Honestly, should Andromeda been a bit more alien?

Unfortunately, this. Just more of the same, in that aspect. Could have been in a new area of the MW and barely anything would change.

I think you're absolutely right. The Mass Effect universe has a rich canon and - perhaps more importantly - it was built over several years. If you make the decision to set your new game in an entirely new galaxy, you'd have to build all that canon again for that game/galaxy/storyline if you wanted to achieve that same level of depth. This obviously would take a lot of time, money and resources and so, they didn't do that.

All of this really begs the question if it's then worth all the trouble: why have the game go to a galaxy that is of 2.2 times the size of the Milky Way to have it populated by only three races and have the game set in a tiny little corner called the Heleus Cluster? The time and effort spent on thinking of a plausible way for living things to cross a 2.5 mio ly distance and designing 3 new races only to end up with a watered-down Milky Way clone could also have been spent on trying to think of new exciting story lines in the Milky Way.

In fact, I believe the canon of ME is so rich, they could have chosen from a plethora of story settings, my personal favorite would have been Mass Effect: Terminus Systems: I can see an entire new ME-trilogy play out along that theme...

I really wish people would stop trying to push this angle.

Imagine a mass effect with a fraction of the gear, taking place in a tiny portion of ME1's area, with a storyline that was ultimately meaningless because regardless of whatever happened, the Reapers were still out there, the massive epic scope of the trilogy is still to be played out, and your entire set of accomplishments get eclipsed by a guy called Shepard. Same goes for all the similar stuff about setting it in the FCW.

Andromeda's misteps would literally fill a book but one of the things it genuinely didn't do wrong is write itself into a corner. There's the skeleton of an interesting continuation to the overarching chronicle of Mass Effect here and Andromeda's biggest crime was that it didn't put enough meat on it.

How is it that every time someone posts about MEA these days, someone else always comes up with the Kotaku article? I'm not a fan of the article with regard to the subject it's applicable to but citing it as the ultimate source containing of all Andromeda's problems and shortcomings is beyond reason, if you ask me.

Anyway, sure they had 5 years and could have added more races but that's not what I meant to convey. When BW chose that new Galaxy, they automatically chose difficulties: how would living beings get there, which races would go there (and - just as important, perhaps even more - which not) and which races would there already be in the new galaxy. You're going to have to create new races and may be leaving existing ones behind.

I'm not saying it's a bad choice, I'm just asserting that such would create an extra stress on time and resources, as well as waste a part of the time and resources already spent in the past. If anything, I'm saying it's a big risk business-wise.

Personally, I think they had big plans for Andromea, that this was just meant as the first installment and that the rest of the galaxy would have been filled in the following years. Heck, perhaps they haven't even abandoned such a strategy. This all speculation on my part of course, which is why I have that question: Why Andromeda?

I do kinda disagree with this though. A prequel doesn't necessarily have to be ancillary to the original story. Not every event, life or storyline in the Milky Way is somehow linked to or foreshadowing the Reaper's return, nor does the ending of Shepard's story necessarily devalue every prior one. 

Despite knowing the events of the X-Men trilogy, First Class was a pretty great film. It needed great actors, good writing and solid direction, but it produced a story that stood on its own merits. 

I'd love to see a game that went from the First Contact War up to the opening of the human embassy on the Citadel. Imagine being the first human to meet a Krogan, hearing their language without a translator, and how terrifying that might be. Getting lost in the relay network without a galaxy map. Getting stranded in a cluster with a faulty relay which is inhabited by races that have never met the other known Milky Way races. Using semi-modern weaponry and realising that there's no way to kill an enemy with kinetic barriers.

You don't need to raise the stakes either. The fate of one life, of one ship, space station or planet can feel just as impactful as the fate of the galaxy if done right. 

A simple keyword search would have done that job.

The reasons for not staying in Milky Way are the ME3 endings and not wanting to deal with the consequences. It would have been an impossible job, since they more or less wrote themselves into a corner. The premise is fine, but one could expect them to come back with more than one new race and not to be that reliant on the old Milky Way races for the rest of the game. Apart from the fact that the new race also suffers under the Asari condition of being clones that only varry in color.

Wasn't there similar complaints about every Mass Effect game?

One of the biggest problems about making things alien is frankly in my opinion technology in general and I don't just mean the use of Frostbite. There are physics that all of the games conform to. Even going back to the first game three of the races we encountered just stood in one spot and acted like a minor exposition dump. There was only one place in the first Mass Effect game that really felt alien to me and that was Ilos, nothing else really felt alien to me.

Am sorry but how did MEA have a lighter tone? Liam and Peebee made jokes sure and the Reapers aren't ravaging the entire universe, but this was still a game where we got to see the mutailited corpse of Salarians, the Angarians suffering from alien occupation, Game of Throne-like politics on Kadara, our sibling being tortured and screaming constantly during the climax, and a shit ton of obvious allusions to Nazism and colonialism with the Kett.

Honestly, MEA having all these heavy themes and dark moments and yet pretending its lighter and softer than the original triology is a major reason why this game's narrative feels so mismatched and scattered.

Building environments and species for a new engine is programming and that's not what I meant. When I say you have to create new races and which one you may be leaving behind, I rather mean lore-wise. The OT has already built all that and throwing part of that away is what I would address as the business risk.

With regard to your saying that they at least didn't go back into the ME1 Codex to try and find a Voeld Environment, I would say that such a thing is unnecessary: the Milky Way has an estimate of 100 billion stars and it's estimated diameter is 100,000 light years, so methinks there's ample room for places to go that haven't been visited and have not been taken up in any Codex yet...

I don't think that interest or the absence thereoff features into the creation process. Not with multi million shareholder business. Someone, either at Bioware or EA thought that there was still money to be made and, since Edmonton was busy creating DAI, tasked Montreal with it.

I don't see any romanticism in todays game development. At least not when it comes to so called AAA titles. There are business plans at the roots of these games, not someone having an idea or vision. If market research and the following business plan doesn't promise profit, it wouldn't be done.

You seem to be making the assumption I'm suggesting prequels are inherently inferior - I'm not. I'm pointing out that part of the whole thing of Mass Effect is this full galaxy-spanning epic space opera which deals with mystery that goes back millions of years. That's the basic schtick of the trilogy. Part of the point of Shepard's task is that he's literally doing something no-one in history has ever successfully accomplished.

Clearly, you can have other stories set in the Mass Effect universe - they've already done it. What you can't do is move the whole concept of a Mass Effect game for the new hardware generation on the basis of faffing about on one of the minor backstories - particularly given that the major complaint of MEA is that there's not enough happening. If the argument is that there's not enough aliens, not enough planets, not enough story etc etc etc, why on earth does anyone expect a game set around a bunch of slave raids decades before the basic groundwork ME1 put in is going to fit the bill? Same with the FCW? Hell, that's even better, as that lasted a couple a of days and took place before humans had biotics, so they'd be even less content.

MEA may not have made best use of it's setting, but the actual idea of colonising an entirely new galaxy is a reasonable canvas for making a new saga.

If the argument is that they didn't need to make a new trilogy then I'd point out that the fan expectation was pretty clearly for one. Stuff like Rogue One isn't really a good example as a) it was never styled as a new trilogy and it actually had direct relevance to the original trilogy, as it set into motion the events of ANH. The Skyllian Blitz did nothing like this.

As for whether I answered your point - I wasn't intending to answer it, I was commenting on the part that I quoted.