Developer States Mass Effect: Andromeda Was Treated Unfairly

Mass Effect: Andromeda was probably one of the biggest flops of 2017. Were it not for Star Wars: Battlefront 2’s lootbox disaster overshadowing Andromeda’s terrible release, the game would’ve probably received a lot more negative attention than it already has. However, Bioware developer Mark Harrah took to Twitter to explain some of his thoughts on the game’s release.

I’m going to regret this in half an hour but let’s talk “did MEA get a fair shake”

— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) June 27, 2018

The discussion started with a short comment that Mark Harrah made in a rapid-fire interview

with Gamespot. He stated that he did not feel that Mass Effect: Andromeda got a fair treatment since it was released in an extremely tight release window in which other great RPGs came out at the same time. He states that other great games like Zelda, Nioh, Nier: Automata, and others all released in a similar window which meant that reviewers and players will more easily see the flaws of Andromeda as well as compare it to games that a far superior.

As a result, even systems that are pretty decent get scrutinized against superiorly implemented ones.
Does launching in a different window turn 72% into 90?
Certainly not.
72 into 77/78? Maybe

— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) June 27, 2018

However, he also acknowledges that the game is severely flawed and that releasing in a better window would have never pushed the game up towards a score over 90, but might have increased the game’s score to a 77 or 78. He goes on to say that this small increase in the score of the game would’ve most likely not made an impact on the number of sales. He says that word of mouth plays a huge role nowadays and we can certainly see why. Social Media and YouTubers certainly weren’t kind to this game. The game’s bugs and glitches were all over the internet in a matter of seconds which probably swayed a lot of people’s opinions on whether to buy the game or not.

Does that affect sales?
Some.
But word of mouth matters so much these days.

— Mark Darrah (@BioMarkDarrah) June 27, 2018

The failure that was Mass Effect: Andromeda has made a lot of people skeptical of Anthem, the upcoming release from the same developers. The game looks absolutely fantastic in the trailers that we were shown at E3 and in some of the gameplay footage, however, the same was true for Mass Effect: Andromeda. We hope the studio can learn from the mistakes it made in the past and will deliver one of the best games of all time with Anthem. It would certainly suck to see such a legendary developer as Bioware create yet another failure.