It's fair to say that this year's Mass Effect release, Andromeda, was one of the poorer entries in the series. Although the story was expanded and continued beyond the events in 2012's Mass Effect 3, the graphics for certain parts improved and the combat just as exciting as its predecessors, there were a lot of problems with it. The voice acting wasn't great, the facial texturing and lighting choices were bizarre and in-game animations were frequently buggy and weird.
With that in mind, many wondered if the response to the game would have an impact on Bioware and it looks like it has. Reportedly, parent company EA Games has moved over a number of Bioware employees to its EA Motive, Montreal studio. It's also shelving Mass Effect as a franchise, for now, demoting the Bioware studio to a support studio that will help other developers with their games, rather than build its own.
That means it will continue to patch and update Mass Effect Andromeda, but the majority of its work will be focused on aiding the development of Star Wars Battlefront II and new EA property, Dylan (thanks Kotaku).
This has brought down the size of Bioware Montreal considerably, which could well impact the amount and quality of DLC and updates we can expect to see with Mass Effect: Andromeda in the near future.
It isn't expected that Mass Effect will sit on the sidelines forever, but with the relatively weak reception to the recent entry in the series, it seems EA is keen to address what went wrong there before it begins work on a sequel just yet.
