BioWare is undoubtedly one of the most respected development teams in the gaming scene, especially as regards the Western-style role-playing games. Company founded in 1995, over the years the Canadian software house has in fact churned out iconic titles such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and, in recent years, Dragon Age e Mass Effect. However, like the vast majority of companies that achieve success and popularity, there was no lack of some obstacles along the way, just think of the production problems of Star Wars: The Old Republic, to the criticized Dragon Age II or to the controversy it has involved Mass Effect 3 and its questionable ending. Despite this, however, Bioware has always managed to stand up and regain the consent of the public, especially in the case of the third chapter of the space opera starring Shepard, where thanks to the DLC (free and not) it was possible to appease the frustration of the fans. Despite everything, it is always important to remember that we do not live in the world of fairy tales and that not all stories have a happy ending. Let's project ourselves to the 2017, the year in which BioWare after a long wait released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One e PC his Mass Effect: Andromeda, a spin-off of the series that made the software house famous in the distant past 2007.
Obviously you already know this, but it is right to repeat it for the record: Andromeda turned out to be a disaster, both for critics and the public, and in hindsight this project was only the prelude to the real decadence of BioWare, given that two years later a certain Anthem. But how did a studio like BioWare go from star to rags in a couple of years? What went wrong with Mass Effect: Andromeda?
Internal changes in BioWare
Having reached the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy, not without difficulty, at BioWare the intention was not to remain anchored to the past but to explore new narrative and playful opportunities with the new chapter of the series. This revolution, however, would not have involved only the title, but also the development team. Casey Hudson, executive producer of the entire Mass Effect trilogy, was not in fact involved in the development of Andromeda, together with his team on the aforementioned Anthem. Andromeda would take care of it BioWare Montreal, a team founded in 2009 to create i Series DLC. With Casey Hudson out of the project, a new guide was needed, and when the game went into pre-production it was Gérard Lehiany, who had previously worked as a Writer on The Amazing Spider-Man, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter e Spider-Man: Edge of Time (the latter also as Director).
Lehiany was supposed to be the new guide of the team, driving the development of the title towards those unexplored shores so desired by BioWare. The most ambitious aspect of the project was undoubtedly to create a game with a galaxy wide and explorable, where players would have the opportunity to explore an exponentially wider amount of attainable worlds than in previous installments of the series. Initial plans foresaw hundreds of procedurally generated planets, however, all still involved in one way or another in the internal mythology of Mass Effect: Andromeda. Obviously, things did not go as planned.
The Frostbite graphics engine
Between 2013 and 2014 the project went live and the effectiveness of the graphic engine began to be tested Frostbite 3.0. The primitive version of the aforementioned graphics engine was created by EA Digital Illusions CE (now known as DICE) For Battlefield: Bad Company. Since Electronic Arts decided to push many of his teams to use Frostbite for all their flagship titles, including BioWare games. The Canadian software house had already worked with that graphics engine a Dragon Age: Inquisition with very good results, but nevertheless Frostbite 3.0 was one of the biggest obstacles to the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Frostbite 3.0 was a badly viewed graphics engine by BioWare, especially for producing an ambitious game as Andromeda intended. In fact, Frostbite is a great game engine for certain things, such asexcellent yield of the destruction of buildings or the vehicle modeling, but bad for the generation of large maps, an element that should have been essential in Mass Effect: Andromeda regarding the creation of procedurally generated worlds. Obviously the difficulties related to the use of the graphic engine spilled over to notorious facial animations, which after the release of the work in the shops became the true symbol of the unsuccessful BioWare project.
Problems between teams
The great chaos generated by the new graphics engine and internal changes to the development team were also accompanied by problems of geographical nature. BioWare, in fact, had offices in three cities: Montreal, Edmonton e Austin, and given the importance of the project it was decided to channel the energies of all three teams on Andromeda. Unfortunately, however, BioWare, unlike Ubisoft, did not have the experience to develop a game of that type with three teams residing in three different cities, and in particular according to some rumors it seems that the three studios rivaled each other, with Montreal accusing Edmontons of having stole some of their ideas for Anthem.
Over time the situation became more and more unsustainable and this caused theabandonment of a dozen people not only from the project but also from the Montreal team. However, these dropouts were not compensated by new hires and therefore the Mass Effect: Andromeda project also had to deal with a lack of staff. To top it all off Casey Hudson, who had been busy developing Anthem until then, left the company in mid-2014, while Gérard Lehiany decided to abandon the project that same year effectively leaving Mass Effect: Andromeda without a Director.
Who Seeds wind shall harvest storm
Mass Effect: Andromeda was too big a project to stand by (or even be canceled); it was therefore necessary to reorganize, and that's what BioWare did. He was called back to base Mac Walters, Writer of all three chapters of the Mass Effect trilogy, who was supposed to fill the role of Director left uncovered by Lehiany. The rush to finish the project as soon as possible and all the production problems that had occurred until then convinced Walters and the rest of the team that the work done up to that point was unusable, and consequently the original concept of the game was deeply resized. The idea of creating a galaxy with planets made in a procedural way was put aside, making room for a more classical structure. Furthermore, all the creative and narrative component created up to then was thrown away. In practice, all the work done up to then turned out to be totally useless and development work on Andromeda started from scratch.
Obviously this caused eighteen months of fire at BioWare, with developers undergoing a long period of crunch and called to solve sometimes unsolvable problems, being in an atmosphere of final stage of a project when in reality the development of the title was still on the high seas. The result, as already mentioned at the beginning of the article, was disastrous, and all those fans who were burned by the controversial Mass Effect 3 were not indulgent with the title, which currently records the lowest Metacritic ratings of any BioWare work released to date. It certainly didn't help that Andromeda was released in the same month as three works of the caliber of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn e NIER: Automata. The sad conclusion of this tangled affair has seen the BioWare Montreal team dismantled and the Mass Effect series shelved until the recent announcement of a new chapter in the series during The Game Awards of this year.
Mass Effect: Andromeda, on balance, it's not even a bad title, but it is the result of a wicked development which obviously compromised the final quality and the perception of the public. Because after so many promises, fans really expected the definitive Mass Effect, and instead they found themselves in a title whose development still seemed far from being completed. When companies understand that the consumer is not a beta tester it will always be too late. What remains to be understood, in light of the recent announcement of a new chapter in the series, is whether this fairy tale will finally have the happy ending it deserves.
