Whether you think the side-missions are all annoying fetch quests or absolute bliss, no one’s denying that Mass Effect: Andromeda is a large game. With so many planets in the game to potentially look at, aside from the ones you actually explore, one has to wonder whether Bioware looked at procedurally generated planes like No Man’s Sky at some point.
According to Bioware’s Fabrice Condominas in conversation with Finder, it was an idea that the development team explored for a time. “Yes, obviously we are looking at what else is happening in the industry overall. In the specific case of No Man’s Sky, at the time it was released, we were already deep in development.
“But we noticed that it was very focused on procedural worlds and we tried that, actually, over a year. Our conclusion at the time was that it wasn’t for us in the sense that it wasn’t for the type of game we were doing. Because all the content we build we try and make to a high quality, but when we tried procedurally generated content we never reached the level of quality we wanted.”
So the same planets you can scan from space are the remains of those procedural generation experiments and were ultimately abandoned in favour of quality content. “That idea certainly crossed our minds and yes we tried those things, but in the end we went with quality over quantity. The game is already huge, so I don’t think people will feel lost on things to do.”
What are your thoughts on it all? Let us know in the comments.