatch between the story and the small number of actual colonies makes a lot more sense now.

Reading the article, it's kind of a miracle the game even came out at all-much less in the state it was actually released in. It's a damn shame, really. It almost seems like it was set up to fail with the engine issues and Bioware branch drama.

Thanks for linking this news article, @freedom4556. It's an interesting read. I'm not at all surprised by the contents, having played Mass Effect: Andromeda to 95% completion and seen how rubbish it is first hand... but it's still interesting. :-P

What confuses me is the intermittent EA hate that I saw in some of the Kotaku comments. Frankly, it doesn't sound like EA did anything wrong in the slightest (and this is coming from someone who still looks back at Westwood, Pandemic, and Origin with a wistful, embittered sigh). Okay, maybe they're making everyone use Frostbite Engine... but that is less a nefarious thing and more of a "wow, look at the licensing fees we were paying for Unreal during the 360 / PS3 era. Let's just build an in-house engine and cut Epic out of the loop" thing. For the games EA usually makes, Frostbite works very well. It's a "Formula 1 sports car" engine for a company that makes metaphorical Formula 1 sports cars.

Granted, big RPGs with lots of dialogue, animations, and underlying systems are not such said usual fare... but Bioware Edmonton already grappled with Frostbite, learned how to work within the limitations of the engine, built a bunch of new code necessary to get a RPG off the ground, and churned out Dragon Age: Inquisition. The groundwork was more than done for a new Mass Effect entry. At the risk of sounding condescending, all Bioware Montreal really had to do was take a pre-existing game engine already fine-tuned for shooting games and driving games, apply Edmonton's accompanying in-house code and work that enabled such said engine to run a RPG, outsource some textures and sound files, and build Mass Effect: Inquisition.

Frostbite doesn't do big open worlds well? Then don't do big open worlds. Keep the planetary "zones" the size of the zones in Dragon Age: Inquisition or smaller. Know your limits and push against them a bit. A bit... not "let's build a procedurally generated galaxy of hundreds of planets to visit on a game engine not at all designed for such a thing and then desperately wrack our brains trying to figure out how to add meaningful content and story to all that fluff!"

The only parts of the game that weren't irredeemable were combat, driving the Bat-Mako (honestly feels like the batmobile from Arkham Knight), and the multiplayer... which apparently were also the only things not constantly re-scoped and retooled by an unfocused, overly ambitious, poorly coordinated game development studio.

Man, it feels weird to defend EA so heartily after they effectively hamstrung TitanFall 2 and knocked out some of my favorite studios. I'll never forgive you for this, Mass Effect: Andromeda. :-D What a dumpster fire.

Edit: also, $40 million dollars and 5 years of development time sound like neither too little funding nor too little time to me considering that...

A. They already had an in-house game engine with lots of internal support available (EA owns DICE and Bioware Edmonton) and plenty of proprietary code already in existence to reconfigure such said game engine for an RPG.

B. They already had a pre-release Dragon Age: Inquisition to use as a foundation for how to structure and plan Mass Effect: Inquisition. Inquisition Keep is now the Tempest, the capital of Orlais is now The Nexus, and each planet is a separate zone you reach via the Tempest's galaxy map. There. Heck, build a tentative vertical slice of your game as a glorified Dragon Age: Inquisition mod as a proof of concept and go from there. Not... what they ended up giving us. Ugh.

Is it "executive meddling" if they already own Frostbite? I'm sure they saved thousands on not having to license out some other engine or develop one in house.

I would classify it as executive meddling if BioWare told EA Frostbite really didn't work for the game they were trying to make and were told to use it anyway. Whatever they might have saved in not having to license an engine they seem to have lost in the extra man-hours banging their head against technical issues.

I'm also curious about how much cross-team communication there was between the ME team and the DA team? BioWare wants to play up their creative interchange between their various studios, but it seems like DA:I faced a lot of the same issues trying to make an RPG in Frostbite. That game came out at least alright, so they might have been a good resource to talk to, but the article kind of implies that the teams never really talked.

@lawgamer: Scheier's sources seem to suggest an open rivalry between Edmonton and Montreal, at least after the change in creative leads.

Developers in Edmonton said they thought the game was floundering in pre-production and didn’t have a strong enough vision, while developers in Montreal thought that Edmonton was trying to sabotage them, taking ideas and staff from Montreal for its own projects, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dylan.

...Some at Montreal saw the directorial shift as Edmonton trying to take over their game, while some at Edmonton saw it as them needing to come in and rescue it.

The other important thing to remember is pre-production for ME:A would have been taking place during the development of DA:I, so a lot of those solutions from Edmonton might very well have been done during and after Montreal needed to have had them for their pipeline planning.

@freedom4556: Timeline-wise, Dragon Age: Inquisition started development in 2010 and came out November 2014 and Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development from 2012 to 2017. Assuming that the last year of Dragon Age: Inquisition was polishing and bug-testing and that Bioware did their usual shtick of trying to keep all their studios involved on projects in some fashion, I'd find it hard to believe that Montreal wasn't aware of Edmonton's struggles and solutions even at the earliest phase of Mass Effect: Andromeda's development. Chronologically speaking, I think it's more probable that Montreal dropped the ball.

I find it hilarious that a game said to be so bad still has a 70% on metacritic. Im probably not going to read this, but seems like a classic case of biting off more than you can chew and fixing what aint broke. And Inquisition used frostbite, so that excuse doesnt make much sense. If anything mass effects action combat should have been much easier since its a shooter engine.

Not surprised Andromeda had development issues but the animation problems seem odd with it being Bioware's second game on Frostbite Inquisition had fewer problems with an equally big sandbox including better animation and character creator, animosity between Montreal and Edmonton must be palpable if they don't share basic lessons and tools. All of EA studio's use Frostbite it seems a very capable engine FIFA transitioned to Frostbite between yearly iterations adding ton's more animations in the process.

If you actually read the article, it details exactly why Frostbite caused problems (Hint: it had nothing to do with the combat).

that was an interesting read- and it certainly garners sympathy for the devs- it must be so demoralizing to be attached to something you might legitimately love- only to have it seemingly mismanaged. then you crunch like hell, and for what? embarassing gifs and middling reviews.

it does bum me out to see early in the process they moved off the idea of a prequel and immediately thought to blow-the-fuck-out the scope of the game. as a fan of the universe i don't want 100 procedural planets. i'd take 10 good hours in a LA Noire-meets-CSEC game. or even a very contained story about the first contact wars.

just because you have an enormous universe and mountains of lore doesn't mean you need to tell an impossibly large story.

Reading the article bummed me out and made me way more sympathetic with the team. Their hopes to deliver on the potential ME1 held, but was never realized in the sequels.
Just to see poor management drag everything down.

It's nice to know that even if they had stuck with their original premise, it would've been just as crap. "Exploring" hundreds of procedurally worlds is a goddamn terrible idea. Nothing means anything because it's just a bunch of shit thrown together by your dumbass algorithm. "Buhh, I went to one planet and it had a waterfall." "Hurr, I went to a planet that had a waterfall AND a cliff!" "Wow!" It's a planet! Planets are large! Don't treat them like they're street corners!

Bioware sound like a bunch of disorganized amateurs and it's been reflected in the last four or five games they've churned out.

@bocckob: um, did you read the piece?

I just hope it doesn't kill the fransiche. There is nothing wrong with Mass Effect it was just this game and just because of the development problems. You could still make a great ME game.

That was such a good article I didn't even care that I was on Kotaku!

In all seriousness though, it was a good read. Doesn't sound like a great atmosphere for creating an ambitious game. Sucks for the people working on it. It sounds like a lot of the reception was warranted, but I'm surprised it managed to ship at all.

Some publishers would look at the result and take some serious measures and delay the game, maybe even kind of reboot development (like Square did with FFXV or Sony with TLG). Which makes people angry, because they are waiting for a long time, but in the end they get something that was worth the wait.
EA just throws it on the shelves, sell enough copies, leaving people unsatisfied with the product and thereby probably killing a once succesful franchise.

hmmm I just joined so I don't want to get banned right off the bat.

Jason Shrier went to the masS effect andromeda subreddit to defend his article.He was not well received.People like me, people who agreed with him, well we weren't well received either.So to avoid controversy if you are interested you should go to the mea subreddit and read what happens for yourself.

I was kicked off the subreddit. It isn't a great loss.

I expect when the deniers understand there won't be any ME dlc and have to accept it that subreddit will go away.That won't be a great loss either.

They are still holding out hope dlc will be announced at the GDW but I don't see that happening.

I liked MEA but fanboys get o n my nerves. The Bioware I use to love BG1and 2 back when I joined the pre-EA BSN, that company is gone.It doesn't exist any more.

Some of us realize that and I hope more do as time goes by.So that most fans will accept that and realize it is time to move on from Bioware permanently.

Hmm if you look at the timelines between the two games and also when "proper" dev time started on ME:A (what was it, they figured the game was cobbled together within 18 months?) I don't think its fair to say thy should have just used the solutions to the engine problems found within Inquisition.

The majority of the initial design of Andromeda seems to have been focusing on something far larger scale than Inquisition. The solutions that Inquisition team had may not have looked applicable at the time or until too late when they actually started to develop the game that it eventually became. Saying "just make Mass Effect: Inquisition" doesn't seem fair either, they dreamt maybe a little too big but at least they were striving for something new. Not moving from the same basic concepts is something Bioware had been criticised for at the time so they were being ambitious and rightfully so. Shame it didn't work out.

The real shame of it is that the original idea, "No Man's Sky + Mass Effect" is SUPER INTERESTING. One of the big reasons No Man's Sky didn't work was a nonexistent story and a dearth of content. Put some Mass Effect writers on that shit, and have their small army of artists, voice actors and designers pumping out assets, that game could have really been something special. The two games are complimentary: what was flawed in one was good in the other. Together they might have just made one decent product!