Kotaku: The Story Behind ME:A's Troubled Five-Year Development

I've posted this before in another thread but I have to say it again, just look at those prototype characters:



Imo they look so much better than the final male Ryder(s), it proves that BioWare can make eye candy characters, they just somehow cut them in the final game.
Or maybe those are "too handsome" to be a space jerk like Ryder, I presume?

Isin't somehow strange, that Kotaku got allways first news from Bioware?

Also this prooves only, that BW Montreal was not ready for this project. I would rather wait even ten years for new ME, than got an trash like is now.

That's concept art, which is always, for just about every game, wildly superior to the final product. Because, of course, it doesn't have to meet the restrictions of the engine the game is built in, and the hardware it's built for.

That's big, though. Modding opens up the vanilla game to your liking especially if you love to roleplay. I personally modded EVERY SCENE or LEVEL in Origins using the toolset provided. I felt like I was in complete control of the canvas once I understood what each of the variables meant (thanks in part to Mass Effect Wiki). Losing that type of control sucks. However, Fallout 4 vanilla, is a flat 6. The settlement building sucked. It completely drains me because I'm so detailed. Thanks to modding, I can import someone else's settlements and keep the game flowing. With that said, with the GECK, Fallout 4 is an 8. If modding was allowed, even just for PC Master Race, the threads here would be filled with solutions and more desktop-worthy artwork. I keep watching that thread about Frostbite tools with drooling anticipation.

Not strange at all. As a journalist you have your network of sources. In this case it seems Bioware sources. I don't know if it's that particular author or the whole outlet, but having worked in journalism, I don't consider that strange at all. In fact it's what you do to get stories. Probably specialising on the way.

I think 71 is pretty much spot on. The reasons why it came to that rating may be off in some cases, but I wouldn't rate it any higher than that. My score would probably be even lower.

Everyone talks as if a score of 70+ was something bad. That's entirely down to the industry more or less handing a score of 80+ to every AAA title. People aren't used anymore to  more realistic score. 71 doesn't say this game is bad. It says, it's pretty much above average. More than 20 notches above average, as it is, with 50 being the base line.

It doesn't deserve anything in the 80ies, let alone the 90ies. Not because of some agenda, not because of animations, but because of lack of content. There are a lot of fetch quests and generic ones, but the story is meh and the character also. Judged not against other game companies, but against Bioware's previous efforts. It's a fun game, but nothing memorable and nothing really to invite numerous replays.

About that, do we have any concrete numbers about how well the game sold?

Begs the question, what do you expect from any large game developer or publisher? These are shareholder companies. Of course they only care about revenue. As far as DLCs are concerned, the sales of the main game in comparison to expected revenues in the original business plan will decide if DLCs are even produced. There's a fair chance that one was already in the late stages of production when the game was released. If that's the case, it will be finished. And add to testing the water if further production costs and manpower are warranted.

When they are, as you say, handing out an 80s score to everyone else... a 70s score is off the curve and indicates a bias.  Grade creep has been going on in the school system for years, but aberrations like this, unless things are really bad, usually just indicate a bias.  The game is not that bad.  It's better than an average AAA game... more fun, more interesting, more varied things to do in it, and provides Bioware's marked style of allowing the player to shape the PC with different personalities.  It deserves at least the "average" AAA score.  There are still bugs in TW3... I was getting ghosting, stuck in walls, had quests that locked and had to be restarted.  It also has it's share of "guffaw" lines and some conversations don't flow right when selections are pressed in different orders.  In other words... despite being a game that scored well into the 90s, it still has many of the bugs that ME:A got totally trashed into the low 70s for having.  That's shows a bias... a bias that was clearly evident long before ME:A was ever released.  A bias that media, IMO, became more interested in justifying  than it did in fairly reviewing the game.

If you're going to argue that a low 70s scores is "spot on" for ME:A, you should also be arguing that a high 90s score for TW3 is too high and that all the AAA games that score in the 80s should be scored in the 70s instead.

Yeah, you should.

This is a realistic score as opposed to many others I've seen.

So why aren't you.  TW3 then doesn't deserve the score it got.  It should be lower.

Saying that ME:A deserves to be higher when the average curve is higher doesn't make me arbitrarily blind to it's faults.  It's a game I'm enjoying playing.  It's a game I'll complete and a game I'll play again and again.  I did not enjoy TW3 despite all the rave reviews it got and the "TW3 is boss" hypers that frequent this site.  I also know it has bugs... two years after release that CDPR should have had ample time to fix them.  It deserved a lower score than it got.

The curve was different when those previous Bioware efforts were ranked.  TW3 is ranked "off the curve" in the other direction.  I'm also of the opinion that, in many respects, ME:A is a better effort than previous Bioware efforts.  They improved on a lot and the game is larger and far more complex than any of the MET games.  They did (correction:  did not) get the facial animations better in ME3, but after patching ME:A, I don't see where they are any worse than ME2 and they are certainly a big improvement over ME1.  Starscape design is certainly very good.  The planet designs are also very good... I'm not seeing where people get off saying they are all barren deserted when I'm currently engaged in the jungles of Havarl.  I'm not finding the side quests boring at all.  I'm enjoying the puzzle solving (sudoku) and, mostly, I'm enjoying being able to shape the personality of my PC.

I haven't played DA series, so I'm not ranking it.  I'm a huge fan of the old Trilogy... I've played it through more than 30 times and will certainly play it again several more times.  I'm also looking forward to future installments of ME:A.  They are different stories... and that makes it even more exciting for me.  MET was a war story.  This one is not and I'm enjoying it immensely.  It beats ME1 for exploration value hands down.