Article: A requiem for Mass Effect: Andromeda

The only people who lump all girl gamers in with the boobie streamers are assholes, of course, but the truth is, everyone is an asshole to everyone on the Internet, especially in online gaming. That is my point. Making it a gendered issue adds completely unneeded dynamics to the situation.

I am well aware of it actually happening, but there is a very obvious reason for referencing that one indecent in particular.

Reddit is cancer.

Uhh - some of those body animations were pretty janky - not as bad as the faces, but not brilliantly done... some of the human bodies were pretty bad.

Alive and we're all well done though.

BioWare seems incapable of doing anything with the human form at this point, imo.

I liked the angara, honestly. It doesn't seem to matter what game, but all the BW games I have played miss the mark on modeling and animating human characters.

She only wrote a few lines over that incident. In an opinion piece of roughly three pages if it was in print.

Bioware/EA made a lot of mistakes.

1) Rushing out the game in the condition it was in
2) Putting a review embargo on the game, while still allowing players early access.
3) Then having the early access be what was probably the worst planet on the game.

Now you have only reactions from players initially, which took the form of memes and jokes. Also, review embargos that go so close to the game launch make people leery, it's kind of like movies that aren't screened before release. Some people take that as a sign that it's going to be bad.

But what ultimately did the game in as far as EA was concerned I think was the Metacritic scores. Say what you want about Metacritic and how you don't care. But if developers have focus groups predicting scores, they care. So when the game came back as Bioware's lowest scored game ever, some soul searching needed to be done. Because you can't chalk it up to just disgruntled fans who wanted more of the trilogy or anything that.  Even the professional reviewers turned on you. 


So now we're at the point where EA is basically saying, we know the game was released in a poor state which may have kept you from buying it, but we've fixed it now, so come play it and see if you change your mind.

I truly feel sorry for the people that worked on the game, because it seems that they didn't get the support or leadership they needed, and they were left holding the bag and scapegoated. Bioware Montreal may be forever tainted after this.

Other than the infamous slap fight scene. 

I thought 2+3 did human faces well - 2+3 human faces and Andromeda aliens would have been nice. With the aliens there's not an exact template that we interact with every day so even if they got some stuff "wrong" it wouldn't stand out like with their human faces.

The professional side of metacritic is just a collection of reviews around the world. The user part is emotional and hardly based on facts. But it's still noteworthy that up until ME2, user and professional reviews were pretty much in line. They started to drift apart with DA2 and never came back to what they were with previous Bioware games.

You said it yourself, they partly did themselves in by granting early access in a facepalmworthy attempt to promote Origin Access while ambargoing professional reviews. That way the youtube can of wirms was opened even before release.

Reddit is weird in the sense that its effectively a forum designed from the ground up to be an echo chamber. Stuff that people don't want to hear literally gets downvoted into oblivion. I've no idea why anyone bothers with it.

Having said that, like the /r/dankmemes subreddit. It's extremely dank.