Mass Effect: Andromeda Creative Director Believes Bioware Could Have Made a Better Sequel if It Was Greenlit

One of the leading men behind Bioware’s military science fiction franchise Mass Effect is Mac Walters.

Alongside the legendary Casey Hudson, Walters was part of the development team behind the original Mass Effect trilogy. Following Hudson’s exit from Bioware and Gérard Lehiany’s departure as game director, Walters took over the reins of the franchise’s most recent mainline title, Mass Effect: Andromeda.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Walters talked about his working in Bioware and the various Mass Effect games. Furthermore, he shed more detail behind the troubled development behind Mass Effect: Andromeda.

Plans for procedurally generated world in Mass Effect: Andromeda

In his interview, Walters talked about him taking charge of Andromeda from Lehiany in 2014. At the time, the series was looking to introduce some major changes to the formula by introducing elements of procedurally generated worlds akin to the ones you see in No Man’s Sky.

However, that never materialised. Walters said, “Ultimately, that was too much at odds with a lot of the way that we tell stories, and the way that we create our content, which tends to be very bespoke – a lot of big set-pieces and things like that. It’s hard to translate into a procedural world.”

Plans for sequels

Unlike the original series, Andromeda was planned to be the start of a trilogy. However, Walters explained that the devs at Bioware wanted it to be the start of a new series. “I think the idea of carrying plots and story and characters through the series, and choice and consequence, was actually part of it on Andromeda, but early days Andromeda, and I wasn’t on the project then,” he stated.

Walters, along with several Bioware veterans who worked on the original trilogy, was initially working on Anthem. However, following Hudson and Lehiany’s exit, he was brought in to work on Andromeda, which featured a new development team with few veterans like Walters himself.

The development of Andromeda was marred by issues of huge scope, such as the procedurally generated worlds, which were later removed. Along with that, the team also faced problems while using the new Frostbite engine. When Andromeda came out in 2017, it was met with disappointment from critics and fans, and it eventually caused Bioware to put the franchise on the back burner.

Walters accepted the gripes that fans had with the game, especially in comparison to its predecessor, Mass Effect 3. However, he noted that the latter became widely successful because of the improvements it made from the previous titles.

Walters believes that him and Bioware could have done something similar, if they had been given the chance to work on a sequel to Mass Effect: Andromeda. “I only wish we had been able to then do a second one, because then you would have really seen that polish just like we did from [ME1] to [ME2] on the original [trilogy],” he noted.

At the moment, it’s unclear whether the studio has any plans for a new title for the series, despite recent teases. However, if such a project arises, it will be made without Walters, as he announced his departure from the studio earlier this year.