Not too long ago at PAX West, team members from BioWare held a panel where journalists and other media outlets could ask them questions about a myriad of things. One of the queries happened to surround that of Mass Effect: Andromeda and its DLC, to which the producer of that game and Anthem, Mike Gamble, said “Mass Effect: Andromeda never had a good foundation to support long-term plans.”
Publication sites gameinformer.com and usgamer.net had the chance to talk to Anthem executive producer Mark Darrah and Anthem lead producer Mike Gamble about Mass Effect: Andromeda’s DLC.
According to Gamble, Mass Effect: Andromeda had no DLC released to the public because the development team had to go back and fix a large number of problems. This would hinder the team from setting up a proper foundation to follow through on DLC for Andromeda.
According to Darrah during the GameInformer interview, he stated the following information about the differences between Andromeda and Anthem:
“We had used a specific piece of technology up to and including Andromeda that we’re not using anymore. Part of it is just paying more attention to it and making sure it’s tuned properly and giving it specific attention.”
Gamble would follow up behind Darrah and say:
“Also, Andromeda has hundreds of characters. It’s a volume problem as well. Tarsis does not have hundreds of characters. The example I used in our panel is, it’s Downton Abbey, where you don’t have a massive number of characters. You have enough and those people are hopefully very interesting.”
As for the USGamer interview, Gamble would go on to give a different explanation and state:
“I can speak conclusively when it comes to Andromeda, the [post-launch] plans were never in place the way that they are for Anthem. The systems and tools weren’t in place to support the long-term plans, it was never like [Anthem]—never had a good, solid foundation to start from with that. Where with Anthem [post-launch] is a part of it. The job does not end on February 22. It only begins for us, really.”
BioWare will be teaming up with writer Catherynne M. Valente to finish the Quarian Ark. The announcement that BioWare would make a novel and team up with Valente was announced on October 26th, 2017, over on bioware.com. However, it is worth noting that the novel named Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation has been delayed multiple times and has been in the works for over 18 months.
Anyway, if you are looking forward to Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation — which continues the Quarian Ark story — it is set to arrive in U.S., Canadian, UK, and Australian stores later this year or in early 2019.
