recentio wrote...
Having been involved in a few large-scale projects, I can tell you that it's not always the case that things will be rigorously and effectively planned in advance. If you have talented people, as BioWare does, you can often get away with it because your Aces will pull your a** out of the fire and sometimes come through with spontaneous brilliance that excessive planning might have stifled. By walking a fine line between careful preparation and on-the-spot execution, a team can reach (IMO) maximum potential. Still, this is a tightrope walk that not every project team should attempt.
Based on seeing patterns that resemble this before (or perhaps projecting because I think this resembles patterns I've seen before) I'm of the opinion that BioWare's ME3 team was harried with their backs to the wall at almost every level in the final months. Though something was scrabbled together, the fact that the influences jotted down "Brave New World" and "The Matrix [Revolutions]" are transparent in the final version imply to me that there was not enough time to fully develop the ideas that the ending juggles.
I feel this last-minute (by the looks of it) job is why the game does not build to the ending and hence why the ending does not 'fit' the game. Proper set up and continuity checking could have dealt with every plot hole and made this ending epically mind blowing. Instead the apparent thesis of the ending is not the same as the apparent thesis of the game.
Did they let it get away from them? Did they run out of time to do it right? I think so. Luckily, there's all the time in the world now. A six-month wait for a revised and expanded ending DLC would be welcomed with jubilee by a lot of customers. It's their chance to do everything they really wanted to do with it and blow us all out of the water. (Though I would suggest that "LOTS OF SPECULATION" is not a wise goal in a trilogy conclusion.)
Those are my thoughts looking on from the outside. Only BioWare knows what actually happened. I'm curious to know what stresses lead to this mess, honestly. It's probably an interesting behind-the-scenes story of its own.
I agree completely.
As I've said elsewhere, I really do think another element of this is the lack of a more "detached" editor involved in the writing. Books have editors, movies have producers, but Bioware has leads who are themselves directly engaged in some of the writing.
When you're that close to a project for so long (especially when you're pouring so much into it to make a deadline), it's impossible to take a step back and look at what you've created with any kind of clarity. Everything is just this big blur and it's hard to really tell what's good and what's bad any more. This is the point at which an editor would step in and say "No, this doesn't work" or "Yes, run with that", but this just wasn't a resource available to the team.
The combination of EA's insistence on tight deadlines (which has hurt more developers than just Bioware) as well as the lack of this basic quality control check means that the writing team really was working with both hands tied behind their backs. It's pretty surprising that the rest of the game was as good as what we got.
I've always felt similarly about DA2. DA2 was a mess and I did not enjoy playing it, but at the same time, given the extremely short development cycle Bioware had to adhere to, it really is a remarkable game. They cranked that thing out in about a year as I recall. It wound up ultimately hurting their brand, I think, but I bring it up only to illustrate the kinds of contstraints Bioware is working with.
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