How can one above average game sink an entire franchise?

Kinda obvious if one game takes five years and the other one 18 months. Should be obvious, I would think. I'm not familar with the budget that went into DAO or DAII, but with MEA it's 40 millions and 5 years. So there's your difference that renders sales number crunching obsolete. DAII at least had a much shorter development cycle as had ME2, as well as ME3. You can't compare them based on sheer numbers.

Its a combination of factors. Sales obviously matter, but a well established series will generally sell regardless, as the mentions of FF earlier have pointed out. Resident Evil 6 and even Operation Raccoon City are other examples. Bioshock Infinite is another. All sold well, but were greeted with mixed to hostile reviews from critics and fans (Bioshock Infinite was initially praised by critics, but most backslid on that due to their readers not agreeing).

In the case of big name sequels, fan reaction and criticism in the social media age, mean that even finnancially successful games can quickly become a millstone that turns it from industry darling to PR disaster. Rockstar for example pride themselves on only having their name associated with popular games that endlessly generate positive comments. So they were quick to distance themselves from the perfectly acceptable LA Noir when it didn't prove the ultra smash hit they hoped it would be.

As for Dragon Age 2, it was always unfairly maligned. Many hardcore fans were extremely hard on the game for a combination of budget issues leading to recycled locations, short dev time and simply not being like DAO. Many of the complaints are valid, but none were the fault of the development team themselves who had no control over resource allocation and deadlines. David Gaider has always seemed rueful that all this detracted from what is in fact an excellent RPG. He never seemed to accept it deserved such criticism, nor should he because it didn't deserve that. He admitted the budget and deadlines meant compromises and a poor final Act. But rightly flagged up the great Act 2 of the game.

MEA falls somewhere short of being an underappreciated gem IMO. But it is certainly underrated and underappreciated with flashes of brilliance and of what could have been. I think its a generally worse written game than DA2, but with a more satisfying and varied world, greater freedom and genuinely good exploration and combat. I place a high value on story and characters in RPGs though, and MEA flops in that regard for me, preventing me from placing it in my unsung gems list as I did for games like DA2 and Fallout New Vegas etc.

But I would contend that ME 3 is also very poorly written (and IMO an overall worse game than MEA). So I agree that the rot in this series started there (and arguably even further back in ME 2, though that was more a case of poor continuity of story and world building than writing quality - it changed ME from hard sci fi to hard boiled space adventure ripping yarns etc. Not bad, more exchanging one good thing for another very good, but very different kind of thing, such that it was hard to reconcile them being from the same series, even before you get to the actual retcons).

What MEA should have been?  A 10 hour shooter with pretty graphics, but lacking that something like destiny did, probably? It looks almost exactly like Destiny to me.

Lets just hope that it doesn end up like Destiny. A hyped game, but ultimately a shallow experience delivered. And with a story akin to "I could tell you... But i wont" "I dont even have time to explain why i dont have time to explain".



But hey, who cares. Thats where the money is, right. Lots of Loot and monsters to shoot, whee.

So now we're already prematurely ripping apart Bioware's new IP, eh?  Heaven forbid that people just wait to see what develops and give Bioware a little bit of space to develop it.

So much this 

But in that particular case, I was comparing the dragon age franchise to mass effect franchise, not just a specific episode to another. Because that guy was saying that EA was excepting more from the mass effect franchise rather than dragon age, that is why I put the sales of both DAO and ME 3 to tell that both franchise were just as profitable.

Now sure MEA costed more than DA 2, but still if the 40 million budget is accurate, they already they made their money, I am not saying its a motherfucking huge profit but they did make it back with the actual sales.

If the genre of game they're planning just doesn't interest you... then be honest about that.... simply state that the genre doesn't interest you.  It doesn't interest me either.  However, there is absolutely no fault on any developer for choosing to try to make a game of a different genre than they normally do... It's call expanding one's horizons... mixed in with a little bit of just trying to survive (particularly since people have been recently so adamant at telling them they're total failures at making RPGs now anyways).

Don't go around trashing it as a particularly "shallow experience" years before it gets released.  People are certainly not going to encourage them to make more or better RPGs with this trashing everything they make tactic.

If they had simply called the game 'Andromeda' with only the human race discovering new aliens , I recon the game would have been a glowing success.
But they had to go and include the words 'Mass Effect'. Shep is dead, yet they drag the whole story bar Shep into a new galaxy. It was doomed to failure.

And yet! If they had brought a clone of Shepard along to be employed as pathfinder, not only would you have shep back, but you would have the amazing story of how he/she dealt with the fact that she/he was now a clone.

Shep and Mass Effect are linked by umbilical cord, pull one and they both die.

That's what I think too. The ME universe revolved around the technology that was used and depended on by the advanced civilizations of ME. Their infrastructures and social dynamics were built around it. It dictated their policies. Shepard is just a small part of the whole. There're many possibilities that can be explored with the network.

There is no mass relay network in Andromeda. The present civilizations that live in that galaxy, or the cluster (forgot name), use other technology. They evolve independently. To call it ME is a misnomer. 

Both Ray and Greg left Bioware 7 months after the release of ME 3 and roughly 9 months after the release of  SWTOR.  I suspect  that   there are a couple of managers here and there that have been feeling the heat of the fallout of Andromeda for a couple of months now. And in today's toxic climate it's will be hard to put a time frame on it. Heck, some could be sacked as soon as E3 is over.

I have a bad feeling it might be resting with the fishes like Dead Space is.



So was Dead Space, it didn't matter.

(Mournfully looks at Dead Space novels, animated films, and Isaac Clarke statue on bookshelf)

its not just above average. i am having a BLAST so far!