To say that expectations have been excessive from 2017’s Mass Impact: Andromeda within the lead-up to its launch could be an understatement, however on the identical time, it could be an understatement to say that it didn’t dwell as much as these expectations. The open world RPG was met with lukewarm reception from critics and gamers at finest, with the sport’s technical points and bloated measurement being amongst a number of of its greatest points to be on the top of widespread criticism.
Andromeda, unsurprisingly, didn’t promote the best way EA had hoped it could, and shortly after its launch, it was introduced that the collection had been placed on ice, and that plans for the sport’s post-launch DLC had been cancelled. A sequel, which was very a lot being arrange all through Andromeda’s story, additionally by no means got here to fruition- although former BioWare veteran Mac Walters, who directed the sport sport, nonetheless needs the studio had acquired the possibility to develop a direct sequel.
Talking in a current interview with Eurogamer, Walters – who left BioWare earlier this yr – talked about how the event crew was centered extra on amount of content material than high quality, and ended up compromising on polish consequently.
“There have been simply quite a lot of issues that we needed to relearn, re-figure out, and in the end whenever you do this, it’s very, very difficult to come back out and be as polished as your third iteration was, and we didn’t hit that,” he stated. “And we most likely ought to have – in hindsight – simply decreased scope extra and executed on what we may to [ensure] high quality.
“However we have been additionally in a bizarre section within the trade the place lots of people have been saying amount was high quality, so we have been deluding ourselves internally a bit bit that if it’s perhaps not as polished as [Mass Effect 3], it’s wonderful – it’s larger and there’s extra right here, and there’s extra to do. And we hit some extent the place folks have been like, ‘No, that isn’t okay.’ Or, at the least, ‘It isn’t okay on your franchise’. And that’s wonderful, that’s a lesson discovered.”
Nevertheless, Walters consider that if BioWare had been capable of make a direct sequel, the developer would have utilized considerably larger ranges of polish to the title, simply because it did over the course of the unique Mass Impact trilogy.
“I solely want we had been capable of then do a second one, as a result of then you definitely would have actually seen that polish similar to we did from [ME1] to [ME2] on the unique [trilogy],” Walters stated.
Later, he added: “Definitely, had we shipped an Andromeda 2, I’m one hundred percent sure we might have improved on all of the issues that folks referred to as out after which additionally been about to lean into the progressive issues that we have been making an attempt to do as effectively.”
After all, BioWare is at present at work on a brand new Mass Impact video games, which was first confirmed to be within the works in December 2020, and acquired a mysterious new teaser in November of final yr. Little or no is thought in regards to the sport, however though it’s unlikely to be a direct sequel to Andromeda, BioWare has hinted a few occasions that it may nonetheless decide up unresolved narrative threads from the 2017’s RPG story and proceed constructing on them.
A few years in the past, former BioWare writers Chris Helper and Jo Berry additionally spoke about Mass Impact: Andromeda’s growth, and the way the studio needed to severely lower down on the sport’s scope because of finances restrictions. Learn extra on that by means of right here.
