Mac Walters is Lead Writer for Andromeda

Because he gets the brunt of the blame for the ending.

In truth a lot of what Walters does has been positive, mostly characterization direction.

His big problem is overly logical knot tying...think 2001-style, deep thinking stuff.

My main gripe with Mac is his dismantling of an (arguably) nuanced setting to make more room for his pet creations (namely Cerberus and general human centricity) and preferred depictions of characters. While he is not named specifically, I am fairly certain it was Walters that Chris L'Etoile was butting heads with over Legion and the Geth in ME 2. The whole hero worshiping/creepy stalker bit with Shepard's armor was to paraphrase Chris' words: "Forced on him by someone higher paid than himself". The fact that after L'Etoile departed BioWare, and Mac Walters, as lead writer, green-lit the whole Pinocchio bot transformation of the Geth in ME 3 would seem to indicate as much at any rate. 

Try to read the comics and think about what happens instead of gushing over it just because it's your favorite characters doing "cool" things.

I posted this ina different thread, but besides having some joke names based on co-workers: Padok Wiks (Patrick Weekes) and Jondum Bao (John Dombrow). There is also a Salarian STG officer probably named after Chris L'Etoile. You only find him in Sur'Kesh if Kirrahe died in Virmire. His name is Lieutenant Tolan, and I really think this was for L'Etoile, who was no longer employed by Bioware. Sources:

masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Padok_Wiks

masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Jondum_Bau

masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Lieutenant_Tolan

I really enjoyed Arrival lol Tis all a matter of prospective...

I have never cared about who is lead writer, designer or things like that. I look at the game when it is done and out. Getting hyped, or in this case anti-hyped because someone is in a specific position, just seems like a waste of energy and time.
I mean, why even bother with anything that is connected with EA in that case?

Is it not better to wait until we have something MORE concrete about the game then who is doing what?

Same as the ending. Nobody is gonna decide for you what you can enjoy or not, but it's objectively bad storytelling. Perhaps if BioWare had reinvented the wheel for narrative structure with a new form of internally consistent method of plotting and planning it would be good, but they are actually trying to fit their narratives into the Hero's Journey or at least a 3-act structure most of the time, and that's why it's easy to objectively point out where they go wrong. Arrival is shorter, so maybe that has no 3-act style, but what does it have for structure then? Not really anything. There's no arc to it. It's just "this happened" and it randomly features a new Reaper gateway and some idiot scientists that brought a Reaper artifact in and housed it in a central room of their station, and there's no arc to any of this. It's just another strange plot-development and it doesn't even bridge the plot to ME3 because they decided to back out of that "for newcomers" so there isn't even any trial for Shepard after Arrival. It's a narrative mess.

I like Mac for certain things, but he's the god damn M. Night Shyamalan of game writing. On a bad day maybe even Roland Emmerich

A rational counsel for people in this thread.

That's not how writing works. Writing changes all throughout the development process, all the way to the end, as we saw in the November leaks before the release of ME3. That's the reason why so much cut content is left in the game files.

Are you really surprised people are anti-hype when the dumbass premise of this game screams "We were more willing to contradict our own writing than we were having to deal with the shitty endings we wrote for ME3."

All throughout the original trilogy we're told time and time again that the Mass Relay network is the key to long-distance interstellar travel. They spell out in no uncertain terms how difficult non-relay travel is even with plenty of planets to discharge near and refuel on. ME3, which is set AFTER the big Andromeda Ark exodus, shows absolutely no sign of the kind of technology that would make a trip to Andromeda possible, such as a multi-century long core charge capacity, ultra-efficient fuel cells that can last centuries or an FTL drive efficient enough to attain Normandy-level of FTL speeds for a vessel the size and mass of the Crucible.

Even in the war setting of ME3 where no intergalactic journeys take place, this technology would be immensely useful because it would massively reduce the length of supply lines and prevent vessels from being sitting ducks while discharging their drives. There's basically no credible excuse for the galactic civilization to shelter this technology and prevent it from being used in the war.

Yet now we are being told that the same galactic civilization who for 2,500 years has bemoaned their inability to efficiently navigate galactic space without the use of Mass Relays suddenly have developed technology that allows them to make a 600 year journey to another galaxy without refueling, without discharging and with such an efficiency that they can allow a ship as gigantic and massive as an Ark to travel as fast as the Normandy (4380 x speed of light/12 light years a day).

Where was this magical technology in ME3? Can you not see the giant, cosmological plot void here?

This is the Mass Effect equivalent of 1960s NASA engineers bemoaning the fact that they lack the technology to send people to Mars 56 million kilometers away, right before sending a crew of astronauts to Alpha Centauri 42.5 trillion kilometers away. In what reality does that make any sense?

Let's be real here for once. BioWare hasn't shown you anything that could remotely be used as basis for hype. On the contrary, everything they've shown reinforces the idea that they've learned fucking nothing from ME3.

Well, they've learn that they can insult our intelligence and still get away with it.

Hell, when I first played ME2, it was the dumbest premise I'd seen in awhile.. executed in an equally dumb way.. Where I lived and was resurrected all in 5 minutes. But yet, it turned out to be my favorite game. Go figure.

That's exactly how it should work. If story gets rewritten last minute, it's a catastrophe not a "development process". Cut content is typical problem, because some things always get underestimated and cannot be done in time, you can minimize it, but never negate completely.