Bioware animators not the badguys (Unfairly Vilified?)

This is a great video. My gut feeling was that it was never the developers. My anger is the completely horrible leadership and lack of HR support. You can't pass on the vision of the original work if your leads keep changing.

I've moved on from ME:A and am now playing other games. Truth be told, I probably won't touch ME:A again, unless some really interesting DLC comes out. But that said I played at least 60 hours worth, and two full playthroughs, because I wanted to experience as much as I could to get a full grasp on the game. My feeling is this...

I think EA forced Bioware to make this game. I think Bioware were serious during ME3's release when they said they had no further plans for the series. I think ME:A was made strictly for money reasons, and it was dropped on a smaller studio who had no experience making a full game. Their first full game being an Open World RPG, one of the more difficult types of games to make. I don't think Bioware Montreal had a chance. That's not to say they're not at fault for a lot of the game's shortcomings, especially the writing. But this is absolutely a symptom of EA.

Andromeda feels very design by committee. They designed this game by bulletpointing what people loved about the previous games, without actually understanding WHY they like it. They didn't look at the care that went into the things people loved about ME1-3. Mass Effect 1 came from a creative spark, and team of developers that had a story they WANTED to tell. ME:A came from EA saying "make another one".

o.o really? I just reached Kadara with 45 hours on first playthrough.. I enjoy the game a lot and tried to make peace with the facial expression + animations.

and about the animation.. do they really need to blame others?

No such thing as "such and such was responsible". A team is a team is a team ... period. Every last employee involved with the game is responsible for all positive and negative aspects of the game ... period.

That said, despite the fact that the facial animations bugged the hell out of me, I enjoy this game and will continue to enjoy it as I live stream. Are the facial animations silly? Yeah, but they are not game breaking. My game doesn't crash. I can play for hours at a time ... I got what I paid for and consider myself happy.