In our Mass Effect: Andromeda review, we said, “What’s bizarre is that BioWare took the trouble to send us 2.5 million light years away to introduce just two new alien races (plus some robots) for more than 50 years. hours of campaign and major side missions, and only one local will join your crew. “Apparently this wasn’t the original plan, and many of the developers on Andromeda recently spoke with TheGamer to discuss why these new alien species never made it to the final game.
“I think it was a project that couldn’t possibly have lived up to expectations,” said Neil Pollner, a senior writer on Mass Effect 3 and has written parts of Andromeda. “Not only the high bar of the original trilogy, but also the logical expectations that someone would have if Mass Effect went to a whole new galaxy. Because the scope of [the first] Mass Effect was so unbelievably great that there was an inherent promise that you would get a huge new experience with a lot of new things in [what was supposed to be the first] Mass Effect Andromeda – new species, new knowledge, a whole new galaxy at your fingertips, etc.
‘But we only got the budget for two new species, plus the Remnant. Not to mention that we couldn’t even include all species of the Milky Way. And we couldn’t let you travel the galaxy. This meant we had to develop the story around some pretty glaring inorganic constraints. So not only did you get something that felt (and was) much smaller than what you got before, almost everyone who played the game probably had something they really liked about Mass Effect that just wasn’t there. “Pollner continued to discuss how they had grand plans in pre-production, including expanding the “first contact” experience with new aliens, but most of that work wasn’t even used.
Chris Hepler, another longtime Mass Effect writer, discussed how he suggested five or six new alien strains, and ex-Bioware writer Jo Berry had also come up with a few that were “great.”
Dorian Kieken, who was the franchise design director at the start of Andromeda’s development, explained that some of the early alien concepts were “ beautiful out there ” and that they were dropped because one of Mass Effect Andromeda’s goals was to make it for make fans easy to cosplay the characters of the game.
“One of the strengths of the original Mass Effect trilogy is that you can actually cosplay most of the alien characters except the Hanar, although I wouldn’t underestimate the creativity of some cosplayers,” said Kieken. “Mass Effect Andromeda’s intent was to introduce new races that would still be in the field of cosplay, which is probably why more crazy concepts were abandoned.”
In fact, Kieken said the two alien races that reached Andromeda gradually shifted to “cosplay-safe territory,” with the team trying to avoid “jellyfish” types of aliens.
While you can hope some of these designs find their way into the next Mass Effect project, fans of the series can look forward to interacting with the original set of aliens in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition in May.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.