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

Exactly. This guy is, and always has been, a clickbait hack.

Well, that article sounds very plausible. Everything that's in there fits with what we've heard from the devs over the years and also with what the final product looks like. I have no trouble believing all of it.

It's sad to see how bad leadership can screw up a project like this. Frankly, I have to say it was a bit delusional to think you can combine procedural planets ala No Man's Sky with classic BioWare design. Maybe if they had realized this very early on and cut their hundreds of planets down to thirty and switched to a hybrid approach of procedural and hand crafted right away, as well as loosing the space flight stuff, they might have gotten a much better result. I do not understand how they didn't see those problems coming. If ME3 with its story focus already took up the dev budget, how did they imagine to do the same in terms of story and cinematics, add a whole bunch of completely new features and do the whole thing in a new engine without a major increase in funds? I am by no means an expert in business strategy, project management or production but but it seems to me that common sense was ignored on every level by the leads of this project's early phase.

If it's true that most of the game's content has been crunched out in 18 months, I actually have to say, the quality of what we got is pretty good in that context. So kudos to the low level devs and artists who crunched through this and managed to get something done.

Also, I have to wonder which mock reviewers they sent this to at the end of last year to get such bad feedback. People were worried all over even just from the gameplay trailers they published around N7 day. You'd think for these testing reviews, they choose extra critical people to avoid overestimating their product.

And finally, this article - if true, and again, I believe it is - reveals that the statement we saw late 2016 "We plan to release in March but if we see that the game needs more time we'll give it." was a blatant lie. They knew the game was in trouble and not where they wanted it to be and they decided to release it anyway and hope that it muddles through somehow and gets a good enough score to then make a sequel where they were hoping to get it right. Bah! That's just sad to hear.

Exactly. Those guys don't deserve all the harsh criticism that was leveled at them. They can only do what is expected of them and considering their abysmal leadership, they did an OUTSTANDING job to get it done. Unfortunately, the higher-ups will point to all the criticisms and blame the core workers instead of just cleaning out their offices. 

Since the game shipped unfinished, (Did they really think the eyes looked good?), I'd say something went wrong. Just about anything filtered through a game journalism site has to be taken with a grain of salt, but this would explain much.

Interesting article, particularly about the software used, but too much of it feels like conjecture to be considered a serious article. Like someone taking various talking points they've heard and building a predetermined narrative from it.

I can't imagine them using a different system. Sending it to random people would end with the game being freely available on the internet. Not after release, but months before that date. There has to be trust involved. And trust doesn't grow overnight. I also imagine that these people aim to please in order to stay on that list.

Maybe. Ironically, I doubt these guys will stay on the list. At least if I were a project manager at BW I wouldn't use them again after that screw-up.

I don't trust anything that is written in Kotaku, clickbait fest that only wants to gather publicity and nothing else, even at the cost of telling outright lies. That said, what we saw from the outside during development hinted very much of troubled development. Few points stood out for me:

1. Even according to Bioware, the franchise should have ended in ME3. Bioware just didn't know what to do with the game and they just flailed their arms around for 2 years at least.

2. Frostbite 3 is a liquid shit engine. This is an engine that is extremely not flexible and very hard to work with, evident by the gameplay flaws of Inquisition (tactical cam? LOL), this is 100% on EA. The game should have been developed in UE4, I guess it would be far easier to transfer assets from the OT.

3. Management problems: I don't know the source of it, but such frequent replacement of staff during the development is bound to kill a game, Edmonton and Montreal actually weren't cooperating, clearly evident in the state of the character creator. As a side note the article makes Mac Walters as the hero while most fans make him as the villain... If various parts of the studio don't talk to each other, that isn't something that can be fixed that easily, and I worry for Dylan as well as the future of Bioware. If Dylan doesn't score in the 90s I won't touch it. It would be a first for me with a Bioware game since Dragon Age Origins.

That guy also says that he doesn't think any story DLC is on the way BTW.

Battletech is being developed by Harebrained Schemes, the same people who made the Shadowrun Returns games.  So I have faith that it'll be decent to possibly quite good.

Bioware used to write great stories.  But something has happened.  Maybe they sold out to EA.  Maybe They've replaced lost talent with lesser writers.  Maybe they shifted too much focus on being "accessible" and 'streamlined" focusing too much on action and not enough on story.  Whatever it is, they are not the Bioware they once were.  Their priorities have shifted, and not for the better.

I was just remembering how many people said MEA's marketing wasn't a clear evidence of a troubled development, but a change in strategy by Bioware's part.

...

The truth is that ever since E3 we coudl tell something was very wrong. Although I honestly didn't suspect it was so wrong. I never expected Andromeda to be such a disappointment.