IGN Video: Mass Effect Andromeda: A Tour of the Nexus

Here's an idea. A lot of the good talent left the company over the last 5 years. The same goes for the story which worries me the most. Part of me is hopeful in that so much of the main talent working on Andromeda in fact never worked on Mass Effect before (aside from DLC and remote work) but I'm especially worried now that it's this soft-reboot that the IP, the setting, the new stuff that isn't just reintroduced or reiterated the way ME2 and ME3 did (becuase ME1 set up the universe so brilliantly in 2007), is not going to be as memorable or well-written and therefore you fail to feel as attatched to Andromeda's Mass Effect universe compared to what ME1 made you feel. Things like, is there enough depth to the new lore for a sequel to flesh it out and keep it interesting?

I'm just saying, I was a huge Ace Attorney fan and that series degraded as soon as the main writer was done with his trilogy. It wasn't very noticeable at first but soon enough I just stopped caring and not because it was too much of the same but because you could feel how all it had going for it was the work the original writer had done. His IP conventions, the setting, the implicit rules of the narrative and the cast, but slowly it was bastardized and just going by the last 3 games the script was painfully dull, almost not even re-capturing the characterization of past characters. It got dumbed down and less interesting. I've got this feeling for a long time that this is happening to Mass Effect, if not now, it could happen someday... to any franchise, but Mass Effect is/was so rich and good you just hope it keeps staying that way.

Going to Andromeda is a huge risk in terms of recreating whatever wonder or draw the series had to begin with. We're partly covered by the Milky Way species but what about everything that isn't that. Am I really going to care for this less contemporary setting that happens 600 years in the future with Earth nowhere in sight? Part of the applicability and pondering aspects, maybe just part of the "sci-fi" is kinda gone now... unless they do a great job with whatever Andromeda is. However, they said they started by "coming up with characters" and that's not really reassuring to me, because no great plot will ever come of that approach. David Gaider said that the first character he ever inserted into the time and setting of Dragon Age Inquisition was Solas, and that turned out to be the biggest narrative pull that tied the whole game's plot together in many ways. The throughline was created from him. I'm hoping Mac or Schlerf wrote Alec and co. first and then they came up with companions because if they truly started thinking "ME4 guys: Let's create companions, 2 humans, one Krogan, Asari, Turian and an unknown species!" then that's a bit worrying to me in terms of narrative.