As much as Mass Effect: Andromeda is a "fresh start" for the Mass Effect franchise, it also draws direct influence from the earlier installments of the series and the reactions fans had to them. Everything from the negative response to Mass Effect 3's ending to the successes in the way players' decisions affected the conclusion of Mass Effect 2 shaped how Bioware creative director and Mass Effect franchise lead writer Mac Walters viewed Andromeda as a new point of entry into the Mass Effect world.
After Mass Effect 3's ending was divisive among the gaming community, Walters said the Bioware team learned some key lessons that they applied moving forward to Andromeda.
"It was tough because we learned a lesson that there was no way to really know ahead of time, because who had created a trilogy spanning story with choices that mattered throughout it? Nobody. And so we were the first. As much as some people say they loved the ending, we also know that it wasn't what some people were looking for. We misstepped there," he told IGN during an interview at the 2016 Game Awards. "That's not why we're not doing another trilogy, I wouldn't say that, but certainly I think we learned from that sort of sense of how much people invest in their characters and how important it is to them to carry that forward. If there was one thing that was important it was really to look at how we would start Andromeda with a new protagonist, with a new character that people could fall in love with as sort of a fresh start. I think that was something that was really key to this as we started."
Check out the new gameplay footage released of Mass Effect: Andromeda at the 2016 Game Awards:
The successes of Mass Effect 3 also will have a direct influence on the new game. Walters said the intent is for there to be "more shades of gray" in the players' decision-making so the player doesn't know if they're necessarily making the "right" or "wrong" choice, which was something they tried to push in Mass Effect 3.
"If you think about going to another galaxy, there's not necessarily a military, there's no council there watching your every move. What is a morality scale like paragon/renegade even mean in that? So some of the choices are more tone choices. It's more of a traditional roleplaying experience where you actually choose how you want to behave in a certain situation," he explained. "That said, there still will be big choices in the game, and those will impact the course of the story, but we're not necessarily weighing them and saying it's a good choice or an evil choice. It just was a choice, and it's going to have consequence."
Andromeda will draw similarities to Mass Effect 2 in the way those choices affect the conclusion of the game. "One of the things we want to do is make it more of an organic scenario where you make choices and then logical consequences happen, and they do impact the ending, or sort of the ending level of the game," said Walters. "It feels more like Mass Effect 2 where depending on whether people were loyal or not and whether or not you'd even acquired certain people, and then depending on some of your choices in the final mission, it drastically changes the way that you play that final level, and less so the actual outcome of it. I think that's more along the lines of what we're going for -- not those specific things, we're not looking at loyalty or things like that, but that's the model it feels like."
And don't expect the end of the game to be the end of the Andromeda experience, either. Even though Andromeda has been described as a standalone entry in the Mass Effect trilogy, Walters wants to clarify that this is really launching a new longer story arc for the series.
"There's definitely a plan to continue Andromeda. We just didn't plan this to be a trilogy -- a three-part story over three games. Specifically, we have built in some of the key and big mysteries in Andromeda that you will discover are not resolved in Andromeda, in this game," he said. "We are already planning how we're going to reveal those and how we're going to deal with them in future installments."
Whereas the broad strokes of the Mass Effect trilogy were determined when the writing team was breaking story for the first Mass Effect, Walters said the writers are approaching breaking story differently for Andromeda.
"The ultimate ending of Shepard's sacrifice, that was something that was from the beginning. We knew that this was Shepard's story and it would end with Shepard, even though there's that slight chance that Shepard can still be alive at the end if you do it exactly right," he explained. Though they didn't get to the specifics around key story moments until development started on each Mass Effect game, they knew from the start that Mass Effect 3 would focus on the Reapers' return and an all-out war for the fate of humanity that resulted in Shepard's death."
By contrast, there's no locked in end destination for the Andromeda story. "That's one of the things we're trying to stay much more open-ended about," said Walters. "I don't know if we'll ever see a series that does what Mass Effect trilogy did which it was intentionally a trilogy with choices that carried forward, and we stayed true to that all the way true. That was very special in and of itself. At the same time, it was somewhat limiting as developers because you're always tied to what you did. You've said that this is where we're going and that's what you have to commit to, which is fine, but I am really enjoying the freedom that we have now with Andromeda."
Mass Effect: Andromeda is coming out in Q1, with speculation that its release date could be in March. And if you want to revisit Mass Effect 2 or 3, both games are now backwards compatible on Xbox One.
Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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