Mass Effect: Andromeda Director Leaves Bioware

[RJ 17]

Well...that can't be good.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/12/28/mass-effect-andromeda-director-chris-wynn-leaves-bioware?utm_source=IGN%20hub%20page&utm_medium=IGN%20%28front%20page%29&utm_content=14&utm_campaign=Blogroll

Yep, seems the director for ME:A has quit and will be moving back to the US. So what do you think? At this point in development, will it be fine? Or will we get another Destiny scenario, what with its director leaving and the game launching as a piece of shit?

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

You say that like it wasn't going to be a load of shit anyway.
I doubt it'll have much impact. I doubt EA/Bioware give their staff much freedom with anything. It'll just be more generic rubbish.

 

[Aerosteam]

They got a Gears of War guy to work on the next Mass Effect.
And now that guy is jumping ship.

Oh no...

 

[LetalisK]

Two things. First, it's entirely possible his departure is unrelated to the direction of the game. Second, if it was related, it's also possible he was the problem.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

There's no one left at Bioware I'd consider an auteur essential to the shaping of a game, or the informing of its spirit. If the game is anything like Inquisition...and we have no reason to believe it won't be and every reason to believe it will...it'll be a formless blob designed by committee, not the passionate work of a lone creator.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Perhaps this is a sign. We should all abandon hope of this game being good. Hell, if the director himself can't stand it...

 

[MHR]

With how many stupid ret-cons, how much gutting will be needed to shoehorn DLC, needless multiplayer features, and how bad this game is going to be fucked sideways by EA, nobody with brains should be buying this game anyway.

Anytime I've heard of devs quitting from my favorite games, it was never a good thing. After the respectable devs quit, the game gets fucked over by the second rank. This is a bad sign. But like I said, I wont care.

 

[beddo]

Well...that can't be good.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/12/28/mass-effect-andromeda-director-chris-wynn-leaves-bioware?utm_source=IGN%20hub%20page&utm_medium=IGN%20%28front%20page%29&utm_content=14&utm_campaign=Blogroll

Yep, seems the director for ME:A has quit and will be moving back to the US. So what do you think? At this point in development, will it be fine? Or will we get another Destiny scenario, what with its director leaving and the game launching as a piece of shit?

It's the Development Director not the Creative Director. While it seems difficult for him to have moved on I'm sure he's set up a number of processes and will be able to transition someone else into the role. It will probably have some impact on development but little on direction.

 

[Pseudonym]

It's a mass effect game made after the mass effect game in which we beat the reapers. It's a sequel (or whatever it is, I don't care) that has less of a right to exist than halo 4 from a story standpoint in a series of games that's mostly about its narrative elements.

I like mass effect but I cannot conceive of a dev team that could make that work. Maybe the gameplay will be really good. I highly doubt that but it's more likely than that the story will have any artistic reason to exist at all. In the best case scenario it will be a kind of spin off in the same universe with a different tone and focus altogether that can work as its own thing.

In any case, bioware should be working on some new IP rather than add more fluff to a story that is already done.

 

[TT Kairen]

There's no one left at Bioware I'd consider an auteur essential to the shaping of a game, or the informing of its spirit. If the game is anything like Inquisition...and we have no reason to believe it won't be and every reason to believe it will...it'll be a formless blob designed by committee, not the passionate work of a lone creator.

Considering they said Inquisition will be the baseline by which they create all future games, that has already been proven correct. On the plus side, that game was such an exercise in mediocrity that improving it OR making it worse would be something of an achievement.

 

[JamesStone]

Oh good, a chance to rant a bit about Mass Effect!


Honestly, Andromeda was probably going to be a huge dissapointment anyway, at least in my books.


Here we have the Reapers, the biggest threat to the entire galaxy. What could we make of their functions? They could have been created to preserve the essence of each race, their creators believing all species are doomed to extingish themselves in conflict and war. Or they could have been created as a last resource, a sort of Replicator (stargate) type bussiness that cares only for its own survival and the continuation of its species. The Conduit could have been a massive trap, designed by the Reapers to drain the resources of the resistance, then deliver an overwhelmingly crippling blow: a wave of energy spread through the Mass Relays that permanently disabled advanced tech but left them intact ("You develop the paths we desire" indeed. The Reapers have a perfect stranglethorn of what tech will surface, and as such can weaponize against it) which's code the Protheans secretly managed to crack, turning it against their exterminators. Or maybe just the endings we got with more foreshadowing. Or hell, never tell us the origins and keep the Elditchrian theme you were going for in 1.


With so many possibilities, what's the best Bioware can think of? "They were created to solve the shoehorned dark matter problem", which they haven't managed to do in at the very least 37 million years, which was followed by the "they were created to solve the shoehorned conflict between organics and synthetics", which was forced as all shit. As a bonus, one of the villains with most potential in this gaming era, Harbinger, got completely sidelined, to be valiantly replaced by... a whole bunch of nothing.



Maybe I'm being irrational about this doomsaying, but it's honestly how I feel. "Betrayed", in the sense that I placed my trust on Bioware and their writing team, invested myself emotionally and got let down harshly.

And it's not just Mass Effect! Look at how Dragon Age turned out. It's what Bioware's great at, these days. Great characters, great potential, that goes absolutely nowhere and leaves you unfulfilled and dissapointed.


Which brings the question, even if Mass Effect Andromeda is good, dare I say great, why exactly are you willing to trust Bioware again (If you're satisfied with the endings this question isn't directed towards you) after the constant stream of letdowns that have been their lastest releases?

 

[Silverbeard]

There's no one left at Bioware I'd consider an auteur essential to the shaping of a game, or the informing of its spirit. If the game is anything like Inquisition...and we have no reason to believe it won't be and every reason to believe it will...it'll be a formless blob designed by committee, not the passionate work of a lone creator.

I think we left the 'A game by [X]' days a very long time ago. There're just too many moving parts in a video game these days for one visionary to have anything more than a cursory oversight on a project. Firaxis is about the only non-indie studio that can manage that these days.

 

[Imre Csete]

BioWare Montreal only did the multiplayer bits and The Omega DLC, so I never had high hopes to begin with. Facing escalating threaths are silly, where do you go from fighting the Reapers? Halo fell into the same trap by now, pulling out even bigger baddies at every turn. In Dragon Age Inquisition you save all reality twice. Once in the main game and once in the final DLC. What the hell.

The Conduit could have been a massive trap, designed by the Reapers to drain the resources of the resistance, then deliver an overwhelmingly crippling blow: a wave of energy spread through the Mass Relays that permanently disabled advanced tech but left them intact ("You develop the paths we desire" indeed.

Oh cool, I join in to vent some aswell.

I kinda liked the whole ancient superweapon angle, it's very space opera-ish, with their own spin on the clich?, being made by all the previous races together, bit by bit. It made sense.

Then of course a plot that basically wrote itself for 2,5 games got blown up by cheap plot devices (the all solving indoctrination) and obligatory twists.

 

[Verrik]

Oh good, a chance to rant a bit about Mass Effect!


Honestly, Andromeda was probably going to be a huge dissapointment anyway, at least in my books.


Here we have the Reapers, the biggest threat to the entire galaxy. What could we make of their functions? They could have been created to preserve the essence of each race, their creators believing all species are doomed to extingish themselves in conflict and war. Or they could have been created as a last resource, a sort of Replicator (stargate) type bussiness that cares only for its own survival and the continuation of its species. The Conduit could have been a massive trap, designed by the Reapers to drain the resources of the resistance, then deliver an overwhelmingly crippling blow: a wave of energy spread through the Mass Relays that permanently disabled advanced tech but left them intact ("You develop the paths we desire" indeed. The Reapers have a perfect stranglethorn of what tech will surface, and as such can weaponize against it) which's code the Protheans secretly managed to crack, turning it against their exterminators. Or maybe just the endings we got with more foreshadowing. Or hell, never tell us the origins and keep the Elditchrian theme you were going for in 1.


With so many possibilities, what's the best Bioware can think of? "They were created to solve the shoehorned dark matter problem", which they haven't managed to do in at the very least 37 million years, which was followed by the "they were created to solve the shoehorned conflict between organics and synthetics", which was forced as all shit. As a bonus, one of the villains with most potential in this gaming era, Harbinger, got completely sidelined, to be valiantly replaced by... a whole bunch of nothing.



Maybe I'm being irrational about this doomsaying, but it's honestly how I feel. "Betrayed", in the sense that I placed my trust on Bioware and their writing team, invested myself emotionally and got let down harshly.

And it's not just Mass Effect! Look at how Dragon Age turned out. It's what Bioware's great at, these days. Great characters, great potential, that goes absolutely nowhere and leaves you unfulfilled and dissapointed.


Which brings the question, even if Mass Effect Andromeda is good, dare I say great, why exactly are you willing to trust Bioware again (If you're satisfied with the endings this question isn't directed towards you) after the constant stream of letdowns that have been their lastest releases?

...You should have been a writer at Bioware when Mass Effect was being made. Seriously, I like all of those ideas a thousand times more than the, as you said, FORCED synthetics vs. organics thing.

I mean really, don't give me the option to bring peace between the Quarians and the Geth, only for that to have absolutely NO IMPACT on the ending whatsoever... Jeez, something like that should have at least given that stupid god AI child thing more dialogue explaining why or why not this was a good thing.

 

[LetalisK]

They could have been created to preserve the essence of each race, their creators believing all species are doomed to extingish themselves in conflict and war.

I'm confused. That was revealed in Mass Effect 2, though replace "creators" with "Reapers".