That Mass Effect: Andromeda trailer didn't feature the lead character

The Mass Effect: Andromeda trailer was pretty great, a clear focus on exploration into the unknown (jacking the old "Wild West but in spaaaace" motif from Firefly, you'll notice) with just enough familiar details to make it feel comfortable. A little too comfortable, in fact.

When I see an N7 logo, I think "hero" (well, in a video game, I suppose - if I see it in real life, I think "games journalist with a limited wardrobe"), which is why many jumped to the conclusion that the shadowy armoured figure in the trailer was our Shepard replacement. According to the Bioware blog, this is very much not the case:

"While we aren’t ready to go into too many details just yet," writes Studio Manager, Aaron Flynn, "as you saw in the trailer and can tell by the name, this game is very much a new adventure, taking place far away from and long after the events of the original trilogy. You will play a human, male or female, though that’s actually not the character you saw in the trailer (more on that later)."

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It seems we've got a little wait to see our new protagonist(s) in action - but we have seen something a little more solid in the process. As Flynn puts it: "We built this trailer in Frostbite, our game engine, and it represents our visual target for the final game". It might be a little too much to hope that the game looks as good as a flashy intro trailer, but I'm rooting for Bioware all the same.

Other details in the blog are pretty hazy - a new team to fight and romance, the return of the Mako - but they each come a little closer to confirming the "leaked" details in that juicy survey that floated around the internet a little while back - which, if you don't remember, sounded like a pretty rad video game.