I'd love to learn more as to the ups and downs of Andromeda's production, including the technical and management issues they wrestled with. I know a handful of things I was hearing about a couple of years ago were completely reimagined or outright cut from the project. The first big Game Informer interview hints at a couple of these things, including the technical efforts to make the Tempest fully pilotable in 3D space, which ultimately had to be scrapped.
Though I'm still excited to play tonight, and enjoyed my time with the trial, it does seem clear that the five years of production weren't smooth sailing. Unusual technical and production deficiencies contrast even BioWare's previous work on Inquisition, but I am still suspect that modern Frostbite 3 conflicts with BioWare's production and design vision versus other engines that are proven in this area. I also wouldn't be surprised if earlier scope had to be seriously diminished and maybe this impacted overall production quality. Snags have been hit. And there's always a question of general talent, too, but that's a difficult factor to assess; how talented and experienced are your animators? Your writers? Designers? And so on.
It's easy to point fingers, but it's important to remember Montreal as a studio are not an entirely unexperienced mass of fresh staff. Writers and designers built the Omega DLC from the ground up, which while hardly faultless I do feel is really pretty great and has some of the best encounters in the series, while also being visually appealingly envisioned. The production was up to equal standard and scope to everything else related to Mass Effect 3. Lead designers also worked heavily on Mass Effect 3; not just the multiplayer but the single player combat and encounter design, both of which are routinely cited as trilogy strengths.
Additionally, and I feel this is equally important, "Montreal made Andromeda" is only part of the puzzle. BioWare operate similarly to other major studios where a title in full production draws massive quantity of staff from elsewhere to see assets, animations, and other production notes through to completion. I guarantee Austin and Edmonton also worked on Andromeda, even if that capacity varies. It's hard to pinpoint who-did-what-and-when, especially with staff juggling through exodus and shifting management.
It's also important to remember that Glass Door has no vetting. Literally anybody could boot up and say whatever, no different to a forum, anonymous twitter rant, pastebin, or whatever else. Obviously yes, the Glass Door details could be a completely legitimate insight into Andromeda's process, but they also could be entirely fabricated. Or it could be an individual employer venting, from a perspective partially warped from a bad experience. Or an isolated event. There's no way for us to gauge the degree of truth, and I feel in these cases it's essential to apply the same level of discretion and scrutiny that we would to the same information being echoed in an anonymous post here.
Nevertheless, I'd love to explore Andromeda's production background in full, the highs and lows. It's a shame we see this so infrequently in the medium, but I guess that can be said for all major productions in the creative medium.
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