Mass Effect Legendary Edition (General Discussion)

I ran into a video of the Mass Effect 3 developers (some apparently still work at Bioware) and they are speaking of the ME3 ending and well, look it up yourself and tell me what you think. Some don't want to touch the ending topic at all, others offered different takes, some are still mad that they had to do the Extended Cut under crunch after developing the game under crunch, etc. The video host does point out that the expectations of development and crunch would mean that the promised product would never be delivered, the comments are also split (there is no question that the pushback from fans got ugly, but that doesn't excuse a rushed product and it is on EA and your leadership who you should be blaming as well your over reacted consumers):

Your welcome, this video might answer their behavior with the MELE and how they have yet to give thanks to PC modders any recognition for fixing things they didn't do, because they don't see themselves as having none of the problem and in their eyes there are no more issues in the LE because what the modders are doing is just extra things.

I am so glad for this video, may it serve to temper the prospect of ME5, it is awesome seeing people respectfully calling out the developers being interviewed as they know their words are mostly cover for themselves given that they still work for Bioware, then there is one commenter that states the camping behind the ME3 ending controversy were the first signs of right wing radicalization while going to also point the fingers at Bioware, I feel dumber from reading that first part.

I'm going to leave the politics out of it.

The whole idea of a company like EA/BW is to make money. It makes sense to do that in the most efficient way. However, cutting costs on patching is a drop in the ocean of their budget. It doesn't seem good for their PR to leave that in the hands of modders. What is more astonishing is, that when you look to the entire development cycle, EA/BW doesn't have any sense of understanding that planning of a game and sticking with it, is more important than their trial-on-error approach, which obviously leads to a bad product, overworked devs, and in the end dissatisfied customers. That will cost them money.

I am baffled. It is the core job of managers to be beacon in that process. If nothing changes in the attitude of those managers, their devs will suffer, and, as a result, so will we.

The Legendary Edition ought to have been the MCC equivalent for Mass Effect honestly, what it is now I mean, instead it feels completely abandoned like it's fucking 2004.

I leave that up to you, I don't use Twitter, and never ever will.

It's completely fine in my opinion. They actually patched the visuals in the most recent updates.

I'm referring to HTMCC

He doesn't, though. He's in his own studio. 

This is from the first allegue modder who after I asked permission to cite his name and as I didn't get his permission I am citing his words (you can fund him in the YT video) which lead me to ask the second modder for verification:

"No, I'm not in charge of the tools we use, so I only saw correspondence as a third wheel, and the BioWare reps stopped appearing in our chats when the project was closed at around July this year. But some of the tool developers still talk to them privately. So I did get to see the shock on their "face" when they realized 3-hit melees were accidentally missing in Legendary Edition Mass Effect 3. A feature that will never be added back at least on consoles. It was clear that the reason he couldn't push to get it fixed is because their QA department only had room to address "critical" bugs, i.e. actual game crashes and other serious problems. Unfortunately an ugly save glitch is still stuck in the PlayStation ports where random plot flags and values are truncated in rare instances of saving. That will never be fixed.

The initial correspondence was allegedly by accident, because someone said they worked with modders but we had not heard a word. We contacted them because of that, and they owned up to it by actually collaborating directly after that point. We now have details like all their entire "StoryManager" plot table, which means we know what every single plot flag in the trilogy means, which means we have much more clarity about plot-branching issues and how to fix them, and the ability to create story-driven mods that depend on official choices you make in the core game.

But the bottom line is: The reason we are even able to release mods today for Legendary Edition is because the toolset developers worked directly with BioWare to know how the game works under the hood. If BioWare hadn't done that, there wouldn't even be a sprawling mod community for Legendary Edition in 2021."

That's not an excuse. If you're afraid to tamper with an atomic bomb, because it might blow up, then you shouldn't have built it in the first place. The only thing that is an admission of, is that they don't know what they are doing. Great vote of confidence for future game development.

It's probably because they feel because modders tend to do things their own way regardless of wha ta company does so maybe they just feel why not just let them do it. At the end o fthe day the LE is still in a playable state so as far as I'm concerned I'm not that bothered by it. But yeah I did college courses on programming a swell as part of my IT course back in the day so yeah I know how tricky coding can be. Also to be fair to them there ae rbugs in all games not just in Bioware's. I think most people who know about computers likely know this anyway.