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The black sheep of BioWare’s franchise holds its own against the original trilogy

Image: BioWare/EA

The original Mass Effect trilogy is pretty cool. But know what’s really cool? Mass Effect: Andromeda. Tomatoes down, please!

Mass Effect: Andromeda, released in 2017 for PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One, served as both a spinoff and a sequel to the core Mass Effect trilogy of space opera RPGs. Whereas the original trilogy is well-regarded as some of developer BioWare’s strongest work, Andromeda…is not. It was marred by a turbulent development cycle, and eventually released in an infamously glitchy state. Players also criticized its open-world bloat and narrative threads that were left unfinished. Ask five Mass Effect fans to rank the Mass Effect games, and five of them will put Mass Effect: Andromeda last.

Ask a sixth, though (hi), and you might get a different answer.

Technically set between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, the bulk of Andromeda’s story takes place 600 years after Shepherd and crew saved the day. As species-eliminating creatures called Reapers ravage the Milky Way galaxy, a privately funded enterprise finances construction of a series of ark ships. They set forth to our neighboring Andromeda galaxy, with a plan to reestablish life somewhere giant intergalactic cephalopods wouldn’t demolish everyone they knew and loved with nuclear lasers.

Image: BioWare/EA

Of course, grass that’s 2.537 million light years away isn’t always greener. Andromeda’s primary races — the battle-hungry Kett and the scholarly Angara — are locked in a struggle over their corner of the galaxy, a string of habitable star systems known as the Heleus Cluster, which, by the way, surrounds a black hole, and is plagued by an anomalous mass of energy that eludes all explanation. Whatever causes the anomaly also appears to have woken up a sentient, and antagonistic, race of ancient robots. Meanwhile, the Milky Way’s arkships are scattered to the winds, and it’s up to your character, a plucky explorer named Ryder, to find real estate on safe planets for society to set down roots.

The original Mass Effect trilogy trafficked in compelling but straightforward action. You knew the stakes. You knew your enemy. Andromeda, by contrast, is all mystery — about figuring out what went wrong and how, and identifying what, or who, is responsible. (The intrigue is wrapped in a prescient critique of our real-life billionaire class, specifically those who insist on privately funding humanity’s expansion off-planet.) In classic BioWare fashion, Andromeda teams you up with a rogues gallery of standout companions, including a meditative Angara, an obsessive Asari, and, because a Mass Effect is incomplete without this one, a Krogan who loves getting right into the action.

And how great that action is! Even its staunchest critics agreed that Andromeda’s combat system was unimpeachable (well, when the framerates behaved). Previous Mass Effect games were typical cover-based third-person shooters — standard late-2000s stuff. But Andromeda gave you jet packs, and additionally didn’t limit abilities to specific classes, so you could mix and match biotic powers to your heart’s content. These coalesced into a combat system that had you darting around the battlefield like a telekinetically powered Iron-Man.

Image: BioWare/EA

It’s a shame BioWare has yet to have a decent chance to fully explore these ideas in a proper follow-up — something creative director Mac Walters told Eurogamer in 2023 he wished the studio could’ve done. The combat mechanics could’ve used another wave of polish, mirroring the technological leap between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 in the early 2010s. And while Andromeda’s story wrapped up its major conflicts, it left key questions about its setting unanswered, and went full MCU with a credits stinger teasing an Even Bigger Threat. (Codex entries also suggested nefarious connections to characters from the main trilogy, tying Andromeda to some of the events that unfold in Mass Effect 3. Those threads remain unresolved.) The studio extensively patched Mass Effect: Andromeda after release, to the point where it now arguably functions as smoothly as any game from the era, but the damage was done.

Following Mass Effect: Andromeda, BioWare’s next project was the live-service shooter Anthem, and we all know how that went. A planned overhaul was canceled in 2021, and its servers are now scheduled to shut down for good in 2026. Anthem was followed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which also featured live-service elements at one point in development before the studio pivoted it to a single-player game. The Veilguard ended up reviewing decently (though, side note, it’s another BioWare RPG that deserved better) but nevertheless failed to meet EA’s sales expectations. In September, a group of private investors, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, announced a $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, BioWare’s parent company. No matter how you cut it, that’s the sort of figure that demands profitability from its acquisitions.

As of this writing, BioWare is working on the next Mass Effect game, first announced in 2020. Though details included in pre-release marketing suggest the next Mass Effect will connect to Andromeda in some way, the studio hasn’t officially confirmed as much. But given its recent history, the future of BioWare — and of Mass Effect — is more uncertain than ever.

In the event we never get a sequel, Mass Effect Andromeda would leave behind a legacy worthy of the space operas that inspired the series, whose creators knew you didn’t need to spell out every detail of a far-away galaxy to inspire legions of fans. Absent definitive answers for Andromeda, amid the grandiosity and infinite universes of possibility, it’s up to our imaginations to fill in the blanks.