>>721124623 (OP)
Something hopeful from my youth that turned into a depressing waste of potential.
I was used to clunky "action" RPG games, like Morrowind, that kind of played like shit but even then I realised Mass Effect 1 had fairly boring combat. But the world building and visual style was extremely good and I saw it as a potential new Big Game IP.
Big IPs are like Star Wars, Warhammers, Elder Scrolls, LotR, DnD/Forgotten Realms etc. They all have shitty games but the imaginary world is really interesting to audiences (maybe Forgotten Realms is just familiar rather than interesting...) and they keep calling for more of it, so devs keep making games and eventually some of them are really good.
Corporations are wrong to think an IP is a Golden Goose that should always lay golden eggs. That's never going to happen. But entertainment companies are basically goose-egg-pie factories that need a constant supply of eggs. Big companies will kill and eat a goose because they realise it isn't laying gold eggs, only to then wander around begging on the street for any spare geese. Don't kill the goose you stupid fuckers.
Mass Effect was a setting that could have had mobile games, RPGs, shooters and survival games for decades, but instead they tried to squeeze as much of an TPS/RPG game trilogy out of it as possible, as quickly as possible and it killed the setting. Andromeda bombed not just because we could tell it was shit, it also bombed BECAUSE it was set in the Mass Effect world aka a dead universe that had been nuked by the previous games.
