Sources: BioWare Montreal Scaled Down, Mass Effect Put on Ice (for Now)

[Megalith]

EA has announced that they still have faith in BioWare after what happened with Mass Effect: Andromeda, yet that may not be the complete truth: a report suggests that the Montreal division has been turned into a support studio, while the sci-fi franchise is being put into temporary stasis. BioWare will continue to patch Andromeda and support its multiplayer component, but it may be a while before we see a new game. At least we have BioWare Edmonton’s new IP to look forward to…

BioWare has put Mass Effect on hiatus and turned Andromeda’s developer, BioWare Montreal, into a support studio, according to four sources close to the company. That doesn’t mean there will never be another Mass Effect game, of course. It’s unlikely that BioWare will kill the popular sci-fi franchise. But BioWare is letting Mass Effect sit for a while rather than putting staff on Andromeda’s follow-up right away, those sources said. Last month, a number of BioWare Montreal employees were transferred to the studio EA Motive, also based in Montreal, to work on Star Wars Battlefront II.

 

[NickJames]

Good, let them clean up their mess first before they start churning out endless franchise milking sequels.

 

[NeoNemesis]

Stupidity abound.

A studio is more than just a name, it's the people who work there. Bioware has shed tremendous talent since it's acquisition.

As far as I know, Bioware Montreal never had any talent to begin with.

 

[Vader1975]

While the animations were poor and the faces were poor they are improving. The game itself was fun and I thought it one of the best once you got into it. It had a far better story overall than ME3 which ended like a shot to your own foot. So bad that they tried to redo it. Everything being ugly in the game surely didn't help. The people were all nasty and inhuman looking and it was the most "PC" pc game I had ever seen. But the actual gameplay was a good time. I guess I am torn about this game. I was laughing at the stupidity of the faces etc but enjoyed the gameplay. I originally thought 3rd parties would make custom patches to make it a prettier game. (looks out at the mod community with earnest!!!) I definitely felt like an alpha tester when it launched.

 

[IdiotInCharge]

It's been reported (somewhere else) that this was a shifting of employees to a different EA studio to work on Battlefront II, which makes some sense given the ME:A team's extensive experience with Frostbyte.

Als, we don't really know if these are the people that would work on expansions.

 

[Pusher of Buttons]

EA is like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it!

 

[oldmanbal]

rabble rabble rabble

 

[Viper87227]

While the animations were poor and the faces were poor they are improving. The game itself was fun and I thought it one of the best once you got into it. It had a far better story overall than ME3 which ended like a shot to your own foot. So bad that they tried to redo it. Everything being ugly in the game surely didn't help. The people were all nasty and inhuman looking and it was the most "PC" pc game I had ever seen. But the actual gameplay was a good time. I guess I am torn about this game. I was laughing at the stupidity of the faces etc but enjoyed the gameplay. I originally thought 3rd parties would make custom patches to make it a prettier game. (looks out at the mod community with earnest!!!) I definitely felt like an alpha tester when it launched.

Pretty much this. The facial animations are bad, but they don't ruin the game, and I really don't think they are that far off from other similar games. You can't compare a ~100 hour open world RPG with something like Uncharted. The more dialog you have, the less likely that dialog is going to be fine-tuned to perfection. Looking at games like Fallout 4, I don't think it's much different.

Beyond the animations and some cheesy dialog (which again is pretty much the standard in these types of games), Andromeda is a good fucking game. It ran very well and had very few technical issues for a game of its scope and size. Again, look at your average Bethesda game, they are a fucking nightmare at launch... ME:A was much better. The story is interesting (to me), and the gameplay and gunplay is the best the series has ever had. It's pretty sad to see what's an otherwise great game dragged though the mud by a bunch of overly cynical cry babies who seem to think that anything that falls shy of perfection is garbage. I think the game, because of what it is, and who it's made by, was held to a much higher standard than other titles. And I think everyone latched on this one obvious flaw and just ripped the game to shreds over it.

Normally, for the people bothered by the animations, I'd say it's their loss for passing on a really fun game over a trivial issue. But because of how much sensational media attention this gathered, and how swiftly it spread through social media, enough people chose to pass on the game that it made a tangibly difference on the games profitability. Makes for a bad time to be a fan of the series.

 

[NickJames]

Normally, for the people bothered by the animations, I'd say it's their loss for passing on a really fun game over a trivial issue. But because of how much sensational media attention this gathered, and how swiftly it spread through social media, enough people chose to pass on the game that it made a tangibly difference on the games profitability. Makes for a bad time to be a fan of the series.

As one of the biggest fans of the series, good. I will not accept half finished work. I am sorry but there is no excuse for releasing a buggy and fairly ugly product by a (once) AAA studio. For a game that focuses so much on dialogue, animations and story telling, half assing that portion of your game is just baffling in my opinion. I would rather play a game with buggy mechanics and occasional crash issues than suffer through shit dialogue and horrendous animations for the entirety of it. Mass Effect 1 handles like dry playdough but I still replay it because the story, the characters and the animations are still quite good today. Same goes for KOTOR.

 

[Viper87227]

As one of the biggest fans of the series, good. I will not accept half finished work. I am sorry but there is no excuse for releasing a buggy and fairly ugly product by a (once) AAA studio. For a game that focuses so much on dialogue, animations and story telling, half assing that portion of your game is just baffling in my opinion. I would rather play a game with buggy mechanics and occasional crash issues than suffer through shit dialogue and horrendous animations for the entirety of it. Mass Effect 1 handles like dry playdough but I still replay it because the story, the characters and the animations are still quite good today. Same goes for KOTOR.

C'mon man... this is the exact attitude i'm talking about? Half finished? What half is missing? The story is complete, and IMO it's as good as any other game of it's type. The gameplay is solid. All the playable bits are there. And I encountered no major bugs along the way, or any technical issues. Nor have I heard of anyone else really complaining in regards to performance or game breaking bugs. The game is solid. You're really of the opinion that some bad lip animations represent fifty fucking percent of a massive, ~100 hour open world RPG? 50% of the games overall value derives from the faces in the game? That's insane to me.

And I still wouldn't call it half-assed. Looking at any other game on this scale, I'd say the animations are very similar. I keep bringing up Bethesda, animations in those games are as lifeless as it gets. Witcher 3 was better, but I wouldn't call it night and day. That's what happens when you have a world like this. You can't compare it to something like an Uncharted, which has 8 hours of very clearly defined narrative and direction. There are so many countless hours of dialogue, they can't possible hand-animate every line. It's a necessary trade off for the amount of content you get.

I just can't buy into the fact that the majority of the games value lives and dies with the lips. I'm happy to admit the game isn't perfect, and I'm happy to admit that the game is not for everyone. But for people who are otherwise fans of the series or genre, discrediting it solely for the facial animations just boggles my fucking mind.

 

[NickJames]

C'mon man... this is the exact attitude i'm talking about? Half finished? What half is missing? The story is complete, and IMO it's as good as any other game of it's type. The gameplay is solid. All the playable bits are there. And I encountered no major bugs along the way, or any technical issues. Nor have I heard of anyone else really complaining in regards to performance or game breaking bugs. The game is solid. You're really of the opinion that some bad lip animations represent fifty fucking percent of a massive, ~100 hour open world RPG? 50% of the games overall value derives from the faces in the game? That's insane to me.

And I still wouldn't call it half-assed. Looking at any other game on this scale, I'd say the animations are very similar. I keep bringing up Bethesda, animations in those games are as lifeless as it gets. Witcher 3 was better, but I wouldn't call it night and day. That's what happens when you have a world like this. You can't compare it to something like an Uncharted, which has 8 hours of very clearly defined narrative and direction. There are so many countless hours of dialogue, they can't possible hand-animate every line. It's a necessary trade off for the amount of content you get.

I just can't buy into the fact that the majority of the games value lives and dies with the lips. I'm happy to admit the game isn't perfect, and I'm happy to admit that the game is not for everyone. But for people who are otherwise fans of the series or genre, discrediting it solely for the facial animations just boggles my fucking mind.

If I can't feel any emotional attachment to the characters because they act like potatoes and are animated by a lazy team that just uses a tiny of pool of animation presets that they didn't even bother to QC. Characters which I am expected to watch and listen to for hours which make up a large majority of my gameplay time, then yes, I would say it's half finished. If you looked at some of the early videos, it's easily comparable. The characters showed little to no emotion, everyone had the acting talent of a spoiled rich kid whos mommy bought their way into drama school. Their faces as dead as the sidewalk, I find this totally unacceptable. How is it that the original Bioware was able to get it right? More hours of dialogue is not an excuse for poor quality.

 

[Viper87227]

If I can't feel any emotional attachment to the characters because they act like potatoes and are animated by a lazy team that just uses a tiny of pool of animation presets that they didn't even bother to QC. Characters which I am expected to watch and listen to for hours which make up a large majority of my gameplay time, then yes, I would say it's half finished.

I think you may be confusing lack of effort for lack of resources. AAA game budgets and development timelines are getting insane. When a game is taking 5+ years and 10's of millions of dollars to make (IIRC ME:A was $40M to make), you gotta draw the line somewhere. It's quite likely that the immense undertaking that would be fine-tuning all that dialogue simply is not profitable.

Either way, I still disagree that the animations were so bad that they ruined the game, or that it's worth anywhere near the amount of fuss people made over it. Can you provide examples of other games that are similar in scale that have notably better animations? Specifically games with long story lines and multiple conversation choices for every encounter . Because again, looking at the likes of Skyrim, Fallout, Witcher, etc. I'm not coming up with anything that significantly better.

 

[scojer]

Kinda off topic... but the thread title had me imagining the series as a play on ice...
I think it could work.

 

[NickJames]

I think you may be confusing lack of effort for lack of resources. AAA game budgets and development timelines are getting insane. When a game is taking 5+ years and 10's of millions of dollars to make (IIRC ME:A was $40M to make), you gotta draw the line somewhere. It's quite likely that the immense undertaking that would be fine-tuning all that dialogue simply is not profitable.

Either way, I still disagree that the animations were so bad that they ruined the game, or that it's worth anywhere near the amount of fuss people made over it. Can you provide examples of other games that are similar in scale that have notably better animations? Specifically games with long story lines and multiple conversation choices for every encounter . Because again, looking at the likes of Skyrim, Fallout, Witcher, etc. I'm not coming up with anything that significantly better.

For you to say Witcher is on par with Andromeda makes this a pointless argument. Sorry but even Half-Life 2 did a better job at animating facial expressions than Andromeda.

 

[Viper87227]

For you to say Witcher is on par with Andromeda makes this a pointless argument. Sorry but even Half-Life 2 did a better job at animating facial expressions than Andromeda.

TW3 has better facial animations, but not by much. They are generally lacking accuracy and expression. That's the way it goes with games like this. As for HL2, no, they aren't better. And regardless, I'll make the point over and over again, you cannot compare a short, linear game with something like this. I'll again use Uncharted as an example, because it's worlds apart in this department. But it's a game that takes 10-15 hours to beat. It is much shorter, but had a similar budget and development time frame. They had resources to develop to painstakingly animating every cut scene to look perfect.

Where exactly are you proposing Bioware / EA come up with the resources to apply the same treatment to a game that is somewhere around 10x longer and significantly less linear? Should they go broke trying to make the game to appease your delicate tastes? Is it so hard to accept that something, somewhere has to give to make a game this size?

 

[Aireoth]

I think you may be confusing lack of effort for lack of resources. AAA game budgets and development timelines are getting insane. When a game is taking 5+ years and 10's of millions of dollars to make (IIRC ME:A was $40M to make), you gotta draw the line somewhere. It's quite likely that the immense undertaking that would be fine-tuning all that dialogue simply is not profitable.

Either way, I still disagree that the animations were so bad that they ruined the game, or that it's worth anywhere near the amount of fuss people made over it. Can you provide examples of other games that are similar in scale that have notably better animations? Specifically games with long story lines and multiple conversation choices for every encounter . Because again, looking at the likes of Skyrim, Fallout, Witcher, etc. I'm not coming up with anything that significantly better.

i had broken dialogue triggers all game long, characters would cue in to say things out of context, dialogue triggers would often cut off current ongoing dialogue. I had end of planet dialogue triggering shortly after landing, and beginning dialogue retriggering long after completion of a planet.

The plot too was rather dull until 3/4 of the way through the game, not a problem exclusive to MEA though.

Witcher 3 had way better animations.

The bad guys... damn they where so boring I am having trouble remembering their name... ah Kett, where nothing more than discount reapers. So sad.

Honestly, I am glad they are resetting, even though i think the second game had a chance to really be good as the game ends in with the perfect setup to make things exciting. Why couldn't they just have made things exciting from the start?

I'd love to see race selection as part of the game,

 

[Viper87227]

i had broken dialogue triggers all game long, characters would cue in to say things out of context, dialogue triggers would often cut off current ongoing dialogue. I had end of planet dialogue triggering shortly after landing, and beginning dialogue retriggering long after completion of a planet.

The plot too was rather dull until 3/4 of the way through the game, not a problem exclusive to MEA though.

Witcher 3 had way better animations.

The bad guys... damn they where so boring I am having trouble remembering their name... ah Kett, where nothing more than discount reapers. So sad.

Honestly, I am glad they are resetting, even though i think the second game had a chance to really be good as the game ends in with the perfect setup to make things exciting. Why couldn't they just have made things exciting from the start?

I'd love to see race selection as part of the game,

I'd agree with certain criticisms. A little more variety in new alien life would have been cool. I still don't think what is there is bad though, but I wouldn't have had an issue with more. But I'm willing to accept they did what they could with the resources as hand. I've had few complaints about the story. The fact that it's in another galaxy means nothing to me, but discovering new things is exciting. That, to me, is where the excitement is before the story hit it's stride. Finding new planets, new biomes, new creatures. Maybe I found enjoyment in that that others didn't, but I found the mystery exciting.

I still never really had major bugs though like you encountered. The most annoying thing was Sam telling me I had e-mails when I didn't. Performance was great and SLI worked day one. I really had nothing in that department to complain about.

I'm not saying ME:A is perfect, only that the whole facial animation scandal was way overblown. I do think taking a hiatus is a poor choice. This was a big undertaking for a virgin studio. I'd rather see them embrace the criticism they got and make a better game next time around. You can't expect perfection on the first outing. Keeping the good parts of ME:A and improving the not-so-good parts would make for an amazing game. I'd rather see them given the chance.

 

[NickJames]

TW3 has better facial animations, but not by much. They are generally lacking accuracy and expression. That's the way it goes with games like this. As for HL2, no, they aren't better. And regardless, I'll make the point over and over again, you cannot compare a short, linear game with something like this. I'll again use Uncharted as an example, because it's worlds apart in this department. But it's a game that takes 10-15 hours to beat. It is much shorter, but had a similar budget and development time frame. They had resources to develop to painstakingly animating every cut scene to look perfect.

Where exactly are you proposing Bioware / EA come up with the resources to apply the same treatment to a game that is somewhere around 10x longer and significantly less linear? Should they go broke trying to make the game to appease your delicate tastes? Is it so hard to accept that something, somewhere has to give to make a game this size?

Dude, the game is not that big. I don't why you think EA is incapable of spending extra resources perfecting their game, they're the largest video game studio in the world, I think they can handle it. If they expect me to pay for their games, yes, I expect them to go the extra mile. Quality not quantity.

 

[Viper87227]

Dude, the game is not that big. I don't why you think EA is incapable of spending extra resources perfecting their game, they're the largest video game studio in the world, I think they can handle it. If they expect me to pay for their games, yes, I expect them to go the extra mile. Quality not quantity.

Just because they can pay for it doesn't mean they have an infinite budget. Every single thing they do is a game of cost versus potential profit. Just because they have cash to dump $100M on a single game doesn't mean that they are going to see an appropriate return on the initial investment. Everything has limits, everything has compromise. And yeah, the game is that big, especially with the particular aspect we're talking about, which is dialogue.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2017/03/14/mass-effect-andromeda-has-the-most-dialogue-of-all-mass-effects-by-a-mile/#60167ca13c68
[LIST]
[*]Mass Effect: Andromeda has over 1,200 unique speaking characters, almost double what Mass Effect 3 had at 670.
[*]This does not include shopkeepers or random NPCs spouting dialogue, these are characters with actual dialogue wheels.
[*]The number of lines of dialogue are more than Mass Effect 2 and 3 combined. This means that there aren’t just more people to talk to, but conversations are deeper and longer than ever.
[/LIST]

From what I can find, ME2 had 25,000 lines of dialogue and ME3 had 40,000 lines of dialogue. That means ME3 has over 65,000 spoken lines. Can you seriously not fathom how much that is? There's only so much they can do to make all that look natural. I get it, it definitely could have been better. But you can't expect the same quality you get on games that have short, defined narratives. They have to establish some sort of auto-generated facial animations.

At the end of the day, we can argue all day long about what you expect them to be capable of versus what I expect them to be capable of. Doesn't matter. I don't think it's as big of an issue as you seem to. I'm moving on. Have fun being grouchy, i'll have fun playing the game... sloppy faces and all.

 

[NickJames]

At the end of the day, we can argue all day long about what you expect them to be capable of versus what I expect them to be capable of. Doesn't matter. I don't think it's as big of an issue as you seem to. I'm moving on. Have fun being grouchy, i'll have fun playing the game... sloppy faces and all.

Ok, no one is stopping you from playing the game. A lot of us Mass Effect fans just have higher standards. It was feared day 1 after EA took over Bioware that there would be quality issues and we were right. Game should've sat on the back burner another 6 months, the fact that one patch was able to solve a large majority of the issues proves that they could've done more. I'll buy it eventually, once a bundle with all the DLC and patches is released.

 

[sir-gold]

This is typical EA tactics.
Buy a company that has released a good game (or 20), milk it to death with sequels, close the studio when people get sick of it, rinse and repeat.

From Wikipedia:

Danger Close Games in Los Angeles, founded as DreamWorks Interactive, LLC. in 1995, acquired in 2000, renamed as EA Los Angeles and closed down in 2013.
Origin Systems in Austin, Texas founded in 1983, acquired in 1992, closed in 2004.
Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, Nevada, founded in 1987, acquired from Virgin Interactive Entertainment in August 1998, merged into EA Los Angeles in 2003.
Pandemic Studios in Los Angeles, California and Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, founded in 1998, acquired October 2007 from Elevation Partners, closed November 17, 2009.

Looking at the full list, they have closed 1-4 studios per year, for the last 17 years, with many of them being shut down only 3-4 years after being bought by EA (and it one case, the shutdown came hours after the purchase)

Even when EA doesn't kill a company, they still have their identity and heritage stripped away by being renamed "EA [location]", like some sort of Borg drone designation.

 

[M76]

If I can't feel any emotional attachment to the characters because they act like potatoes and are animated by a lazy team that just uses a tiny of pool of animation presets that they didn't even bother to QC. Characters which I am expected to watch and listen to for hours which make up a large majority of my gameplay time, then yes, I would say it's half finished. If you looked at some of the early videos, it's easily comparable. The characters showed little to no emotion, everyone had the acting talent of a spoiled rich kid whos mommy bought their way into drama school. Their faces as dead as the sidewalk, I find this totally unacceptable. How is it that the original Bioware was able to get it right? More hours of dialogue is not an excuse for poor quality.

Have you looked at a bethesda rpg recently? Compared to oblivion, F3, F4, or skyrim, the animations and characters in andromeda are masterpieces.

This hate is completely unjustified. People should start to have their own thoughts and not parrot what a few youtubers started. I explain everything in my Review that needs to be known about the game.