In every other way, though, moving to the Frostbite engine failed the game. If for no other reason than it took too long to adjust to the new engine and construct the tools the engine doesn't include. Various insiders opine that what actually shipped was completed in less than a year, and that after many of the team had left.
The game shows over and over that there just wasn't time for the polishing steps. And this goes deeper than the bugs. Take the janky animations the interwebs treated with such derision. Those are partially the fault of an inadequate toolset and inadequate test time, but they expose something else specific.
Which is that they are canned. Sure, this is an open world, and it makes sense that the necessary interactions of the tens of sidequests are handled in-engine, but...there are key interactions, major story interactions, interactions happening early enough in the game to shape the player's perception of the experience, which never saw the touch of an animator.
In ninety five percent of the conversations my Ryder had, the camera snapped to a single over-the-shoulder two-shot and locked there while Mimic or whatever lipsynch engine they were using tried to match facial movements to recorded dialog. Poorly. So poorly does this automatic in-engine system work, my Ryder went through several conversations unable to see any of the people involved in it!
(There were also times the dialog wheel itself popped in and out, and even moments when Ryder would suddenly blurt out her reply five minutes later and five km down the road in the Nomad, but that's the kind of bugs the game is still saddled with despite multiple patches).
(And just to add insult to injury, every single conversation would exit with the cursor floating in the middle of my screen, in the way of everything. What kind of lame coding is it when you can't even keep a stray cursor from being left lying around?)
Doesn't help that this isn't the strongest writing or voice acting of the series, either. Or for the company, either; Fallout 4 uses a similar lock-camera plant-and-bellow approach, leading to what reviewer Yahtzee calls "The Bioware Stare," but at least there are hand-tweaks to the animation when the conversation is important.
Contrast this to Mass Effect 2 or 3. Conversations are hand-animated, with multiple camera angles, shot reverse shot, push-ins, props; each performance is carefully constructed and staged and will have unique actions. This is also true of The Witcher, of even the later Wolfenstien games -- which aren't even RPGs!
The point of this is not that this is bad, per se. Or that it is unforgivable, given that the toolset they were working with wasn't accommodating. There are plenty of games and not just older games where this kind of cinematic mini-cutscene conversation isn't in use or wouldn't even be appropriate. The point is that this is a Mass Effect game. Which have given us this kind of close-up of the people we are interacting with and given them a chance to be distinct characters not just in their voices but in the ways their bodies move.
As another reviewer points out, Mass Effect isn't a driving game (although Andromeda brings back the vehicle and the large explorable terrains). It isn't really a shooter (although the combat in ME3 and Andromeda is so good that in the later is is almost the best part of the game). What it is, is role-playing. About interacting with people, changing the world through your choices and defining yourself in the way you make them.
And it is not to say full metal cinematography and a full Serkis mocap is necessary to have this kind of interaction. Players were deeply moved when conversing with a sixteen-pixel sprite through a text window, back in the day.
No, what's really the issue (besides the failures of story, dialog, design, and acting that make few of the Mass Effect Andromeda conversations memorable) is that, particularly after the kind of intimacy you got in the previous games, there is a real lack of emotional connect here. This isn't interactive dialog, this is walking through the animatronic Hall of Presidents.
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The scenery is lovely. It is also static. I will give kudos for tire tracks being persistent, but there's a similar lack of connection that makes it into more like watching an IMAX movie of the Mojave then actually feeling like you are in the Mojave.
The approach used in Skyrim (actually, in most of the Elder Scrolls series -- and as well in many of the Fallout series) is to make as much of the litter as possible into physics objects. This was brought out in interviews with the lead designer for Skyrim. They absolutely intended to forge that closer connection to the game world by making it possible to knock over stuff (the fact that Skyrim's physics model makes it nearly impossible for the player to actually pick up a cup and place it on a table is disappointing, but the idea is there.)
The reboot Tomb Raider games have, as a part of their hidden-rails philosophy, no such moveable objects. Instead they give this interaction to the avatar; Lara will noticeably push small branches aside if you send her through the shrubbery, feel along the wall of a cave, and otherwise react to the scenery around her. Which animates somewhat in response. It may seem a small thing, but it helps so very much.
The outdoor scenery in Mass Effect Andromeda is lovely, though some of it is a little busy. The interiors are ridiculously busy, every square inch of wall covered with boxes and consoles and pipes and blinkenlights -- it looks like the ISS in there -- and the floors are so cluttered her teammates are constantly struggling with their pathfinding. And, yes, there is a chair or two you can knock over, but for the most part it is not just a static environment, but it is an unnecessarily cluttered one. There's no sense to it, no aesthetic, no overall pattern. No flow. Just stuff, so much stuff you stop looking at it. Instead of actually enjoying the insides of buildings I got into the habit of just pressing the forward key and hoping Ryder would eventually stumble on a path through the clutter, while looking at nothing other than my HUD for the pop-up that would indicate there was something for me to interact with.
(Another failure -- though far from unique to Andromeda -- is that the "interact" popup is persistent. In Andromeda, even quest markers were persistent; as in, they'd continue to clutter up the map and HUD even after I'd finished the quest. And while we're on the subject, both the journey and the map are garbage, and the navigator part of the HUD is the worst I have seen in decades.)
I've talked about this before. I don't like the way we put a mass of detail that doesn't matter, and then put a giant glowing label on the only things we can actually get game points off of. It is just like the Quick-Time Event problem; the screen image and sound design might be showing something wonderful, but the game progresses when you press the right button in the right time or place. This kind of clutter-plus-HUD doesn't give you the feeling of searching a room for a weapon, it gives you a feeling of playing Simon Says while a movie is playing in the background.
Would it be possible to disconnect, or rather, reconnect? I've tried Skyrim with the HUD turned off. I found I could still locate medicinal plants and mineable ores. It just became more annoying trying to find the sweet spot where the "gather" animation would actually play. I bet this could be solved just by increasing the size of the interact area, though. Incidentally, every single conversation in Mass Effect Andromeda started with a clumsy dance of trying to get Ryder close enough to the NPC and facing in exactly the right direction to unlock the "interact" button with them.
Once again, you spend all your time looking at a glowing glyph on your HUD and not with the depicted world the game is pretending to simulate your immersion in.
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These are just two aspects of the failure of Andromeda. They are in part philosophical. The team spoke of concentrating on making a better combat system and they succeeded. They prioritized free exploration in an open world knowing that this would harm the thrust and pacing of the more story-driven trilogy. And it has never really been a physics object world where you can pick up things like Skyrim or destroy scenery like Just Cause. And they made many, many changes and compromises in order to support multiplayer.
The real failure here is the adoption of a game engine that can't do many of the things that were strengths of the series. Worse, the limitations of the game engine impose its own aesthetic; one of a non-interactive landscape and equally conversations.
They dreamed of making a game where you seek out new lands and meet new peoples. What was shipped was a game where you look at static landscapes and are shown talking dolls.
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