This meant that we had to develop the story around some pretty glaring inorganic limitations. And we weren't going to be able to let you travel throughout the galaxy. Not to mention that we couldn't even include all the Milky Way species. “But we were only given the budget for two new species, plus the Remnant. Because the scope of Mass Effect was so incredibly massive, there was an inherent promise that you'd be getting a massive new experience with a ton of new things in Mass Effect Andromeda - new species, new lore, an entire new galaxy at your fingertips, etc.
“Not just the high bar of the original trilogy, but the logical expectations anyone would have of Mass Effect going to a whole new galaxy. Pollner was a senior writer on Mass Effect 3 before going on to write parts of Andromeda. “I think it was a project that couldn't have possibly lived up to expectations,” Neil Pollner tells me.
The “species who were indigenous to Andromeda” part is important, given that there were also different ideas for how to handle first contact - making the Pathfinder a violent colonist who shoots first and asks questions later wasn’t something that was set in stone from the get-go. Another dev mentions that an entire system was constructed just to facilitate communication between species who were indigenous to Andromeda and those who had arrived from the Milky Way. One writer lists having proposed “five or six” new alien types, while another states that the ones BioWare opted for in the end were specifically chosen for being in “cosplay-safe” territory. First of all, there were several more species designed for this galaxy. After speaking to various developers who worked on Andromeda - some of whom were there at the beginning, others who saw it through to the end - I’ve learned quite a bit about what happened here. Well, three if you include the Remnant, who are just sort of weird robots.Īs it turns out, this wasn’t always the case.
In the end, not only were a number of Milky Way aliens missing from the Andromeda Initiative - this vast, unexplored galaxy only appeared to contain two new species (and they’re both essentially the same species). And so, the promise of embarking on a mission to a brand new galaxy, Andromeda, seemed to offer boundless possibilities. In Mass Effect, the Milky Way is so immensely large that it uses both faster-than-light travel and jump gates - most sci-fi generally opts for one or the other - just to facilitate the traversal of a single galaxy. One of the most magnificent things about space is its inherent unknowability.
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