Game play has never really been their problem, they couldn't ripcord and pull Anthem around soon enough on the end game narrative and game cycle. The writing on Andromeda was not fully up to spec through the red lense of their prior games.
I liked Andromeda for the most part, but the quippy companions were soooo unbelievably bad. It's the only thing that's stuck with me and will remain the only reason I don't replay it.
Yeah I didn't mind Andromeda. Was it as good as 1 & 2? No. But that's almost an impossible goal as those were the type of games that don't come around often.
It had a good world and I could see potential in expanding it. The story itself was also solid. Not as good as the trilogy but again, hard to compete.
People are too forgiving for ME3 nowadays because the characters developed in the previous games carried it and received some iconic resolutions like Mordin.
But pretty much every character that ME3 introduced was dogshit. Except Javik, Javik's great but you couldn't even enjoy him originally as he was cut from the base game to be sold as DLC.
People are too forgiving of Andromeda nowadays. It was pretty universally and infamously disliked and heavily criticized when it was released. Horrible bugs, bad graphics and animations, rote gameplay, bad story and dialogue, unfinished story beats, etc.
The studio even got shut down because of it, which back then, happened more due to failure rather than because of the trash way this industry works now.
The problem with both Andromeda and Anthem was that Bioware spent way too long fucking about in preproduction trying to figure out what the game should be.
Andromeda with its procederally generated planets to explore until EA started asking where the actual game was.
Anthem with its... everything to the point an EA exec had to tell them "No. Put the flying back in. That was fun. Why did you take it out?"
Veilguard I put at EA's feet though. They had to reboot that game twice from a singleplayer RPG(Dreadwolf) to a live service game, and then back to a single player game because live service games were dying left and right.
Veilguard's writing I put on Bioware though:
("The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
"The elven gods Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain"
Yah yah I GET IT! I GOT IT! WE'RE FIGHTING THE ELVEN GODS SHUT UP ABOUT IT!)
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u/Deeppurp 7h ago
It wasn't even just Anthem.
It was Anthem and Andromeda.
Game play has never really been their problem, they couldn't ripcord and pull Anthem around soon enough on the end game narrative and game cycle. The writing on Andromeda was not fully up to spec through the red lense of their prior games.