Your pitch for a NEW Mass Effect game.

[USS Triumphant]

Andromeda did not have budget issues. In short, that project's issues stemmed from bad management.

Fair enough. I couldn't think of another reason why they would have put it in the hands of whom they did - but yeah, bad management would cover it, too.

 

[JD]

That is true. I'm not sure what Bioware was doing at the time. Maybe they were too busy with something else? Either way, trusting an unproven studio with an important franchise was perhaps a bit of a stretch. Usually for sequels, Obsidian would do them as they've had a close relation with Bioware.

Would they have been working on their next game, Anthem, yet at that point?

 

[Kronos]

That bad management could have made a nice budget issue by taking all the money to do jack squat.

 

[Reverend]

Fair enough. I couldn't think of another reason why they would have put it in the hands of whom they did - but yeah, bad management would cover it, too.

IIRC, the satellite studio was the same one that did the MP content and the Omega DLC for ME3. Really the warning signs were right there in front of us the whole time. They just didn't have the experience for a game that big and complex. Add to that the number of higher ups jumping ship or changing direction every 5 mins and honestly it's amazing (and I suspect a testament to the hard work of the grunt workers) that the game is only crushingly mediocre and not outright unplayable.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Would they have been working on their next game, Anthem, yet at that point?

Yeah, I think it's quite possible. It's a bit of a departure for them, but then, if I were in their shoes working on the same type of game for so long, I'd probably be feeling like I needed some change. They were likely pretty much done with Mass Effect at this point, but the suits likely wanted a new game in the series, looked at which studio also had experience in it and the rest is history. But I also think the mistakes the game had was down to a number of issues. Bad management, certainly, but from I've read the dev team was feeling the pressure. Not only was it completely new team that had only done an expansion at that point, but they had to use a new engine (Frostbite) by EA's mandate that all of their studios had to use, was hard to use and entirely unsuitable for their project. And while they were struggling with having to use it and adapting it for their use, EA was doubling down on the pressure to release it and ended up releasing it earlier to meet deadlines. Result: A mess effect.

https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

 

[Thestral]

Frostbite is such a shitty engine. But then, EA.

I don't really have any particular desires other than a return to that 'verse. Give it to the people that made the Citadel DLC, that was by far the best of them.