There's nothing I dislike more than supposed big games, cooked for years, coming out in a state that makes me think it was either rushed or iterated to a point where it lost its way.

It can be a bad game for tons of reasons which are easier to understand and think 'I can totally forgive this, because at least they tried their best'.

We know for a fact Mass Effect: A was delegated to a less experienced pool of developers, as it was pitched around, and over 200 developers put hours and hours into this.

The games are, in my opinion supposed to include humor, sadness, action, horror, romance into this engaging experience filled with characters you come to feel attached to; all set in a universe with cool technology, alien worlds and mystery.

Unless BioWare wants to go text, isometric, 2d or whatnot else - if they go 3d, they have to account for the attention to detail a 3d world requires when you're supposed to be '''immersed''' and a factor for enjoyment is '''caring''' about the characters you spend time with. It is a very daunting task to make something like this. BioWare knew this going into it, the margin for error is huge. That they messed up on stuff like faces and bodies is weird to me, especially with the depth and requirements needed to achieve the synergy of all the other aspects of the game which were supposed to contribute to the player feeling immersed: You'd think the visuals of basic humans would be one of the more straight forward sides of the game BioWare could quality-assure just by looking 5 to 10 minutes at their own game while playing it. Someone played this and thought "THIS LOOKS AMAZING! THIS GAME IS READY FOR MASS CONSUMPTION. YOU SHOULD BE PROUD." ? Doubtful. If that's the type of feedback they got throughout the dev process, they should probably look into it; and seek to completely overhaul their project planning.


I don't want BioWare or other companies for that matter to give up on these types of projects because of their scale and high requirements for content.

You can't really just stuff a character centric, dialogue heavy game with generic looking characters with bland or stereotypical personalities and expect it to do well with the crowd that is really into these types of games.

Why?
Because players who love to read, especially the book/lore reading crowd actually reads. They read and they know good writing, and even more, they see inconsistencies and even pick up and get annoyed by stuff like bad grammar or, like in this thread, evidence of certain 'contemporary RL'-agendas or political views being pushed on the players through game dialogue.

We're all aware of the 'diversity' project going on in both TV-series, movies and gaming; and that's fine, but #1 should always be to cast/create the person best suited for the part.

You can see complaints about Scarlett Johansson in the Ghost in the Shell situation; where suits got it wrong. Not because Scarlett is a bad actor or anything like that, but because it might have been smarter to go with a different actor to carry the movie - now the main things when boiled down that I see when that movie is brought up somewhere: A) Scarlett Johansson is in it! B) The movie is bland C) It is not Sci-fi enough. Not what you'd ideally hope for.

Got to try and get the big companies in the industries to care a bit more about their source material, about their own IPs and also about doing quality work just for the sake of it, even if just once in a while - in between cashing in on rushed projects - to see if we can get some more games to remember, and some new classics to talk about ten/twenty years from now. I'd like to see more situations where we can say 'wow, that game was really ahead of its time'. Now it is very iterative, very trend and focus-group driven, often tied to other industries, like movies dictating when games have to get released and so on (star wars)...