He said this in an interview with Eurogamer, which explains the history of the series and the development of Mass Effect: Andromeda, a 2017 game that was not received positively. For example, Walters confirms a rumor that Andromeda originally contained a procedurally generated universe.

Walters first worked as a writer on the Mass Effect and Anthem trilogies at BioWare Edmonton, but was transferred to BioWare Montreal and Mass Effect: Andromeda midway through development when director Casey Hudson left the company. At that point, the game was transitioning to a more linear game.

“Ultimately, the procedural universe just didn’t fit the way we tell stories,” says Walters. “We’re doing a lot of big set pieces and things like that, it’s hard to translate into a procedurally generated world.”

According to Walters, the game industry was at a “strange point”: “A lot of people said quantity is quality, so we convinced ourselves internally that maybe the game wasn’t as polished as Mass Effect 3, but that was fine: it’s bigger and there’s more of it, and there’s more.” And then there came a point where people said, “No, that’s not good.”

Walters can live with that, but he regrets not having an Andromeda sequel after this. According to him, it is unfair to compare the game with Mass Effect 3, because that game was made by an experienced studio, following the previous two parts. Andromeda came from a relatively new studio, which previously mainly supported Mass Effect games.

“There were so many things we had to learn and figure out,” he says. And when you do, it’s really hard to be as polished as the third edition, and we just didn’t get that. We had to, in hindsight, just go smaller and focus more on quality. I wish we could have made a second because you’re really going to see that progression, right? Like between ME1 and ME2 from the original trilogy.”