Multiplayer saved/killed the franchise?

Love playing Melee pally, especially with those clutch energy drains if geth on the board.

sjw and feminazis killed the franchise
MP keeps some people playing mp

i bought andromeda mostly because of mp, i loved me3mp

I know this thread has been dead for like a week now (this board is so slow now rip) it kind of interested me because I was thinking about why MEA was so bad in comparison to ME3. I've seen some good answers in this thread, but I also kinda wanted to add my thoughts.

TLDR: Game was unfinished, connection issues and crashing combined with poor balance on release meant that people had not much incentive to stick it out and hope that the issues get resolved

I think the main reason that MEA died was because there were so many unfixable issues in the game that arose from the game being unfinished on release. MEA was BioWare Montreal's first big game release and there were many issues behind the scenes such as chronic mismanagement, that lead to the game being unfinished on release. What I read is that because it was the studio's first big game, and because they had to rebuild almost everything for the new Frostbite 3 engine they had to keep pushing back deadlines (I think the game was originally supposed to be released in Q1 2016 or something) until EA gave them a hard deadline and told them to release what they had at that point, finished or not.

Unfortunately for us MP players, we are in the vast minority of people who buy Mass Effect games, so as a result the developers have to consider the MP as an afterthought because the SP will be the largest majority of the revenue (although what this thread says is that MP microtransactions brought in considerable revenue may mean that focusing on SP more may not be the best idea). This means that we got an unfinished MP that had many fundamental issues that made the game almost unplayable such as connection and performance (for PC at least). While issues such as balance, character variety, and maps are easily fixable down the road, you don't need to be a game developer to realise that fixing connection and performance issues is a mammoth task and once the game has been released it is impossible to redo and fix it.

I'm not going to ignore the fact that ME3 MP had blatant connection issues that under certain circumstances made the game completely unplayable (as an Australian, playing from Australia to a dodgy Russian connection is one of the least enjoyable experiences you can have), but under a majority of circumstances the game was completely fine. For example, playing from AU to US West was completely fine and I could play even power classes like vanguards and adepts (although they were not as powerful as playing them on-host for obvious reasons) and weapon classes were just as good off-host as they were on-host. Fast forward to MEA even playing on another Australian host made weapon classes vastly inferior to playing them on host due to the completely stupid off-host headshot hitboxes (maybe it's only an issue because I'm a PC player that cares way too much about aim and accuracy) which during the game's release weapon classes were the only viable classes (everyone remember the Vanquisher meta) making playing off-host not that fun at all. Now for Australia to US West which for 90% of games is still highly playable (160-180 ping is fine), for MEA the experience was awful because you would have constant rubberbanding, your guns wouldn't reload, constant disconnects, constant crashes, jumping around with your jetpack was awful, headshot hitboxes were completely off, enemies teleporting, and many other issues that I have trouble remembering considering I haven't touched this game in 6 months. In general, the off-host experience for MEA was completely awful which made the game much less enjoyable off-host. Now you may ask, "why not just only host?", and for PUGs this is my solution, I don't care enough about the other 3 player's enjoyment (which would be very low considering they're playing on an Australian host), but when playing with friends hosting became a big issue. Often we would have 2 AU players and 2 US players in a lobby, and the players who weren't on the continent that was hosting would often have a much worse game experience compared to the other 2 players and as these players are my friends, if we aren't having a good time playing MEA, what's the point?


If the game was balanced better, i.e. power classes were stronger, the vanquisher wasn't the only usable weapon, enemy balance wasn't completely out of whack, then perhaps maybe we would have been able to overlook the connection and performance issues of the game more, however using the Vanquisher against Outlaws on Firebase Zero for the 20th game in a row really gets boring quickly. Considering they had the numbers from ME3 MP I'm not entirely sure how BioWare managed to get the balance so off, you don't need to copy the damage number for guns exactly, but you would think that it would mean that the game would be at least somewhat balanced. A combination of the balance issues and the connection issues meant that not many of my friends bothered with the game for long at all, which is a complete shame considering how much time we all sunk into ME3 MP, it would have been really nice to reunite the gang and have a game that we can all enjoy together because after ME3 MP most of us started playing different games. Who knows, an optimistic thought is that perhaps if more people stuck around because the game was fun and better balanced BioWare would have seen this and maybe even fixed some of the connection issues that made the game unplayable.

Anyway, I guess that's my essay on the subject, for your convenience I put a TLDR at the top because I'm such a considerate guy, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out on the subject because as I said in my last paragraph, I was really looking forward to MEA MP being a success due to it being a game that my friends and I could all play so I was really disappointed when MEA MP turned out to be quite awful.

Your profound thoughts about the Vanquisher sniper rifle indicate that you only played the game for a month after release from the bottom-end (sniff sniff) of the world and went to back to fighting kangaroos ( A lot has changed since then vege-mate) .