The Smartest Solutions for the Perfect Game Gone Wrong

What could possibly go wrong? Mass Effect, BioWare’s sci-fi rpg game series has garnered quite a bit of praise in the past. Mass Effect 2 in particular was praised, but also the now ten-year-old original and part three were received predominantly very positively. 

The Games with Complications

Part four in the series, Mass Effect: Andromeda should have continued this line for BioWare and Electronic Arts, but it went wrong and not so much. Painfully, Digital Foundry’s John Linneman noted that the latest improved version released specifically for the Xbox One X back in November ensured that we ‘finally have a console version of the game that runs reasonably well’. That patch for the Xbox One X, which allows for 4k resolution and for the first time a stable frame rate of 30 frames per second, came only nineteen months after the game’s release.

Low Performance

However, the poor performance, in the form of, for example, the frame rate that was often considerably below 30fps on the consoles, was far from the only problem. Mass Effect: Andromeda was plagued by a multitude of bugs that crashed the game, for example. Furthermore, the facial expressions of the different characters were heavily targeted. The looks in the eyes of the characters were described as “lifeless,” as if they were staring into an empty depth. According to the expert, the eyes of some characters sometimes went back and forth quickly , as if watching a tennis match where the ball went from left to right at high speed. One after the other gif came online, in which players made fun of the facial and regular motion animations. Some characters’ gait has been compared to that of penguins, robots and gorillas. And then the story could not count on much applause. The lol smurfs account is the best option there now.

The Next Best Choices

Based on the state in which Mass Effect: Andromeda came out in March 2017, it is quickly concluded that the game hit the market too early. The experts concluded in an extensive article that the debacle was partly due to a change of director, an understaffed animation team, too tight a timeline and technological challenges. The latter, for example, referred to Dice’s Frostbite engine. This engine has been used for many years for the Battlefield games and is highly regarded for, for example, rendering images, but the lack of an animation system broke up the developers. The Frostbite engine proved hardly suitable for RPG games, something that the developer of Dragon Age: Inquisition also had to deal with.

Battlefield V

However, the Frostbite engine and the beautiful images could not save Battlefield V from the necessary criticism. EA also made a mess of the marketing campaign. For example, a strange, poorly rated disclosure trailer came out in May, Patrick Soderlund of EA found it necessary to lecture critical Battlefield fans about political correctness, and was even ridiculed after Twitter for criticizing the historical inaccurate on Twitter in-game display.