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

Interesting read. While I've actually enjoyed the game, it clearly wasn't ready to go on release. The patches have helped a lot and I have to imagine if they had waited to release until this summer/fall it would've been received a lot better.

We could see a lot of signs of the troubled development but it was always difficult to tell as fans just how troubled it was. I also think the secretive approach to releasing information was more related to being behind schedule than a cohesive strategy. Makes you wonder whether the forum closure was related as well but that was probably just a long time coming.

I hope we get more ME games in the future. I think they could do a lot with MEA2 if it ever happens.

Then it was dumb to tell us it was an option because it makes them look idiotic when the game was released in the state it was.

Mass Effect is dead, then. Not even 6 months and they already treat it as the sad tale of gaming. The same treatment of Aliens: Colonial Marines.

I stopped reading at this:


Because aside from the negative folk and haters in this forum, I have come across far more (by far more I would say probably hundreds and that is just the ones who bother to post about it) people that like or love it. This forum seems to have an inordinate amount of people that dislike it and they dwell on it because they just don't have a life or know how to focus on things they like or maybe they don't have things they like because they spend their time on things they don't like. Whatever the case, they just live in the negative and hang out here or keep coming back here or search the web for more things they don't like. What is most striking to me is that these people have something they are unhappy about and instead of finding things they are happy about to focus on instead, they stay stuck on what they don't like. This leads me to wonder if their dislike about the game is simply that they are unhappy people who can only find things they don't like. Glass half empty people who like to complain and just don't know how to or don't want to or don't try to pay attention to anything enjoyable therefore everything become misery because that is literally all they can see. And it basically invalidates everything they have to say because they are so focused on the negatives that when there are positives, they are not be able to see them. My guess is these people are not particularly happy or else they would be spending their time focused on those things rather than sitting around bitching about a game.

Kotoku understands this and therefore is writing these articles as click bait. Whatever the development cycle was doesn't matter. That initial statement that I quoted is simply not true. A lot of people like this game. A lot of people like this game a lot. They just don't come here, probably because this place has so many bitchers and whiners and complainers that it detracts from their fun of enjoying the game. So the forum has been overrun with bitchers and whiners and complainers only to have a small group that actually hang here because they love the game. I know who most of them are because I have seen them in posts. The are the same people and they repeatedly focus on the things they love about this game which supports my original hypothesis. Focus on what you don't like and you get more of that and find more of those people. Focus on what you do like and you get more of that and find those people.

Heck I've been saying MEA was basically a defense of Synthesis for a while now.

But they made those impossible expectations themselves. The creative leads made up a massive scope they could never achieve, failed to make a compelling vertical slice, and then had to scramble to release a mostly functional generic action adventure game.
Are you implying that Andromeda isn't a formulaic mess? Even if it wasn't another bog standard open world game, it's got practically the same structure as Inquisition, but with even worse bugs. I don't know how you can make a great distinction here, let alone put Andromeda on top.

Have you never worked in the Corporate world? Don't you speak corporate, which is their PR departments speaking actually? Do you believe company statements to be the truth and nothing but the truth, especially in lights of a brewing shitstorm?

Much better. And that's even leaving out the lackluster companions MEA provided us with as compared to the ones in Inquisition.

And I think it's worth calling out their BS, consumers should know who they're buying from.

Something tells me you might have some issues with Mac Walters.