Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

[GarfunkeL]

I'll happily be proven wrong and see Bioware go down in flames.

 

[Lhynn]

I'll happily be proven wrong and see Bioware go down in flames.

I like to think it wont go down in flames, it will merely be taken to the back of the shed by EA and mercifully shot and dumped in the common grave they have there. It will be in far better company than it deserves tho.

 

[pippin]

If Bioware insists in making a Bioware game (you know what I'm talking about) Andromeda will fail. Although I've always seen ME as the most successful franchise of nubioware.

 

[J1M]

Infinitron, which part does he discuss the ending where you reject the 3 choices?

Based on my math, that was actually the only reasonable choice. (For Shepard, but also the player.)

 

[Infinitron]

It's time for one last unfortunate visit to the Mass Effect universe!

Andromeda Part 1: So What Happened?

I’m sure most of you remember the novel-sized retrospective I did on the original Mass Effect trilogy that ran from July 2015 to June 2016. At the end of the series we were still looking forward to Mass Effect Andromeda and wondering how that would turn out. Since then the game has been released, received mixed reviews, became an industry-wide joke due to bugs and glitches, was patched up by the developers, and then faded from public memory. It began as a hot mess and ended as a disappointing footnote in the history of BioWare. Now I’m finally getting around to playing it, over two years after my original Mass Effect series ended.

Frustratingly, this game is neither as good nor as terrible as I’d hoped. This is not a return to the energetic worldbuilding of Mass Effect 1, but neither is it an affront to reason like the final act of Mass Effect 3[1]. There are a few good ideas here, mixed in with the bog-standard gameplay, open-world busywork, and cringy dialog.

While Mass Effect 3 was at times frustrating and irritating, Andromeda‘s great sin is that it’s merely disappointing. There’s not much to get worked up about here. Mass Effect 3 had the problem where its story unraveled right at the moment where it should have started wrapping up, and it was the conclusion to a story we’d been following for three games over the course of five years. This game tells a stand-alone story. The stakes were lower this time around, and so were our expectations.


What Happened?

If you’re a longstanding fan of BioWare then one question probably hung in your mind as you played through Andromeda: What happened to this game? Janky animations, un-BioWare gameplay, linear dialogs, Ubisoft-style open-world stuff, pervasive bugs, oddly scripted cutscenes, and a host of other problems all work to pull your mind away from the game and turn it towards thinking about its development.

The previous games came from BioWare’s Edmonton studio, while this game was created by the new studio based in Montreal. I deliberately avoided looking at the credits during the writing of this series[2], so I didn’t know which (if any) writing staff or creative leads this game might share with the previous entries. As in my previous write-ups, we’re going to pretend that this story is the work of some singular unnamed writer. I find this makes it easier for the analysis to feel detached instead of coming off like an angry hit-piece.

Obviously I don’t have any special insider knowledge about the development of this game. I’ve never met anyone from BioWare and I’ve never personally worked on a AAA game. I’m stuck on the outside looking in, just like everyone else. Most of the behind-the-scenes information I have comes from the Kotaku article The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Troubled Five-Year Development. Sure, there are other sources of information out there, but as far as I can tell they all lead back to the original research done by Kotaku.

While I don’t have any insider information, I do feel like this series would be incomplete if I didn’t offer my own take on how things went wrong. As far as I can tell from reading articles and playing the game myself, the problems with Andromeda can be traced to three key decisions: Changing game engines, trying to make an open-world game, and ramping up the scope of a Mass Effect title to include much more content. All three of these are bad decisions, but they’re bad decisions that all exacerbate each other.

The first bad decision is that they decided to…

1. Switch to the Frostbite Engine

As the Kotaku article explains, the previous entries in the series used the Unreal engine. But for Andromeda, they switched to using EA’s in-house engine called Frostbite.

The thing about changing engines is that it requires you to retrain your entire creative staff. If you’ve got three dozen people who are all experts in using Unreal Engine to pump out game content, then switching to a new engine will effectively turn them into a bunch of rookies. They may have to change tools, which is hard on both productivity and morale. If you’re fluent in one 3D modeling program and you’re forced to adopt another, then you’re going to spend weeks struggling with what used to be simple tasks. The team will certainly need to adopt a new workflow. Sure, your artists can get the basics down in a few weeks, but they probably won’t be fluent in the new tools until they’ve shipped a game with them. (This game came from a new studio, so it’s possible they hired Frostbite experts. Still, they no doubt began with a seed team from Edmonton or Austin.)

The new engine will also oblige you to restart your entire asset library from scratch. Let’s say you’ve just spent the better part of a decade building up a vast collection of talking animations, ship models, weapon models, character models for several different species, models for “furniture”[3],and modular interior room sections[4]. If you were sticking with the same engine you could draw from that collection to fill in your gameworld, and maybe just touch up the oldest ones to make them appropriately “next gen”. Even if you end up remaking a lot of them over the course of development, it’s really nice to have the old content to serve as a placeholder during production or a fallback option if the schedule gets tight. But if you have to wipe the slate clean then you end up starting with a blank canvas.

Worse, the team was switching to a less mature game engine with fewer features. The Unreal Engine is about twenty years old and is a generalized set of tools to support many different types of games. Frostbite is ten years old and is mostly focused on linear first-person shooters[5]. There are assumptions built into the engine that simply don’t allow for non-linear exploration-based content. You’re supposed to run through a level, shoot all the dudes, and then leave for the next level. The engine didn’t originally have allowances for the idea that the player might have a branching dialog with someone in zone A[6] that will cause changes to the content in zone B[7] that can be reactive and persistent[8] and which can make further changes to the contents of zone A[9]. All of that needed to be added.

This engine switch is a heavy burden to place on a team. All by itself, it would make for a challenge. But on top of that the team decided to…

2. Create a Procedural Open World

If not for the Kotaku article, I wouldn’t have believed this. You certainly can’t tell from playing the game. Apparently the team wanted to run with the idea of being a space pioneer and give you massive procedurally-made worlds to explore.

While this does indeed sound like a great idea for a videogame, it sounds like a horrible idea for a Mass Effect game, a worse idea for a team dealing with sweeping changes to their development tools, and worse still for a game built using the Frostbite engine.

Mass Effect is a game about telling science fiction stories using cutscenes and branching dialog trees. In a story-rich game like Mass Effect, the writer needs some control over the order in which you encounter content and the pacing of that delivery. I won’t say it’s impossible to do that in the context of a procedural world, but it’s never been done before in the AAA world and there’s no obvious way to reconcile these two vastly different ideas.

This idea ran against the genre of the series and the new engine. It’s an idea that leaves a lot of question marks in the design and requires a lot of R&D to sort out. It’s not something you should be messing with when you’re also changing engines and trying to rebuild your entire content library and trying to break in a new team.

This feature was obviously abandoned for a more traditional design, but it still ate up a lot of time and development resources. This is bad because they also decided to…

3. Ramp up the Scope

This is a big game. There’s a lot of content here. Sure, a lot of it doesn’t fit together and none of it is polished, but someone on the team felt like Mass Effect needed to “go big”. Possibly different creative people had different ideas about what content the game should include and what it should be about, and rather than settle on a singular vision they just decided to take two and a half conflicting game designs and blend them all together. Or perhaps the creative leadership just had runaway ambitions. Either way, we wound up with this oversized, unfocused mess.

• In terms of story, the main plot has you facing off against the bad guy for control of the space-MacGuffin. This is a bit like the core of Mass Effect 2, where you have a chain of fixed missions that are more or less divorced from the side content.
• The main plot is about the MacGuffin, but most of the gameplay is focused on making five different planets habitable and sorting out the local political conflicts to make the places safe for colonists. Each planet has its own questline to sort the place out. Back in my Mass Effect 1 write-up I divided the game’s story into “episodes”. Each of these five planets feels like at least an episode worth of content.
• As with previous titles, each of your six squaddies has a story you can go through to unlock their full potential. Unlike previous titles, some of these stories can span multiple missions and run in tandem with the main plot.
• On top of the main plot and the planet-fixing stories, you have the missions where you rescue the arks. These missions exist in a sort of neutral zone between the other content. One of them acts as a stop on the main story, and another is the personal mission for one of your squad mates, while the third is completely standalone. You can sort of claim these parts have already been accounted for above. But these missions have more in common with each other than they do with anything else in the game, to the point where they sort of feel like yet another independent questline.
• There are more romance options than ever before. You can romance five of your six squad mates, plus a couple of additional crew members, plus a few random people sprinkled around the gameworld.
• There’s this whole side-plot where the player unlocks Alec Ryder’s memories to learn the backstory of Alec, the Andromeda Initiative, and AI buddy SAM. It’s a very simple story (no branching) but it’s really heavy on content. Every memory is a full cutscene that runs for several minutes.
• On top of all that is a huge collection of random sidequests. Even after getting all five planets to 100% habitability and completing the game, I still had dozens of open quests and countless more quest markers on offer. I had emails offering me quests, people on the Nexus[10] offering quests, people on planets offering me quests, and even people on my ship offering me quests. None of them are particularly deep or engaging and they offer very little worldbuilding. Most of them follow the form of “click on three things” or “shoot three groups of dudes” or “find and scan three things”. It’s shallow content, but it still has voiced dialog and brief cutscenes associated with it. Which means these quests were eating into the time budget of all the other content.

That’s What Happened

On top of these three bad decisions was the unavoidable fact that this team needed to do some sort of soft reboot / reset to the Mass Effect universe, because making a same-setting sequel wasn’t possible and the public didn’t want a prequel[11]. Any one of these decisions would have created challenges for the team, but when you combine them you end up with an insurmountable mess. The team was in a situation where making content was going to be harder than ever while also embracing a design that required more content than ever before while also messing around with experimental designs that required lots of prototyping while also breaking in a development studio that was at least partly new to the franchise.

I know it’s popular to dump on EA, but I don’t think they can claim more than a third of the blame for this. I’m sure the move to the Frostbite engine was their idea. Frostbite is EA’s in-house engine, and this move was probably done so they wouldn’t have to pay the licensing fees for the Unreal Engine. It’s entirely possible the accounting nitwit who imposed this decision on BioWare didn’t even understand why using Frostbite for a BioWare game would be difficult. You can imagine the technologically illiterate thinking behind this: Both games are about shooting dudes! How hard could it be?

But that decision wasn’t enough to kill Mass Effect Andromeda on its own. If the team had stuck to the tried-and-true design and limited the scope of the project, they would have enjoyed much better odds at making it out of development with a polished game.

But Shamus, isn’t it unfair to fault the developers for trying new things? They’re just trying to push the medium forward!

If this was a new franchise, then I’d agree with you. My problem is that they were “trying new things” that ran counter to the kind of game they were supposed to be making. If they had a design idea ahead of time that would be one thing, but from reading the Kotaku article it sounds like they began making the open-world stuff first, without any clue as to how they could reconcile that with the linear story they wanted to tell. “We’ll figure it out later” is a pretty dangerous attitude, particularly when you’re also trying to change to a game engine with no support for “open world procedural” content.

A Lack of Polish

What we ended up with is a scattershot game that’s being pulled in six different directions at the same time, built atop wobbly technology[12], where all of the content suffers from a glaring lack of polish. It’s a sad end to a long development cycle and possibly even the end of the franchise.

Over the next 22 entries, I’m going to go over the major story arcs of the game and point out the failings, but I’m not going to do a deep dive on the entire game mission-by-mission the way I did for the previous entries. This is an enormous game and covering it in detail would take forever. Worse, most of my analysis would boil down to “This mission is poorly paced, poorly animated, poorly scripted, and contains too much repetitive busywork.” These problems are pervasive, and I don’t feel the need to document it every time they crop up.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Yes Mr. Young, a Mass Effect game where you explore procedurally generated environments under the context that it is Sci-Fi and that the things you find are never before seen does sound like a bad idea, and it's a good thing that none of the games ever tried to do this.


Out of Touch AAA developer tried to emulate a game from 10+ years ago for and they couldn't even do that, that is why Andromeda sucks.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Over the next 22 entries, I’

This seems like an inordinate amount of time to dedicate to this game.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Over the next 22 entries, I’

This seems like an inordinate amount of time to dedicate to this game.

I loved Shamus's evisceration of Mass Effect, and I will love this too. Plus, I'm never planning on playing the game so I can consider this a nitpicky playthrough.

 

[Falksi]

ME1 was IMO a top game. Something that really captured that space-explorer vibe despite all it's flaws. It actually had elements to the combat I prefered over the others too, namely the heat system (ammo often makes combat so fucking boring) & the fact it was geared towards making you pause more mid-combat (which just felt & looked really cool). It really built things up well, had a superb balance of RPG elements for a casual, shooter "RPG", and for me they really nailed a load of good stuff. Wonderful atmosphere, and some great C&C. Played through 4 times, enjoyed every one, and will play through again.

ME2 felt like an inferior, yet decent spin-off. It's like one of ME1's cast got their own series. It suffered badly for the additional streamlining and obvious Mako-for-mining switch, but overall it was just really fucking boring for massive portions. It relied WAY too much on gameplay as the gameplay was the worst in the series - neither as good as ME3 or as roleplay-focussed as the original. Still, the classic "form a gang" vibe did a lot for me, and I enjoyed it to a decent degree just for that. Played through 3 times, only really enjoyed the 2nd playthrough, the rest were "meh".

ME3 was fucking wank. Forget the ending, the shambolic inconsistancies (my Shepard was a sole survivor, so I pissed myself when I saw a man who had seen family slain, comrades slain, and slain thousands himself get choked up and start dreaming about 1 fucking kid lol), the awful attempt at being an "RPG" (picking up quests by tab-hanging? Really?), the absolute butchery of former characters (the Illusive Man's laughable transition from morally grey figure to Scooby-Do villain in the first few hours especially), and the fucking absurd hand-holding made it shite before the ending even existed. Yes they did nail the gameplay, but the rest of it was so bad it didn't matter. Played through half of it and youtubed the ending. Sorry, all 3 endings. Wank.

MEA actually started really well for me. I was prepared for it being a dumb shooter, so I really enjoyed the first 5-6 hours with the setup & initial exploration. 10 hours in and the repetitive nature of it & poor characters started to show, 15 hours in and it fell apart into sheer mind-numbing boredom. And for a game based around powers & gameplay, most powers were dull as hell and way too similar. Gave up after 15 hours.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

ME2 felt like an inferior, yet decent spin-off. It's like one of ME1's cast got their own series.

I agree, and that's the only way to play it, because if you think of it as the sequel to ME1 then it becomes really hard to tolerate. When are we going to get to the plot, mommy?

 

[Jarpie]

ME1 was IMO the last decent (or even good) game by Bioware, the gameplay was pretty shit, but it was fun scifi schlock. The things in the setting were obviously ripped off from the other mediums, for example how humans are quickly becoming one of the strong races with almost going to the war with one of the other races was "influenced" by Babylon 5, with the difference that there was an actual war in B5. Didn't even bother with the sequels as ME2 looked lot more retarded.

After ME1 Bioware seemed to lost their way, Derp Age Origins was so fucking boring, that being said, I haven't played ME1 since the initial playthrough, which was like a decade ago so I probably remember it being better than it is.

 

[Spectacle]

ME3 was fucking wank ... Played through half of it and youtubed the ending. Sorry, all 3 endings. Wank.

It's convenient that you can get all 3 endings in one video.

 

[RepHope]

I’m glad he’s not just bashing the surface criticism of the terrible animations. There were so many bad decisions made that it’s a wonder the game shipped at all.

 

[RegionalHobo]

Procedural open world? At the best they would get a even emptier dragon age inquisition experience, even more MMORPG lite garbage. It seems they really tried to make a product with gigantic scope, scraped it and had to make something that works in months with the assets. What a mess.

You know, i'm less critical than most here about bioware. I think ME 1 was a really damm good game in a genre that s not easy to execute. ME 2 like another user said, seems like a fps spin off, remembers me of ff crisis core, but it s good for what it is. Dragon age : Origins? I did not like most of the cast, but it was a good rpg with a decent setting .

That said DA 2 + ME 3 double punch? That killed the studio for me no doubt, but as bad as DA 2 was i think ME 3 is the most heretical game, perhaps because i liked the franchise a lot more.

When the second wave of decline came i already did not care. That said, i went with the 7 seas version for andromeda and inquisition and could not end either game. Absolute garbage titles with even less redeeming features than DA 2 and ME 3.

The third wave is about to start with their take on destiny. at this point i'll not even pirate their games.

 

[Agame]

Over the next 22 entries, I’

This seems like an inordinate amount of time to dedicate to this game.

Yea its mind boggling!

To be honest I find all this angsty analysis of these type of games hilarious and also fascinating.

It reminds me of the Fallout 3 vs 4 debate, and the vast amount of internets devoted to explaining why F4 is a terrible game, and F3 is somehow better. Guess what, they are both utterly shitty RPGs.

Here is my analogy: A guy sitting down with two piles of steaming feces in front of him, and he is trying to explain to you why one of them is great and the other one is terrible, and then he starts stuffing that tasty F3 shit right into his mouth and gives you a big shit eating grin with chunks of Todd Howards long digested lunch dribbling down his chin. "Mmm Mmmm now that is some tasty shit!!"

F4 is better than F3 because mechanically its superior, and as a shooty run around in a post apoc landscape game its fun. As a Fallout game and an RPG both F3 and 4 are complete garbage and equally bad.

I have played all the ME games and I found very little difference between any of them. They are all derpy sci fi games where you run around and pew pew aliens. And thats fun for what it is. Andromeda was just the same derpy pew pew and flying around in a spaceship. And I had fun playing andromeda because I wasnt expecting some kind of prestigious next level RPG.

 

[cvv]

Retarded drivel of analysis. Anyone who says "ME2 grate, ME3 hot garbage" immediately loses any credibility with me. It's usually pandering to common wisdom - everyone "knows" ME2 is popular nad ME3 is shat on so everyone will agree with me and that'll feel so good. Baloney.

I've replayed the entire trilogy last year. If there's something that stood out to me it's how similar both games are. Like two breeds of dogs. There are differences if you come close enough but they're both fucking dogs. The structure, the gameplay, the narrative architecture, the level design. Both have offensively retarded plots and endings, it's just people forgot how bad it is for ME2. Both are basically the same. Recently I've seen some dumbass on Youtube proclaiming AssCreed Origins is garbage but AssCreed Odyssey is a very good game. No you moron, in the grand scheme of things they're fucking twins. You can find differences to justify why you like one game more than the other but there's no universe where one would be very good and the other "garbage". They're too similar for that. The same is true for ME2 and ME3.

So that's bad enough for this here Seamus. But then he doubles down and says Andromeda is not as bad, certainly not as terrible as ME3? What is this guy doing trying to write wannabe high-brow, detailed video game analyses with a judgement and taste like this? Literally shaking rn. I know Codex is generous and always willing to accommodate naked retardery of all kinds but this is stretching the limit. This stuff can give you brain cancer, even if you already have one.

 

[Nutria]

Anyone who says "ME2 grate, ME3 hot garbage"

You lost me there. The whole point of everything he's written about Mass Effect is that it starts sucking right at the beginning of ME2.

 

[cvv]

Anyone who says "ME2 grate, ME3 hot garbage"

You lost me there. The whole point of everything he's written about Mass Effect is that it starts sucking right at the beginning of ME2.

Unlike great many people he's not saying ME2 is outright great, no, but he's making a distinction. He says ME2 didn't make him angry and wasn't horrible, whereas ME3 did and is. Like...no. That's just pandering to the common wisdom.

 

[Infinitron]

ME2 inherently can't make people as mad as ME3 did because it's not the conclusion of a trilogy. There's a tradition of middle acts of a story going off in unusual directions. People accept that as long as everything comes together again at the end.

 

[YldriE]

I marathoned the trilogy earlier this year so nostalgia and fetishization of older games cannot come into play.

Gameplay-wise I won't argue that the game just became slicker and more polished, though it 100% committed to being an action-centric cover shooter and I would say a great one at that. I had a lot of fun approaching Mass Effect 3 as a combat game, especially with all that gun porn and the fact that the series had finally stopped beating around the bush. No point in killing a good action game with arbitrary restrictions and clunkiness just because you want to pretend you are an RPG and please neither audience.

But holy turd, the writing was all over the place. In the first, everything was solid and self-contained, and in the second you have a mediocre main plot and great sitcom character dialogues and arcs.

The real genetic abomination is 3, and you cannot blame it on nostalgia as I had finished 2 just before. Every fucking dialogue in 3 felt wrong, and I'm sorry if the best word I can come up with is "frustrating". It felt like Shepard always went out of his way to 1) speak without my input 2) say something stupid, nonsensical or otherwise irrelevant.

I was really torn between how fun the gunplay was and how antagonistic the dialogues felt, but the fun gave way (I had several months of Mass Effect behind me as that point, and Dead Space before that) and I just wanted it to end and self-congratulate on a job well done.

But then I decided to do a few sidequests and somehow one of them was that DLC where you end up getting Wrex and other old characters (no clue it existed so I was an inch away from missing it entirely, had I done the main quest), and HOLY SHIT it was night and day.

All of a sudden you return to clean and punchy dialogues, funny one-liners, interesting plots, a large number of new areas with superb visual design, and that thing would just never fucking end, it took me a while to get to the end. How pricy was this DLC? While up until that point I was getting major ending fatigue, it turned everything around and I was once again eagerly hoping for more.

So the writing team didn't "just lost all talent", since I assume the DLC was produced after the main game. How did the same people make the neverending frustration of Mass Effect 3 and the constant fun of the DLC?

And in before SJWs-did-it because the Andromeda characters look like Tumblr parodies.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

citadel dlc is the true game. had they sold it as "the secret of masseffect island" it'd have been one of the best games ever. but they didn't, and me3 is one of the most iq-depriving experiences ever. then andromeda came, and me3 didn't seem so bad anymore in comparison.

 

[cvv]

Citadel was fun but the writing team hasn't changed and there's no difference in the "quality" of dialogues between the base game and Citadel. It's all smoke and mirrors and confirmation bias.

Btw the plot of ME2 wasn't "mediocre", it was just as laughable, nonsensical and incoherent as the ME3, unless you think Jesus Shephard and insect aliens building a goofy humanoid reaper out of actual people is anything less than outright retarded. Oh and as for the characters - I suppose ME2 can boast more characters that are not offensively dumb and annoying...by about one and half.

 

[oldmanpaco]

People rip on ME2 but remember Bioware made the only black character's father a deadbeat dad who drugged and raped women. Shit was real.

 

[Drax]

Anyone who says "ME2 grate, ME3 hot garbage"

You lost me there. The whole point of everything he's written about Mass Effect is that it starts sucking right at the beginning of ME2.

Unlike great many people he's not saying ME2 is outright great, no, but he's making a distinction. He says ME2 didn't make him angry and wasn't horrible, whereas ME3 did and is. Like...no. That's just pandering to the common wisdom.

wat
He clearly says that ME2 completely ruined all that ME1 had built and that the writers were either incompetent or just didn't like ME1. He doesn't need to say LOL THEY RETARDED because he shows it by pointing out in the actual game how pretty much every choice made by bioware was the wrong choice for the game. The part that he finds redeemable is the actual shooting gameplay, which is a mild improvement over the first (A point for debate, sure, but not a retarded or shill-y thing to say)

 

[Falksi]

I think ME2's plot was fine in isolation, it just ultimately went nowhere & was totally forgotten about in ME3

That was the trouble with both sequels, both ignored the previous installment to a large degree. By the end of ME2 you were no closer to unravelling questions asked in ME1, and ME3 took the whole Illusive Man plan to defeat the reapers and tossed it to one side.

It felt like Frodo had set out to Mordor destroy the ring, found out Vader was his father, then sacrificed himself to stop agent Smith spreading in an insult of an ending.