According to Neil Pollner, Senior Writer Mass effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda, the new project was doomed primarily due to the scale of the expectations. Players expected completely new experiences from the transition to a new galaxy, including a lot of races never seen before.
But we were given a budget for only two new species, not counting relics. Not to mention, we couldn’t even use all the races of the Milky Way. And we couldn’t let you travel the galaxy. This meant that we had to build a story with a host of strange external constraints in mind.
Neil Pollner
Polner said that the writing team had been thinking about the basics of Andromeda long before the game’s volume and budget were announced. In particular, ideas were ready on how the first contact with the new race should go – as we remember, in the finished game it all came down to a shootout.
The explorer hero’s first contact experience must be dynamic and challenging. Instead, in the game, we almost immediately kill the kett. So some of the cornerstones of the story just don’t get laid.
Neil Pollner
The writers mapped out several storylines that would clarify why the expedition was organized. They came up with a number of new races and invented ways that players could start communicating with them. But almost all of this preliminary work was not useful.
Another screenwriter, Chris Hepler, admitted that he personally came up with five or six interesting races. However, all his ideas remain the property BioWare, and even if the studio definitely does not use them, he cannot talk about them.
In total, the Mass Effect Andromeda team has proposed a dozen new races. Some of them were immediately swept aside, including various jellyfish-like ones: by tradition, all characters in the series, except perhaps the hanar, should be available for cosplay. And even the two approved races had to be tailored to suit the cosplayers’ capabilities.
In the early stages of game development, we thought about many new species. I don’t know why we settled on a specific number that ended up in the game. But I assume that this was dictated by production reasons. In addition, the number of races must be reasonable in order to cope with their elaboration, and we already brought some of the species from the Milky Way.
Dorian Keeken
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