![]() (For clarity, we’ll refer to it as Andromeda for the rest of this story.)īy 2013, Mass Effect: Andromeda had entered pre-production, the phase of development in which the team behind a game figures out the scope, workflow, and outline of what needs to get done. The word “Contact” stuck, though, and that became the codename for the fourth Mass Effect. So BioWare changed course, ditching the prequel idea. “We wanted to do a game set after the trilogy, not during or before.” “The feedback from the community, focus groups and the team working on the project was the same,” said one person who worked on the game. The answers were resounding: most people wanted a sequel, not a prequel. In late 2012, Hudson asked fans if they’d prefer to see a game before or after the original trilogy. ![]() One early idea was to develop a prequel to Mass Effect, set during the First Contact Wars of the series’ lore, when the humans of Mass Effect’s galaxy had interacted with aliens for the first time. Let’s focus on bringing back exploration.’” We figured out the combat, which is awesome. “Lots of people were like, ‘Hey, we never fully tapped the potential of the first Mass Effect. “The goal was to go back to what Mass Effect 1 promised but failed to deliver, which was a game about exploration,” said one person who worked on the game. They could pick a brand new area of space and start over. ![]() There’d be no Reaper threat, no Commander Shepard. This group, which included several veteran BioWare employees as well as Hudson, who wanted to help guide the project through its infancy, had lots of fresh ideas for a new Mass Effect. In early conversations throughout 2012, a team of directors in Montreal brainstormed ways in which to make the next Mass Effect feel distinct. Meanwhile, BioWare Montreal, which was founded in 2009 to develop downloadable content like Mass Effect 3’s Omega expansion, would lead production on the next Mass Effect. (That new IP’s code-name, a source said, came because Hudson and team wanted to make the Bob Dylan of video games-one that would be referenced for years to come.) ![]() Rather than develop a Mass Effect 4 at the studio’s main headquarters in Edmonton, which had made the first three games, BioWare decided to put its Montreal studio in charge.Ĭasey Hudson, executive producer on the main trilogy, would start a new team at BioWare Edmonton to work on a brand new intellectual property, which they gave the code-name Dylan. Outside of that whole ending kerfuffle, both sequels were widely loved.įor the fourth Mass Effect, BioWare wanted a fresh start. So BioWare doubled down on what worked-the story, the dialogue, the combat-and ditched the exploration, axing the Mako for subsequent games in the trilogy, Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3 (2012). Fans and critics praised its character design and storytelling, yet many people hated the Mako, a clunky land rover that the player could drive to traverse planets. The first Mass Effect, released in 2007, was critically acclaimed but hardly perfect. (EA and BioWare declined to comment for this article.) This was a game with ambitious goals but limited resources, and in some ways, it’s miraculous that BioWare shipped it at all. Many games share some of these problems, but to those who worked on it, Andromeda felt unusually difficult. ![]() The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, office politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. I’ve spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. 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? Almost immediately, fans asked how this happened. ![]()
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