EA Boss Says Mass Effect: Andromeda Got Too Much Criticism, Franchise Could Return

That's exactly what they tried to do. They barely released anything about the game at all until the month of and still there were big issues. And we still got that infamous scene with Peebee holding her gun backwards. Now I'm no artist but I can't imagine the horror of releasing a demo reel with a mistake like that let alone doing it in a real project. Besides they did have the whole No Man's Sky direction. It was just a terrible direction and had to be scrapped.

Of course the hardcore fans bashed it like it's Ride to Hell-Retribution, every Bioware game gets that treatment when released, then after the next game people suddenly remember that it wasn't that bad. The general reception for DA:I was very good, it was critically acclaimed and sold well, only after The Witcher 3 was released about half a year later the flaws of DA:I became much more apparent, and yes it had flaws that were needed to be addressed, some of them were in ME:A but at the expense of what we expect from a Bioware game.

Would have fixed the ending...

All things considered I think the devs in the trenches put in an admirable effort since they were fighting an uphill battle dealing with the lack of direction they were given and let's not forget the lack of experience a good number of them had.  It's too bad they weren't given a chance to put some of the experience they gained to work with making a couple of DLC.  Regardless of what people thought of the main game the DLC would have shown what they learned and what they would have been capable of in the future.  I've always criticized handing the franchise over to the bench players but it's a pity now that these bench players won't be given a chance to evolve into starters.  If I was EA I would have at least given the Montreal studio a chance to finish up the DLC and see how the DLC was received before deciding what to do with the Montreal studio.  Look at the DA team they have had their share of bruises over the years but they always bounced back from them.  DA 2 was crapped on pretty hard by a lot of people but most people seemed to respond well to it's DLCs.  DAI was generally received pretty well but it had notable flaws it's DLC were considered an overall improvement over the base game and it's last DLC is arguably one of the best DLCs bioware has had to date.   The Montreal team should have at least been given the opportunity to show that they can learn and improve.

If some nerds hadn't turned it into a meme, I don't think most people would have even noticed.

The problem aren't the technical glitches at release. The problem is the lack of vision, writing and character design. Lead as well as crew. I'm not the only one thinking that I haven't played a bad game. I have played a bland game, without replay value. In this thread alone you find quite a few who got the same feeling. This game doesn't suffer under animations, glitches and bugs. This game suffers because someone forgot to add the proverbial salt to the soup. And that's not down to the grunts making it work. That's down to leadership, or rather the absence thereoff.

As I always keep saying, I see a lot of wasted potential. It could have been so much more and it shines through at times. It just doesn't come to fruition.

Well said.

- it's like a demo reel of ineptitude.

I don't think that the people in Montreal are worse than the ones in Edmonton. We're talking about the ground crew here, the ones actually taming the engine and making the things work. The problems was the constantly changing leadership turning this whole production into a mess. If they'd worked on the same vision for the whole mile, I think, we would have seen a much better game.

Maybe I'm a bit more lenient with glitches, since I play Bethesda games for a very long time. The flying corpses for instance are with the company since Morrowind. There's a reason why they also go by the name Bugthesda.

What I'm not willing to excuse, especially in a Bioware game, is bland writing, bland characters and bland protagonist.

Man it is insulting ti judge other people 's work this way. I doubt they wanted this launch mess and as they proved with the patches it was released early so they were not incompetent. Tell them lazy or that they rushed their product. Incopetence is a harsh world.