Mass Effect: Andromeda Interview

GameSpot has published an interesting interview with the creative director of Mass Effect: Andromeda, Mac Walters, who touched upon the game’s new gameplay systems and its philosophy concerning content and writing. Walters strongly hints at the fact that, while BioWare isn’t planning for a new strategy, they might already be looking into a direct sequel for Andromeda with the Ryder characters returning in some form.

A couple of excerpts:

The trailer mentioned lots of worlds with different stories. How are you creating those? Are they procedural or are they all scripted?

We have a handful of worlds that are scripted to be hand-crafted, rich, and detailed. Each planet has its own history and backstory and they are designed specifically with unique characters, stories, challenges, and choices. Each world has its own main narrative, with a central storyline throughout, and key decisions that impact that planet for the rest of the game. All of the sidequests and adventures on a planet tie into that story, or the main game story in some way.

We also saw a bit of crafting in the trailer–how significant of a role will crafting play in the overall experience?

This speaks to our goal of freedom. It’s up to the player how much they choose to engage in crafting. If you were to just follow the main story missions, you don’t really need to engage in it at all–unless you want to. But it can give you an advantage, and if you want to fully explore all the planets, and survive all their challenges, you’ll need to dig in to the crafting system a bit more. Because of that, we’ve made it much more accessible and robust than previous Mass Effect games.