Mass Effect 4 Should Avoid Big Andromeda Mistake

Mass Effect 4 is currently in pre-production, which it's now been in for two years as BioWare primarily focuses on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. In other words, the game's direction, design philosophies, and more are still taking shape. To this end, BioWare should avoid a big mistake it made with Mass Effect: Andromeda while making this new Mass Effect game. 

The first Mass Effect game took about 17 to 42 hours to beat/complete, depending on your playstyle. Mass Effect 2 took 24 to 50 hours. Mass Effect 3 also took 24 to 50 hours. And then there is Mass Effect: Andromeda, which took 18 to 92 hours. The time to mainline all four of these games is fairly similar, but the time to complete a majority of the content or 100 percent Mass Effect Andromeda is roughly double the other games. 

Why is this? Well, because Mass Effect: Andromeda has multiple open worlds for players to explore. The first Mass Effect game also had this, but it was so rudimentary and not even in the same spirit that it didn't greatly contribute to the total playtime. And then with Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, the games became far more linear, and in turn, the series really hit its stride. 

Open-world games are not inherently bad, but Mass Effect is not an open-world series, and when BioWare tried to make Mass Effect: Andromeda an open-world game, it stumbled. The worlds were big and beautiful, but boring to explore and interact with outside of the funny character banter that could be heard as you drove the NOMAD around from point of interest to point of interest.  It was boring, and more importantly, it wasn't Mass Effect, which isn't about exploring space but witnessing an epic narrative unfold through well-realized and written characters.

Not only did we witness BioWare fail to make Mass Effect open-world, but we witness it with Dragon Age: Inquisition. The latest Dragon Age game is a great game, but its empty and lifeless open worlds were the weakest part of its experience and didn't do anything to improve the game's story or characters, which is why you're playing a BioWare game to begin with. 

You can tell a great story and have great characters in a vast open world or across multiple big open worlds linked together by fast travel, but it's difficult and expensive. And more importantly, it's not Mass Effect and it's not what Mass Effect fans want. We would love to explore space and planets, but we don't need to spend dozens and dozens of hours running MMO-style fetch quests and driving around in a vehicle to experience the vastness and richness of space. If you can make several big open-world environments and make them interesting, then have at it, but BioWare has demonstrated it can't do that. And it probably doesn't have the necessary budget in place to even do it in the first place. So keep the scope simple, don't be afraid to be linear, and focus on giving Mass Effect fans what they want the most: more of the trilogy.