Mass Effect: Andromeda
The BioWare devs tell us how Andromeda will make Ma ss Effect about exploration again.
BioWare talks exploration and more.
The Reaper threat loomed over the entire Mass Effect trilogy. You knew this deadly, ancient race of alien machines would arrive one day, and you knew Shepard and company would have to face them when they did. Their presence meant the third game was never going to be anything but a grim, bitter bloodbath. Andromeda doesn’t have a big bad—at least, not in the same way. BioWare wants to get away from that idea of an overarching threat. Instead, this is about exploring new worlds and trying to find a new home for mankind, and a deliberate attempt to create a sci-fi story with a slightly more optimistic bent instead of barrelling towards certain doom.
“There is something going on, larger than the game itself”
“The Reapers had basically attacked and everything had all gone to shit,” says producer Michael Gamble of Mass Effect 3’ s story. “It’s really hard to have a story about an individual, their struggles, their personal crises, how you can help and what you want to do with them under the umbrella of ‘Oh, and by the way the galaxy is basically ending’, right? For Andromeda we wanted to remove that a little bit so that we can tell stories of exploration, stories of a more casual nature. Now, it wouldn’t be a Mass Effect unless there was this larger meta-story kind of going on in the background, and there certainly is for Andromeda. There is something going on that’s larger than the game itself—that exists because I don’t think it’d be Mass Effect without that. But we definitely want to take on a bit of a lighter tone, for sure.”
Andromeda is set 600 years after Mass Effect 3. You play one of the Ryder twins, Scott or Sarah, assigned the role of Pathfinder when your father passes it on for as-yet-unknown reasons in the opening act. This means it’s your job to find a new home in the Andromeda galaxy for the human colonists on the Hyperion, one of the huge ‘ark’ ships carrying familiar Mass Effect species from the Milky Way. (There are no Hanar or Elcor arks. Or maybe the Elcor haven’t left yet because they were so slow to pack?)
The Andromeda Initiative, as it’s called, isn’t going as peacefully as humanity hoped. For one thing, there’s the bumpy alien race the Kett. For another, our educated guess (a “good one”, according to BioWare’s Mac Walters) is that some of the Initiative broke off and formed factions—and some now operate as outlaws. That’s why there are other settlements of familiar species to find in the galaxy.
The structure of the game is influenced by both the original Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Inquisition. In place of the Mako is the Nomad, which is more fine-tuned for driving across planetary landscapes thanks to BioWare working with Need For Speed developer Ghost. In place of the Normandy is the smaller but slicker spacecraft, the Tempest. Planets will have enemy bases to clear out, drop points that can detail places of interest on the surface, powerful optional enemies, and areas to scan that can
open up crafting opportunities. There are also puzzle-locked vaults to uncover and investigate.
Each planet is its own distinct story, creative director Mac Walters says. “One of the things that was very critical for us early on was this saying that when we develop these planets, each one needs its own story and its own history, its own backstory and its reason for existing. It needs to be unique and memorable compared to all the other planets that are out there. Each of them has characters that are associated with it and its cultural nuances, but also, usually, its major decision points that impact that planet. Sometimes beyond that planet as well.”
There are also over a dozen ‘hubs’ in addition to the planet areas, including the Nexus, a Citadel-like space station, and Kadara, a populated zone that looks like a more cyberpunk version of a Wild West town from Firefly. Walters describes the hubs as ‘information centers’ and a ‘pitch point’ before you’re sent out into the greater galaxy. “So the planets are interwoven throughout all of that as you play.”
galactic grind
One glaring issue with Inquisition’s open world was that the sidequests frequently felt like filler—collecting decorative gems, for example, or fighting bears. It’s what we’ve unofficially dubbed “the Hinterlands problem” on PC Gamer, where the player gets stuck in one location, dutifully grinding through all the sidequests instead of getting on with the superior main story, dampening their enthusiasm to carry on. “I don’t know if we’re doing anything to ‘discourage’ people from doing that,” says producer Fabrice Condominas. “But we are approaching the completionist aspect very differently, because we’ve done and learned a lot from Inquisition. But we’ve also observed what other games have been doing, like The Witcher. And it was very important for us that the quantity of scope doesn’t downgrade the quality of whatever you are doing there.” Condominas describes all the game’s sidequests as “meaningful”.
Along with those and the main story, you’ve got loyalty missions, returning from Mass Effect 2. In almost all of those, Shepard had to resolve something in a squadmate’s past, altering their relationship for better or worse. I think they yielded many of the moments fans recall when they deem the second game the best, so bringing them back was wise—particularly with such a radically different setting.
“It absolutely changes the type of stories that we can tell,” says Gamble. “If you think about the setting, the initial setup for Andromeda— it is a pretty fertile ground to tell different stories on. You’ve traveled so many years to get here, not everyone arrives at the same time, there are things going on in Andromeda that you have no control over and you’re the alien to that. There are local inhabitants of Andromeda; there are the aggressors in Andromeda, and you just kind of stumble upon all of this.
“The squad members that you have, whether they’ve arrived with you or whether they’ve come before or they’ll come after—in addition to the kind of political game that’s been going on already in Andromeda, that sets a cool ground for us to tell a lot of different side stories. The story is not only about the cast. The story is about settling, the story is about survival, the story is about the locals—and that’s where the loyalties will definitely focus.”
Five squad members have been revealed at the time of writing. There’s
“space is no longer represented on a 2D plane”
Liam, a human who’s part of your initial Pathfinder squad and apparently an idealistic presence. There’s a krogan called Drack, and a female turian called Vetra. Then there’s Peebee, an asari, and Cora, who’s part of your initial team from the Hyperion along with Liam. Gamble says it was tough to create a party so different to that of the original trilogy— you had three games and five years’ worth of investment in Garrus. As Gamble tells me, investment isn’t something that’s created overnight, it comes from going through some shit together, sometimes across multiple playthroughs. One character was reportedly even cut for being too similar to others from the trilogy.
“Some characters appeal to different people for different reasons,” Gamble says. “And I think some of the beauty of Mass Effect is we have a number of characters, and because of the depth that we can build into them, we’re allowed to appeal to everyone in different ways. So for example, Cora will appeal to a certain type … she’s a type of character who I think is likely more militaristic and orders and rules based. Whereas Peebee will appeal to a different kind of person who is looking for someone who is more fun, adventurous and carefree and that kind of stuff. We try and have characters which cover a gamut of where we think players’ heads are at.”
Paragon and renegade have been replaced with an as-yet unannounced, less binary system—and interrupts return from previous games. BioWare has worked harder to deepen your non-romantic relationships, too. “The ability to express tone and different emotions to many NPCs in the game, and have different reactions from them based on that, is not just exclusive to your love interests anymore. It’s kind of sprinkled more throughout the game.”
in profile
Progression, combat and customization have received similarly intense overhauls. Your characters’ class is assigned based on the abilities you choose to unlock. “Your first menu, you actually don’t choose a class,” Condominas explains. “The idea is that you will have access to all the skills from any class when you go along with the game, but depending where you invest, you’ll actually unlock ‘profiles’, which are the equivalent of classes—so the Soldier or whatever—but you’ll unlock them as you go based on where you choose to invest the different skills.” You’ll be able to swap those profiles as you go, too, if a particular situation out on a planet requires more of an Infiltrator approach.
The combat has also received a substantial overhaul. As detailed in last issue’s hands-on preview with Andromeda’s multiplayer, you can jump, hover in mid-air while aiming and perform a melee slam attack. It’s much more open. Instead of rolling, you use a dash attack, and cover is automatic. While BioWare says some of the story missions are a little more arena-like, combat in the open-world planets is a different deal. You can leave a combat zone if you want to, and the AI has been reworked for open spaces. Biotic abilities are expressed with more extravagant animations, and pleasingly it looks far more like an action game from 2017 than one from 2009.
You have the ability to build and name your own weapons, as well. Melee weapons have their own slots in your inventory, so while you start with an omni-blade, you can later swap this
for a krogan-style hammer. I ask Gamble if this an effort to an inject a more traditionally RPG-style system back into Mass Effect, because I know some players miss that stuff about BioWare games. “Yes … I mean fundamentally, we just think it’s really cool to be able to name your weapon, and call them what you want,” he says. “I guess you can say in that direction with Andromeda, we’re trying to build depth into nearly every system, and that’s just one example of that.”
That goes for space exploration from the Tempest, too—your new pilot is a salarian called Kallo Jath. I’m curious about the galaxy map on Ryder’s ship, and how space is represented in Andromeda generally, but right now Gamble speaks in broad strokes instead of specifics. They’ve worked to make space travel feel more tangible, and less like a detached set of menus. “The fundamental difference really between what we have now and what we had before is that you are represented in 3D space. So space exists—space is a place that you fly around via the map—you don’t actually control and this is not a flight sim. But it’s no longer represented on a 2D plane, so that allows us to do a lot more cool things visually. That allows us to do some unique and interesting gameplay with it, but the immersion level of it is the key factor. You never now have to pop into this small UI and travel around. Mass Effect has always been a space game, but—in my opinion—we’ve never actually nailed the look of space. That’s really what it adds, and that’s really what I think we should be most proud of.”
Mass Effect Andromeda should be a far truer representation of the original game’s sense of exploration than BioWare was able to pull off in 2007, married to some of the deeper squadmate-specific characterisation seen in the second and third games. Inquisition gave us our first glimpse of what the new generation of BioWare RPG looks like—but Andromeda is its opportunity to get closer to what they’re traditionally good at. It’s not really about how many sidequests you can fit into an open world: it’s about taking that journey into unknown lands with characters who you love, and becoming deeply involved in the stories of those you meet, whether they’re friendly or total bastards.