The third major mistake in Andromeda, and by far the biggest, is this:
They don’t conclude any of the storylines.
Seriously. Not one.
At the end of the game:
- You have reactivated the Remnant sites, putting several worlds back on the path to livability. But that eventual outcome is years in the future, and in the meantime, beyond learning the name of the Remnant builders, you still have no idea who they were, what they were trying to accomplish, if they’re still around somewhere, who sent the Scourge against them, or what, exactly, the Scourge even is.
- You have founded several colonies and made connections with the separatist settlements, beginning the process of rebuilding and restoring the various relationships. But they still continue to live apart from you, regarding you with mistrust and veiled hostility.
- And you’ve defeated the kett leader and eliminated them as a threat to your nascent colonization effort. But it’s a short-term victory, because you learn he wasn’t the overall leader, just a local general, and there’s a vast empire behind him, which will be a problem now that they’re aware of you.
You don’t even get a conclusion to the flashback narrative; instead, there’s one final revelation about your family, with possibly significant implications, but then you decide to table any action until later.
This isn’t a matter of an epic saga that deliberately concludes without tidy endings, telling a large-scale story that finds a satisfying stopping point while suggesting the continuation of life and conflict beyond the final page or after the credit roll.
This is obviously intended as the launch point for a new trilogy, or series, or whatever, with the aim of following the plotlines into the future. So, yes, that requires a lot of setup, and will leave threads dangling to be picked up and developed in subsequent installments. Yes, we expect to be left with certain cliffhangers, hooks to motivate us to continue the story by purchasing the next game when (or, now, if) it’s released.
But Andromeda doesn’t give us any resolution. It leaves everything hanging.
Not only does it not have the focus or discipline to tell us one story, it starts telling us four different stories, and then doesn’t finish any of them. You definitely get the sense that the designers do have at least some of the answers, that they have a general plan for resolving the mysteries and they know where the story is going, but they don’t give us any of that. They have the temerity, the arrogance, to hold back almost everything, blindly trusting that of course the game would be hugely successful and would justify future installments where then we would get our conclusions and our answers.
The presumption of this. The gall.
And they indulge in this unalloyed hubris despite being completely oblivious to the fact that their central story hook, the Remnant mystery, is fatally flawed as narrative, dead and fixed and passive, and requires the piling-on of dozens of hours of semi-adjacent story just to give the player something to do.
This kind of delayed-gratification storytelling can work. The first Mass Effect introduces a villain for us to chase, before revealing that there’s a greater power behind him. In the end of that first episode, we defeat the local antagonist and a single representative of the greater power, and we put off the larger war until later. But that first game is smart enough to give us answers, leading us forward in the story. Imagine if we had defeated Saren, and learned of the existence of something called Reapers, but we didn’t know what they were, and we didn’t know the truth of the Citadel and of the cycle and of the Protheans’ place in it. Imagine how much less satisfying that first game would have been without all of those resolutions.
That’s Andromeda.
And the ironic result of all of this, the misplaced confidence and swaggering ego required to believe that they can get away with offering only part of the story, wrapping up with a “come back next time!” wink, is a failure so catastrophic that it’s unlikely they will get the chance to finish it. Even if we get beyond our irritation at their smug refusal to give us a complete story and allow ourselves to get involved in the world they’ve built, even if we feel some investment in seeing the story through, we now must face the reality that we almost certainly won’t. We’ll never see if the krogans can achieve new maturity and keep their colony together. We’ll never be able to scrub the self-serving and corrupt bureaucrats from Initiative leadership. We’ll never make real peace with the exiles. We’ll never have the chance to destroy the terrible kett once and for all. We’ll never know who really built the Remnant sites or who inflicted the Scourge on them. We’ll never know the truth of the angara. We’ll never get to go rescue the quarian ark.
It’s maddening.
And it’s all part and parcel with the distinct feeling that not only did the designers never really figure out what story they were telling, they couldn’t clearly decide what game they were making.
