Mass Effect: Andromeda Is Ending Single Player Updates

Mass Effect Andromeda
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)

We all knew it was coming sooner or later after the dearth of news regarding any single-player DLC, but apparently, EA isn't even giving BioWare a whole year to update and maintain Mass Effect: Andromeda's single-player content.

Over on the official Mass Effect website, BioWare Montreal announced that single-player updates for Mass Effect: Andromeda will be brought to a halt.

According to the post, update 1.10 is the final single-player update for the game. Whatever is in the game that hasn't been fixed or addressed, will stay that way.

The post explains that after receiving feedback about the customization options, the animations, and some of the more pressing glitches, BioWare went back in and fixed up the game in an attempt to bring it up to the quality standards people expected from a Mass Effect outing.

According to the post, the multiplayer team will offer details on the continued support for the online multiplayer portion of Mass Effect: Andromeda, which will include additional multiplayer kits, missions, and a special event for N7 Day.

The road through development for Mass Effect: Andromeda was not an easy one. The team switched over to using the Frostbite 3 game engine, but had a difficult time getting a handle on the engine. Early on in development, there were problems with the scope, given that the team wanted to have a procedurally generated universe, much like No Man's Sky or Star Citizen. However, things didn't quite work out so well, and BioWare ended up settling for having just over a handful of planets to explore instead.

The procedural planet generation was also replaced with something a bit more contained. The environments were still much larger than any previous Mass Effect title, but nowhere near as big as the 100km x 100km worlds that the team wanted to implement.

Animations problems also plagued development, as the team ran into problems with trying to tie-in some of the outsourced facial animations with the middleware toolset, resulting in a lot of the work having to be thrown out or reconfigured.

Two areas that actually went over smoothly was the vehicular traversal and combat, which are two things that the Frostbite can knock out of the park with ease. The environments were also well designed and have been consistently praised by the gaming community.

However, a lot of the roadblocks that BioWare Montreal encountered leading up to release didn't exactly get smoothed over by the time the release date hit, and Mass Effect: Andromeda launched with tons of quality control issues. This greatly affected the game's sales and any potential for a series of single-player DLC expansions.

Fans had hoped that maybe Electronic Arts would announce something about the single-player DLC for the game, but it never came. Now we know that not only will there not be any single-player DLC, but the updates for the single-player are being brought to cessation with update 1.10. For those of you out there still enjoying Mass Effect: Andromeda's multiplayer, you can continue to look for some future updates to arrive.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.