When the decision was made to move to a new setting and story within the Mass Effect universe for Andromeda, was there any friction on that within the team?

Well fundamentally we are storytellers, so it was never really a question we asked ourselves. In the sense of the trilogy, we always knew it was a trilogy – so we knew it was going to end. It doesn’t mean it was easy, but the idea was also to, over the course of the trilogy, not just tell a story, but build a universe. And we wanted to build a universe that was deep, rich and complex, because we wanted to tell more stories. Internally, it was never implied that would involve the trilogy’s characters. The problem is, of course, that the players get attached to those characters. But after our discussions, we all decided it was important for us as well [as the series] to get away from the trilogy and to have a fresh start. To leave those characters alone. They had a good ride and were strong characters, but we can build just as strong characters in another world.

Part of that decision was moving to a new game engine – from Unreal Engine to Frostbite. Why make that move and how has it impacted what you have been able to do with Mass Effect Andromeda?

So obviously that was a radical move, as you have to redo all your art, redo all your artificial intelligence; you have to redo everything. But we had to move to a new engine to reach the level of quality we had in mind. The Frostbite engine was perfect for us because it’s shared across EA, so you benefit from what the other teams are doing. We also benefited from one of the most powerful engines in the market in terms of visual quality. So the engine made sense. The timing also made sense as we were making a fresh start [with the series], so that was perfect.

Obviously, it’s a big investment as there was a lot of things to redo. Dragon Age Inquisition was the first RPG to use Frostbite, so BioWare had already put a lot of RPG mechanics into it, but it still wasn’t that strong for a science-fiction game. For example, the lighting is extremely powerful in the Frostbite engine, but when we asked those guys how we could place in two suns, they had never imagined that someday, someone would want to do that. So it was challenging, but visually I think it was the right move.

You mentioned that over 5000 bugs had been fixed in just the week between when the game was exported mid-February and the build I played - I noticed that some of the character models and animations were further along than others. Do you feel that is a fair comment?

I don’t know specifically what order we are working on the characters. But if you are referring to the facial expressions and all that, then for sure that stuff comes at the very end. Because all the dialogue needs to be in, so that is one of the aspects the team is doing fast right now with something we call Face FX.

It still feels like a Mass Effect game; like the sense of being in the same universe is seamless.