Mass Effect: Andromeda Is More About Choice Than Story
The latest entry in the beloved video-game series is part of a larger industry trend—offering a vast playground for users without the narrative investment to justify it.
Arguably the biggest contribution in recent years to the space-opera genre—that heady mix of sci-fi, fantasy adventure, and careful plotting that defines works like Star Wars and Doctor Who—has come from a video-game series: Mass Effect. With three titles released in 2007, 2010, and 2012, Mass Effect stood out for its close attention to world-building, complex storytelling, and customizability, allowing players’ choices to shape every narrative arc. The (multiple) endings of Mass Effect 3 were so controversial that the studio BioWare created an “extended cut” to try and mollify a vocally outraged subset of fans.
