Who's accountable for the Mass Effect series being put on Hiatus?

If anyone has seen me post before, they know I'm a big fan of this game. However, this post, in my opinion, is going to take a critical look that will be as objective as I can. That being say, there is blame to be shared by everyone I'd say, but one party stands out far more than others..

Bioware launched an unfinished product that should have stayed in development for at least several more months. If reports are true that they outsourced the animations of characters, they, as a professional game developer with many AAA and highly rated titles under their belt, had the responsibility to play-test and ensure everything was running smoothly. Bugs and glitches in games are, sadly, just a part of the gaming industry. However, the amount of bugs reported by Andromeda, many of which I didn't experience myself but don't doubt they existed, should not occur. The animations should NEVER have been shipped pre-patch 1.05. Again, I had the benefit of not picking up the title until the day that patched was released. They launched an incomplete, buggy product. That's where mass criticism has come in and hurt this game's launch and that lays on their door step.

EA, as the parent company, also plays a part in this as well. Their unrealistic timetables and high pressure, as well as taking away creative freedom of their developers seems to stifle growth and innovation. Their focus on streamlined, "simple" games that are churned out like clockwork with heavy focus on multiplayer components has not done the industry any favors. I don't work for either company, but if reports I've read online (we know how reliable they can be) EA can be a nightmare to work for. Bottom line - they care about money. Not fans. Not good stories. Not even good games. They care how many copies they can push. They are certainly to blame.

Haters are absolutely part of the problem. The amount of people that have bashed this game everywhere from Facebook, to gaming article comments to blogs to.. frankly, everywhere and have NOT EVEN PLAYED THE GAME is astonishing. Many of these people either jumped on the bandwagon of hate or they are simply bitter still over the ME3 endings and quick to jump on anything that hates Mass Effect. There are plenty of people who enjoy the game, myself included, who are drowned out by the people who scream from the roof tops that they hate the game, many of whom only watched a video on Youtube or saw a meme.


However, all that being said, there wouldn't be a negative pushback, even by the mass of haters out there, for no reason if the game was solid at launch. Despite my love for this title, I must say that the blame for ME being put on the shelf, if the reports are true, can't be placed anywhere other than the developer who created it. EA's crunch time might be overkill. Maybe they gave no quarter to Bioware for extra time to fix the problems. However, Bioware dropped the ball with the release of a buggy, poorly animated game to people both overly hyped for the game and eager for any scrape to see them fail. Unfortunately, I have to be objective. The initial launch was awful. I don't think pushback would have been nearly as bad if the game had launched with patch 1.05 to fix the animations... or even if they had just animated the game in-house... or even CHECKED to see if it was properly animated. However, that's in the past. They launched it like they did and the blame for that falls at their feet.

We have a comedian here   How dare fans not be happy with a broken/bug filled, poor story with poor characters in a boring open world game. 

Second: I found a lot of the criticisms over the animation bugs EXTREMELY overblown almost laughably so. "The animations suck, the animations suck, the animations suck" when again IN MY OPINION and EXPERIENCE with MEA that wasn't simply case I thought they were good, but not great. I found the animations before patch 1.05 to be on par with most AAA and in some cases even better than most.

The only reason I think there may be something to this hiatus story is because I don't recall BW ever making an announcement like this. I mean, usually they finish the game, get quiet, put out some patches, get to work on dlc. Yeah, they switch people around, too, help with other games. But I don't remember them ever coming out and saying they were taking an hiatus. Why would they even need to say that if it was business as usual?

It may have nothing all that much to do with MEA itself, and may be more about EA wanting more people and resources going towards this Dylan thing, and ofc star wars because star wars. Hell, they might not be too keen on any space sci-fi genre competition with star wars.

Although, this Dylan thing..what is it? It's supposed to be some Destiny-esque/Division-esque sci-fi? "MMO-ish"? Wtf is this shite? They pushed it back, and I'm like I don't even know what the heck you're pushing back. Are you making a game?

Come to think of it, some blame should certainly be placed on the marketing of MEA. It was pretty shite marketing.

Okay, your tone there is very serious so I don't think you are joking, but I mean come on now.  Even the most die hard MEA fan can't actually think that can they?

I could post enough examples to make the page unloadable but I'll just leave this vid instead, it covers most of it.  I don't think the game is shit or anything, but no one can seriously deny all the animation problems this game shipped with.  It was laughably bad and BW deserved every scrap of blow back they got over it.

Yeah, I heard about that. Guessing that's for dlc, too. If they don;t decide to drop it.

If they were to decide to drop it, that decision would have been based on the first two weeks of sales. That's when most sales occur. That would have been the first week of April, and Cora's VA tweet was from early May. VA's are expensive, and so if they were going to cut the DLC they would have done it before bringing her in.