Mass Effect: Andromeda gameplay designer Manveer Heir let slip some choice words about EA’s approach to game development on the Waypoint Radio podcast[1] this weekend. Heir left Mass Effect: Andromeda[2] developer BioWare and is now an independent developer.
Considering the current context — with EA shutting down Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline[3] developer Visceral, which saw its current project, a single-player Star Wars[4] game in the vein of Uncharted cancelled, it doesn’t bode well for fans of linear, single-player experiences. He explained why Mass Effect: Andromeda was made an open-world game, instead of sticking to how the previous entries were.
"It's definitely a thing inside of EA," he said, "they are generally pushing for more open-world games. And the reason is you can monetise them better. The words in there that were used are 'have them come back again and again’. Why do you care about that at EA? The reason you care about that is because micro-transactions: buying card packs in the Mass Effect games, the multiplayer. It's the same reason we added card packs to Mass Effect 3: how do you get people to keep coming back to a thing instead of 'just' playing for 60 to 100 hours?"
"The problem is that we've scaled up our budgets to $100 million plus and we haven't actually made a space for good linear single-player games that are under that. But why can't we have both? Why does it have to be one or the other? And the reason is that EA and those big publishers in general only care about the highest return on investment. They don't actually care about what the players want, they care about what the players...