Interesting excerpt from Mac interview regarding Andromeda as a series and where it's going next

Yeah at least Hawke can go back to Kirkwall and live it up with Viscount Tethras.

I'd prefer Bioware not go down the route of new protagonists every game like dragon age, as dragon age already does that, but if they do then it would be nice if we could play as someone other than a human. After all if they are going to just keep us as human all the time then they may as well continue the adventures of Ryder and friends IMHO.

Name other franchises that carry the same protagonist and the choices through save games across trilogy of games.

That's right. Remove that and you remove single-handedly most unique aspect of ME Trilogy in modern game industry that played a massive part in player investement and attachement to the series despite all the fuckups with actual consequences to carried choices.

This "standalone" route, likely meaning changining protagonists, sounds utterly unambitious and trying to play is as safe as much as possible. Yawn.

Wise decision by Bioware.

Ryder sucks so bad we don't want another game with em.

The Mass Effect equivalent of Assassin's Creed Connor

Just a quick note, but ME2 can be played after the critical path ends. Not sure exactly how much you can really do since I tend to do everything before the main campaign ends in the vanilla game, but LotSB, Arrival and Overlord can be played whenever. 

In ME2, you can basically do any missions after the suicide mission that you haven't already done before it.  Of course, there are a certain number of missions that must be done before the next set of main story missions will trigger. 

In ME1, you can do all the main missions with the exception of Ilos and then do any or all of the main mission quests.  It seems odd, though, in light of the urgency of getting to Ilos once Shepard steels the Normandy; but the game does not actually penalize the player for doing them.

In ME3, the game will return you again to the point just before you begin the assault on TIM's base, you can then do any missions you missed and redo the assault and endgame after that point.

I don't believe that Mac is saying that Ryder will disappear completely in the next installment,  The nice thing about Ryder being a pathfinder is that he/she has a job that involves continued exploration as the game world is perhaps expanded into other clusters.  What I'm wondering is whether or not he means that we will be able to return to hubs in Heleus and the colonies there even as the game expands outside that particular cluster; but the story itself will be completely independent of any of the decisions we made during this first game.  Ideally, we might be able to choose our character from Ryder or any of the other pathfinders introduced in ME:A1.

It's not that simple. If they stayed this route we'd inevitably get a ME3 again. All your choices would get funneled into one plot point and you might not like that anyway. The nice thing about games like DAO is that since the game is meant to be standalone they can focus on making games choices more meaningful without worrying about the virtually impossible job of tying it together in 3 games. Character deaths for example led to really bad consequences as potentially dead characters ended up with less dialogue than others. Characters that could've been interesting had the personality sucked out of them because they could die. This is why Liara was so prevalent in ME3 - she couldn't die in the trilogy and thus she got a big role in the game.

Let's be real here -  you could cut out ME2 from the trilogy and the story would be barely affected in any way. You'd just wonder why that Reaper at the end of ME3 had four eyes. The Collectors (what a name) were a B-story villain at best that didn't matter in the larger scheme of things. ME1 was chock full of plot points that were relegated to codex entries and one-liners in the dialogue. They did what they could but a lot was left up to the imagination. And then there was the Rachni...

Besides all of that, being invested in a character depends greatly on the writing of that character. You shouldn't need to read three books to finally care about a character. Making 10 games or 1 shouldn't have a difference on that. Carried choices are great - but Bioware is having problems with making them relevant for just single games let alone a trilogy. In fact standalone stories will allow Bioware to be waaaay more ambitious since they no longer will have to worry about the consequences of plot points carrying over and - THEY CAN WRITE WHAT THEY WANT.

Sure maybe it is possible to get the game to work in the way you want it to. But it's not practical. To do the kind of game you want (and to make it better) would require time and resources that I frankly doubt EA will ever give them. In a vacuum sure it would be great. But I don't think something like the MET is ever going to be attempted again by anyone without unlimited resources.

I want my ryder to grow over games. I want my ryder to return for the next few games. Having a new character each game is the least fun experience for me. My shepard was awesome because I was with her for three games. My witcher was awesome because I watched him evolve. Getting new characters each game feels way less fun to me than evolving them. That is why shepard was a huge success. That is why the characters were a huge success. Unless they want to dig way deeper than they have there with this one on stories and arcs, this is not sufficient for a stand alone game as others have noted. We need to have characters develop and grow, see their arc over time to really see the richness of them, including their own ryder. Part of the fun of this game for me is knowing there is more to come and that this is just the start. If it turns out that this was all my ryder did and all I see of the characters, I think I would be feeling pretty meh about this game. Even the thought of it now is less compelling to me. I want to watch my character grow, to see that. This was not really a character growing, it was a character dealing with some shit and coming into their own but not really getting a chance to be in their own. They are stronger at the end for it, but after shepard experience, it's sort of meh by comparison. It is the equivalent of leaving shepard at ME1 and then switching off to some different character for ME2 and ME3.

I like the idea of a new protagonist moving the world of Andromeda forward. references, appearances, consultations with Ryder and friends could tie the series together, along with a shared history of galaxy/world events.

No it isn't. Read in between the lines and you can hear that they don't want carry over decisions. Why else would they take that route?

Pretty much anything except LMs for dead characters. I generally do at least Jacob's LM after the conclusion, since it isn't time-critical. Plus any N7 I haven't stumbled across yet.

Yeah preferably not. I would preferably play again as Ryder however with all the arks there is plenty of opportunities to play as another race.