"Kiss your plot goodbye. Here's loyalty quests and non-important companions!" paraphrased: Mike Gamb

Thats a big assumption right there

He talking about specifically loyalty quest but theres no guarantee that certain companions won't affect main story missions. Hell if you do Wrex's Family Armor quest he barely needs any real convincing on Virmire, Wait for more character and story reveals before shifting to panic mode

You're out of the loop. Mac said "no" when asked if companions could die in the Ask 101 questions video. That's part of where my worrying comes from in regards to these statements. It adds up, see?

I just want to know how we're going to have "loyalty missions" designed to get to know your companions better when everyone is 2.5 million light years away from their old lives.

Yeah, quite the contrary. People probably miss home and are willing to talk about it, and once they get to andromeda they'll probably start looking for things to compensate for the loneliness of being isolated from everything they used to know. Some will be assigned to certain squads with collegues to form stories out of, some may have traveled as a family just like the Ryders, some stumble upon stuff on planets in Andromeda they will require Ryder's help with for personal reasons. Plenty of opportunities. Most interesting would be the more characters who start from scratch with zero pre-existing relations in Andromeda the more those characters will have a sense of agency in forming relationships from the ground up with the people or places that surround them.

I especially get the sense that Peebee might be some sort of vent-thief on the Nexus or from the Asari colony. Even her Racoon motif seems to suggest to me that she's an outcast that thrives in secret hideouts or something. Her story may be subversive to her design, but I do get the feeling that there'll be plenty of good scenarios aboard the Arks and the Andromeda places to make stories... I just really hope it's not only a bunch of character vignettes and then a family drama whilist the bigger plot of settling into Andromeda, meeting the new races and etc. feels like it's background-stuff because so much writing is spent on writing those Loyalty vignettes and mundane drama, detracting from the science-fiction plot of the premise; going to an alien galaxy.

That's true.

Important is not the word I was looking for. More likely they won't be involved in key decisions and events like Bastila and the Star Forge in KoTOR. Not in that way at least. Or fight you like in Jade Empier when you clearly go against their principles. 

But it does match the more light tone of Andromeda. I wonder if squadmates will just be best friends that will never confront or challenge you in any meaningful way.

It sounds like ME2 which isn't a bad thing. It will depend on the main plot though, they need to be careful not to make it too imminently important if they want all players to do the companion missions before completing the main plot. Of course you can probably do the companion missions after the main story is done, although they would have to be of high quality to encourage me to do so. And it makes combat scaling really important. Bioware have never really done a game with good scaling, ME2 is probably the best. In ME3 and ME1 the game got ridiculously easy after you hit a certain level plateau even on the highest difficulty. And now in this they will have everyone potentially doing completely different content at different levels which is a huge challenge to their gameplay team.

There is very little difference about whether the individual characters story effects the final mission or not from my point of view. In ME2 the loyalty and recruitment missions were almost entirely about an individual and distinct story. Yes, whether or not you did them did have an impact on the last mission, but it isn't important for the structure of the story. It was the fact it took you to an entire new area with a separate map and enemies. I still think it sounds more like ME2 than DAI. The companion missions in DAI were in general much shorter areas in terms of gameplay, this sounds like they open up entire new levels etc and DAI only did that in the most superficial manner.

Thanks for the clarification Ian

Can someone else make these currently salt ass threads.

Also, Solas aside, DAI's didn't use most of the cast to be important in the main plot. They turned out fine.

You're losing the edge.

He's not the only dev one that posted or lurk here. Josh Hendricks does too.

As an example, Garrus' loyalty mission is based on a personal history that goes back less than 2 years. Where or how a character grew up, or even where they're from is not necessary to get to know them better. 

When the internet was first created, there was a greeting that said: abandon all hope all ye who log in. True story.