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[Big Nikus]

edit: damn, you did the maths.

 

[Heckler456]

They announced full-on development in 2012 on their blog. Before that, Casey Hudson made some references to early design on social media.

So five years, not including creative strategy and vision meetings.

They were also prototyping shit like you flying your own ship to 100's of planets during that time, and who know what else.

Fact of the matter is, we don't really have any clue as to what went on internally. After Mass Effect 3 released, they also released Dragon Age Inquisition, and seem to have been in active development on their new IP too (plus Star Wars and Shadow Realms, but who knows how far they got on the latter). Bioware is an 800 dev studio all told, which is big, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have 2 redundancies for every discipline for every single project in active development. Bioware games are really fucking big after all.

 

[BrassDragon]

Not sure why the development time needs to be parsed down to the month. Bottom line is, they had a reasonable window.

Also, the play is the thing. Why should the audience hand out merit badges for effort if the end result comes up short of reasonable expectations and below the quality standard set by other releases?

 

[jowell24]

your ryderlooks really nice, yopu got a pic of the preset/ sliders you used?

Cheers! Didn't save the sliders but I do have the Mass Effect archives link.

More pictures here in case you're unsure
http://imgur.com/a/7NHr6

 

[semiconscious]

Mass Effect Andromeda should have been a Q2 release and not Q1.

well, yeah. but we're pretty much already all in agreement that this is true ...

what's being discussed is, who's responsible for this: ea or bioware. &, imo, there's at least as much reason to think it's the latter's fault as there is the former's...

 

[Renekton]

Not sure why the development time needs to be parsed down to the month. Bottom line is, they had a reasonable window.

Also, the play is the thing. Why should the audience hand out merit badges for effort if the end result comes up short of reasonable expectations and below the quality standard set by other releases?

Naturally our discussions cross into semi-sympathetic gamedev and industry speculation instead of just simple "game good or bad." We don't need a dedicated forum with 10+ ME threads if we only focus on the bottom line user experience.

 

[BrassDragon]

Naturally our discussions cross into semi-sympathetic gamedev and industry speculation instead of just simple "game good or bad." We don't need a dedicated forum with 10+ ME threads if we only focus on the bottom line user experience.

Oh, I'm perfectly fine with discussing the development but there seems to be a deep reluctance against calling out lacking or mediocre artistry. When gamers discuss these issues, it's always the 'evil suits' and 'faceless shareholders' causing problematic creative directions.

At some point, the artists and developers in the trenches should get some blame for the end result. BioWare in particularly gets a lot of mileage out of the '...but EA' excuse. That doesn't sit right with me.

 

[Big Nikus]

Oh, I'm perfectly fine with discussing the development but there seems to be a deep reluctance against calling out lacking or mediocre artistry. When gamers discuss these issues, it's always the 'evil suits' and 'faceless shareholders' causing problematic creative directions.

At some point, the artists and developers in the trenches should get some blame for the end result. BioWare in particularly gets a lot of mileage out of the '...but EA' excuse. That doesn't sit right with me.

It's not the EA executives who receive the insults on Twitter though, it's the regular devs. Also, it's usually BioWare devs who are victims of harassment, not the EA suits. I think BioWare gets enough (and by that I mean, too much) flack already. They're not "getting away" with anything, a billion threads here are proofs of that.

 

[knerl]

The biggest issue also is that we have 5+ years of development and far more capable hardware. So you wouldn't expect them repeating the same mistakes of the past. Imagine if Uncharted 4 barely looked better than Uncharted 2 or worse in some areas. These things are also so elementary level, was there no one there like oh shit the Asari are identical this is messed up. Or oh damn, these characters look like shit in the cinematics and dialogues.

Except this game technically blows the other ones out of the water. Only thing that might look worse in some cases are certain faces. Other than that you can't even begin to compare the older games to this one.

 

[geomon]

So it's kind of fixed I guess. The punch still doesn't connect but it's a lot damn better than before.

 

[Keinu]

After the patch all my dialogue options are blank/empty. Can't see what choices I make, any fix on this? Tried reinstalling the patch, but no luck.

In case anyone else run into this problem, I solved it by deleting the .exe files in the Mass Effect folder and running repair.