Aside from this, the studio also reacted to Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s negative critical reception and whether it was justified or not.
Mass Effect: Andromeda was released in March 2017 and it garnered mostly mixed / negative reviews from the critics and well, from gamers alike. Now, more than one year after the game’s original release, Mark Darrah from BioWare spoke about whether the critics were right and whether the negative reception was justified. He also talked along with Casey Hudson about where the team wants to go next and what kinds of games they’ll want to do.
Darrah didn’t deny for a second that Andromeda was a problematic game, especially at launch when it was full of bugs. However, he thinks that it got more negative reviews than it deserved. He thinks that the game launched at the wrong time, because Nioh, Nier, Zelda and Horizon just released and all of those games did something better than Mass Effect. But he says just because those game did something better, it shouldn’t automatically mean that Mass Effect is bad in those aspects. It’s not as good, but still good. Mass Effect: Andromeda has a 72% rating on Metacritic and Mark thinks that it could have been 77-78% if the game would have been released at the right time.
Darrah also spoke about BioWare‘s future along with Casey Hudson. They said that next to the big budget AAA games they want to do smaller, but more experimental titles in the future. The team is very passionate about this and they have a lot of creative ideas that they want to share with the players. They want high production value titles, but with lower cost, basically AAA-indies, like Blood Dragon, Valiant Hearts, Grow Home, or Rockstar Table Tennis.
