The Pyjack's Den! The ME News Discussion Thread

If you do find the source for this, feel free to ping me or message me with it :-)

As an aside, I dug up an old article on BioWare's dev writing process for prototype to preproduction phases, if anyone is interested. No idea how relevant it is to their modus operandi in the 2020s, but it's still interesting to look at.

He did shed some light on it, and he also says the funny eyeball darting issue was a "data-error". It was probably supposed to be the eye-noise effect from the trilogy but something wasn't importing properly between delivered animations and how the MEA Frostbite framework was handling the data, leading to an animation weights issue.

We did see some Frostbite-implemented cinematic from MEA in a 2014 leak though. They used a similar process to DA:I where they developed the game using the most highest end PC they could find, and that's why the graphics have more polished VFX and whatnot in any snippet of pre-release footage shown before the PS4 Pro reveal.

Personally I always thought that what happened with Andromeda's dev cycle was that after they started finding the right path when Mac Walters and Schlerf got involved BioWare Montreal overestimated their own ability to produce it, and expected all animation to be fully motion-captured and hand-keyed by the animators. 90% of cinematic animation in the trilogy was not done by hand. It's around 100 or so gesture-animations reused in clever ways and I'm sure all Mass Effect fans noticed that the same animations play over and over in cutscenes. That's because it's not actually done by animators but Cinematic Designers. For MEA they completely overestimated going "next gen" and thought they could use less gesture-library animation or FaceFX (automatic lip-sync and emotion sliders) but late in development things like the FaceMorph system was implemented, messing up existing face performance animations and on top of that and FaceFX didn't work on the kind of face rigs they made on the 3D models, so they had to basically redo all of the outsourced animation.

A lot of Andromeda was getting done in 2014 actually. That's when the main story and loyalty missions were written, and originally the game was more akin to ME3 where it's just Ship->Mission->Ship->Mission. Then DAI's team got the GOTY and Aaryn Flynn decided in around 2015 that MEA needed to go open world. One of the gameplay people from MEA expressed that the Edmonton studio came in late and was like "We're gonna do open world" when people at Montreal said "We have never done that we don't know how", so that's when they started DAI-ifiing the game. I think they also did that to address the initial plan for 100s of procedurally generated planets. They reduced that number over time but still didn't know what to do with them, so DA:I'ifying them and reducing them to 6 meant they could reuse things from DAI and get it done.

When you hear that the story and game was made in the last 18 months (2015-2017 roughly) it's because most of pre-production Montreal staff left at that time, like Schlerf, Ann Lemay and more, and that's when the Edmonton Studio and DA Finaling Team came on to add a lot of flourish to the game, and all of those 6 planet stories was made as a multi-studio thing. The main plot with the Archon and Family Mystery and Loyalty Missions and all the companions was already getting done at this point, and the story it has is a bit different, but is essentially the same as it was around 2014. It took 5 years to make MEA, not 18 months.

This actually tracks more with what I experienced than what I'd assumed.

I got a feeling (again just some short personal convos that I'm reading very much into and only have vague memory of) that in ~2014 they knew what a lot of the game was going to be, at least in the broad sense, but something was going in some direction that left devs/artists/etc uncertain about where things were going to *go*. I can easily imagine (2012)2013-2014 they knew better where they were going and were testing things out (that is, going to Andromeda wasn't some *last minute* asspull, and we can believe this because of ark hints at least as early as Citadel DLC), but 2015-2016 the bump had happened (more open zones --> lets go even more open DAI), and they had to get in shape to actually ship this thing because of all the faffing about. I imagine by 2016 and then with 2017's release reception, studio shutdown became inevitable. Flynn left 2017, and Edmonton put their focus onto Anthem. Was Bioware Magic project management going to save them? It did not.



I think for most players if they kept with something tight-but-now-Frostbite, and polished up on their supposed strengths of narrative and cinematic roleplaying choices, it'd have worked out better. There seemed since the 2000s a pattern of these devs trying out something different (fine), but for too long, and that taking away from the time they could have used for just a damn refined product. Lets make a multiplayer only game, lets make a No Mans Sky, lets make an open world looter shooter, lets lets letsss

baun @ baundiesel.bsky.social
90 minutes later (and only 1 forgotten recording incident😅) N7TheLegend and I are finally done ranting and speculating... and maybe talking about some exclusive Mass Effect 4 and Dragon Age Dreadwolf info.👀

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N7TheLegend had some insider info about the next Mass Effect that he discussed on the N7 Day recap episode of the Mass Effect Lorecast. iirc he mentioned that there was other stuff he'd heard about that he couldn't necessarily talk about or couldn't verify and didn't want to share because of that lack of verification, so I do wonder if there's going to be a rehash of his Lorecast info or if there's something new/an update to what he was alluding to before.

As a point of interest, I had mentioned in a Discord server I am in that I was skeptical of The Insider Report™️ that we are getting from the Lorecast re: the number of people currently working on Mass Effect. Someone else in the server who also has some insider view into BioWare said the numbers were off and that there were definitely still people working on the game, just that he could confirm for sure that at least one group had been moved to DA:D. I didn't doubt that N7TheLegend has been talking to people but it was my opinion that there was some kind of misunderstanding of some sort because it didn't track for me, but where I gave him credit is that he did qualify this statement/claim/whatever with the disclaimer that it was just his understanding of what he was being told. Which, totally fair.

He responded to me:

An additional point of interest related to the layoffs is that we also had a brief discussion about DA:D and projections, and someone else asked about numbers. The numbers that we're hearing atm are ~200 people currently work at BioWare, which was in line with what N7TheLegend was also hearing.

I will definitely be keeping my eye out for the video when it comes out.

Anything worthwhile in it, I am not joining to listen to it?

Mass Effect 1 turns 16 today.

At this point I only care if they remove the EA launcher.

Too much a male model? I kinda like his default face, well both of them, Tom and Scott

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