For years, Mass EffectFan Fiction writers have used the idea of the male and female versions of Shepard being brother and sister as an excuse to include both in the story. For Andromeda, the developers themselves decided to use that idea so they could include both versions of Ryder.
Also in the case of Jaal, many fans expected him to be bisexual in the game and went as far as spread rumors about their perceived sexual orientation of the character, with support from the findings of dataminers. When the game actually came out, Jaal was indeed revealed to be a romance option but only for a female Ryder. The developers after listening to some feedback from fans, eventually decided to officially make Jaal bisexual and made him a romance option for a male Ryder when the game was updated by patch 1.08.
Author's Saving Throw: Two weeks after release, BioWare announced several patches and future content updates that addressed many gripes about the game, including improved character creation, improvements to gay romance options for male Ryder, and a tweak to Hainly Abrams' dialogue. BioWare also publicly apologized for Hainly Abrams' depiction.
Dummied Out: Before patch 1.08, there were various unuseddialoguefiles suggesting that Jaal was intended to be a bisexual romance option at one point during development. The discovery of this content fed into the game's criticism for lack of same-sex male romance content, and as a result, it was ultimately restored in patch 1.08.
According to several Bioware artists who worked on the game and spoke to YouTuber Liam Robertson, upper management decided facial models and animations of human characters were to be completely outsourced to another EA studio, possibly EA Bucharest, because they did not see them as important enough to be done by the studio employees themselves. Bioware artists were not even allowed to polish the faces and animations done by the other studio in any way.
Also, Electronic Arts heavily pushed for the use of the Frostbite Game Engine created by EA DICE, despite limitations which include: difficulty rendering large open environments (slightly central for an Wide-Open Sandbox game) and total lack of support for RPG Elements (slightly central for a Role-Playing Game).
The Premium edition, which included costumes, gear, and a pet monkey for the single player campaign.
The Premium Plus edition, which contained everything in the Premium edition plus a pile of multiplayer equipment loot boxes.
The one that became famous, though, was the Collector's Edition which included a remote control toy copy of the vehicle from the game, a steel game box, and no game. What was intended by the title was that it was a collector's edition of the model, but this was in no way obvious from the ad copy that listed "Mass Effect Andromeda Collector's Edition" in big letters and then "Diecast/Remote Control Nomad ND1" in a different font below that.
Meaningful Release Date: Unintentionally. The game is being released in North America on March 21, 2017, which reads as "3/21" on American calendars. BioWare Director Aaryn Flynn has said the developers didn't even realize the significance of the release date until fans pointed it out to them.note The significance being that the date is jokingly referred to as "3, 2, 1... (launch!)", which fits the game's space theme.
Kumail Nanjiani, the voice of Jarun Tann, has said that playing the first three games was his favorite gaming experience.
The entire idea behind the "Explorers Wanted" contest, in which fans got to submit auditions to Bioware with the winners being selected to voice minor characters in the game. Cari Sholtens and Kyle Land won respectively.
Stillborn Franchise: While it avoided ending up as an outright Franchise Killer for the Mass Effect series,note (Mostly due to a combination of Anthem (2019), which EA apparently had hopes could replace the series, being an even bigger flop, plus the much more positive reaction to the Updated Re-release of the original trilogy with 2021's Legendary Edition) the Andromeda sub-series was rendered dead on arrival by the game's critical and commercial failure, on top of a tidal wave of negative publicity generated by its troubled development and Obvious Beta status on release.
The game was passed on to B-team Bioware Montreal as the main studio at Edmonton wanted to develop Anthem. The Montreal team was given very little instructions for the game outside of the edict that it would not touch upon the conclusion of Mass Effect 3.
The team continued to struggle with the EA-mandatedFrostbite Engine. Due to the Mass Effect being a 3rd person shooter with verticality, in addition to needing to use a newer version of the engine, the developers could not use the modifications they used to develop Dragon Age: Inquisition, which forced them to develop the RPG mechanics and animationsnote Necessary since Frostbite was mainly built to support First Person Shooters and not other genres like RPGs from scratch.
Even though the game started development sometime before Dragon Age: Inquisition finished production in 2014, the team lost two years of development trying to create a system that generated fully functioning planets for players to explore but no engine or program could deliver satisfying result in the Frostbite Engine, forcing them to go back hand-crafted planets.
The game was far from finished by 2016, with incomplete assets, broken animations and cutscenes, causing management to panic, this led to EA to assign some lesser studios in Eastern Europe and Asia to help with development, with one studio being assigned to develop the facial animations while Criterion Games helped with the vehicle mechanics. This ended up causing problems down the line as communication between the studios was chaotic at best and non-existent at worst. The fickle nature of the Frostbite Engine ended up slowing development due to constant bugs and glitches popping up over the smallest changes and they couldn't get any assistance from people with knowledge of Frostbite's code as most were assigned to work on EA's sport titles. This caused EA to delay the game to March 2017.
When the game was eventually released, its Obvious Beta status ensured that it was to a mixed-at-best reaction from professional critics, and what was much nearer an outright negative reaction from gamers. Needing to earn similar sales to those of the first three Mass Effect games combined to so much as break even, the game failed to come remotely close to doing so, leading EA to put the franchise on indefinite hold, and only bringing it out of Development Hell after Anthem (which the publishers held out hopes could replace the franchise in the public consciousness) fared even worse from a critical and commercial standpoint.
The original design of the game called for a Procedural Generation system for planets similar to No Man's Sky. Numerous technical and engine difficulties forced the system to be cut and the final game features hand-made environments.
According to the writers of the game, several alien species were cut due to a mix of budget constraints and visual designs that were not conductive to cosplaying.
Word of Gay: The update patch 1.08 revealed that Jaal is bisexual even though he was originally only available for a female Ryder. The use of this trope on Jaal was suggested by fans and eventually made canon by the game developers.
several patches and future content updates that addressed many gripes about the game, including improved character creation, improvements to gay romance options for male Ryder, and a tweak to Hainly Abrams' dialogue. BioWare also publicly apologized