Mass Effect: Andromeda has been garnering tons of complaints with regards to its most obvious issue: the "ugly" animation. Many AAA developers have already defended BioWare and Mass Effect: Andromeda from the players' abuse throughout several social media websites. Despite the support of several developers from other companies in a valiant show of solidarity, the controversy surrounding Mass Effect: Andromeda doesn't stop with animation issues.
In Mass Effect: Andromeda's Defense
One of the developers from Naughty Dog, Jonathan Cooper explained how animation works and what players see with Mass Effect: Andromeda over twitter. He shared his thoughts hoping that people will better understand the process. Not only that, he stressed that "going after individual team members is not only despicable, but the culprits of choice and target revealed their true nature," pertaining to Allie Rose-Marie Leost who was harassed with misogynistic abuse after learning that she worked with Mass Effect: Andromeda's animation despite working with a team.
Cooper said that a team's successes and failures should be credited to the team and individual team members should never be singled out. Going back to Mass Effect: Andromeda's defense, he said that animating an RPG is a great undertaking with a completely different process from a game like Uncharted so comparisons are unfair. What happened to Mass Effect: Andromeda is simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff since RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content along with the player/story choice.
With the series of amazing and aesthetically pleasing games recently released like Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn, Cooper said that the expectations of players have only grown. This makes their work more difficult but furthers animation quality. One thing's for sure, though, whether Mass Effect: Andromeda did their best with the animation or not, it's not right to blame a single member when the entire team had a hand in animating the game.
Mass Effect: Andromeda Still Has Another Issue
Many players, however, think that the complaints directed to the game's animation are distracting everyone from Mass Effect: Andromeda's biggest issue and that is the overall narrative. The animation would not have been a problem if the writing was really good and many would've forgiven Mass Effect: Andromeda's pervasive bugs and animation flaws if the story was endearing. However, they think that the game's story is bland and lacks ambition; is poorly executed by the rushed plot and bad dialogue. It is going to be hard explaining and defending this issue to the players but here's hoping they put their attention to this and let the animation controversy rest.
