It’s been over nine years since Mass Effect: Andromeda tried to kickstart a new era of BioWare’s original sci-fi RPG universe, an experiment that ended with pretty poor results. Now, we’re eagerly awaiting news on the mainline follow-up revealed in late 2020 and Amazon’s TV show.
One of Andromeda’s leads, Tom Taylorson, the voice actor behind Scott Ryder, recently had a chat with fan site We Are Mass Effect (hat tip to IGN). During the conversation, he reflected on what went wrong during the game’s development and after its release, even if it was eventually reappraised by some fans of the franchise.
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“It was done dirty by a publisher expecting too much from it, not being fully cooked, forced out the door too early, forced to use corporate’s shiny new engine when many of the team didn’t know how to work with it and it was NOT suited to the storytelling part of the game,” he said. Almost a decade later, Taylorson isn’t pulling any punches, underlining well-known problems during the game’s bumpy development (such as the forced switch to DICE’s Frostbite engine), and BioWare Montreal’s lack of experience when it came to taking the lead on vast projects.
To be fair, and as also explained by IGN’s report, 2024’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard was also built on Frostbite and, for all its faults, was one of the most polished triple-A releases of that year. It’s true BioWare had trouble adapting to it on Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, though. It’s worth noting, at this point, that the next Mass Effect has returned to Unreal Engine.
The actor also pointed out the online reaction to the title wasn’t the kindest when the game finally launched: “It was released to a VERY toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space,” he explains. The actor is convinced “online chuds” amplified the problems the game faced during its launch window: “Their love of hate sealed the deal. What saddens me is that this would not be the last time I was in a project doomed by online haters picking a game for Punching Bag of The Week: I also worked on Highguard.”
The Mass Effect franchise is eventually going to return — though, at this point, anything could still happen with the next game — but the plans for Andromeda’s own series were scrapped following the poor critical reception and disappointing sales. “It hurt most because I knew that was it — Ryder wouldn’t be coming back… I, and others, thought we’d have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that — gone.”
