Some said what made
the crunch worse than previous Mass Effect games was what the developers called regression. On a typical video game project,
the last few months are devoted to “polish,” a phase of the game in which the developers can fix bugs, fine-tune mechanics, and improve existing content to make everything feel as smooth as possible. In the final months of many games that turn out to be good, developers say that the game gets markedly better in that short final stretch.
On Andromeda, however, everything just kept regressing. “We’ll put something together, and it’s been bug tested and signed off and approved,” said a developer, “We’d say, ‘OK, we can now move on from that to the next thing.’ And while our backs are turned, what we’d just put together falls apart.”
The root causes of this regression could be tough to identify. Sometimes they were as
complicated as an engineer updating a core system; other times,
they were as simple as a character modeler changing the look of an NPC.
It was draining, developers said, because they felt like they were constantly redoing parts of the game that they thought they’d already finished. “The types of problems that arise from the entire project coming together in the last year and a half really compound at the end,” said one developer.
This video, comparing leaked footage of Andromeda from April 2016 to a final build of the game, is one example of what this regression could have looked like.
The downgrade in quality could have been caused by any number of factors ranging from the lighting changing to the animations taking up too much memory, a source said, but those were the sort of problems they faced. While we’ve seen other games get graphical downgrades from their initial trailers to final products (Watch Dogs, The Witcher 3), it was unusual to feel like they were regressing this much so late in development, that source said.
The “downstream” teams—effects, cinematics, audio—were hit the hardest during the final months of development. “Because the entire project was behind schedule and teams were wrapping up later than ideally they should have, that just compounded even more on the downstream teams,” said one person who worked on the game.