Mass Effect: Andromeda — Why?
This is not a review of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
I’m happy that I don’t have to review Andromeda, to be honest. This is because there are two main questions I like to ask as a critic. First, does this game succeed, when taken on its own terms? In that regard, I think Andromeda does…kind of. It’s messy and it’s awkward, but it’s got a good heart. I like it! (That article is coming soon, probably when I finish the game, which should be in a few days.)
The other critical role I like to play is placing games, or whatever piece of media, into historical context. Most of the time, these two work well together. The Shepard trilogy of Mass Effect games, for example, fits firmly within the historical contexts of BioWare role-playing games, serialized storytelling, and various types of science fiction. Mass Effect: Andromeda, on the other hand…doesn’t. It really doesn’t. It makes no sense to me. So I’m gonna try to puzzle this out — this piece doesn’t have a conclusion, really, but maybe I’ll get there.
So here’s what I mean by the lack of context: between Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 — or 2003–2012 — BioWare focused on making 30–50 hour cinematic role-playing games (with the sole exception of the slower-paced Dragon Age: Origins). And they got damn good at it. Many of these games are considered amongst the best role-playing games of the era; Mass Effect 2 in particular won all kinds of Game of the Year awards; and Mass Effect 3 refined the formula marvelously.
And then it stopped. First with Dragon Age: Inquisition, then with Mass Effect: Andromeda, BioWare totally changed their formula. The tight cinematic semi-linear quest and conversation systems? Gone. Replaced by massive, largely empty open worlds. The strangest thing was that story-centered quests with moral choices, the staple of BioWare RPGs of all kinds, have been replaced by open maps filled with navpoints.
Now with Inquisition this seemed to make sense: Dragon Age 2 attempted to tighten up the formula, proved controversial, and so BioWare went in the other direction with Inquisition. I think they were wrong about Dragon Age 2, and I think the open world zones of Inquisition were an utter disaster, making it easily the worst BioWare game since they started making RPGs, but at least I can see a potential thought process leading from point 2 to point I. I can’t with Andromeda.
I do think Andromeda is a significant improvement over Inquisition — for one thing, you’re actually given decent motivation for enough of the side quests in its open world, and the theme of setting up colonies on harsh worlds makes exploring consonant with the themes of the games.
But it’s quiet. Static. Even, well, kind of boring (although I’m more positive than Kat is on the game). There’s almost never any kind of narrative urgency to Mass Effect: Andromeda. You just kind of wander around, getting into fights, solving puzzles, completing quests, and having people talk at you. They barely even respond to what you’ve done. It’s like 2004-style NPCs as signposts, where you methodically click on every conversation option and they slowly tell you their life story.
I just replayed the Shepard trilogy and it’s astonishing how static Andromeda feels compared to the original games. Mass Effect 3 in particular was a lean, efficient, story and shooting delivery mechanism. Conversations with important characters and old friends get the full click-on-every-option deal, but for most side characters, you get only the story or joke or quest that they want to tell.
Quests, meanwhile, are handled almost entirely as their own specific slices: you get a mission, the Normandy lands you at the mission site, you play and shoot your way through, get a moral choice at the end, and then — this part is crucial — the game and the world reacts to what you’ve done. There’s a debriefing — usually with Hackett in ME3, and then you see if what you did added to the War Assets with a little text. You run through the Normandy, and most every character has at least a line about the last mission for you. The world knows you exist, and reacts to you!
In Andromeda, on the other hand, completing most missions leads to maybe a muttered line of text right in the moment, but more likely it just cleans up from the log, gives you a bit of experience, and shows the planet’s viability increasing. I’ve had difficult quest chains, like activating a Vault on a world to start the terraforming process, end with barely a whisper. Start a colony on a world and clear out a Kett base, and there’s still never-ending shuttles dropping Kett enemies in your way a couple hundred yards away.
Even the plot missions feel static. Check out the opening of this supplemental mission from Mass Effect 3, which feels (intentionally) like the damn storming of the beaches at Normandy.
This is from 2012. In Mass Effect: Andromeda, released five years later, there’s nothing at all like this kind of big, dynamic, momentum-carrying scene. Even in the core plot missions or the characters’ loyalty missions, which are usually traditional Mass Effect sliced out levels, things are still fairly quiet. (That said, the loyalty missions in particular do try to have traditional Mass Effect-style missions, and guess what? They’re the best part of the game!) Even Dragon Age: Inquisition, which had similar issues of static exploration zones, still managed to have these huge set pieces like the defense of Haven or the siege of Adamant. In Andromeda, you might see a few commandos fighting enemies through a window.
There’s no urgency anywhere in Mass Effect: Andromeda. You just wander around. It’s astonishing, coming from the game series that gave us Virmire, the Collector Base, and Grissom Academy. It’s not a bad wander but I don’t know why it exists.
How BioWare Got To 2017
Let’s take a look at how we got here. First of all, an interesting thing about Mass Effect games is that while they’re dominant in the discourse, they’re not actually mega-hits. They tend to sell a few million each time — more than enough to keep BioWare going, but not Call of Duty levels.
BioWare was also purchased by Electronic Arts in 2007, right at the start of their rather amazing run of releasing role-playing game of the year contenders every year until 2014 (with 2009 and 2013 taken off, although the latter had the superb “Citadel” expansion). They’ve been treated better than, say, Origin Systems was by EA (the best developers in games turned into the worst within two years), but EA is still rather famously a bottom-line oriented company. In 2012, the founders of BioWare, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk (known as the Doctors) both left the company. Given that 2012 is when Mass Effect 3 was released, it’s probably fair to say this is around the time that Mass Effect: Andromeda’s development started.
2012 also saw BioWare’s previously near-pristine reputation taking some serious hits. The year prior, Dragon Age 2 was released, and quickly became one of the most polarizing games in the BioWare catalogue. Some of the criticism was legitimate, others was proto-Gamergate yelling at diversity, but after the universal acclaim that most of the previous games had received, it was weird.
Mass Effect 3, the next year, had a similar set of problems. Again, a devoted group of diversity haters targeted it for being too gay or the like, but it most famously became targeting for its ending. I do think the ending was a disaster, but the furor almost entirely overshadowed what was, as I linked above, arguably the best of the cinematic role-playing games at fusing its supposedly separate story and gameplay components. Still, all anyone wanted to talk about is the ending.
On the other hand, ME3’s multiplayer mode — initially controversial both for existing in an epic RPG, and for attaching parasitically to the single-player — turned into one of the best parts of the game. It was a consistent moneymaker with a solid fan-base, and even skeptical critics like myself ended up big fans.
Meanwhile, most of the Game of the Year awards in 2011 had gone to The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, from BioWare’s consistent comrade/rival in the blockbuster RPG space, Bethesda. Not only did Skyrim win tons of awards, it sold like gangbusters. Like, one of the top-selling games ever. This slow-paced, open-world, exploration-oriented, plot-lite RPG blew everything, including even BioWare’s best, out of the water in terms of sales.
What May Have Gone Wrong
So the first theory as to why Mass Effect: Andromeda goes against BioWare’s traditional strengths and is instead a slow-paced, open-world, exploration-oriented, plot-lite RPG seems straightforward enough: EA, with more power over BioWare after years of ownership, pushed the developers to create an open-world game that would sell like Skyrim, not like Mass Effects 1, 2, and 3. BioWare itself, hurt by the negative reaction to primarily story elements in Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, may also have been happy to move in this less risky direction of quest markers and elfroot collection.
This is entirely plausible, but I don’t think it fully explains Andromeda’s weirdness. Entire swaths of the game, like the Nexus, or many of those slow, static conversations seem tacked-on. The game’s now-famous bugs specifically seem to hit event triggers the worst — characters who are supposed to move or appear or talk at certain times just don’t. Or they do too early. Or you read notes from party members who belong you races you haven’t even made first contact with, let alone met.
When I’ve brought up my confusion as to why Andromeda is structured the way it is on Twitter, one consistent response (especially from Justin Keverne) is that EA pushed BioWare to use the Frostbite engine, and Frostbite is great for big open spaces but bad for event triggers. If this is the case, and given the serious flaws of both Inquisition and Andromeda, it seems plausible, then what we’re seeing is a corporate imposition not only damaging the creativity and quality of a once-thriving company in BioWare, but the entire cinematic RPG sub-genre seems to be on the brink of disappearing, as isometric RPGs did in the early 2000s.
(This is probably worth another full article, but with BioWare and CD-Projekt Red going open-world, and Obsidian doing throwback RPGs, pretty much the only major 2000s-style cinematic RPG released in the past couple years is Deus Ex: Mankind Evolved. What a bizarre and unnecessary genre collapse.)
There’s also the fact that Andromeda was developed by BioWare Montreal, instead of BioWare Edmonton, which had been responsible for the three previous Mass Effect games. While this change is almost certainly important in terms of quality, I’m not sure it’s sufficient in terms of explaining why Andromeda is structured the way it is.
Other people jumped in with some rampant speculation, and while I normally don’t like to do so, one in particular has stuck in my head: the idea that Andromeda was built on the bones of a collapsed Destiny-like massively multiplayer shooter. (We know that BioWare was working on at least one multiplayer action game, the now-cancelled Shadow Realms.) And goddess, if you squint at Andromeda, it sure does look like a slick, ME3 multiplayer-inspired MMO with a Mass Effect storyline pasted over that. I mean, none of the planets on their own scream Mass Effect, right? That might even explain why the Nexus feels like it was added a couple months before release. Or why Foster Addison looks like she was put together like a week before launch.
I felt dirty just typing out that conjecture like an angry Redditor, but like I said: I can’t get it out of my head when I think of why this game exists in this fashion. The various components of Andromeda do not fit together well enough for me to say with confidence that this is a harmoniously designed game.
I honestly don’t know why Andromeda feels like it’s a game from 2004 attached to a shooter from 2017. I don’t know why it doesn’t seem like it learned anything from the technical improvements made over the course of the Shepard trilogy. I don’t know why, after the game learned to make fun of its awful Towers of Hanoi puzzle in Mass Effect 1, I’m suddenly doing fucking sudoku to unlock Vaults like hacking mini-games are a thing that needed to come back. All three previous Mass Effect games knew exactly what they were trying to do, and maybe they couldn’t quite make it (and maybe the gap in between ambition and execution is the title of my book), but they had a reason to exist.
There’s a pretty good game in Mass Effect: Andromeda, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not a good Mass Effect game with any kind of consistency. Hopefully one day we’ll get the story as to how that happened, because I kinda wanted the new Mass Effect game to actually be a Mass Effect game.
