What Are you Playing Now & General Game Discussions

[Stewy]

(08-21-2023, 04:39 PM)XenoMorph Wrote: oh yeah.. Andromeda has/had the smoothest combat and gameplay overall of the series.     And to be honest by time i played i had very little issues.  (but i didnt play it till 2021 or 22 lol )   But the characters themselves just didn't seem as well written as previous games.  Which bioware is definitely a victim of their own success in that regard. 

NOTE that Andromeda was never supposed to be a RPG.  It was supposed to be a space exploration game with action adventure style combat in the ME universe, akin to NMS (before NMS was born).   They got the procedurally generated world to work and build, but they could not get the worlds into the Frostbite engine.  They spent 3.5 years in pre-production going down the Space Adventure path, when the Producer left Bioware/EA completely and left Bioware with essentially no game.  Bioware usually builds out 80-90% of their story, characters, narrative in Pre-Production, then builds the rest of the game around the story.  However, because Andromeda was never supposed to be a RPG, there was no story written for it in Pre-Production.

Fast forward 3.5 years and with 18 months till release there is no game.  Bioware comes in sees nothing of the previous game salvageable except the gameplay, and starts from scratch making a RPG.  Everything was written while the worlds were being built by hand.  Instead of having time to flesh things out and see if they work, they had to be in CRUNCH for 18 straight months.  That's why there were so many bugs, things felt unfinished, the story shaky at best.  No time for polish, testing, uniformity.  No class system, no reputation system, not as features, but because there was no time for implementation and balance.

Then Bioware showed they learned nothing and repeated the exact same errors with Anthem.  They only get one more shot.  If DAD isn't a hit, they're going to be done I'm afraid.