Panic at BioWare Montreal?

I can't defend the animations nor the human models, seriously....did they THINK THIS was acceptable in 2017?...after DA:I?

The game looks beautiful and engaging but yeah.
I won't lie at all when it comes to obvious issues and ..the CC.

It depends on how much money it makes. EA seemed to be pretty happy overall with the financial performance of DA:I, even if they didn't give out the exact number of sales. That suggests that Dragon Age 4 is very likely in the early stages of development right now, and there is another new IP that they have cooking that we know virtually nothing about beyond "Yep, it's a thing".

I think they've got plenty of talent left, but this shift to the Frostbite hasn't done them any favours(which was forced on them by EA, unfortunately). Both DA:I and ME:A appear to suffer technical issues due to the respective teams working with new tech. Inquisition had a number of things that I looked at and went "They're clearly trying to make the engine do something it was never designed to do here", which might as well have been the subtitle for the Tactical Camera in that game.

DA2 sold well enough to justify a sequel, like really well despite the criticsm against it. The only way criticsm can kill a franchise is if the sales are terrible because of it (and some franchise can continue without critics approval), Or the game is called complete shit and not just by group of gamer but by sites like IGN or gamespot. If they would gave it a 4 out of 10 like colonial marines then the criticsm could be dangerous to the franchise and for future installments.

But let's be fair, even in the worst possible scenario for mass effect andromeda, it would be very surprising that most major "professional web sites" would give the game a lower score than a 7 out of 10. That would be very surprising for them to do that, oh and before anyone bring me one sites that is less enthusiastic about MEA, I mean a majority of the web sites. A MAJORITY.


I would also say that considering DA 2 was not that huge in content and only had a year and a half of works, it was probably not as expensive to make as MEA. Which means it did not need to sell that many copies to be profitable and therefore assure a future to the franchise, MEA on the other hand, when you consider the forstbite engine, the amounts of dialogue, the size of the content that this game have. It is going to need much more sales to recup the budget. So if it is not as profitable as EA hopes, I don't see the franchise continuing. We have seen that happen before with other licences.

Now don't get me wrong, that is not something I hope. Mass effect is my favorite franchise of all time (and yes that includes the 3) but I am realistick about it and I am not going to say that the mass effect franchise will always continue whatever happens due to the sales of MEA. I am confident it will sell enough because that is mass effect after all, but is failure or dissapointment coudl totally mean the end of the franchise not bringing shepard back. like some people say.

about tree fiddy

From what I remember DA2 dropped off in sales pretty quickly after word got out it wasn't that great.

Although I'm not going to say that Mass Effect will continue no matter what either. It will only continue so long as EA believes it's profitable to continue. I'm not sure if disappointment alone would entirely mean the end of the franchise, but it could put a lot of pressure on the next installment to do well or be thrown out.

I actually kind of hope they don't try to bring Shep back in desperation. I'm not against going back to the Milky Way, but Shep's story is over.

...and again, BW shot them self into the foot with a SWAT door buster shotgun... it's basically ME3s ending all over again, as far as the disconnect between marketing and the actual product are concerned.

I'd consider bringing Shepard back an even riskier move than just starting with a clean slate in the same setting. People are always going to compare any ME PC to Shepard, but actually reimagining Shepard would make this immensely worse. 

In The Witcher 3? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of emotion being expressed in facial animations in general. It merely makes sense for Geralt because he was actually written that way from the start.

In ME:A, BioWare tried to make characters show a lot more emotion and it backfired in certain places. Playing as Sara there is some early scenes where clearly she's supposed to be smiling but it comes off as really creepy instead.

In fact, most scenes where she smiles look off.

And people thought they weren't showing the game because they did not want to repeat that, "being careful with the marketing" they said. I tried to make them see... but alas many did not.

You know what people say: Fool me once...

I see Mac Walters is still a lying sack of shit. You know what though, I take it back. I don't think they're panicking. I think they've known for awhile now the game was fucked up. It explains the refusal to show the game off for such a long time.

About facial animation, its totally possible that they thought they could do better on this area with more time and ressources put on them. its possible that At some point it was planned to improve them, but finally they switch their attention from that to something else on the game. It happens a lot in game development where plans changes and some features were suppose to be improve or created but then things changed for whatever reasons.