How well is MEA selling?

Don't count on it. The Force Awakened was commercially very successful and was decently received by critics, Disney knows that more of the same will provide them with more money and they are as every bit as cynical as EA. AFAIK it doesn't carry the same aura of crapiness that the prequels had, sort of like DA:I for the outside the hardcore Bioware fandom.

Why did I mention Obsidian? Because it's the closest you can get today to 2000s Bioware without being Bioware, and because it happened in the past with NWN2 and KOTOR2, both games are good. I'm aware it wont happen and frankly I would prefer the IP handed over to Blizzard or CDPR, but it wont happen either. 

I haven't seen anything new from Obsidian for me to give them that kind of support and I rather deal with another game like Andromeda then be like the messes they have recently made, for it would be the same as saying that BioWare is perfect based on Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins.

I just don't think Blizzard's design style would work for games like what BioWare delivers.

CDPR's biggest strength for their recent games is Geralt for he is a fixed character that you do very little to shape which is the exact opposite of what BioWare does.  BioWare makes their characters extremely bland so a person can insert themselves into the character and build them up instead of just sitting on their shoulder watching what is going on.  I personally rather see BioWare go the route of a fixed protagonist first and see how it compares to their more blank slate characters first. I am curious to see if they fall into the same trappings as BioWare with Cyberpunk 2077 since it seems they are going to the more modern BioWare approach with more customization for the protagonist.

MEA has a 74 Metacritic score, not quite good even by the "professional" reviewers standards.

ITs a good game not a great game not an outstanding game.

When the ME3 demo was out, I had no intentions of buying ME3. Liked ME2 hated the original and all that Time sink crap. Of course I started the series with ME2 and then tried ME1, it was rather disappointing.

So played the demo of ME3 got excited and bought the collectors editions or whatever its called at BioWare. Hopefully there wont be a red blue green ending in this new game.

Also much like DA:I, i dont see myself playing Andromeda multiple times, heck I haven't even finished DA:I. Unlike the 32 play through of ME3 and 36 of ME2

I think the idea is that Obsidian would be good at (some of) the things which ME:A is thought to not have done well.

It's not a crazy theory. I wouldn't trust Obsidian to design this kind of combat, but they wouldn't have to since we've already got decent combat. But I'm not sure they can do cinematic -- or would even want to.

Personally I don't like Obsidian that much, I'm strictly in the philosophy that gameplay > story so playing through Pillars of Eternity in PotD was pretty painful at times without trying to min-max custom characters, but they do make games that have similar structure to Bioware's. I wouldn't call PoE a mess though, I simply didn't like it but there are many who do and I understand them. About Tyranny, don't know. I've just watch a story analysis video of the game and it seems very deep and nuanced, don't know how the gameplay is. NV while bug-riddled, is considered to be the strongest story since the 2D days in the Fallout universe.

Before Overwatch I wouldn't consider multiplayer FPS to be Blizzard's style, but there we are now with Overwatch which is a MASSIVE success. Granted their approach to world and character design is different, but hypothetically I would gladly live with it if the gameplay, story and polish are there.

CDPR already proved that they can make an effective open world RPG which is also heavily narrative-based. They aren't bounded by a publisher (like Blizzard, they are fully doing their own thing without Activision interfering) and their approach to consumers is risky but paid off because they delivered a very high quality product. Unless things drastically change in the next few years (like EA actually succeeding in buying them the second time around) I don't see the pro-consumer approach changes. Will CP2077 live to the glory of TW3? We will have to wait and see, my predicition that it will not, but it won't be too far off.

ME:A is still an expensive game with a very long development cycle that could have gone to other projects. A failure won't risk the existence of EA but it will be painful, especially since Titanfall 2 flopped commercially. EA actually trying to improve their ways over the years, but they do it in a cold corporate way, so if the game flops they will start asking questions and it will be beneficial in the long run. EA has two good+ games in recent memory, BF1 and TF2, so even with corporate checklisting the developers can make a good experience.

After seeing the game, maybe the series should have ended with ME3 instead of throwing the IP to their B team to try to scramble up something that will capitalize on the name only. Maybe we would have seen the new IP earlier and better than what we would get. I wonder if we will see it in E3 though...

(As a side note, I've always wanted a Dune 4 game, but now with EA, I dunno...)

True. I think this will go up after the first patches, hopelly fixing the most glaring issues. From whom I trust, the game is a 80/100.

The thing is, EA is responsible for funding the project.  By what I have seen posted (however I have no confirmation that this is actually true), EA gave $40 million for MEA, which is less than what CDPR spent on TW3.  Remember, too, that CDPR is headquartered in a country with very low wages, so they get more bang for their buck, as well.  So it could be that, with the budget they had and the available people at their disposal (since others in Bioware were working on the New IP, DAI DLC, SWTOR, and the new Star Wars game) they could really just do no better.  They ran out of money and EA was unwilling to give more to the project.  So I think EA can be blamed for some of it, assuredly.  I don't blame Bioware.  I think they did what they could with the resources they had.  You just can't make the 2017 GOTY with such a small budget.

Maybe set your scope a little smaller. Less time spent filling worlds with empty crap and pointless nothing, more time spent on actually making the core of the game.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware set their scope massive like they did with DAI, then going "oh shit we can't do this stuff. fuck... we gotta spend a bunch of time cutting all this content we worked on since it won't be finished" just like DAI and then they panicked to get it in a decent enough shape to launch, but worse off. That's internal leadership. Not EA.

A smaller, tighter focus, a smoothed over story at the edges and actually polishing up animations and features probably launches this game as a GOTY candidate.

I am going to be laughing my ass off when the sales do come out, and it turns out they made more then enough that they are already started to make ME5. Also, the mp is bring is big bucks already. I already spent about 200 on it, and I plan to spend more. Plus there are some who already spent over $500, so they will get their money one way or another.