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Mass Effect: Andromeda straps a jetpack on your back and lets you go to town while fighting and exploring, but don't expect to soar around like Pharah from Overwatch. Andromeda lead designer Ian S. Frazier told us in an interview about how adding the jetpack to the game changed other, unexpected areas, and how the team deliberately tried not to boost jump too far with it.
At first, Andromeda's movement system was much more like Mass Effect 3, which doesn't even let you jump outside of context-sensitive actions. Then Dragon Age: Inquisition (which was also in development at the time, but much further along) added a jump button. That got the team thinking about how to give players the gift of at-will vertical movement, whether to settle for a quick gym-class hop, full-on flight, or something in between.
"We’re still a cover shooter, we’re not suddenly changing into a radically different game," Frazier explained. "We still want you to feel tactical, to think about what you’re doing. We want something that feels sci-fi appropriate, so jetpack. We want something that’ll let you get to a new tactical position in the battlefield. It’s not about hopping on someone’s head, it’s about getting up here and being able to have an advantage over this particular fight".
A problem emerged: once the jetpack was in, a lot of the old moves like the combat roll from Mass Effect 3 felt "slow and kinda stupid" by comparison.
"So we converted all those over to what you see now, so you have all these jet dodges and it built from there," Frazier said. "We added new functionality like hover jets, aiming while you’re in the air. Well, if we’ve got jump we should do something with it, so we have some moments in our progression so you can allow your hover to last longer or to be more accurate as you’re hovering, as you’ve seen in the combat skill tree. So you can be, ‘I’m all about jump, let me specialize in being good with jump,’ if you want to. And if you don’t, good, you don’t have to".
With all of those fun jetpack opportunities for combat, Andromeda must really make you earn your pilot wings when you're exploring alien new worlds, right? No, not really. In fact, Frazier said he tried to "make platformer a bad word for the team" because it's so easy to overdo.
"We didn’t want it to feel like you can’t play this game if you’re not good at leaping from platform to platform"
If you do want to play some Mario Effect, you may find some challenges waiting for you in the form of dedicated dungeons. Well, space dungeons, along with other space dungeons that will test your ability to solve puzzles or clear difficult combat encounters and so on. But it's not a huge part of the game.
"We didn’t want it to feel like you can’t play this game if you’re not good at leaping from platform to platform," Frazier assured us. "I would say that we have it but the general rule is that if it’s in critical role content, like main story, main missions, it doesn’t require a tremendous amount of skill to do, it is pretty straightforward. If you get into some of the optional side areas, you’re exploring some totally optional ancient tomb, and you want to get to the awesome treasure, yeah you might have to do some interesting platforming to get to that."
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