BioWare Thinks Mass Effect Andromeda Was Better Game Than Reception Suggested; Learned Not to Put in Open World in RPGs for the Sake of It
BioWare just released Dragon Age: The Veilguard this October 31, and before that, the last new RPG released by the studio was Mass Effect: Andromeda back in 2017. While The Veilguard seems to be doing well both critically and commercially, the same can’t be said for Andromeda that essentially sunk the Mass Effect franchise in one go.
Most pundits pointed out Andromeda’s various technical issues and lack of polish as some of the main issues people had with it. However, according to BioWare’s John Epler, Andromeda was a better game than its reception suggested, even if it did deserve the reception it got.
“I do think Andromeda was a better game than its reception suggested, but on the flip side, I don’t think the reception was unfair. At the time of launch, there were technical issues and things that didn’t work.”
Safe to say, Andromeda was not BioWare’s finest work, and the studio learned a lot from it, which included not shoehorning an open-world just to tick off a box from a checklist. You see, when Andromeda was released, featuring an open-world and big explorable spaces were all the rage then, though in Andromeda’s case, it dragged the game down given there’s not a lot of meaningful things in it. This was something Epler mentioned that The Veilguard tried to avoid, and the learnings from Andromeda certainly helped with that decision.
“We had been doing Dragon Age pre-production on versions of Dragon Age 4, and we did have a version that was a lot more open-world. But again, we ran into the same problem of how do you make it compelling or narratively interesting? The reception to Andromeda definitely solidified that.”
Thankfully, Dragon Age: The Veilguard seems to be a return to form for the Canadian studio, as it’s been showered with high praise thanks to its combat, world building and more.
The next game on the docket for BioWare is the new Mass Effect game, as the studio shared that they’re not developing any The Veilguard DLC since the entire studio is now focusing its development duties on the new and still-untitled Mass Effect game.
As someone who played and loved the original Mass Effect trilogy, I absolutely did not like Andromeda. Not only did the game’s protagonist lack the charm of Commander Shepard, but the facial animation and whatnot certainly broke whatever immersion the game tried to offer. With The Veilguard’s success, it seems we might be seeing the return of Mass Effect’s prominence the next time a new game in the franchise is released.
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I loved Andromeda.
I actually quite liked it myself so when I heard all the negative about it I just put it up to a sign of the times.
But the game was disgustingly received well lol. Eurogamer notoriously “Recommended” Andromeda…. AT LAUNCH TOO…. over Horizon Zero Dawn, a unanimous GOTY contender in 2017.
They have NEVER lived it down. People still talk about it and they done a mass banning of accounts on their website as a result. I was one of them.
Andromeda was received way better than it deserved. It was just such an awful horrendous game when compared to what came before.
Andromeda wasn’t so bad when you realise how much publisher interference went on, how many times they restarted and the fact that, for a large number of the staff, this was one of their first titles.
The fact it turned out as well as it did is almost miraculous.
Of course the current bioware, makers of Veilguard think that about andromeda. They’re both the nadir of their respective series.