Mass Effect: Andromeda was originally more like No Man’s Sky

Insiders explain the troubled story of Mass Effect: Andromeda's sloppy launch in a new report.

The long-awaited Mass Effect: Andromeda launched earlier this year, and fans were, frankly, disappointed.

As an in-depth report from Kotaku now reveals, the game’s development was apparently plagued from issues right from the start. According to several sources close to the game’s development (who chose to remain anonymous), the original plan for the game was wildly ambitious: Keep BioWare’s high standards of storytelling and combat, but add hundreds of procedurally-generated worlds for players to explore, an idea similar to the one we saw in last year’s No Man’s Sky.

“The goal was to go back to what Mass Effect 1 promised but failed to deliver, which was a game about exploration,” one source told Kotaku. “Lots of people were like, ‘Hey, we never fully tapped the potential of the first Mass Effect. We figured out the combat, which is awesome. We figured out the narrative. Let’s focus on bringing back exploration.'”

Unfortunately, pre-production ran into one snag after another. Focus changed from making a prequel set during the First Contact Wars to making a sequel after fans were polled. Animators who had already begun work in 3ds Max were switched to Maya, effectively losing all of that work. Additionally, the team was using the Frostbite engine, which, at the time, had never been used to create an RPG. This meant that basic systems like inventory management and a party member tracker had to be created from scratch (though some resources were able to be shared with Dragon Age: Inquisition, which was also in production during that time).

Then, in 2014, the political troubles began. Director Gérard Lehiany departed, to be replaced with Mac Walter. Other staff left or was shifted between the Montreal and Edmonton studios, and collaboration between different time zones became difficult. As staff changed, so did the vision of the game, cutting the number of explorable planets down from hundreds to thirty, and finally to just seven. Even with a smaller scope, though, there was a problem: there just wasn’t much of a game.

“They were creating planets and they were able to drive around on it, and the mechanics of it were there,” said one person who worked on the game. “I think what they were struggling with was that it was never fun. They were never able to do it in a way that’s compelling, where like, ‘OK, now imagine doing this a hundred more times or a thousand more times.'”

Ultimately, the delays and massive changes to the design of the game came back to bite it hard in one of the most visible areas—polish. With the scope and core of the game changing so late in production, other elements, such as writing and animation, had to be pushed even farther back and ultimately rushed to completion.

“What you see [in the final game] is writing that has been done in the past two years rather than the full five years of writing,” one developer said. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”

In other words, the last several months of production—time that’s usually spent in fine-tuning a game and adding important layers of polish to what the players actually see—was instead spent frantically cobbling together the story, animations, and visuals to match the decisions that had overhauled the entire scope of the game.

It’s not a happy story, and the tale of a game finishing in a mad rush to meet a deadline is one that’s unfortunately all too common. To see more behind-the-scenes commentary on Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s development, it’s worth checking out the full story on Kotaku.