BioWare has revealed to International Business Times UK that it initially explored a procedural design for Mass Effect Andromeda but dropped the idea as it didn’t produce satisfactory results, especially in terms of the studio’s narrative vision for the game.
Lead Designer Ian Frazier explained:
We were looking at a game that used a lot more procedural tools to have a vast swathe of planets and places to go. We spent a lot of time developing down that road, and tailoring the story towards it and so forth, and we quickly found it wasn’t yielding the results we wanted.
You can make a giant procedural game, but we were finding that the giant procedural game wasn’t the narrative experience or the moment-to-moment experience we wanted players to have.
Frazier also said that BioWare does use procedural tools “here and there” in Andromeda but “when you explore Eledin or Eos, those are handbuilt planets.”
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[Source: IBTimes UK]
