Everyone that knows about Mass Effect Andromeda by this point has undoubtedly seen a whole lot of things that don’t paint the game in a good light. Whether it’s the odd animations, the writing, or otherwise, Mass Effect Andromeda doesn’t quite live up to its predecessors…and there may be a reason why, according to a former employee.
The original Mass Effect trilogy was one of the most popular and well-reviewed series of the previous console generation. Even with Mass Effect 3’s highly controversial original ending, which tainted BioWare’s reputation for several years afterward, many people look back fondly on all three games. However, Andromeda is different.
Various gifs of bad animation and weird facial expressions have taunted the game since its first gameplay reveal, and it seems like inner divisions between BioWare Montreal and BioWare Edmonton, two of the company’s branches, along with employee purges, “bro culture”, and conflicts between them, are to blame.
The first few reviews for Mass Effect Andromeda, while not necessarily awful, don’t paint a glowing picture like they did with the other games, instead painting it as fairly average.
The divisions at BioWare, along with losing 13 different leads from areas like art, game design, audio, senior core leads, and more in Montreal while Edmonton only lost three.
It seems like all is not well in BioWare Montreal, and whether it’s a purge of lead designers that don’t mesh with their own culture and thoughts or just going off bigger opportunities remains to be seen.
The “bro culture” report, however, is a fairly interesting issue, considering how progressive BioWare games are.
It seems that the huge amount of culture clashing, issues between teams, inter-studio politics, leadership conflicts, and more are all responsible for dragging down Mass Effect Andromeda’s quality, which considering the studio has made a great number of critically acclaimed games is quite the shock.
Hopefully BioWare can remake itself into what it once was and continue to put out great games.
