Yeah, this.
According to Schreier’s article, the Bioware crew in Edmonton, which had developed the first three ME games, was pulled off Andromeda so that they could work on Anthem instead, and Andromeda was assigned to the Bioware team in Montreal. Maybe that had something to do with it as well as the wheel-spinning that took place while they tried to make procedurally-generated worlds, which turned out to be biting off more than they could chew given the limitations of the Frostbite engine.
But there’s something philosophically askew about Andromeda as well. It feels almost as if they were trying way too hard to make the game more accessible to players outside the straight-white-cis-male gamer stereotype, and fell all over themselves doing so. Much was made of how they screwed up with their trans character (she somewhat atypically outs and deadnames herself almost immediately upon meeting the player character, which isn’t too terribly representative of the usual lived experience), and they’ve updated the game so that the male Ryder has more opportunities for gay romance, though still not as many as the female Ryder does. (By my count, as a male Ryder you can romance five women and three men, and as a female Ryder you have opportunities for three men and four women.) The romantic spectrum representation is great (and you don’t have to romance anyone at all if that ain’t your thing), but as I mentioned before, there’s a high Mary Sue quotient as well. In RPGs with character creators like Mass Effect, Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls, I always play as a female character for various reasons, but one of the things I like to see during gameplay is if I notice my character being treated noticeably differently for being female. Usually I don’t, except in instances like in the last few Fallouts when I might get a perk like Black Widow or Cherchez La Femme that gives me an edge over opposite sex or same sex NPCs respectively. But anyway, in the first 3 Mass Effect games, my FemShep was an Ellen Ripley grade badass. She didn’t feel particularly masculine or anything, but her dialogue (on both sides) never felt tuned to her sex or gender. People took her seriously at every turn, and it felt easy for me to take her seriously. (The only time I couldn’t take her seriously was when she was drinking or dancing at the Citadel’s bar. Holy Christ did that look awkward as hell.)
My female Ryder, on the other hand, is supposed to be a relatively low-grade officer at the start. Her dad gets all the respect, but my character is supposed to be youngish and absolutely new to command. And yeah, plenty of characters second-guess her, especially in the first half of the game. But no matter what boneheaded shit I pulled, if I completed a mission at all, I’d level up and have to record some speech for posterity and generally get treated like the hierarchical equivalent of Shepard’s boss, when all along I’m just playing as a wisecracking, informal twentysomething who gets dropped into the thick of crisis after crisis like the battle-hardened and experienced N7 that Shepard was. I mean, the game seems deliberately designed to kiss the player’s ass about how awesome and competent they are, even if their play decisions objectively suck ass. I’m sorely tempted to start a playthrough as a male Ryder to see if I get the same impression, because I’d be horrified to think that this impression is predicated on the fact that I was playing as a woman half my age and that my own sexism prevents me from seeing her as a competent professional.
I don’t think so, though. I never got that impression with my female Shepard. But Ryder has one loyalty mission that consists of going to a desert planet and scattering seeds by tossing them oh so prettily into the air. And there’s a whole series of side missions that aren’t anything more than going from planet to planet and collecting various and sundry snacks for, of all things, a movie night for the crew on our ship. And this series of missions is spread out over DAYS. Somebody was writing missions for the game for people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to concern themselves with suspending any science fictional disbelief… like, at all. There’s even a quest to find out what’s leaving crumbs all over the ship; a quest that results in you owning a cute, fluffy little space pet in your quarters. It squeaks adorably when you click on it!
I just keep remembering how carefully I had to play in ME2 to cultivate my crew’s loyalty and keep everyone alive and leveled up to make it through the final battle, and how I played the minigames and side apps and stuff on ME3 to try and ensure the best outcome for everyone, whereas in Andromeda I played zero multiplayer and blew off most of the strike team missions and didn’t spend more than a couple hundred credits during the entire game and found it way too easy to reach 100% viability on any given planet and rarely remembered to sell off any salvage or mined resources and still got to 92% completion with an apparently happy galaxy. I wonder if it’s possible to lose at this game, or at least to finish in a less than satisfactory fashion. And I wonder if, in Bioware’s desire to achieve maximum accessibility, they nerfed the thinking part of the game as opposed to just the combat part (which would be where the five or six difficulty settings come in).
I don’t want to think they did that. I want everyone to be able to play, but I can’t help but feel that Andromeda holds your hand way too tightly, not as an FPS but as an RPG with a story.
And now that we’ve seen what Bioware Edmonton has been up to on Anthem, I grieve for the dregs of what Andromeda could, and should, have been.
