11 Ways Bioware Should Have Made Mass Effect Andromeda

5. Make Ryder's Memories Integral To The Story, Or Lose Them Entirely

Fundamentally, there's little point in letting the player customise a character and have agency in their personality, if you're going to make them act a certain way regardless. Mass Effect 3 suffered from this, as you could've played the previous two as a total war-machine psychopath, only to get completely hung up on the death of one child at the beginning of the game.

As such, in Andromeda, Ryder has a completely optional tie to a series of memories that detail his or her backstory, fleshing out father Alec Ryder as someone who struggled to balance his work with his home life, and ultimately, these sequences reveal the assumed-dead mother Ryder is still alive - albeit in cryostasis.

All of these memories are fascinating and ultimately worthwhile, which is why it's baffling they remain optional. Either make them a key part of the story and give us more reason to empathise with Ryder's 'bumbling idiot saves the galaxy' shtick, or lose them entirely and continue the same "the past doesn't matter, but fill in the blanks if you like" Shepard style.

There's a real problem with how malleable Ryder is in Andromeda, as Bioware appear to want to write a defined character they can market and talk about, whilst simultaneously ticking the box of the original trilogy's DIY approach.

You can't have both. It has to be one or the other, to which I'd say, go with the latter.