The truth comes to light... Some quotes;
Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.
Another of Lehiany’s ideas was that there should be hundreds of explorable planets. BioWare would use algorithms to procedurally generate each world in the game, allowing for near-infinite possibilities, No Man’s Skystyle. (No Man’s Sky had not yet been announced—BioWare came up with this concept separately.)
There were some hiccups, however. One lingering question for the Andromeda team was how they could possibly implement a BioWare-caliber story in a game with procedurally generated planets. Some teams felt perpetually understaffed, and there were technological difficulties. BioWare’s level designers used a tool called WorldMachine that could simulate erosion and build realistic mountains on each planet, but other 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 Mass Effect: Andromeda team knew they were going to run into major technical barriers with or without procedural generation. Over the past few years, one of BioWare’s biggest obstacles has also become one of EA’s favorite buzzwords: Frostbite, a video game engine. An engine is a collection of software that can be reused and recycled to make games, often consisting of common features: a physics system, a graphics renderer, a save system, and so on. In the video game industry, Frostbite is known as one of the most powerful engines out there—and one of the hardest to use.
DICE made first-person shooters like Battlefield, and the Frostbite engine was designed solely to develop those games. When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.
Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “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.” (Frostbite was later attached to an animation system called ANT, that source said, but it was full of “duct-taped issues.”)
Pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda was a tale of two cities. Several people from the team described 2013 as one of the best years of their professional lives and 2014 as one of the worst. Whereas 2013 was full of possibilities for the developers of Andromeda, 2014 was full of politics. Conflicts emerged between BioWare staffers at the company’s two main studios, in Edmonton and Montreal. Developers in Edmonton said they thought the game was floundering in pre-production and didn’t have a strong enough vision, while developers in Montreal thought that Edmonton was trying to sabotage them, taking ideas and staff from Montreal for its own projects, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dylan. By the end of 2014 at least a dozen people had left BioWare Montreal for other studios, and it wasn’t clear to the remaining staff whether those positions would be replaced. The animation team in particular was understaffed, sources said, and when people left, their positions sometimes weren’t refilled.
The Mass Effect: Andromeda team was also having trouble executing the ideas they’d found so exciting just a year ago. Combat was shaping up nicely, as were the prototypes BioWare had developed for the Nomad ground vehicle, which already felt way better to drive than Mass Effect 1’s crusty old Mako. But spaceflight and procedurally generated planets were causing some problems.
“We started to realize by summer 2015 that we had great technological prototypes, but we had doubts they would make it into the game,” said another person who worked on the game. The Andromeda team had gotten systems like spaceflight up and running, two people said, but they couldn’t figure out how to make those systems fun to play. “I think production reality hit hard and they had to make some really strong cuts.”
Many of the gameplay mechanics—the combat, the multiplayer, the driving—were on time and proceeding smoothly. Those weren’t touched by the rescope. But the content—the story, the levels, the cinematics—was way behind schedule after Andromeda’s messy pre-production cycle. That was a problem.
“What you see [in the final game] is writing that has been done in the past two years rather than the full five years of writing,” said a developer on the game. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”
It wasn’t just the writing. Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017. Most of Mass Effect: Andromeda was made in just a year and a half, by those accounts.
“For the last few months of the game, we spent most of our effort just trying to keep it together rather than polishing,” said an Andromedadeveloper. “Just trying to stay ahead of how quickly it was falling apart.”
One critical issue, said two people who worked on the game, was that the animation team remained understaffed throughout development. “The biggest problem with the animations was manpower,” said one of those people. “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.”
Full article;
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428