Article: Mass Effect fans feel abandoned by BIoWare after Anthem reveal

It's no time to feel abandoned. Rejoice. The age of cowering behind chest-high walls of insecurity are over.

Embrace the dawn of high-octane, battle-fueled adventures!

The appropriate response here would be to question as to what had caused this unpleasant situation to occur was at all avoidable prior to the game's release.

The limited character creator and the lack of same-sex romance options for male Ryder were things bound to created to uproar, however the solutions provided by patch 1.08 could reasonably have been implemented before the game's release, as did most of the visual adjustments and bug fixing, really.

A lot of those posts died off after Mass Effect 3.  I don't think it is the people either, but the overall culture of the internet for if you look at the wonderful world of social media that is what is common now it is posts like that.  There isn't constructiveness anymore, its just people attacking one another because they don't share the same opinion.  Going back to Mass Effect 3 and when BioWare released the Extended Cut for free they were still being attacked because it didn't change the endings to what some people wanted and they refused to believe that what BioWare gave us was based on any community feedback.

I agree. I guess being someone who has been around since the start, seeing what these places have become is such a turn off. Hardly anyone gives criticism that's constructive now. It's just the in thing to trash something and post memes, and those that try, get their threads locked by spammers who don't want to discuss it. BW has proven they listen, and I am sure they would again if a thread was made to talk about what could be improved for the next one, and what people felt went wrong with this one. They will read it too.

People say "if you don't like it, write your own" so why not? Show them what MEA should be written like. Give them ideas.

The bigger question is why you feel you're representative of everyone who happens to have hated ME:A?  Just because you say you didn't set out to hate doesn't mean that someone else could not possibly have set out to hate it.  Are you saying that the hate others dumped on this game in no way affected your opinion of it? Or, in no way caused you any apprehension that would not have been there if the game had been positively received?  Were you blissfully uninfluenced at all by all the memes as you sat down to play the game for the first time?  Is your "opinion" of the game formed in some sort completely objective vacuum... because I was influenced.  I was made far more apprehensive about buying the game and,as I sat down to play it the first time, I was not really anticipating loving it the way I had anticipated loving TW3 (which had such positive reviews from a whole lot of people).  For me, as it turned out, I wound up hating TW3 and enjoying ME:A... because different people can like different things about a game.  I'm glad I put my apprehensions aside and bought ME:A in spite of everything I had been reading here.

Could Bioware have produced a better game if they had applied even more resources to it... probably yes.  Would the public have received it well and gone wow?  I don't think so... not even if they game they had of delivered was damned near perfect.  Why do I say that... because most of them couldn't find anything good to say about ME:A despite it being not so bad a game and it does have many positives to it.  While you may not enjoy it as much as I do... It's still a better game than it was made out to be by many of the previews, the metascores, and many of the reviews.

I hear that a lot these days but honestly, that doesn't work very well for me.
With all due respect for these studios and their games, they are just not my cup of tea. I do want AAA production values, proper voice over and a truely immersive experience that I simply cannot get from these smaller productions. Call it a limited imagination but the isometric perspective, the P&P like combat systems and the massive amounts of texts for dialogues throw me out of the game world (or rather don't really let me in if you will). I know they do write beautiful stories and characters but so do book authors and I still want to play my video games. It's like these days I have to choose between the gameplay I want or the stories I want, can't have it both.

Is it really too much to ask just a few AAA game publishers to properly support studios to create technologically advanced games with decent writing? BioWare used to be one of them, so did Obsidian by the way but with BW moving toward online service games and Obsidian effectively having retreated more into the retro/indie/kickstarter niche, who's left? CD Projekt Red and that's about it.

I hope that soon, publishers will realize that between CDPR only releasing one game every 5 years, Horizon: Zero Dawn being an exclusive and Bethesda just re-releasing Skyrim over and over again, there is an opening with demand to fill.

I've said it before, but it's pretty damn good for the reputed 18 months it had.
I just wish they hadnt had to do y in 18 months and I hope we get a chance of more, but this time without them scrapping everything halfway through and then doing a rush job.

Personally I am not interested in Anthem, I don't have the free time I used to have.

Oh when we first see it, it's flying in the distance and Ryder has the goofy smile. Now we see the camera pan on Ryder as they leave the tram with Cora, then you see close-ups of the Tempest soaring through the sky, the theme playing and you watch it land. Then Ryder says to get a closer look.

No instead you are going to cower behind a giant wall and only come out when you put on some oversized mech armor.  Well your giant wall won't do you any good when you hear a loud bwaam and look up to see a mile tall squid shaped machine of death descending down on you.  You will cower in fear but not the guy wearing a normal sized suit of armor with an N7 on his chest.  Anthem is not worthy of shining Commander Shepard's boots.

There isn't much of a main story in ME2. It's mostly character driven. And frankly, that's what I love about it.

Things certainly feel like it is coming to a head.  I don't think the practice of chopping games into DLC sized pieces and micro-transactions is going to sustain the industry long term.  How that all turns out in the end is anyone's guess.

How old am I?  You mean my real age or the age I tell people I am?  I'm older than I've ever been before?   


Seriously though my age doesn't bother me, I'm 40.  Born on the Bicentennial of the greatest country on Earth.