Oh, your mis-understanding what we were referring to. The original idea of the game (and what the map was designed and created for) was that the player and crew would go out into this extremely hostile world with iron man like suits that could jump/glide. The whole map was made for the player to walk and maybe fly like once a mission to get out of emergencies.....but flying was the only cool looking part of the game so a EA Exe told them to put it in full time. It wasn't a way to skip stuff in open world games, it was "This is the only unique and fun thing I have seen so far, focus on that" from a higher up with a game that was not designed with it in mind.
So all that works was basically just wasted cause Bioware had no idea what they were doing and wanted to make.
considering they were still designing basic shit way too late, I highly doubt they redid huge chunks of the map to prevent going on foot, and the basic layout isn't set up for that either, meaning you'd have to take huge detours to go up a cliff, and that's not how games are designed these days.
flying as shown in the reveal trailer wasn't even in the game (since there wasn't really a game at that point and more a "that's what we wanna do") and one predictions was that you gonna get dropped into a small-ass area after a flying cutscene. you can't really revamp stuff that was never really in the game to begin with.
Bioware Montreal were the ones who worked on the last Mass Effect game. This was when Edmonton was working on Anthem. Edmonton was going to try and fix Andromeda with a skeleton crew but EA told them to put everyone on Anthem and get it out as soon as possible. That also meant removing the skeleton crew on Andromeda. Which is a good thing because no one likes working with the Frostbyte Engine. It's a particle/ physics engine EA tries and tell people it's a 3d engine, except you need 3rd party software to model, texture, and even rig everything. The fact the EA forces Bioware to use it pisses them off. Respawn got to use Unreal Engine for Jedi Fallen Order and not forced to use Frostbyte 3 which pissed some people off.
I should mention that the reason why EA keeps naming city companies after Bioware is because they want some of the good will Bioware has from the old AD&D and KOTAR days. Except Austin his housed by lazy fuckers and Montreal had interns that didn't know what they were doing.
Expect a lot of hype from the Austin studio.
I meant 3, andromeda wasn't even done by a "real" bioware studio, EA just called it that for marketing.
and frostbyte is fine, when you have devs go on record saying they needed weeks to implement a 3rd person camera, when that shit was already in bf3, it's not the engine that's a problem - and no one besides indies is using a single engine for everything, that's not how production pipelines work. a specialized program will
always be superior, as much as timmy might shill unreal's capacities. big companies pay the big bucks for the big buck support contracts because it's chump change for them.
plus it's not like bioware were wizards and frostbite was their foil, when they were using unreal it was an equally bad hackjob, only difference is unreal has more shit on stackexchange. not to mention the revolving door of high-level people doesn't stop there, no matter the engine used bioware didn't have the talent (or didn't utilize it) - which is ironic considering already had a studio that had experience with 3rd person
and frostbite in the form of visceral, but they closed it.
