After a hiatus, the Mass Effect franchise is once again back in the limelight. Recently, fans have been able to rediscover Commander Shepard's story with the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, packaging the first three games in the franchise while also updating a bunch of issues that fans originally had issues with. The infamous vehicle Mako and combat in the first game specifically has been fixed much to the delight of fans.
However, this package does not include the most recent game in the series, Mass Effect Andromeda, which may make at least some fans happy. Andromeda attempted to push the series forward by telling a new story with new characters, though how things ended up likely didn't go the way anyone expected. The launch was plagued by issues, bugs, and visual glitches, many of which went viral such as bizarre character movements or facial animations like those of the female version of Ryder. Before long, EA appeared to pull the plug on the game, any DLC, and moved developers to other projects.
Recently, more behind the scenes details seems to have come out on the polarizing game. Mass Effect senior writer Neil Pollner revealed that the Andromeda's original opening was once quite different, seeing Ryder act more as an explorer rather than alien destroyer. Considering their role was to be a Pathfinder, BioWare wanted Ryder's first contact experience to be more dynamic and challenging rather than simply discovering the Kett and then immediately shooting at them.
Pollner confirmed that even before the project had began officially, the writing team began working off of the general premise that the game would take players to the Andromeda Galaxy. Originally, the Mass Effect Andromeda writing team was devising ways how the player would learn and communicate with these new species as well as storylines to better explain why the expedition was being undertaken in general. Unfortunately, most of that pre-development work was cut, resulting in what was actually shipped and becoming a highly criticized part of the overall experience.
And we set out to brainstorm and grow ideas that could organically serve that general premise. That first contact expectation I mentioned above? We'd developed ideas for how the player would navigate that. We were working on a process for the Milky Way species to learn how to even communicate with the new alien species. We were developing several additional species for the new galaxy, as well as several different storylines for why the expedition had been undertaken. Most of that pre-development work ended up not being used.
The news shouldn't be too surprising as other reports indicated that Mass Effect Andromeda had experienced a ton of issues behind the scenes. Earlier this year, Pollner indicated that the game's budget was much smaller than the trilogy games, limited what BioWare Montreal could do and resulting in content cuts which included 10 alien races including ones from the previous games. The ones that were kept were chosen due to how easy they would be for fans to cosplay instead of what made sense for the game and its story. Thankfully, BioWare and EA will have another chance to set things right with Mass Effect 4 which is currently in development.
Source: TheGamer