BioWare Montreal is being stripped of its developers and the studio is reportedly being downsized and relegated to support work on other DICE and BioWare projects. BioWare Montreal was responsible for the mess that was Mass Effect: Andromeda.
According to Windows Central they received a boilerplate PR response to a query they made about rumors circulating that the team that worked on Mass Effect are now being pushed into a support role and Mass Effect as a franchise is being put on hiatus. The PR response reads…
“With our BioWare and Motive teams sharing studio space in Montreal, we have BioWare team members joining Motive projects that are underway. We’re also ramping up teams on other BioWare projects in development. There will be much more to come from BioWare in the years ahead.”
The BioWare Montreal team will be moving over to work on Star Wars: Battlefront II and the other mystery IP headed up by the main BioWare studio in Austin, Texas.
Mass Effect: Andromeda was riddled with bugs and glitches that hampered the immersion of the role-play experience, especially when it came to the character dialogue sequences, navigation, and facial animations. That’s not to mention that the entire game was designed to be Tumblr-friendly at the expense of being a good, critically thought-provoking sci-fi experience like the first three games.
The safe-space sci-fi adventure was met with a lot of ridicule and disparagement from normal gamers but was praised by people who had never played games before or who were super hardcore BioWare fanboys and fangirls.
Nevertheless, Windows Central noted that Mass Effect: Andromeda will not be receiving a follow-up sequel. There hasn’t been any confirmation of this from EA, but EA CEO Andrew Wilson side-stepped this inquiry by praising the game and noting that its failure didn’t affect the decision to delay the mystery IP “Dylan” (even though we all know it did).
In the meantime, new content and DLC will also apparently be on hold for Mass Effect: Andromeda and BioWare will instead focus on patching the game from here on. The latest patches address some of the movement and cinematic animations, as well as raising the level of the Nexus to 29, and balancing out the difficulty in single-player and multiplayer games.
Some of the conversations have been fixed as well, along with improved stability and performance upgrades. You can check out all the updates, fixes, bug squashes and improvements made available in patch 1.06 by visiting the official BioWare website.
