And unfortunately, that's the corner game development backs themselves into. Even the big guns like EA have to churn stuff out even if something isn't ready because every product the sell is still a sizable chunk of sales.Delaying a game are sometimes not an option, especially when there are locked in contracts and shareholder expectations. Unfortunately, it's the nature of the business.
And like other huge, big budget games, they probably had a laundry list of things that needed fixing, and they had to prioritize the ones that broke the game.
At every company I've worked at, we have so many skus, we always cancel probably 10-15 products out of the initial strategy of 50 new items. And then we have legacy sales of existing products that sells for 10 years. So nobody really cares about dropping some duds before it releases. But gaming is such a day one launch sales strategy, you have to swing for the fences at the first at bat.
Some companies force themselves to churn out annual crap. And some like EA releasing ME:A in a sorry state shows they had to release it. Even though 360 ME games were clunky due to the hardware limitations, there's no way I saw that many bugs and glitches in those 8 year old games.I understand that but it seems to me that some of the larger game corporations despite shareholders can afford to delay games until its in a polished state. Case in point is Nintendo. Breath of the Wild was darn near delayed a whole console generation but was worth it due the critical and more importantly financial success it has become. But Nintendo rolls to beat of its own drum so they may be the exception. More to your point, if ME:A proves to be a commercial success in EA's eyes despite its problems, I fully expect to see more of the same from Bioware in the future where it relates to ship then fix.
Then again this is why I am an armchair analyst and not on any company's payroll.
However, some large studios baked into corporations like id, Blizzard and Bethesda never seem to have make or break deadlines. If EA was in charge of these studio's franchises, I'm sure we'd already be up to Doom 9 and Diablo 11.