Mass Effect Andromeda: 10 New Gameplay Features That Will Change Everything
2. It's Going Fully Open-World
The original Mass Effect games stuck fairly rigidly to BioWare’s traditional RPG formula. As in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, players could travel to hub worlds, wherein they were able to explore one or two large locations.
The first game also experimented with exploration, offering up a series of sandbox planets that could be discovered and explored in the Mako vehicle. The only problem was, each planet was about as varied and detailed as a real life sandbox, with each new world feeling more like a carbon copy of the last.
Andromeda will attempt to reintroduce some of these elements. As the Pathfinder, your goal will be to colonise new worlds. As such, more of a focus is being put on exploring open environments. This has led a lot of fans to speculate that Mass Effect: Andromeda might be tearing a few pages from Dragon Age: Inquisition’s book, forcing the player to traverse open environments for little more than collect-a-thon quests.
BioWare have reiterated that this isn’t the case, and that each discoverable world will come with its own rich set of stories. An anonymous source at BioWare claimed that the game takes more inspiration from The Witcher III than Inquisition: “We’ve done and learned a lot from Inquisition. But we’ve also observed what other games have been doing, like The Witcher. And it was very important for us that the quantity of scope doesn’t downgrade the quality of whatever you are doing.”
Each planet will come with at least one base, which can be cleared of enemies in order to further colonise its respective world, a gameplay feature often found in Ubisoft’s open world games.