MEA would you like to play as another species?

We can only hope!!!!!! 

I would love to play as one of the Shepard species.

Yeah the quality over quantity thing seems to be the main issue with a choice of main character.

I don't really care to play as another species. Maybe this should be a poll. Simple "yes" or "no". Part of the issue comes down to romances. We've already got some serious gender gating. Adding race gating makes it even more difficult. And let's face it, BioWare games have romances so let's not pretend that can be ignored.

Could be interesting to see the results of a poll

Yes it would add complexity and it is always going to be impossible to please everyone but DAI achieved it to an extent. However as I think you are implying there are always going to be issues from players who don't get what they want or perceive that.

Sorry if I missed your point.

Cheers

FYI if you are getting notified re this thread Sofajockey very kindly added a poll to the beginning if you want an opinion but didn't want to comment.

I wish they dished Andromeda and gave us 2 prequels :
- Mass Effect: Rachni Wars (where you play a Krogan)
- Mass Effect: Krogan Rebellion (where you play a Turian or Salarian)

Yes, definitely. I would love to have a system like in Dragon Age: Origins, where each race has it's own origin and some sort of personal quest. This could had been executed well in Andromeda, though it would require a lot more work and some overall changes for the story. However, if I were to plan Andromeda from beginning, then I would give the player the opportunity to play as Human, Turian, Asari or Salarian. Depending on your choice you would start on different arc with different problems of your race. The "prologue" would be focused on fixing problems with the arc and finding Nexus. Andromeda is also about personal story with Ryder's family, so other race's pathfinders would need to have their own, exclusive equivalent quest.

Basically the changes would be limited to the first part of the game until you find Nexus + different "family" quest AND maybe some slight differences in the ending. Most definitely doable.

Unless BioWare was willing to give us species options that actually looked, played, and narratively encountered the story completely different from each other and/or they went back to having a silent protagonist in order to allocate enough of a word budget so as to be properly acknowledge to our racial choice then I would say no.

I don't want to play a human wearing a Turian costume, I don't want the narrative watered down to the point where my Asari avatar knows less about her own culture and what "By the Goddess" means than the human diplomat does (dwarf play-through of Inquisition says hi).

If I am going to be playing as a Salarian, for instance, then the narrative should reflect my character's heightened metabolism and lightning quick mind, my need for less than four hours of sleep a day. I should be able to get a semblance of a universe seen through the eyes of a species that could very well see the other, long lived aliens around him as moving in almost slow motion. Etc.

Personally, I don't see that level of detail being possible, certainly not with the instance of multiple voiced protagonists. The reason why DA:Origins had the reactivity it did was because the game didn't have to gut 50% of the dialogue so players could hear their character speak. The fact that we had all this extra dialogue meant that our companions and other NPCs could recognize us as playing as a City Elf, and offer their own input, the larger allocation of responses meant that they could spend more time crafting a narrative that better fit your chosen background.