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Mass Effect BioWare Montreal's Mass Effect: Andromeda - where element zero meets trisomy 21

Vorark

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edit: The relevant part starts at 15:45. I don't know why, but I have a problem with copying the exact moment.




Ay2m7yB.png


:0-13:
 

Iznaliu

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The article is pretty good but obviously Kotaku being Kotaku they glossed over the hipster snowflake culture and writing team with a huge SJW tumor on their brain.

Not everything has to be linked to your cause celebre. If you replaced them with Codexians, the results would be even worse.
 
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Lurker King

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Ass Erect: Androgena’s development cycle makes Dikes of Numenera look professional in comparison. What a mess.
 

J1M

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LONGPOST:

The Story Behind Mass Effect: Andromeda's Troubled Five-Year Development

...

Not long before Mass Effect: Andromeda launched, BioWare sent early builds of the game to mock reviewers, as nearly every AAA game developer does in the months before their game comes out. A mock reviewer will typically offer a private, early assessment of a game, a report on its strengths and weaknesses, and a predicted Metacritic range. Companies frequently make major strategic decisions based on Metacritic scores, so it’s that number that gets the most attention.

When the mock reviews came in for Mass Effect: Andromeda, BioWare’s leads were relieved—the Metacritic was expected to be in the low-to-mid-80s, according to two sources. Although Andromeda’s developers knew the game wasn’t perfect, they were fine with a score like that. If they hit somewhere between 80 and 85, they could use what they’d built for Andromeda to make the sequel way better, much like Casey Hudson and his team had done from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2.

...

They thought it was good. :lol:
 

Drakron

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Metacritic stopped being relevant even to EA years ago and honestly a AAA game being in the low-mid 80's is bad because publishers like EA put a lot of effort on hype campaigns so all scores at release will be in the mid-80/90's and only start to dip when other publications start to put their own reviews.

Starting to believe their own propaganda is dangerous.

Also more retarded, Mass Effect was published by Microsoft that was willing to foot the entire trilogy until EA happened, comparing the first Mass Effect were Microsoft was publishing them to shore up their console line up with Andromeda that was under EA as their parent company being multi-platform is very much apples and oranges, Mass Effect unless it was a lemon would be a series as long Microsoft was interested and at that time Microsoft was as now ME is yet another EA IP that they can just sit on like with all the other IPs.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Since this has seemingly been posted everywhere but here:

BIOWARE DEVS BLAME EVERYONE ELSE FOR MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA FAILINGS



There’s an in-depth, post-mortem look into the development cycle of Mass Effect: Andromeda over on Kotaku. It’s a collection of thoughts, insight and tales of the nightmare process that BioWare Montreal and BioWare Edmonton went through to create the highly controversial game.

Ultimately, though, the developers sharing their knowledge about the project blame everyone but themselves for the shortcomings of Mass Effect: Andromeda.

The entire thing reads like a bunch of the people who talked to Kotaku from the BioWare studios were only willing to point fingers instead of taking responsibility for the fact that the game was too big for their britches.

Pre-production started in 2013 and it was troubled from the start, since they wanted to create a game that was essentially what RSI and CIG are aiming to do with Star Citizen.

Some of the developers from BioWare Montreal pointed fingers at BioWare Edmonton, claiming that the latter was trying to sabotage the former’s opportunity for success. Others who worked on the project blamed inter-office politics, they blamed lack of resources, and they blamed lack of staffing.

No one seemed to point out that BioWare Montreal was to blame for taking on an IP they just weren’t qualified to handle.

One of the developers blamed the Frostbite for not being adequate for what they wanted to achieve; BioWare Montreal wanted to make procedurally generated planets like No Man’s Sky for the exploration aspect of Mass Effect: Andromeda, but they readily admit their engineers just weren’t talented enough to pull off, as they were only able to get parts of the planet generation to work, and failed to accomplish what CIG was able to do with Star Citizen, or what Novaquark is doing with Dual Universe.

They claimed that the Frostbite couldn’t handle maps stretching 100 by 100 km. Frostbite is known for handling large-scale maps, as evident with Battlefield and the open-world City of Glass featured in Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. But none of the big-name game engines are designed out of the box to handle procedurally generated galaxies like No Man’s Sky, this includes the Unity 3D engine, Unreal, CryEngine or Frostbite.

In order to accomplish galactic travel, you would have to do what what n00b did with the Source Engine by creating small instanced areas imitating galactic space travel in games like Garry’s Mod. It was a method that BioWare ended up settling on using for Andromeda since they admitted…

“[…] teams had trouble figuring out how to generate high-quality worlds without getting in and doing it by hand. “Unfortunately that was the only team that was able to figure out how to do stuff more procedurally,” said a person who worked on the game. “No one else had the resources.”​

The thing is, once you white box test something and can’t figure out how to get it to work, scrap it and go small.

Even still, they decided to blame Frostbite further for the lack of proper animation tools, with one of the developers telling Kotaku…

“Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” […] “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.”​

It doesn’t have an animation system because it uses ANT… a series of tools designed to accommodate engineering solutions for animation systems. Essentially it’s the basis for which other engines like Unreal and Unity ended up adopting for procedural animation blending solutions. You could have motion-capture quality animations that blend with hand-animated keyframe sets. However, it’s up to the animators and their skillset to make Frostbite beat with the rhythm of a drum that sings to your eyes. As revealed in the GDC presentation, Frostbite is only as powerful and efficient as the developers using it.



In this case, BioWare Montreal simply were not qualified to use the Frostbite game engine to make Mass Effect: Andromeda look as good as it should have.

According to the report, back in 2014 BioWare had already hired a company to craft the facial animations but they didn’t know how to implement the animations into the engine and scale it across the game. This here is a surefire sign of both a lack of engineering competence and lack of leadership foresight. Why would you outsource animations for a project without knowing how to implement the finished results into your workflow pipeline? That’s the whole point of white box testing before you settle on your middleware suite.

All of that testing should have been setup during pre-production. You establish your workflow charts:
  • Here’s what’s needed
  • Here’s how it’s going to be implemented
  • Here’s how long it’s going to take to finish implementation
  • Etc., etc., etc.
Core mechanics for a game completely reliant on “cinematic dialogue sequences” should have had that slice of the pie cornered well before anyone even touched a sculpting tool or began kinematic rigging.

There is absolutely no one to blame but incompetent, inexperienced leaders, managers and engineers.

These sort of solutions should have been ironed out way ahead of time. It’s like if Slightly Mad Studios decided they were no longer sure they were focusing on making a realistic racing sim with Project CARS and shortly after pre-production decided they were going to make a more arcade-style game closer to Need For Speed instead of Gran Turismo, and scrapped all their work during pre-production to completely change gears. That’s the kind of thing you would expect from a child suffering ADHD working with a free-form Lego set.

Another excuse was that they were understaffed. Kotaku reports…

“You use motion capture for in-game stuff, but the actual work of bringing that animation into an engine so it responds to your controls, that’s not something you can motion capture. It takes people and it takes time. They had very few people. They’re actually quite talented people, but if they had ridiculous schedules, then it just makes me sad to see the end result.”​

Mass Effect is known for its extensive dialogue interaction sequences. How do you understaff the design section for the most prominent feature in the game? How did this escape the project lead’s knowledge? How did they not know this during any of the milestone meetings? Why didn’t the animation lead and animation director not bring this to their attention sooner? How did this not get addressed for three years if it was “flagged” as a problem back in 2014?

Worse yet is that they tried blaming the complexity of animations on custom characters, saying it’s easier to focus on predefined/prefab models instead of those players can sculpt. Yet that excuse doesn’t hold up when you compare it to the fact that Mass Effect 1 has better lighting and character animations than Mass Effect: Andromeda, even though it’s 10 years older! Just check out the video from HellRa1z3r for the comparison.

There is absolutely no one to blame here but BioWare Montreal. It’s like if someone was pumping out half-done reviews on this site for three years leading up to it opening to the public and then the site goes live and a bunch of people complain that the reviews are either half-finished or not complete or completely shoddy. You can’t blame the CMS, you can’t blame the servers, you can’t even blame the writers. Some fool still had to sign off on that for every milestone they completed for three years, and any fool who did so is a fool for doing so.

There is no one else to blame but BioWare.

They tried blaming it on outsourced studios, but one of the developers gives it away by mentioning that the writing wasn’t entirely complete as they were trying to work on the animations, saying…

“But with the [writing and design] teams still working until very late in the process, that foundation shifts so much that it makes it very difficult to rely on outsourcing.”​

Once again, this betrays the whole “it was everyone else’s fault”, because they’re admitting that the writing wasn’t even done and finalized in some sections so it was tough to send notes to any studios who they outsourced the work to.

For reference, typically you have all your script work, voice work, and cinematic storyboards, timing and sequencing plotted out and completed before you begin any sort of animation work. Usually the base scripts are finalized during or just after pre-production so you can get cinematics and animation work done as quickly as possible since they can be the most expensive parts of the game. The fact that BioWare was still writing out the story while the animation team was still trying to setup and outsource to other studios is a pathetic travesty.

There’s no one to blame but BioWare.

The mock reviews they tested before release led them to believe they would be settling for low 80s on Metacritic, but that was far from the truth. The game managed low 70s across PC and PS4, and a 77 out of 100 for Xbox One. All of the user scores nestled in at around 4.8 out of 10.

Ultimately, the blame rests on no one’s shoulders but BioWare’s. There may have been multiple factors contributing to the troubled development, but it all started and ended with poor leadership, poor vision, poor workflow, and a team who obviously was neither talented nor skilled enough to make use of DICE’s esteemed Frostbite technology.
 

felipepepe

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What the wall of butthurt above ignores is that BioWare is like soylent green: made of people.

Devs aren't blaming "everyone else", they are listing issues they had and pointing out the bad decisions made by BioWare's directors & leads.

Also, LOL a guy using a GDC presentation of an engine to argue against devs who actually work with the engine.
 

Spectacle

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Whether you call it "blaming" or not, it comes down to the same things; the team at Bioware Montreal lacked the skills they needed to develop the game, and the project management failed to realize this until it was too late to do anything about it.
 
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Lurker King

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The comments section is so much fun!

Disqusted said:
Blaming everyone but themselves is textbook SJW behavior.

GodBowser said:
Isn't it funny that the song used in the ad for this social justice infested failed abortion of a game happens to have the words... Don't put the blame on me?

Nephanor said:
It is Bioware. Not just Montreal, but Edmonton. Both of them. Edmonton is the head office, infested and overrun with SJWs that can't write or program worth a damn and are slowly destroying everything. Montreal is partially infested, and full of EA employees who are good at action games, but shit at RPGs.

Keystone said:
"Others who worked on the project blamed inter-office politics"

Translation:
Social justice assholes like Manveer Heir were too busy virtue signaling and being racist against whites instead of actually working on the game. Others, like that chick who said she got "raped" in GTA Online, were too busy being insufferable screeching harpies; AKA your average modern feminist.

Still can't imagine why that work environment didn't produce gold.

It. Is. A. Mystery.

Raging Papist said:
SJWs always project... To the extreme....

SJW madness is the mental virus that will bring down Triple-A studios. I hope they suffocate by their own political ideologies to the point they can’t make games anymore.
 
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J1M

Arcane
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Messages
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What the wall of butthurt above ignores is that BioWare is like soylent green: made of people.

Devs aren't blaming "everyone else", they are listing issues they had and pointing out the bad decisions made by BioWare's directors & leads.

Also, LOL a guy using a GDC presentation of an engine to argue against devs who actually work with the engine.
It's more like GDC presentation vs. anonymous sources that are butthurt animators, so not as goofy as you make it sound.

Also, are you really going to side with people that claim this many games were built in an engine without an animation system? https://www.ea.com/frostbite/games

It's clear that they had the Inquisition codebase to build on, and in case you forgot: that game also had animations.
 

Freddie

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Since this has seemingly been posted everywhere but here:

For reference, typically you have all your script work, voice work, and cinematic storyboards, timing and sequencing plotted out and completed before you begin any sort of animation work. Usually the base scripts are finalized during or just after pre-production so you can get cinematics and animation work done as quickly as possible since they can be the most expensive parts of the game. The fact that BioWare was still writing out the story while the animation team was still trying to setup and outsource to other studios is a pathetic travesty.

What the wall of butthurt above ignores is that BioWare is like soylent green: made of people.

Devs aren't blaming "everyone else", they are listing issues they had and pointing out the bad decisions made by BioWare's directors & leads.

Also, LOL a guy using a GDC presentation of an engine to argue against devs who actually work with the engine.

But this is exactly what happened with ME3 and again with Mac Walters. Not only the ME3's ending, but issues with DLC as well. Devs didn't had what to work with and the result was PR catastrophe. The ending disaster masked how disjointed experience ME3, especially with DLC was all together.

No matter how they try to spin it, product is a sum of production and the very reason why quality is less than what production team would be able to, is that something is not working internally. And this goes high. Someone has to sell these ideas because without those, there wouldn't be budget.
 

Atlantico

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Make the Codex Great Again!
No matter how they try to spin it, product is a sum of production and the very reason why quality is less than what production team would be able to, is that something is not working internally. And this goes high. Someone has to sell these ideas because without those, there wouldn't be budget.

Yeah, Bioware is showing all the signs of being rotten to the core, inside out. IDK what happened, but it's a mess.
 

felipepepe

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It's clear that they had the Inquisition codebase to build on, and in case you forgot: that game also had animations.
DA:I's animation were pretty bad too. Bad in 2014, terrible in 2017. Seems like part of the issue came exactly from people wanting to do better but not knowing how:

And there were constant arguments over which technology to use. Some on the team wanted to use a program called FaceWare, used by EA’s Capture Labs studio in Vancouver, but others argued that it wasn’t good enough. Most of the lipsync in Mass Effect: Andromeda—like other Mass Effect games—was handled by a common piece of software called FaceFX that can interpret sounds and automatically move characters’ lips accordingly.

Regardless, my point is: I don't see people "blaming everyone else", I see devs having a lot of issues for trying something different and also blaming their leaders for being bad at making decisions, choosing technology, managing resources, etc...

The "One Angry Gamer" article makes it sound like the only acceptable thing devs could say is "we suck, we're sorry for being so incompetent, we'll leave the industry now and give Mass Effect to a better team". That's how a child sees the world.
 
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