@rethla: When I said animation issues, I meant the unplayable glitchy mess than Brad posted to youtube, not the fact that the facial animations don't look great.

@undeadpool: When you compare it maybe. But DA:I still did a lot of things really well and I think people are forgetting that now.

Also personally feel Witcher 3 can be a pretty big slog too.

The whole " Witcher 3 is better" thing had gotten a bit out of hand. Sure witcher 3 is one of the best rpgs ever made doesn't mean games are bad for not being as good. Inquisition was a good game in its own right, reviewed and sold pretty well too. I think if Andromeda was given a year to work on those animations the game would habe been considered decent and studios would still be open right now. Could have at least done well enough for a sequel i bet, also would give more time to flesh out the side quests and other story stuff.

Man, those things were such a bizarre inclusion. And I definitely agree with you: it's not really memorable to me in almost any capacity. The end game especially. I know I did a thing, but boy I can't remotely remember what.

I don't think anything is being forgotten about DA: I, and I say that as a massive fan of the franchise who never managed to finish it. I got tired of fighting my way through so many mobs that either took too long to fight through on Normal or were too mindlessly challenging on Hard.

Parts of the Witcher COULD be a slog, but you could also avoid a lot of those parts. Monsters could be outrun, quests could be set aside, but with DA:I, if I wanted to go from one place to another on foot, I was fighting the whole way. And even low-level monsters in Witcher were still a threat.

I'd be interested to know what the financial implications of continuing to patch a game after release would be. Most review scores are locked, and I'm sure a lot of people who played the game at launch are unlikely to go back, so that whole zeitgeist window has already been wasted. It would be very interesting to know the balance between "we need to keep working as a goodwill gesture or the existing customers will be pissed" vs "it's financially detrimental to keep working on this game a year after release and we need to stop doing so ASAP". Or maybe this was the plan all along, and that the whole reason MEA was released half-broken was because their budget ran out, and they included a years worth of patches to be paid for out of the profits they assumed they would make.

Y'know... Business.

Anyway, I hope is that they learn from this and make some big changes next time around, with whatever they decide to pursue next.

There is alternate world where EA didn't try to push ME3 out that soon. It would take an additional year, but with a more fleshed out ending and even some of the DLC content built in at launch. Much better received, the entire universe post-reaper wouldn't be seen as toxic and could then be continued in ME4. ME:A still might be made, but as a spin-off with less expectations. Maybe the franchise even branches off into the main line entries with more straightforward story telling and an ME:A trilogy of open world exploration. In this alternate world Anthem would be an Andromeda game.

It's worth noting it's been exactly five months, not a year.

When Blizzard release a game that doesn't live up to the expectations they double down on fixing the problems. For example D3 got the amazing expansion and a lot of patches and made it into a much better game. Better than D2 IMO.

But EA instead want to wash their hands of it and forget about it. Would it not have been better to reedem the game with some quality DLC? It would generate postivie word of mouth and make people excited for a sequel that isn't botched.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic. I was a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge fan of DA Origins and even really liked DA2 but Inquisition has nothing on Witcher 3.

Also while I don't think Andromeda is as bad as people say it is nowhere near as good as the previous games. I would say ME2,1,3,A in that order from best to worst.

I can only hope this will eventually lead to a less-is-more approach to the next title (a looong way from now when the dust settles). The best aspect of ME in my view was its powerful sense of place and strong character development that it established in ME1 and carried through to an enjoyable finale. The gameplay was simply a means of opening up more facets of that. In comparison ME:A felt very confused and any interesting aspects of the Andromeda galaxy fell flat by how poorly the characters were developed.

EA/Bioware is sitting on a fucking mother-lode of AMAZING lore and yet they keep falling back to the Next Epic Shooty Bang Game™ where YOU can save the galaxy from [insert evil nemesis here]. There are a lot of good pre-ME stories that could be told such as the First Contact war with the Turians, or the circumstance around the Mars discovery that led to humanity's accelerated technology - a perfect setting for a good post-cyberpunk story.

Maybe the next game when/if it comes should just be a pure one and done adventure game ala a Telltale game.

It would really, really suck if this is the end of space-opera science-fantasy rpgs. I really like the genre and while I love me all kinds of fantasy, having a mix of settings is always neat. I really want to see another Mass Effect, or Mass effect like game..oh well.

That said, yeah this game isn't great. But if that 20$ tag is still there, I'd say its absolutely 20$ good. If you down own it, but enjoyed the other ME games..at 20$ I'd say you'll get your moneys worth.

Also good to hear the multi-player is gonna get supported still, since that was always decent fun. Silly microtrancation and loot-chest gambling aside.

@ripelivejam: Yeah, if you remove the action RPG then ME was essentially that and Bioware needs to go back to those roots. They had the right idea with improving exploration but trying to shoehorn the Frostbite engine into that equation was the big killer. Alternately they could have done what they should have originally and used a perfectly good procedural engine like the Inovae Engine to build their procedural worlds. It would have saved them a lot of headaches (not to mention help Inovae Studios fund their own game). Perhaps they could even benefit from Star Citizen's R&D for its modified CryEngine and piggyback off that in the future.

Shit you're right, i'm getting them confused with Hello Games, who just released their third free major update to No Mans Sky over a year after launch and which actually made me buy the game (albeit at a heavily discounted price on the PSN summer sale). That, incidentally, is a way of making good on an underwhelming release. Say what you want about Sean Murray but if you go into that game with low expectations and have all the patches installed, it's pretty alright. Definitely worth $20.

There's a bit of a difference there, Hello Games is an independent company that probably needs to get No Man's Sky into a good enough state that their company can actually have a future other than filing for bankruptcy, with their reputation as tarnished as it was (is?). EA can handle their customers being pissed (I mean it seems like that's their goal sometimes), but even with No Man's Sky turning it around I have doubts Sean Murray will ever be able to promote a game for his company again.

you can't fix a bad game with patches.

I mean ultimately though it's still an issue of developers having to work on a game that's already been released, for which there is very little by way of financial return. The majority of sales take place during the launch window, after which people tend to wait for sales. That's part of the reason so many publishers push for a microtransaction model, so they can continue to make money off their product after that launch window has closed. Sure there's a difference in size between the two mentioned here, and their profit margins will be relative, but it's the same principle.

Get it once it's really, really, cheap. I'm a Mass Effect fan and could let some issues pass just fine as long as I could still have fun with a new ME game, if the story was compelling, but Andromeda is so bad I couldn't even bother finishing the 10-hour trial.

Just like @justin258 said, it's boring, tedious, and terribly written. Terrible acted as well. Every single character is written as an asshole and sound like one as well. The cinematics are bland and the facial animations are still atrocious, it's really obvious that they just fixed the ones that got more backlash (like the "my face is tired" lady). The shooting is quite nice, but that's not enough for how bad the rest is. On a technical standpoint is less buggy than how it was on release, but I still got three crashes during the trial (on PS4).

I'm not sure if we've played the same game...

All single player DLC cancelled, all patching cancelled save for the multiplayer, and the price knocked down 67% to $20 bucks after... five months. Oh, and Bioware Montreal dissolved and its remaining employees dispersed to myriad EA support studios. Ouch.

Kind of makes sense, though. People love to focus on the animations (because they're risible), but the game would have still been fundamentally flawed even with perfect facial animations, no bugs, and fully optimized gorilla walks. The writing was atrocious and the story hollow, which was especially damning for a game in a franchise whose core strengths were the writing and story... well, at least until the last six hours of Mass Effect 3. *shrug* Also, the majority of quest content on the empty, barren worlds was very shallow and consisted predominantly of the lowest caliber possible of open world filler missions. The menus were counter-intuitive as well, there was an almost complete lack of ambient music and sound that made every planet feel like a tomb, and the combat was average at beast, earning praise for "being the best in the franchise"... which was a low bar, since combat was neither the focus nor the core strength of any of the previous entries.

At this point, what were EA's options? It could have kept a contingent of Montreal team-members together to make more single player content in the style of what is presently available ("Let's scan twenty rock piles! We got this!") and seen each DLC release face severe criticism tied to all the afore-mentioned game issues. This would have been bad PR.

It could have pulled staff members away from Edmonton and Austin (who are all already VERY busy working on Anthem and Star Wars tie-ins) to make some DLC and probably provided much higher quality content as a result, but the difference in quality between the new stuff and the old stuff would have made it all the more apparent what a borked job Mass Effect: Andromeda was in the first place, and that would be incredibly bad PR too.

All of the above also ignores the issue of diminishing returns for DLC, too. This game burned a very good chunk of its player-base, and DLC is not cheap. It has to be localized for a dozen different languages and /or multiple writing systems, needs dozens of voice actors, and people expect hours of substantial content that is pricey to develop. All of that effort, and how many downloads can you even expect to sell? How many current owners would you have to sell the content to just to break even, on a game that hasn't even broken even yet itself? Consumer good will is all well and good, but how many dollars are you going to throw down the well before enough is enough?

All of this hassle, or... they could just patch the game until most of the meme stuff was taken care of, mark it down dramatically to get it to move enough copies to cover its development cost, and cut their losses. Let the game fade from the zeitgeist and die, and speak of it seldom. Seems like the path they chose, and I can't blame them. It's unfortunate for fans able to look past all the problems, though.

On a slightly off-topic note, maybe EA should keep a close eye on how Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice does. If that game moves enough copies to justify the re-emergence of AA games, perhaps that offers a way to bring back this franchise later.

Specifically, EA could make a six to eight hour long, very focused Mass Effect experience. They already have a functional combat system and Frostbyte was arguably built more for linear experiences than open worlds anyway. Trim the dialogue fat, RPG mechanics, and tacky binary choices (that have MASSive EFFECTs, har har *drum roll*) to cut costs, and tell a tight, cohesive story in that universe.

It could be like the videogame equivalent of a novella, and perhaps ease people into an eventual ret-conning of Mass Effect 3's ending and a re-emergence of the franchise. *shrug*