The game was put on “temporary hiatus” back in May 2017, with many team members relocated to EA Motive for the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront II. Several game websites had speculated that there would be no more DLC for the game following a mixed reception, underwhelming sales, and middling reviews.
The announcement leaves the future of the franchise in doubt. Plagued by numerous delays, staff changes, and technological difficulties, the ambitious game didn’t seem to realiz its full potential from the beginning, and has relied on the multiplayer loot-box system for much of its revenue.
The other three Mass Effect games had major single-player DLC packs that complemented the main narrative, and this cancellation leaves much of the unfinished Andromeda story in limbo. Whatever happened to Ryder’s family, and who was the Benefactor behind the Andromeda initiative? What about the Quarians? We may never know.
However, BioWare promises that they “will continue to tell stories in the Andromeda Galaxy through our upcoming comics and novels, including the fate of the quarian ark.” More details about multiplayer enhancements and “N7 Day” (November 7th) will be revealed in the coming weeks.
EA and BioWare never seemed happy with the game. In an interview with Engadget, EA Executive Vice President Patrick Soderlund was quite candid about their disappointment with Andromeda. “A game that we launched in the market that doesn’t function and is full of bugs, that’s not who we are and that’s not who we should be,” he said. “With Mass Effect [Andromeda], the game wasn’t maybe as finished as people wanted it to be.”
BioWare is hoping to right the ship with a new franchise set to debut in 2018. Anthem is an open-world sci-fi RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland featuring giant monsters and Iron Man-esque suits of armor.
Still, the announcement about Andromeda marks an inglorious and unfortunate end to an epic franchise that redefined the art of single-player narrative games.
