Nobody expected the Inquisition
Is Mass Effect Andromeda turning into Dragon Age Inquisition?
September’s PS4 Pro reveal event gave us our first opportunity to get up-close with Mass Effect Andromeda in action, and immediately after that initial gameplay peek the internet was obsessed with one topic: is the series about to ditch its past and become Dragon Age Inquisition in space?
Certainly there are similarities between the space opera’s comeback and Bioware’s hard fantasy roleplayer. Like most EA titles (including FIFA 17 on p74), Mass Effect’s now switched over to the Frostbite engine, and in doing so has actually taken some technology wholesale from Dragon Age. Futhermore, Bioware’s openly admitted that feedback gained from Inquisition’s playerbase has been handed over to Andromeda’s dev team. Yet despite those creeping influences, Bioware’s keen to point out that the biggest influence on Andromeda isn’t Dragon Age but the Mass Effect series itself.
“One of the things we said internally was that we really wanted Andromeda to fulfil the promises of the first Mass Effect game,” insists creative director Mac Walters when we speak after a private demo of the game in action. “Not the first trilogy; the first game. That has been our vision. We can’t just be Mass Effect 4 – we have to be more than that.”
So what does “more than Mass Effect 4” look like, exactly? According to Walters, it begins with a renewed focus on exploration and discovery. “This is a story about exploration. And yes, you’ve got a gun on your back and a gun on your thigh, but we also want to make sure that you’re going into a new galaxy to discover it, not just to go fight. So giving players the tools such as a scanner makes them want to learn everything they can about the world, and to direct [that learning] themselves and not just be told at every moment. That’s one of the key things you can expect to see.
“When you think about those uncharted worlds we had in Mass Effect 1, we never really fulfilled that [exploration] promise. Then we tried again in Mass Effect 2, but in Mass Effect 3 we kind of just gave up and became somewhat more linear and
WE WANT IT TO FULFIL THE PROMISES OF THE VERY FIRST MASS EFFECT.
more about the missions. So coming back to this idea but doing it right – where you feel like you have expansive spaces and can explore, but there’s also rich content there to be found – that was part of our challenge to bring that back.” OUT OF THIS WORLD “Mass Effect has always been about the story,” says Walters when we ask what he considers to be the biggest lesson learned from the original trilogy. “But it’s easy for people to confuse story with characters. So one of the things the team and I focus on a lot is that obviously we’re going to have an amazing story – but let’s not get too caught up on that. Let’s get more caught up on the characters and what we want to do with them. How do we want to do our cinematic storytelling with them?
“Let’s just focus on making sure our characters are amazing, and then put them in unique situations. That way, an amazing story and world will come out of that. That’s one of the big things.”
Those characters start with the Ryder family. As we’ve known for a while now, Commander Shepard has been retired, replaced instead by protagonist Ryder. Once again you’re forced to play as a human, but in a new twist for Andromeda the male and female Ryder options are actually brother and sister in the story’s canon – and their father’s kicking about in the universe, too.
Aside from an awkward moment where a known bug turns everything gold – necessitating a full system restart to fix it – our debut demo offers an encouraging first glimpse at one of the alien worlds Bioware’s created. But most promisingly of all, Walters is fully aware he needs to address the biggest controversy from the ME trilogy. “Certainly there were lots of learnings around Mass Effect 3’s ending,” he adds, totally unprompted, “but this is just the beginning so we can wait for a while before we have to work on those!” Keep track of every big 2017 game with next issue’s free calendar, out 22 Nov.