[Virdo]

Kotaku hat nen Artikel über die Entwicklung von Mass Effect Andromeda veröffentlicht, sehr interessant zu lesen auch weil es einige alte Gerüchte bestätigt. Dazu wurden einige der ehemaligen oder noch aktuellen befragt, natürlich werden keine Namen genannt.

I’ve spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch.

Erstkontakt Krieg war wohl wirklich mal ein Thema

One early idea was to develop a prequel to Mass Effect, set during the First Contact Wars of the series’ lore, when the humans of Mass Effect’s galaxy had interacted with aliens for the first time. In late 2012, Hudson asked fans if they’d prefer to see a game before or after the original trilogy. The answers were resounding: most people wanted a sequel, not a prequel.. “The feedback from the community, focus groups and the team working on the project was the same,” said one person who worked on the game. “We wanted to do a game set after the trilogy, not during or before.”

So BioWare changed course, ditching the prequel idea. The word “Contact” stuck, though, and that became the codename for the fourth Mass Effect. (For clarity, we’ll refer to it as Andromeda for the rest of this story.)

Auch manch Sachen die in frühesten Gerüchten auftauchten werden in gewisser Weiße bestätigt. Wie zufällig generierte Planeten oder aktives Fliegen des Raumschiffes

Another of Lehiany’s ideas was that there should be hundreds of explorable planets. BioWare would use algorithms to procedurally generate each world in the game, allowing for near-infinite possibilities, No Man’s Sky style. (No Man’s Sky had not yet been announced—BioWare came up with this concept separately.)

Procedural generation is a process that leaves the creation of some of a game’s content to algorithms rather than requiring that each item of the game is hand-crafted. Such a technique could dramatically increase the scope of a space exploration game. It was an ambitious idea that excited many people on the Mass Effect: Andromeda team. “The concept sounds awesome,” said a person who worked on the game. “No Man’s Sky with BioWare graphics and story, that sounds amazing.”
Throughout 2013 and 2014, Andromeda’s developers played with all sorts of ideas that today sound distinctly No Man’s Sky-ish. They built prototypes in which you would pilot a spaceship around the galaxy, then use it to land on planets. From there, you could hop into your Nomad space rover and explore each new world, hunting for habitable terrain. Then you could go back into space and fly around some more. “It was a very ambitious project,” said one source. “We wanted to give the feeling of really exploring space.”

There were some hiccups, however. One lingering question for the Andromeda team was how they could possibly implement a BioWare-caliber story in a game with procedurally generated planets. Some teams felt perpetually understaffed, and there were technological difficulties. BioWare’s level designers used a tool called WorldMachine that could simulate erosion and build realistic mountains on each planet, but other teams had trouble figuring out how to generate high-quality worlds without getting in and doing it by hand. “Unfortunately that was the only team that was able to figure out how to do stuff more procedurally,” said a person who worked on the game. “No one else had the resources.”

Über die Frostbite Engine

When BioWare first got its hands on Frostbite, the engine wasn’t capable of performing the basic functions you’d expect from a role-playing game, like managing party members or keeping track of a player’s inventory. BioWare’s coders had to build almost everything from scratch.

By the time BioWare entered pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda, the Dragon Age: Inquisition team had built some of the tools that they’d need to make an RPG, but not all of them. Engineers on Andromeda had to design many of their own features from scratch, including their animation rig. “Frostbite is wonderful for rendering and lots of things,” said a person who worked on the game. “But one of the key things that makes it really difficult to use is anything related to animation. Because out of the box, it doesn’t have an animation system.”

“Whenever you’re trying to do something that fits the engine—vehicles, for example—Frostbite handles that extremely well,” the developer said. “But when you’re building something that the engine is not made for, this is where it becomes difficult.” Designing the large maps of Andromeda’s planets became a struggle on Frostbite, where the maximum size of a map was initially 100 by 100 kilometers. The Andromeda team needed their maps to be way bigger than that. Other struggles included the streaming system, the save system, and various action-RPG mechanics that Andromeda needed in order to work.

“It’s been painful,” said a developer. “The pain started with Dragon Age: Inquisition and continued on with Andromeda as well.”

Weiter wird der Konflikt zwischen Montreal und Endmonton bestätigt, der auch früher schon mal zu Gerüchten führte

Pre-production on Mass Effect: Andromeda was a tale of two cities. Several people from the team described 2013 as one of the best years of their professional lives and 2014 as one of the worst. Whereas 2013 was full of possibilities for the developers of Andromeda, 2014 was full of politics. Conflicts emerged between BioWare staffers at the company’s two main studios, in Edmonton and Montreal. Developers in Edmonton said they thought the game was floundering in pre-production and didn’t have a strong enough vision, while developers in Montreal thought that Edmonton was trying to sabotage them, taking ideas and staff from Montreal for its own projects, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dylan. By the end of 2014 at least a dozen people had left BioWare Montreal for other studios, and it wasn’t clear to the remaining staff whether those positions would be replaced. The animation team in particular was understaffed, sources said, and when people left, their positions sometimes weren’t refilled.

In August of 2014, Casey Hudson left BioWare. Not long afterwards, Gérard Lehiany also departed, and BioWare brought in longtime Mass Effect writer Mac Walters, who was based in Edmonton, to serve as Andromeda’s new creative director. Different people point to different reasons for these personnel shifts, but the directorial change had a massive impact on production of the game, as Lehiany had been leading the story team up until that point. When Walters took over, he brought a new vision to the game.

Erst im Jahre 2015 (!) hat man die prozentual generierten Planeten fallen lassen

“We started to realize by summer 2015 that we had great technological prototypes, but we had doubts they would make it into the game,” said another person who worked on the game. The Andromeda team had gotten systems like spaceflight up and running, two people said, but they couldn’t figure out how to make those systems fun to play. “I think production reality hit hard and they had to make some really strong cuts.”

By the end of 2015, Mass Effect: Andromeda’s leads realized that the procedural system wasn’t working out. Flying through space and landing on randomly generated planets still seemed like a cool concept—and by then, many people at BioWare were looking with great interest at No Man’s Sky—but they couldn’t make it work. So they decided to rescope.

First, word came down that they were moving from hundreds of procedurally generated planets to 30. Some of their terrain would still be generated by WorldMachine and the other technology they’d built, but the content would all be crafted by hand. Some time later, that number shifted again, from 30 to seven, according to several sources. For some teams—design, writing, cinematics—this move led to many questions. “There was that time of, ‘what does this mean for us on the development team?’” said one Andromeda developer. “There was a waiting period of, ‘Well, we’re doing it, so ‘what is getting cut, what’s staying, who’s gonna work on which parts of those?’”

Die meisten Dialoge wurden im Grunde erst danach rausgestampft (das erklärt wohl die qualität)

“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,” said a developer on the game. “The writing team—writing the characters and everything—was unleashed too late, just because of too many discussions about the high-level direction.”

Geht sogar noch weiter, letztlich wird gesagt dass das Spiel so wie es ist in 1.5 Jahren raus gehauen wurde.

Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017. Most of Mass Effect: Andromeda was made in just a year and a half, by those accounts. “It really wasn’t until Mac Walters came on board—and that was very much a reaction to the state of the critical path—he was really brought on board to give it direction and get it into shape,” said one person who worked on the game. “Before that it was quite rudderless.” Some at Montreal saw the directorial shift as Edmonton trying to take over their game, while some at Edmonton saw it as them needing to come in and rescue it.

One developer close to the project disputed the characterization that most of the game was developed in the final 18 months, saying that most of the ideas in the final game closely resembled those early visions.

Es gibt da noch viel aber ich weiß nicht wie lang Posts hier sein dürfen, deshalb den Rest, unteranderem über Animationen ect, findet ihr im Artikel auf Kotaku
http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-m...ive-1795886428

[Smiling Jack]

Wieder einmal ein interessanter Kotaku/Jason Schreier Artikel.

Im Grunde sagt das alles aus: "It wasn’t just the writing. Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017."

Und: “At a very high level, even though the game was in development for five years,” said one person who worked on the game, “Mass Effect: Andromeda was just trying to do too much with too few resources.”

Edit: "Ich finde es auch sehr schade, das Bioware (Montreal) nicht einfach ihr Prequel Ding durchgezogen hat. Generell hören die zu sehr manche Fans."
Die Idee eines Mass Effects in Gewand von No Man’s Sky hätte sich Bioware aber echt sparen können. Mal ehrlich das passt einfach nicht zu Bioware.

[Eandril]

Im Grunde sagt das alles aus: "It wasn’t just the writing. Almost every Andromeda developer who spoke to me for this story said the bulk of the game was developed during that final stretch, from the end of 2015 to March 2017."

Das würde natürlich einige Mängel und Fehler des Spiels gut erklären. Auch wenn mir einiges gut gefallen hat und ich die meiste Zeit Spaß beim Spielen hatte, fühlt es sich insgesamt eher nach einem in Eile zusammengezimmerten und rausgehauenen Spiel an als eines mit massig (fünf Jahren) Entwicklungszeit. Über diese ganzen Probleme und Konzeptwechsel habe ich mir vorher auch gar keine Gedanken gemacht, muss den Artikel nachher wohl mal ausführlich lesen...

[Sir Auron]

Passt zumindest ganz gut zum Endprodukt, ich bin also geneigt dem Artikel zu glauben. Man sollte Bioware zumindest zugute halten, dass sie mal in eine andere Richtung gedacht haben und nicht einfach das gleiche nochmal aufkochen wollten. Dass es an der Ausführung gemangelt hat ist dann natürlich sehr schade ( wobei ich das Spiel dann trotzdem nicht Mass Effect genannt hätte, wäre ja was völlig anderes gewesen).

Und Klugscheißmodus: Es ist von prozedural generierten Planeten die Rede. Das hat mit Prozenten nichts zu tun.