In Mass Effect, one of they story elements was giving your character, Shepherd, the chance to be with one of his/her crew romantically. However, sometimes it was too easy for this to happen, and thus for some gamers it became more of just an endgame rather than learning more about the characters and deciding which you want to be with.
This won’t be exactly the case in Mass Effect: Andromeda, as the team has strived for more “natural” conversations that could in potential lead to relationships. Bioware lead writer Mac Walters talked with IGN about how this would go in Andromeda:
“As far as the relationships go, we try to make them less formulaic,” he said. “In the original trilogy, they often were you do a couple conversations with them and then it’s getting close to the end, it’s time to romance. What I wanted to see in this was more of a, well, somebody might want to hop in the sack right away, [or] somebody might never want to hop in the sack because this is too important — trying to find that more natural way into what a relationship would be like within the constraints of game development. We’re trying to make it as open ended as possible.”
Another thing he noted was that there will a wide array of character to potential pair with, and that they’re made to appeal to different kinds of people.
“One of the things I certainly learned as we saw Mass Effect evolve is not everyone’s going to love every character, and you shouldn’t try to do that. We actually want to build some characters who are going to appeal to certain people,” said Walters. “A lot of that actually comes because we have large writing teams. Different writers can invest in their characters in different ways, so you get this nice differentiation between all the different characters, and that’s something that we’ve stayed true to in this.”
Mass Effect: Andromeda will release in 2017.