Panic at BioWare Montreal?

Several years from now, will a lot of gamers care about or even remember Shepard? You'd have to do a reboot on a smaller scale. Not necessarily a terrible idea even if I have no interest in it.

Yes. 

Yes.

We people here on forums are not repsentative of most of the audience, if we were the only customer, the industry would go bankrupt. So no matter how much people here care about shepard, that is a verry different situation for the demographic needed to make sure nay mass effect is profitable.

And does the general customer care about shepard? I don't think he gives a single fuck about him or her. He may buy a mass effect game, but will he buy it because shepard returns? I don,t think so, he will buy it because its a triple A game.

Shepard did not have any new content for 4 years if we count the citadel dlc and 5 years if we only count the basic game. Even if they start making an actual game with him, if you count one year of dlc that it will take for MEA, that would mean the development of a shepard game would start in march 2018.

at best the game would be finished in 2020 and 2 years is not enough for an excellent game, so if you want the best quality that would at least be in 2021.

2021 that would mean more than 9 years without a shepard game, would the random gamer care about him after all these years? I am not sure of that.

Don't think there is any panic over there. Either they've predicted mixed response for a while after locking down on the final product (and not making more delays after a hard 5-year cycle) or they've been so close to their own work they actually haven't noticed how it compares.

Given Mike Gamble's responses I keep feeling it's the latter but I also have kind of a feeling that they were aware this isn't as pretty as even they had hoped to make it becuase you can tell with the full perforamance stuff and the technically beefed up features that they were aiming higher than what the final product is showing. You can never fully expect a big development like this to go completely according to plan, but my guess is that at some point they sort of cut their losses and went to make the next best thing which is this, and for what it's worth, it's still a fully featured game just with some unpolished aspects.

I do have a feeling, and have been suspecting for a while, that there's a strange air of low self esteem going on over at Montreal. I've followed a few of them on Twitter and every now and then they're like "oh thanks for the positive response. It really helps us keep going." as if they're struggling to stay positive about their own work. We know Schlerf, Wynn and even the super talented Cameron Harris editor left in 2016, so sometimes you seriously wonder if some huge setback happened during development or maybe disagreements over the high-level vision and shoot me if I'm not right on the money for saying that they probably made drastic changes to the fundamental vision of the game after Inquisition feedback backlashed after people played Witcher 3 especially. But don't buy into this too much. It's just my vague guesswork at how the game came to be this way.

Of course, I'm also forgetting to mention that we're looking at not just a "BioWare" game but a "BioWare Montreal" product - this is their first full product ever unless you count Omega DLC. They had some leads from Edmonton like Mike and Mac and they have Flynn to keep them all in check I guess, but it really was a ballsy risk to take to not only give ME4 to this team but also decide to blow up the scale of a new Mass Effect led by Montreal to these proportions. Something was going to give, especially if you consider how Omega DLC which was Montreal-led had very lukewarm critic response and IMO it really lacked a strong RPGness to its narrative arc but the combat was really good, and so far that seems to be Andromeda in a nutshell too. Everything but the combat and multiplayer seems to be ridiculed all over the internet and even gaming talkshows like Machinima.

I think the biggest panic would be if the game flops critically (a 60/100 would be enough) and it sets back EA's trust in BioWare as a whole, downsizing the teams and firing staff. I'm still surprised they have not fired Mac but I think it's because of the critics/journalist's neglection of the criticism back in ME3 vs what fans had noticed. As far as EA is concerned we're just a bunch of crybabies and trolls that don't know what we're talking about, so they'd have no reason to let go of the guy who wrote the ending that no critics seemed to agree with us on as to whether it was actually bad or not.

Damn this is really upsetting to hear. I still remember what EA did to the Deadspace series.

Lol.

This hysteria is hilarious. Some people I know that have review copies are saying it is the true successor to ME1. It is much deeper in RPG elements than the last two games, that's exactly what I wanted.

Do we know the budget for the game? Not marketing, just the game itself.

Revan is such a great example of a enduring legacy!