“Early development” on mass effect is wild to say for a game they announced 6 years ago. Absolutely ridiculous that in 6 years they never made progress on the game. Utterly insane.
Ya know what, I’m not even mad. Fuck it. Hopefully ea and its new owners sell off IP to get some cash back and someone who gives a damn can make the next game
Add American McGee's Alice to the list. I'll never forgive EA what they did to the man, they crushed his spirit so hard he basically dropped anything related to videogames.
I think they're just happy with sticking to Battlefield as their military FPS IP. Why invest in MoH when it would just steal sales from their own game? And why sell that famous IP to another publisher when it would also be used make a Battlefield competitor?
At least there's still lots of options for military shooters even if it would be nice to have a new MoH game. Other IPs like Mass Effect, Dead Space, or SimCity have fewer direct alternatives.
Titanfall. Mirror’s Edge. Burnout. Dead Space. Absolute legends left in the dust for the sake of profit. RIP to Pandemic, Visceral, Criterion and the like. Fuck EA
I don’t fully understand why they don’t. Some of these franchises have enough hype that they could turn a profit if they didn’t drag out development for a decade and kept the vision relatively modest. You’d think some studios would pay decent $$ for licensing rights, alone.
Same thing when Halo studios got shut. 6 years and all they had was "we want campaign, multi-player and forge to be avaliable day one" like that's some lofty goal
Being a dragon age fan seeing that your game was probably the last nail in the coffin has to be harsh too lmao. It's sad we will never see a satisfying ending for these games now. Mass effect and dragon age officially ended with a fart.
As an adult, I kinda stopped caring about these type of things because these companies Always usually fail in the end
There is only three constants in the video game world that will always be true. Zelda, Pokemon and Mario. That is it. Those tree are the constant. Everything else is prone to disappear
But to me, mass effect died long ago. Exodus is the closest we got to a spiritual successor and was waiting for they more than mass effect 5.
It is definitely best not to get attached to these things. Dev studios are like bands. They can only ship of theseus so far before the magic is just gone, and Bioware's been there for quite a long time now if we're being honest.
They got a better run than a lot of EA acquisitions managed. Bullfrog was parted out almost immediately.
My biggest issue with it is the companion system. You never really have a chance to actually piss someone off. Every interpersonal conflict is solved by Rook in a single dialogue sequence, then everybody is happy friend time again.
I like to call it Dragon Age: Rook and the Get-along-Gang.
Not to mention that it seems like Rook is never truly part of the gang. The others hang out with each other and do stuff, and when Rook comes in it’s like “oh, you’re here”.
And it was very odd when having initiated some romance with Lucanis (early stages) and there was some blatant flirting between him and Neve.
I think it’s just a fine game. It’s not some crime against humanity, but it’s maybe a 6 or 7/10 that didn’t really live up to its predecessors or do a very good job of wrapping up the stories they’d set up. And I don’t think it would’ve gotten any real attention if it wasn’t from a well known series people really wanted a sequel to.
In the words of my parents: “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”
I don't think methaphorically and literally blowing the entire world of the past games and having been notified by random ass letters is a "good job of wrapping up stories they'd set up" but that's your opinion.
Oh, you know, they just butchered the worldbuilding, preexisting characters, lore, factions, lacked any decision making, characterisation of your mc, depth or moral dillemas, scrapped all previous choices and retroactively wiped them out, then they topped it off with utterly terrible writing, and an almost entirely bland or awful cast.
At least the hair is pretty and it ran well. But it was absolutely the death of the DA series and as we now see, the company as a whole.
You got some comments talking about the negatives, I’ll give you some positives!
It’s gorgeous, like legitimately a very good looking game.
Combat is super fun and engaging.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with the hair physics.
The climax->ending is actually very satisfying, think old school BioWare.
I really liked the main antagonists designs, that’s just me though.
didn't the Master Chief collection only get into a workable place like last year? it came out in 2019 and it took over half a decade for it to be in a viable state. nothing but clowns over at 343
In both cases we don’t really know what was going on behind the scenes and what kind of resources were being allocated by the owners. But it’s hard to see these as anything but poor management by the company that had literally years between projects and nothing at all to show for it.
Agreed. I think the mass effect IP still has enough weight that they may try getting a more competent studio to take over (nothing against old BioWare, just the iteration of the past few years)
This is just anecdotal evidence. I’m in my 30s and I remember playing ME2 and ME3 during their release periods, and even Andromeda still holds up in my opinion. Through some mutual friends, I’m in a gaming group primarily made up of early to mid 20s people, and none of them really have any knowledge or appreciation of Mass Effect, other than knowing it exists. Unfortunately, I just don’t think it has the long lasting weight that it would need. Going so far between releases certainly does not help
Mass effect was all released within 4 years (2008-2012) which is crazy to think. If they kept that momentum maybe we would still see bioware today, even with the complaints regarding 3.
I love the franchise but I've kinda had to move on myself, it doesn't help that andromeda was pretty mid lol.
I never hated Andromeda. I enjoyed it. If anything, I think the decision to go back to the Milky Way and abandon the set up from Andromeda was the 343 strat where they're too scared to stick with something.
Now that bit doesn't mean it was Bioware, could have been EA.
But my goodness, more than half a decade and it was "early development"?
It's a damn shame because the IP could be something of a Star Wars Lite. Imagine a Mass Effect 4x set during the First Contact War or something like Helldivers II set during the Reaper invasion. A space dogfighting game would be sick. Or a criminal outlaw, heist-oriented kind of game taking place in the Terminus Systems. Hell, if you wanna get risky even an RTS could be compelling.
There's so much to work with. All they have to do is throw the right talent at it.
The success of Space Marine 2 has given me a glimmer of hope for these situations. Fans of Mass Effect still exist and maybe enough get together to make a proper continuation of the franchise.
It's not unusual. They did the bulk of the development for their last 3 games all within the last 15 months of development despite having 4 to 6 years to work on all of them. They didn't even know what Anthem would even look like when they were making their E3 trailer and nearly cut flying out of the game when it was a core mechanic.
It's unacceptable for a triple AAA company. If anything Bioware deserves this. Our only hope is someone else picking up the IP which will most likely never happen
Genuinely the 2 most important video game franchises to me. I'm dying, not even metaphorically, I think the Mass Effect announcement genuinely just took years off my life
You’ll get ME5 but it’ll be on the worst spaghetti code you’ve seen and then they’ll gaslight you with some sparse dlc that should’ve been included with launch to forget they ever mentioned a 6th game.
I’m not sure why people are surprised or blaming EA, but this isn’t the first comment section just today to do so.
Anthem had next to nothing after like 7 years. This was pretty well documented at the time, but then even after Veilguard there was the same “but EA kept changing what they wanted or forcing a live service game.” Like sure. Whatever. But that’s a long ass time to have basically nothing to show for it, and then rush something out the door and blame EA.
That isn’t even touching on some of the elitist allegations about their satellite studio that was busy keeping up the only game they had that was at least delivering mid to ok results back then.
The focus probably was on Dragon Age Veilguard. After that did not fulfill the expectations they might have gutted the studio so much that not that many resources remained. There is also the strong possibility that the next Mass Effect originally would have had many similarities to Veilguard so a lot might have gotten scrapped after that one failed.
From the various reports involving Andromeda, and then Anthem, and then Veilguard?
I'm not actually all that surprised. At some point they seemed to shift into "go in one direction, then another, until finally forced to put out a product and have to fall back on the 'story based rpg' approach because we dithered about for too long" and have been that way since pretty much after ME3 or DAI, depending on who you ask.
So the latest one being announced 6 years ago and it was still in early development is the least surprising thing I've seen from the announcement.
Nah, that's just damage control. To say it was in "early development" when that happened at least 2 and a half years ago is beyond insane. It was likely going through the mid development. If they say it was in early development, in their eyes, it makes it easier for us fans to accept that it wasn't just a good idea scratched, but a somewhat early concept that was destroyed.
I hope someone buys it and actually does something with its.
I’d be worried with cdpr to be honest. They’ve got multiple other major projects going on and a mass effect game would likely not get touched for a decade
People like to blame EA when yes they are truly evil but 6 years and they were still in early development? I bet even EA were shocked, after a dreadful mass effect release and then a dogshit veilguard release it's a surprise it took this long to put the cow down, can't even milk them they're that worthless.
6 years and they couldn't fucking release this game. I'm disappointed but pissed at the same time. All because they took the time to make that garbage fucking game of Dragon Age that everyone hated. It really went in the direction that no one expected with ugly af characters and forced & unnecessary dialogs about characters orientations. It's only like this that developers learn through stupid shit like this. Ugh it pisses me off as a big Mass Effect fan.
Might have been 6 years since the announcement but the studio was gutted to a fraction of the size for much of that time, not to mention that the entire Mass Effect team was pulled away from making Mass Effect for 2 years to get Veilguard out the door
I mean, EA cut Bioware to a small team then it got sold, i'm not surprised they couldn't ok Bioware to hire 100s of people and i'm not surprised the Saudis with the debt level they put the company decided to just cut jobs.
The game not leaving early development is not surprising given the manpower avaiable even if they produced a good game slice/prototype/story.
Recently I've been reading into game development, and whereas I used to be all like "oh, let the artists work, it must be so hard!" Now I'm convinced they brought it on themselves.
There's so much terrible management and work ethic in the video games industry, let alone entertainment, I think they fucked up by themselves.
And I'm a diehard Dragon age fan who watched all the behind he scenes stuff and interviews. I loved em
Totally agreed. Also I really feared they would fuck it up since this game was related to the OG trilogy. Even if the ending was kinda disappointing, I feel getting a closure is a good thing. And after the last Dragon Age game my expectations were bottom low and a part of me really wanted they stopped the development of the game.
this is how I feel about most AAA studios these days. they aren't the same studios they were when they released their best games. and I don't think they are capable of releasing games anywhere near the same quality.
People on the inside probably know more, earlier; I can’t imagine putting my heart into a project for years that I was relatively confident would be shit canned. Probably a soul-sucking way to work, but I know it’s also a bad time to be a dev out of a job. Hopefully they all land on their feet.
You understand that BioWare developers were constantly pulled off ME and DA to work on other EA things which is why it's been in early development for so long... right?
That's something I'll never understand from these "fuck you" rich folks... Like you have alllll this vast wealth that you could blow a billion dollars a month and still not make s dent... Why not buy off an IP and create a game you know the people would genuinely love.
If I had that kind of money, I would buy the Mass Effect IP, the gaming IP for One Piece. Hire the best gaming minds that money has to offer, and just let them go crazy!!
Mass effect is too great to be wasted like this, and For one piece to not have an open world RPG game where you design your character and go on an adventure is blasphemy!!!
Ya know what, I’m not even mad. Fuck it. Hopefully ea and its new owners sell off IP to get some cash back and someone who gives a damn can make the next game
Bioware has been a complete shitshow internally for awhile. Alot of it is due to EA meddling ofcourse but if you look up some behind the scenes development stories for Anthem you will notice that Bioware just had massive issues themselves. I hope all the people who worked at Bioware manage to land on their feet again
Games were vastly different back then. It wasn’t unheard of for a game to have less than 2 years development time and be high quality. Now a game with less then 2 years at the aaa level looks like shit
Thats pretty much where I am at too, the chance for a good ME game is a lot higher with the IP in the hands of any other dev than Bioware in the state they were in at the end.
BioWare magic was relied too much on. Partly EA's fault at times, but a lot of the fault was on the incompetence of BioWare who just seemed incapable of actually developing a game on time.
Command and Conquer fans reading this and laughing their asses off probably (they have been sitting on that IP for two decades without making anything, nor selling it off)
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u/americansherlock201 7h ago
“Early development” on mass effect is wild to say for a game they announced 6 years ago. Absolutely ridiculous that in 6 years they never made progress on the game. Utterly insane.
Ya know what, I’m not even mad. Fuck it. Hopefully ea and its new owners sell off IP to get some cash back and someone who gives a damn can make the next game