"We have no news at this time" says EA - what's going on with Mass Effect: Andromeda DLC?

However you felt about Mass Effect: Andromeda when it first came out, plenty of people liked the new story of space colonization and cover-based gunfights well enough to want DLC. BioWare has never officially confirmed whether it has any plans to make paid story expansions for the single-player game (bug fixes and multiplayer updates continue to roll out) but that hasn't stopped news from emerging from various sources - some more trustworthy than others.

Here's a quick primer on everything that's going on with Mass Effect: Andromeda DLC, or the lack thereof.

A season pass was ruled out early

BioWare never set much of an expectation for Andromeda DLC in the first place. In fact, it confirmed early on that there would be no season pass - just like the last three main Mass Effect games. I still assumed that there were plans for story DLC whirring away in the background and that we'd hear about them later, but that was just an assumption based on previous experience.

Fans who shared that same assumption were even more convinced by the many story threads that Andromeda left hanging at its conclusion, any one of which would have been perfect for resolving in an expansion. But then the game misfired hard at launch and reports started circulating that Mass Effect had been put on hiatus and its main development workforce had been portioned off into other EA ventures.

A hoax story spread

Don't believe everything you read in official-looking Facebook posts. A group calling itself Sinclair Networks claimed that it had been involved with producing Andromeda's story DLC but that BioWare had decided to nix those plans. In reality, Sinclair Networks was just a tech support group that tried to transition over to big-time hoaxes. Multiple BioWare developers quickly called out the false story on their personal Twitter accounts.

Never heard of Sinclair Networks. Ever.June 29, 2017

While we can't talk about future yet, I can def say we build our own dlc/patches for our games and don't hire fake companies to do so.June 29, 2017

But insiders still say no DLC is coming

Unfortunately, a room full of hoaxsters on typewriters will eventually land on a legitimate angle. Citing anonymous sources with internal knowledge, Kotaku reported that Andromeda indeed will not receive any story DLC. The reason why is pretty much what you'd expect: Andromeda's relatively poor critical and commercial response, which led to developer reshuffling and shifting priorities, just made further work for big story expansions totally impractical. Hanging story threads don't look all that bad next to big, red cost-benefits analyses.

EA's official non-response

"We have no news regarding Mass Effect: Andromeda DLC at this time," an EA representative told me when I asked about the reports. That's the standard response for anything that EA (and pretty much any other big publisher) doesn't want to address. It leaves the door open for further announcements but I wouldn't hold my breath for one. Companies don't typically send out press releases when they decide not to create a product.

If you want to know more about what went wrong, read about how Mass Effect: Andromeda's troubled development led to those infamous animation problems. Or just laugh at some of the worst animation offenders from the Andromeda's super-janky launch.