Wait how do they get around without mass relays. Haven't heard anything about this

We only need Mass Relays to travel between star clusters. For example, you'd need a relay to travel from the Horse Head Nebula to Hades Nexus. Once in Hades Nexus, though, you could access the entire cluster via standard FTL travel. Thus, the entire Heleus Cluster will be accessible to us in Andromeda. MEA is set in a single star cluster.

The Mass Relays were only needed for long distance FTL travel. Secondary Mass Relays allowed a ship to travel hundreds of light years to another Mass Relay in an instant, and Primary Mass Relays allowed the same for thousands of light years. This allowed clusters to be connected. Once you got within a cluster and were doing short distance travel, you used your ship's Mass Effect drive which allows a ship of our cycle to travel between 12 to 15 light years in a day and overall about 25 light years before needing to stop and discharge the static buildup. The people of the Andromeda Initiative developed the ODSY Drive to allow the Nexus and four Arks to no longer need to discharge and instead harness that energy to allow the trip to Andromeda without Mass Relays though at the speed of our drives, hence the 600 years it takes for us to get there.

I am sad that there will be no Mass Relays in Mass Effect: Andromeda and potentially never again. They were like the icon of the franchise for me.

The had FTL capability on Mass Effect ships and could travel from system to system and they did so regularly, even shuttles had this according to lore.

The Mass Relays of the milkyway however allowed faster access to every connected star cluster in the galaxy at even greater speeds in some cases almost instant transfers.

The Andromeda mission briefing sugests that the intent is to connect to the Milkway through a future relay, that however is a future project for once their civilisation has reached the economic and industrial capability to pull such a thing off. Right now they have to survive and then expand their economy before they can even consider such a project. It's considered a oen way trip for everyone so it will proably take at least a millenia according to their expectations to get to the point where they can build a relay to linkup with the milkyway.

If they get a relay going then travel between the galaxies might become common... Far into the future, or in theory, it could.

You probably need one QEC Quantum entanglement communicator on each end to syncronise two relays. Either they got that or someone will have to do that journey again in the future. Then they need to construct a relay on both ends or at the very least connect the newly built one in Andromeda to one of the ones in the Milkyway.

I guess very far into the future it won't matter which ending you picked because everyone will probably be cyberneticly enhanced anyway so it would be like synthesis. They already got biotic amps and their interfaces and other similar devices in the milkyway before the Reaper storyline started, so with or without synthesis it seems more such tech will integrate itself and probably on a nanolevel and down to molecular since that would be the most efficient.

Other than Shepard people probably won't be too up to date on the details one or a few millenia from that point, there has probably been a lot of other major events since then that feels more current and urgeant by that time.

So, there is plenty to do in Andromeda, and I think they could reconnect the galaxies a century or two into the future. The council races didn't advance their tech too quicly in the few millenia they were playing around on the Citadel before Humanity joined them. So it shouldn't be that hard to just advance the story a millenia and wipe the slate clean for future installment into the IP, mostly.

According to lore less than 1% of the milkyway was explored.... So there was still a lot of exploring to be done in the known clusters of the milkyway.

For some reason they thought it would be interestign and a good idea to expand into Andromeda aswell. Why now, though it's an extreme project. According to briefing the project started as a human initiated project by wealthy businesses and people who probably wanted prestige. Then they got very powerful and influential backers that increased the scope of the project... I'm guessing the Council decided to support the project and use it as a lifeboat to save their civilisations hoping their species might survive in Andromeda even if they get wiped out in the milkyway like those thousand previous cycles of sentient species.

So I guess you  could say that it started with humans being humans doing what the vikings and columbus and all those other explorers did, and then when the others heard... Oh... You're leaving the galaxy? We will come along!

I wonder who got the worst time ahead of them, the ones who decided to run away with the human explorers, or the ones that stayed to fight the reapers...

They got there the hard way using conventional FTL travel which took 600 years.
I suggest you take a look at the briefing videos here garrusfan www.masseffect.com/andromeda-initiative

We assume it's a relay, at least, since the Milkies are familiar with no other means of "linking" the two galaxies. I suspect we may find some alternate means of long-range FTL within the Remnant vaults. That doesn't mean we've seen the last of the relays, but I don't know that we will necessarily need them to explore Andromeda.

I keep thinking of that big space station looking "vault" that kept popping up during the early days. I believe it was an official concept art order. It always looked like some sort of transit hub, to me. It may not be, but I just thought of it again, as I was typing this comment. The Remnant got around somehow, and it didn't involve a Mass Relay network. (I'm just assuming they had a galactic presence.)

Edit:

This thing, for visual reference:

I find it rather unbelievable that the Helius cluster is closed off from the rest of Andromeda. That would make those other developed alien species confined to the helius cluster. I think the remnant might have left something ala Mass Relay technology.

However, I also would find it hard to believe that if there were ways of transportation between the other clusters of Andromeda, then our enemies faction would not call in reinforcements from said other clusters.

What do you guys think?

Sometimes I think we could some FAQ thread, because these questions seem to pop up every week. "How do we travel without relays?", "Which species will be there?", "Can I romance a hanar?", "Which ending is canon?" and all that stuff which way too often comes to minds of people who played ME and just heard about MEA. On the other hand half of first page is stuck already.

Has there ever been a limit on the range two Mass Relays could be at? So for example a link between clusters is not too far (for Mass Relays) but could they as well be put between galaxies in order to link the Milky Way and Andromeda?

I kind of feel like the Nexus is under construction during the voyage to Andromeda and will finalize construction within Andromeda and become a Mass Relay connecting the two galaxies. I would hope a major decision in Andromeda would be if we want the relay to connect back home or not. 600 years gives a lot of time for AI's or whoever to keep investigating and finalize how to recreate a Mass Relay, not to mention they'll still receive transmissions from the Milky Way, although obviously the further they get the longer it will take to reach them. So they could still have updates from major investigation centers on Mass Relay tech and how to recreate it for the Nexus.

As for within Andromeda, as it has been said before, the game only takes place within the Heleus Cluster and Mass Relays are not needed to travel within clusters.

Yeah but "long distance travel" being anything that takes more than a day or two to get there.

Unless we're taking the Hyperion everywhere, the Helius cluster must be an incredibly dense cluster to have so many stars with inhabitable worlds so close together.

And yeah it's a shame there's no mass relays.  They were practically the symbol of Mass Effect.  Part of the fear that this is pretty much Mass Effect In Name Only.

The OSDY drive doesn't make you traverse space faster like relay does, it simple remove the need to discharge into a planet atmosphere allowing for longer FTL travel.