In our Mass Effect: Andromeda review, we said, “What’s weird is that BioWare took the trouble to send us 2.5 million light – years to launch only two new alien races (plus some robots) over 50 hours of campaigning and the most important side missions, and only one local person joins your crew. ‘Apparently this was not the original plan, and many of the developers at Andromeda recently spoke to TheGamer to discuss why this new alien species never made it to the final game.
“I think it was a project that could not possibly live up to expectations,” said Neil Pollner, who was a senior author of Mass Effect 3 and wrote parts of Andromeda. ‘Not just the high bar of the original trilogy, but the logical expectations that someone would have of Mass Effect to move to a whole new galaxy. Because the scope of [the first] Mass Effect was so incredibly massive, there was an inherent promise that you would get a massive new experience with a bunch of new things in it [what was supposed to be the first] Mass Effect Andromeda – new species, new history, a whole new galaxy at your fingertips, etc.
‘But we only got the budget for two new species, plus the Remainder. Not to mention the fact that we could not even include the Milky Way species. And we could not let you travel through the galaxy. That meant we had to develop the story around a fairly striking inorganic limitation. So, not only did you get something that felt (and was) much smaller than you got before, almost everyone who played the game probably had something they really liked about Mass Effect that just wasn’t there not.Pollner went on to discuss how they had big plans in pre-production, including expanding the “first contact” experience with new strangers, but most of the work was not even used.
Chris Hepler, another longtime Mass Effect author, discussed how he proposed five or six new alien species, and Jo Berry, a former bioware author, also came up with a few that were ‘amazing’. .
Dorian Kieken, who was the franchise design director at the beginning of the development of Andromeda, explained that some of the early alien concepts were ‘pretty out there’ and that they were cut because one of Mass Effect Andromeda’s goals was to get fans to it. easy to make cosplay the characters of the game.
“One of the strengths of the original Mass Effect trilogy is that you can cosplay most alien characters – except the Hanar, though I would not underestimate the creativity of some cosplayers,” Kieken said. ‘The intention in Mass Effect Andromeda was to introduce new races that would still be in the realm of cosplay, and that’s probably why more crazy concepts were let down.
Kieken even said that the two alien races that entered Andromeda have gradually shifted to ‘cosplay-safe territory’ while the team tries to avoid ‘jellyfish’ types of aliens.
While one can hope that some of these designs will move into the next Mass Effect project, fans of the series can look forward to communicating with the original set of aliens in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition in May.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.