Anthem dev blames Zelda BOTW for Mass effect Andromeda's failure.....wut?

[Catfood220]

But...Horizon: Zero Dawn launched at roughly the same time as Breath of the Wild and that did just fine.

Maybe, just maybe, when your multiplatform game can't compete with two platform exclusives, then something might be wrong with your game.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Did Breath of the Wild even sell that much better than ME: Andromeda? Because from my recollection ME:A sold very well, 5 million in its first few months atleast, despite the gargantuanly bad word of mouth.. and you know, YouTube. I don't think it was actually considered a financial flop, just a huge hit to -- one could rightly claim a complete evisceration of -- Bioware's already dwindling image.

 

[Dalisclock]

I mean, Dragon Age Inquisition came out to good sales and reviews, then Wtcher 3 came out and stole DA's lunch, so I get the sentiment, but c'mon: the main thing that kill MA:A was Anthem taking all of it's resources.

I think a bigger problem Andromeda had was blowing half their dev time trying to figure out just what they were gonna do and messing around with procedural generation. The fact EA apparently forced them to use the frostbite engine(which isn't really suited to RPGs) probably didn't do them any favors either.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Did Breath of the Wild even sell that much better than ME: Andromeda? Because from my recollection ME:A sold very well, 5 million in its first few months atleast, despite the gargantuanly bad word of mouth.. and you know, YouTube. I don't think it was actually considered a financial flop, just a huge hit to -- one could rightly claim a complete evisceration of -- Bioware's already dwindling image.

Near as I can tell, there's no exact sales figures for Andromeda. EA doesn't publish those unless a game does exceptionally well. The most conclusive indication was from 2017 financial report that MEA was a "significant contributor" to game sales. It also seems expectations from EA were indeed 5+ million units sold worldwide. My guess is Andromeda broke even and most likely made a tidy profit, but on the whole performed short of what EA wanted.

For reference, Breath of the Wild had 8.48 copies sold in april this year.

 

[BrawlMan]

Yong Yea covered this already.


As said in the video, there weren't even that many RPGs released around the same time.




Yeah EA, blame everyone, but yourselves. That'll work.

 

[Majestic Manatee_v1legacy]

Yeah somehow I don't think there's a huge overlap between LoZ fans and ME fans. Though, to be fair, EA has fucked itself in the past by having piss poor release dates, a lot of people theorize Titanfall 2 didn't sell that well being wedged in between CoD and Battlefield. Though considering EA owns Battlefield, that was its own damn fault.

Did they really fuck themselves over with Titanfall 2? Or did they fuck over the independent developer of Titanfall 2 so they would be in a financially weak enough situation to buy them out?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Mass Effect was doomed to fail. Not only did they cut the development time by 6 months, but they actually thought it'd be a good idea to make a soft-reboot of one of the best gaming trilogies ever, specifically not including anything from the previous trilogy, being a story/character driven game.

How could they continue Mass Effect 3 without choosing a definitive ending and invalidating every other ending?

Whatever flaws Andromeda may have had (I dunno, haven't played it), if Mass Effect had to continue as a series, I think Andromeda was a reasonable direction to go. The only other options would have been a prequel, a continuation that would piss a lot of people off, or a sequel set so far in the future that any choices made in ME3 are irrelevant.

They shouldn't have made a new one, that's the point. They wrote an ending to Mass Effect. Mass Effect is about Commander Shepard fighting the Reapers, and that story ended. And when you so decisively and firmly end a story, its impossible to continue it.

The whole point of Andromeda was that it was a desperate cash-grab attempt to milk nostalgia out of a dead franchise. It was doomed from the start.
Andromeda as a story is fine enough - space Organ Trail, aliens, yadda yadda. But the Mass Effect label was a death sentence. It should have been a completely original franchise, 100% distinct from Mass Effect. That way it could have at least survived or died on its own merits, rather than parade around in the corpse of a once loved franchise and be constantly compared to the 3 better games with its shared title.

 

[Avnger]

Yeah somehow I don't think there's a huge overlap between LoZ fans and ME fans. Though, to be fair, EA has fucked itself in the past by having piss poor release dates, a lot of people theorize Titanfall 2 didn't sell that well being wedged in between CoD and Battlefield. Though considering EA owns Battlefield, that was its own damn fault.

Did they really fuck themselves over with Titanfall 2? Or did they fuck over the independent developer of Titanfall 2 so they would be in a financially weak enough situation to buy them out?

Short term, both. Long term, the latter. I'm really not looking forward to the abomination that Titanfall 3 is going to be, and I loved the first 2 =/

 

[CaitSeith]

How could they continue Mass Effect 3 without choosing a definitive ending and invalidating every other ending?

The same way the did it for ME2 and ME3: by reading the player's decision from their previous game savefile. That's how they did it in the past.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Please, tell how a game released exclusively on one major platform that Andromeda wasn't released on, can somehow be a direct competition.

But...Horizon: Zero Dawn launched at roughly the same time as Breath of the Wild and that did just fine.

Yeah, about that: https://twitter.com/BioMarkDarrah/status/1011981627084267521

 

[Casual Shinji]

How could they continue Mass Effect 3 without choosing a definitive ending and invalidating every other ending?

The same way the did it for ME2 and ME3: by reading the player's decision from their previous game savefile. That's how they did it in the past.

Yeah, and look how that turned out. They couldn't account for all the variations so they choose to boil it down three slightly different endings.

 

[Abomination]

How could they continue Mass Effect 3 without choosing a definitive ending and invalidating every other ending?

The same way the did it for ME2 and ME3: by reading the player's decision from their previous game savefile. That's how they did it in the past.

The endings in Mass Effect 3 create such vastly different galactic ecosystems that they would have to make three different campaigns entirely, and within those campaigns would be variations based on other choices. I am not saying it's impossible to do, but there is no way EA would bankroll such an ambitious project.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

So, your save file is going to dictate whether every AI in the universe is dead and everyone is struggling to get technology working again

or whether everyone is a cyborg hybrid with instant access to the combined knowledge of every race that has ever existed in the galaxy and there is no wars or famine

that just sounds like two different games. not exactly the "is wrex or the other guy leading the krogen" decision

Yeah, but it's not like games don't have a canonical ending. Game series do it all the time. Bioware RPGs did it all the time.

I don't think people would collectively shit themselves in rage if they said; "Those endings were bsed on player performance, but for the sake of the universe we created here's what actually happened."

To a certain extent they retconned a lot of possibilities in ME3 depending on your performance in ME2. They also just flat out asked you about what you got up to if you didn't have a valid game save file. Mass Effect simply retconned how their universe worked between ME1 and ME2. For example, how guns worked.

 

[votemarvel]

The logical continuation point would be high EMS Destroy. Now I've always thought of it as more of a death rattle but that breath at least gives the potential for Shepard to be alive. High EMS Destroy also leaves the galaxy in the best place to continue, no Reapers or forced genetic manipulation. Just devastated civilisations trying to recover.

Imagine Joker rebuilding EDI but being devastated to discover that it is impossible to recreate a destroyed AI. Bluebox differences would always make it a different person. One of the missions could be to find Joker, only to discover him surrounded with flawed attempts to recreate his machine love.

For me I'd be quite happy with a continuation of the Mass Effect universe story in the Milky Way.

 

[kilenem]

LMAO, Horizon Zero sold well and was in the same genre and could've easily ended up like Battle Born but was good enough to make people want to play it. Mass Effect is a multi platform game that went against a PS4 and Nintendo Exclusive.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Just say that you botched it up already.

Now that would be refreshing: a major publisher owning up to their mistakes.

Unlikely though, EA probably least of all.