Zombie James
Banned
If this were a standalone game, maybe, but it's not. It's supposed to be the start of a new trilogy and who knows how much paid DLC. They should be all hands on deck to get this thing fixed.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
BioWare to announce how they're going to address ME: Andromeda on April 4th
- Thread starter Zombie James
- Start date
- Status
If this were a standalone game, maybe, but it's not. It's supposed to be the start of a new trilogy and who knows how much paid DLC. They should be all hands on deck to get this thing fixed.
PedroLumpy
Member
Animations really don't seem like something that is easily patched. Plenty of small bugs to patch however.
Did Naughty Dog not care about Uncharted?
It's actually a pretty standard industry move to allow your big team to do something new while getting people who've worked on a project before in a limited capacity to try the next installment. It's almost a win/win situation as it prevents the big team from burning out on the same shit over and over again. And that team is probably more equipped to be creative and do new things. I'd be willing to bet that's what CDPR is doing with Witcher 3. The team that did Blood and Wine is likely working on a new installment while the team from W3 is moving on to Cyberpunk.
This is actually what we want in the industry. We all cry that we don't get any new IPs and then bitch and moan when the creative studios try and make one? It's silly. At some point your favorite IPs either have to be handed off to someone else to get their feet wet and/or try something new or they just disappear altogether.
CharmingCharlie
Member
At the end of the day they poured 40 million bucks and 5 years of development into this thing. So I don't think it is a case of "not caring". At the end of the day god knows how Bioware arrived at this position but I don't think it is a case of "they don't care". It is possible that they actually think they released a great product (Mac and co do have delusional tendencies when it comes to "artistic integrity")
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
Lol.
Pretty much that response. Some people on here are just always enraged. Bunch of miserable, cynical, jaded, negative misanthropes. All on a board about games which are supposed to be FUN.
But also, it's a big site so there are some just enraged by one approach or the other. No practice is going to please everyone.
I mean, why not just share their plans on April 4th without announcing it 5 days prior? Knowing about this 5 days earlier didn't really help anyone. It just builds up expectations.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Yeah but that's still only reflective of week 1 it might be the worst selling ME after a month.
bigdaddygamebot
Member
Yeah...it will prove interesting to see just how this thread unravels if Bioware's response is less than what is expected/wanted.
They turned Battlefield 4 around and that one was getting shit on left, right and centre by the fans. Hell, they even bothered to address the Mass Effect 3 ending months after release when it wasn't really even an issue anyone expected them to address. I have hope they'll do their part here aswell. The game is what it is, you can either love it or hate it - but bringing it to a playable state from a technical standpoint is something I absoloutly expect them to be able to and want to deliver.
The Last Wizard
Member
And not saying anything at all gets everyone enraged that nothing will be done.
In any case it's pretty standard to get messages from the dev when a game's released. All they did was add another date when they'd have more to announce. I fail to see the big deal in that.
It will be.
This is just communication to the fan base which gaming communities complain about all the time. I can't see a patch being ready for another 2 weeks at least (well that at least has some significant changes) and it will more than likely be 2+ months before there are any substantial changes to the games visual representation, that is if Bioware has anything planned.
Which I'm guessing this is what the announcement is going to cover, immediate plans, future patch plans and of course DLC, need to get a little marketing in there while you can!
Allnamestakenlol
Member
I heard your reply in Sam's voice. Gave me a good laugh imagining it as his response to Ryder. Haha
Im sure they could have lasted another 5 days, and not like people quieted down with their complaints.
Trogdor1123
Member
Lol, I'm dying. Seriously I love the bad animation. I'm honestly ok with it. It makes chuckle and that's good enough for me.
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
Naughty Dog didn't hand the Vita game off to a team nearly as inexperienced as the Montreal Bioware team though. And that was also a portable game and not a full on major entry in the series. Though I get that they didn't know the Vita would fail and hoped it would have been a bigger seller for Golden Abyss. I'd argue that now they don't care that much about Uncharted, and probably won't make one in-house after the coming expansion and will let Sony pawn it off to another dev if they want more games. That's the way to do it--if a team tires of an IP, have the publisher get another qualified team to take it forward instead of getting half-hearted efforts from a developers B or C team.
Same with CDPR. They gave the B team experience with DLC expansions before letting them making a full game.
Unless Bioware are just a bunch of idiots, and maybe they are with all the employee reviews about "bro culture" etc." it's hard to see them really caring about the future of the IP if they were willing to pawn it off to a team that had little experience beyond a tacked on (but very good) MP mode in ME3.
"Not caring" was an overstatement, but they clearly don't view it as their key IP going forward or they would have kept it with their main team. They clearly care more about whatever that team is working on.
Also, I imagine most of the $40 million was from EA rather than them. Which would play into the above if EA was pressuring them for an ME game when most wanted to work on whatever the main team is making.
Also, I'm sure the people at Bioware Montreal who worked on the game care about it greatly after all that time invested in making it. I'm talking about the company at large, the CEO etc. maybe not caring about the ME francshise all that much relative to whatever they have the main team on.
ShiftaDeband
Member
I wanted to jump on the prediction bandwagon: I'm really guessing they'll apologize, announce they're improving the face animations somehow, and give a free cheap EA game or two as an apology.
Interested in the announcement either way, this could be good.
Interested in the announcement either way, this could be good.
This is silly. Devs know when they release bad games. There were obviously issues in ME development and EA didn't think they were fixable so they mandated a release date, finished or not to get it out the door. It happens all the time to troubled games that have had too much money spent on them to outright cancel.
Darkstorne
Member
They made an announcement last week about today's announcement. If they don't have something ready to go almost immediately they're really asking for it...
I'm talking about Uncharted 3, not Golden Abyss. The team on Uc2 largely moved on to The Last of Us while new blood worked on 3.
Bioware Montreal did work on Mass Effect before. They were the multiplayer team as well as some DLC. Basically the same road path as CDPR seems to be going.
And the fans will like it either way, I don't see this winning the rest of us over.
They care, but there are degrees of caring. Let's put it this way, they care more about Mass Effect than they did something like Dead Space, but not enough to call it a flagship franchise, and it's likely it has dropped to the bottom of Bioware's pecking order (behind new IP and DA). I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't hear about a new Mass Effect again.
dr_rus
Member
Having played the game for more than ten hours how, I can safely say that animations doesn't seem like something they even should be patching first. There's a shit load of more glaring bugs and issues than some rare animation quirks.
Teletraan1
Banned
If they didn't announce anything there would have been threads crying about lack of communication for those 5 days. In a world with Twitter and other social media people need constant communication for some reason. This is the after effect of that. Rampant speculation, heightened expectations that will never be met. People are just unreasonable either way. The best way to avoid this is not to put out a shabby game that needs fixing and all these problems go away. I guess it was better to release at the end of a fiscal year and deal with this whole blowback. Or maybe it wasn't, these companies seem out of their depth sometimes.
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
Fair enough. Though I think the CDPR team has a ton more experience as Blood and Wine is pretty much a full game, with tons of writing, animation etc. The ME DLCs were always pretty light, so it's not surprising that the B team couldn't pull off making a full ME game as that's just way too ambitious for a team with so little experience.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say. Thanks for putting it more succinctly.
They were done with ME in terms of investing in it as their flagship (or co-flagship along side Dragon Age) after ME3, hence why they put their super inexperienced B team on it when EA presumably pressured them for another installment.
They clearly view whatever their main team is working on as their new flagship IP.
I'm not so sure. David Gaider once talked about how everyone at BioWare was convinced people would hate Baldur's Gate 2. Considering most games tend to have "troubled development" it seems more like devs tend to be apprehensive and pessimistic about the possible reception, and that this doesn't tend to correlate with how the games are actually received.
Darkstorne
Member
Yep. I'd love them to announce a patch available immediately that fixes all the well documented bugs, glitching, t-poses etc, with more in the works as they're discovered, and then also a short video to showcase animation improvements that will be coming in the future. I'd be really happy with that.
Bugs and glitches have to take priority, and animation is such a big job I'd honestly be worried if they claim to have fixed it already. I'd also love to hear they're redesigning the UI to actually be half-decent, but this is Bioware we're talking about, not CDPR, so I'm not getting my hopes up for that.
It will always be less than expected. Some people seems to expect them to redo the whole game or close to that. So I totaly expect a backlash around here.
You are severely over estimating how much the dev have on that matter, who does what is EA/Sony job. The fact that Edmonton managed to greenlit a new IP instead of pumping our ME games till the end of time is already surprising given EA style in that regards. Someone had to make the sequel and Montreal was always supposed to make a full game at one point or another, EA didn't create the studio sorely for support
Son Of Sparda
Member
Is there a time table for this? When can we expect the announcement?
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
Yeah, I've not really ran into many major animation/graphics glitches. The only ones I can think of are:
Double NPCs in a few dialogue seens (2 Jaals etc.), Ryder drinking out of an empty hand (invisible glass) in a bar once, and my party walking through a door in a cut scene.
Yeah, the faces are terrible. But I play with subtitles on and read and skip through those rather than actively watching the faces so I'm not so bothered by that. Leaving helmets on in dialogue scenes in the option is another way to not see it (but I get that people want to see decent acting in these scenes and that's not a fix).
Only things I'd really want to see patched (that are fixable things and not redoing the game) are getting the framerate stable on PS4 Pro, improving load times (especially when changing systems/planents) and some QoL stuff like being able to board the ship without taking off, access the AVP, strike missions etc. from anywhere, and more frequent autosaving in missions.
The writing, overall plot, repetitive side missions, boring open worlds etc. just are what they are and make this a 7-8/10 type game for me. Patching the above is reasonable, but won't change my score.
bigdaddygamebot
Member
It's been roughly two weeks. Compiling a list of known bugs/problems/quality of life improvements and THEN prioritizing them only to then announce to the public what they are going to patch.
Yeah. It's zany what people are going to expect compared to what they will receive.
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
It's always a balance. But at the end of the day, it's not slave labor. Devs (individuals, not the whole team/CEO etc.) can tell their publisher to shove it and just go make their new IP for someone else. I'm sure EA would have preferred the main team make a great new ME as established IP sell better and are safer bets than new IP.
And yes, of course Montreal needed to make a full game. But it's a recipe for disaster to give such an inexperienced team such a HUGE game to make for their first stab at a full game.
Even the main team struggled with ME1. It was a buggy, janky mess that gets a pass as it had a great story and was very well written. The Montreal team clearly didn't have the writing talent to pull that off, nor the programming talent since this game is even buggier, worse animated etc. than ME1.
That's just not going to fly in 2017 when the quality bar for big, narrative driven open world games has been raised so high by games like Witcher 3, Horizon etc. Putting out a game inferior to the first 3 entries in the series, which themselves have already long been surpassed in the genre, is a recipe for disaster and one that should have been anticipated by putting the Montreal team on the game without sufficient assistance from the main ME/DA team.
Garrett Hawke
Member
No, it's not. This isn't a ME3 ending situation where the writers may have thought they did a good job, there are clear problems with the product from the animations to the UI that would be visible to everyone.
Nobody wants to release bad games.
KingParappa
Neo Member
Yup.
We keep telling ourselves that, yeah.
DR2K
Banned
Is there a countdown stating when on the 4th? Or is the announcement going to get that much needed delay the final game should have had?
PedroLumpy
Member
Caring doesn't automatically mean you're talented. You can care a bunch and still shit the bed so to speak.
His Majesty
Banned
If. they fix the inconveniences, improve the performance and do some extensive bug fixing this game is a solid 7/10. I wouldn't call it a clusterfuck.
letmetrythisname
Member
Give it the Ashes Cricket 2013 treatment.
Garrett Hawke
Member
Work?
They haven't dropped the ball as far as most think. The supercuts of bugs and animation quirks aren't representative of the entire game. There is still a LOT of polish to do however - it's probably too late to change the writing but the game needs a lot of quality of life improvements. A new UI, better transitions for fetch quests, better shaders for skin and eyes as the environments are quite nicely lit - they can salvage it.
Son Of Sparda
Member
Ouch.
CrichtonKicks
Member
So you think EA should have just forced Edmonton to work on ME forever even if it means they lose some of their key employees who burn out on the franchise?
This makes no sense. They should make a full game but not *this* full game? They had already produced two single player DLCs and a full, incredibly well received, MP mode. Plus there were quite a few series veterans who made the transition to Montreal so its not like the team didn't have veteran talent.
Nevermind the idea that the Montreal team was entirely staffed by rookies instead of the fact that a good chunk of the team were likely industry veterans.
D
Deleted member 752119
Unconfirmed Member
It's already not a clusterfuck and a solid 7/10 game based on reviews and my 46 hours and counting playing it.
Only people the patches will make a big difference for are those who hit save corruption and other game breaking bugs (which seem rare) and those who are so annoyed by the animation (if that gets fixed at all) that they can't play the game.
Otherwise it's likely just going to be QoL and graphical fixes, that while nice for those of us who are liking the game, aren't going to improve opinions for people who hate the story, characters, side quests, open world exploration etc.
- Status