Mass Effect: Andromeda’s glitches go beyond graphics.
THE RUSH TO JUDGMENT ON NEW MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA VIDEO GAME
The eyes stare at you blankly. The face seems moulded out of Plasticine; smooth and glossy. The lips move as the woman speaks — mechanically, without a trace of affect or feeling — but like a badly dubbed foreign film they don’t quite synchronize with what’s being said. It doesn’t look, sound, or behave like a real person. It’s more like a battery powered talking doll.
This, unfortunately, is one of the first characters you encounter in Mass Effect: Andromeda, a new science- fiction video game block buster from Canadian developer BioWare ( and one of the most hotly anticipated releases of the year).
Andromeda is the longawaited sequel to a very beloved Mass Effect trilogy, the original instalment of which was a colossal success both commercially and critically when it came out on the Xbox 360 just about a decade ago.
The games were renowned in particular for their technical accomplishments and for their unprecedented graphical splendour.
This is the first iteration produced for the new nextgeneration consoles — for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 — and thus fans expected a stunning leap ahead.
What admirers of Mass Effects past were looking forward to with Andromeda was a Mass Effect vastly more impressive than any that had come before.
BioWare has kept Andromeda veiled for some time, as developers of games of such scale and expense often do.
And even without much information about what precisely fans could hope to do and see in this glorious next- gen universe, one could safely expect the game’s launch this Tuesday, March 21 to be a rousing success.
But then a funny thing happened.
Last Tuesday, with copies of Andromeda in the hands of critics and with just one week to go before its release, BioWare lifted the embargo on the game and invited critics to live- stream their experiences and share their impressions — with some restrictions on what could and could not be discussed and with the caveat that full reviews be held for the day before launch.
All at once f ans were introduced to what I’d been staring down in consternation in my review copy: that ghastly Plasticine visage, chattering away in lifeless monotony.
Everyone got to see how the game they’d been looking forward to for years would look and play.
The batter y powered talking doll is a disappointment, as you might imagine. But the trouble doesn’t end there. Andromeda is rife with glitches and blunders, with catastrophes both big and small. Faulty artificial intelligence compels characters to walk into walls and stand around on tables and countertops inexplicably. Peculiar animations make the simple act of walking look utterly in human— when you trot down a set of stairs you often look like a scuttling oversized crab. Textures shift, shimmer and judder wildly all the way through long narrative cut scenes, which gives the game’s efforts at storytelling the aborted quality of watching a Hollywood movie with unfinished special effects. It seems the product not of big- budget professionalism but of negligence and carelessness. Andromeda is a riot of errors and gaffes.
Of course what fans were watching streamed, and what critics were at liberty to discuss, was not Andromeda in its sprawling, comprehensive form.
These were early impressions. Certain critics felt obliged to point out that much of what’s been left unseen about Andromeda impresses a great deal. But the damage had been done.
The wonky facial animations I’d bemoaned in private swiftly became fodder f or Andromeda- mocking memes online.
Snatches of hackneyed dialogue were widely shared and savagely ridiculed. That damned crab walk rose to viral fame in an instant. Game Twitter, an irrepressibly jocular sphere on a good day, couldn’t stop teasing and taunting for a week.
The prevailing sentiment among gamers was clear: Andromeda was a lemon, unequivocally. Pre- orders were cancelled en masse. Anticipation plummeted to the floor.
Was t his a disaster of game design? An object lesson in thwarted ambition and the failure to meet skyhigh expectations? Or was it, more simply, an accident of marketing?
Certainly the technical mishaps plaguing the game were bound to disgruntle a constituency whose high demands scarcely forgive lapses in polish or finesse. And whether Andromeda’s merits as a science- fiction role- playing game only become apparent after the 10th hour or not, its early stages should pretty obviously refrain from putting people off so decisively.
Spend a little more money and tidy up those first- level glitches, smooth out those bumpy facial tics, and suddenly the world’s introduction to the game doesn’t seem so glaringly awful.
But what the Andromeda fiasco reveals, it seems to me, is a problem of reception.
We shouldn’ t have to judge an 80- hour adventure game by its first minutes. Critics shouldn’t have to share“early impressions” in lieu of involved, deeply considered criticism. It’s as ridiculous as expecting a film critic to forgo reviewing a movie in favour of a description of the movie’s first scene.
It takes months, sometimes years to write, program, animate and bug- test a blockbuster video game.
It can take days, sometimes weeks to play enough of t hat game to really understand how it works and t he ways in which it does not. Why should anyone expect early impressions and a quick livestream to take the place of thought and consideration? Why did BioWare think a partial embargo was the right way to present their game to the world?
These things take time. And however ludicrous that Plasticine face looks, however dismal the character animations and punchline-ready that crab walk, there remains, in fairness, more to this game.
BioWare’s true blunder isn’t technical. It was in inviting snap judgments on something that demands patience to be fairly revealed.