Mass Effect Andromeda won't reflect your Mass Effect 3 ending choice

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Mass Effect 3 ended with some galaxy-wide consequences, no matter which of the three options you chose. Accounting for all of those possibilities in Mass Effect: Andromeda - which BioWare has confirmed is set after the events of the trilogy - would be quite a task, but BioWare has landed on a tidy way to start fresh without negating your decision. The answer's right in the name.

"We've done it in such a way that allows all of those decisions you made to remain intact in the canon of the universe, but also allows a new story to begin," BioWare Edmonton general manager Aaryn Flynn told Eurogamer. The Mass Relays, which (Mass Effect 3 spoilers from here on out) spread and amplified Shepard's choice across the galaxy, were only seeded in one galaxy. For now, BioWare wants to leave the glowing green cyber people and other potential results back in the Milky Way and focus on Andromeda.

"We want this to be a new story and it would be very hard to say it's a new story but also that you need to understand how [the past trilogy] ended," Flynn noted. It seems likely that the central colony ship of Mass Effect: Andromeda was dispatched before the end of Mass Effect 3 as a Reaper survival ark (so you'll encounter plenty of familiar species within its halls), but the crew has likely spent decades, if not centuries, asleep.

As for why we didn't see more of the game at EA's E3 press conference - you wouldn't know it was Andromeda's third E3 from the brief presentation - Flynn said it came down to logistics: EA needed to use its E3 time to focus on 2016 games like Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1. Don't expect to see much more of Andromeda until N7 day (that's November 7).

"There's definitely more stuff we could have shown or talked about," Flynn said. "But now we're shipping next spring, the time to really blast all that out there is after the other games come out. We'll be there then to have a great big reveal and release all the details."

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Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan
Former GamesRadar+ News Writer

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.