To say that expectations had 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 might be an understatement to say that it didn’t reside as much as these expectations. The open world RPG was met with lukewarm reception from critics and gamers at greatest, with the sport’s technical points and bloated measurement being amongst a number of of its largest points to be on the tip of widespread criticism.
Andromeda, unsurprisingly, didn’t promote the way in which EA had hoped it might, 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 obtained the possibility to develop a direct sequel.
Talking in a latest interview with Eurogamer, Walters – who left BioWare earlier this yr – talked about how the event crew was targeted extra on amount of content material than high quality, and ended up compromising on polish in consequence.
“There have been simply a number of issues that we needed to relearn, re-figure out, and in the end whenever you do this, it’s very, very difficult to return out and be as polished as your third iteration was, and we didn’t hit that,” he mentioned. “And we most likely ought to have – in hindsight – simply lowered scope extra and executed on what we might to [ensure] high quality.
“However we had been additionally in a bizarre part within the trade the place lots of people had been saying amount was high quality, so we had been deluding ourselves internally a bit of bit that if it’s possibly not as polished as [Mass Effect 3], it’s superb – it’s greater and there’s extra right here, and there’s extra to do. And we hit a degree the place folks had been like, ‘No, that isn’t okay.’ Or, at the very least, ‘It isn’t okay to your franchise’. And that’s superb, that’s a lesson realized.”
Nevertheless, Walters consider that if BioWare had been capable of make a direct sequel, the developer would have utilized considerably better 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 you then would have actually seen that polish identical to we did from [ME1] to [ME2] on the unique [trilogy],” Walters mentioned.
Later, he added: “Definitely, had we shipped an Andromeda 2, I’m 100% sure we might have improved on all of the issues that individuals known as out after which additionally been about to lean into the modern issues that we had been attempting to do as nicely.”
In fact, 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 understood in regards to the sport, however although it’s unlikely to be a direct sequel to Andromeda, BioWare has hinted a few occasions that it might nonetheless choose 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 reduce down on the sport’s scope attributable to funds restrictions. Learn extra on that by means of right here.
