The upcoming next generation of consoles provides BioWare with some huge opportunities for its award-winning sci-fi series, and it is no secret that the next installment of Mass Effect has some big shoes to fill. But though it may still be a long way off, there are plenty of lessons that remain to be learned from BioWare’s recent disappointments, which mean waiting longer for Mass Effect 5 may well be a good thing.
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Lessons from Anthem
Anthem’s 1-year anniversary passed in February with little celebration. The game released in 2019 with issues from bugs to network errors to disappointing loot and underwhelming world events, sparking outrage and disappointment from fans.
The multiplayer RPG has the second lowest review score of every BioWare game ever published, beaten only by Mass Effect Galaxy, an iOS game which has not been available for purchase on the App Store since 2012. While Anthem’s multiplayer focus might seem to make it less relevant to Mass Effect’s development than single-player series like Dragon Age, Anthem’s failure provides an extremely useful case study for some of the problems in BioWare’s recent development processes.
Anthem suffered deeply from a rushed development, and by taking the time to overhaul Anthem properly, BioWare will be given an opportunity to demonstrate to EA the work practices that made games like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 award-winning successes,. It also gives new developers on the team a chance to learn from those who worked on the company’s earlier releases, unlike the development of Andromeda, which was outsourced from BioWare’s Edmonton HQ to an entirely new team in Montreal.
Anthem’s troubled development is the ultimate realization of a trend of tight release schedules that has increasingly plagued BioWare over the last decade. Though there remains a lot the Anthem overhaul needs to fix, the extent of its launch provides a unique opportunity for the practices which caused that failure to be overturned, starting with a successful demonstration of what the game could have been if given the time.
Lessons from Mass Effect
Fans saw what happens when BioWare is made to work on too tight a release schedule long before Anthem. Mass Effect 3 saw a large amount of content cut before release, had an ending so frustrating to some players that BioWare had to release a DLC revising it in an attempt to placate fans, and even faced controversy when Tali’s long-awaited face reveal was discovered to be a hastily edited stock photo.
More recently, Mass Effect: Andromeda left a sour taste in some players’ mouths. EA required BioWare to use its Frostbite engine so that assets could be reused across its developers, despite the engine not being developed with RPGs in mind. This led to an immense amount of animation and gameplay bugs. EA’s meddling behind the scenes of Mass Effect Andromeda saw the game’s creative director quit before development was complete, and difficulty with the Frostbite engine would also see Anthem’s top animator leave BioWare after 17 years.
The long-term success of BioWare will rely upon getting this right, with the new developers BioWare is hiring being given the time and opportunity to learn from those who came before them by working directly with them..
Lessons from Dragon Age
By allowing its creative team more room to breathe, BioWare not only has the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, but to tread more carefully as RPGs head into the next generation of consoles. In order for Mass Effect 5 to be a success, the development of its sister series Dragon Age for next-gen in Dragon Age 4 will also need enough time not only to be a fruitful creative process, but an educational opportunity for the team.
The time will need to be taken to figure out what works on the hardware, what doesn’t, and the limits of what is possible within the confines of this new technology. There will be many lessons for the Mass Effect team to learn from Dragon Age, with hopefully plenty of developers working on both games to ensure their experience can help both franchises grow into their strengths.
The next Dragon Age will need time to overcome its own troubled development, with reports last year indicating that Dragon Age 4 would be “Anthem with Dragons” after the cancellation of the Joplin Project, which would have seen the game focused on heists-like missions to defeat the villain revealed at the end of Inquisition. Evidently, there is still a lot to learn from the rushed release of Anthem that will be necessary for Mass Effect 5 to be a success. The last few years have provided ample opportunities of what doesn’t work for BioWare, but the creative team will need far more time to figure out what does, especially when developing for new platforms.
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The Future of Mass Effect
While the Anthem overhaul, Dragon Age 4, and a Mass Effect remaster may leave some fans impatient, they are in fact an opportunity for BioWare to return to its roots and to demonstrate to its parent company the work practices that made games like Mass Effect 2 one of the best RPGs of all time. The last several years have demonstrated that the BioWare name alone is not sufficient for commercial or financial success, and that the rigidity of the EA development schedules has damaged both companies in the long run.
As it stands, BioWare has fallen from its height at the start of the 2010s to a developer troubled by rushed releases. While taking the time to overhaul Anthem and remaster the original Mass Effect may leave some fans impatient for new content, the importance of these educational opportunities for Mass Effect 5 cannot be understated, or the developer will risk the future of the series going the route of Anthem, or worse, on the scrap heap with the Joplin Project.
It remains unknown whether Anthem’s overhaul will save it, if Dragon Age 4 will be as successful as the last game, or even whether Mass Effect 5 will be a sequel to the original trilogy, the next chapter in the new Andromeda saga, or the start of an entirely new story. What is evident, however, is that unless BioWare is able to retain a single core team to work on its flagship franchises, all of those franchises will suffer from outsourcing and inexperience.
Tight development timelines will leave the team unable to clarify their vision for Mass Effect 5 and unable to learn how to realize it on the next generation of gaming hardware. It might be frustrating to wait for now, but Mass Effect fans will be far more disappointed in the long run if Mass Effect 5, or any of the BioWare projects preceding it, are rushed.
Mass Effect 5 is in development.
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