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draconiam
Seasoned Ace
4 years ago

Mass Effect Andromeda and Shepard Trilogy problem

Hello, as we move closer to N7 Day many of us know there won't be a trailer for ME: Next for a big while if any so I decided to replay ME Andromeda after getting tired of destroying the reapers with over 8k WA. As I play the game it strikes me the massive shot in the foot that Bioware wrote themselves not just in regards to the story in ME 1-3 but in the Legendary Edition (Spoilers for ME Andromeda):

How do you explain yourselves making the Andromeda Initiative, which had massive promotional campaigns across the entire galaxy according to the characters in ME Andromeda, be invisible to Shepard who is dealing for three whole games in the galaxy underworld?

-100k human colonists going missing is enough to enlist Shepard attention yet over that number of Galactic beings got into 4 Arks and the Nexus and made a televised departure between the events of destroying the Collectors Base and Arrival yet none of the news  on the Citadel could be bothered to talk of the Initiative;

-many named humans who made the jump had been with the Systems Alliance, there is a Turian ex Spectre involved, multiple Asari Commandos, STG members and more important a disgraced N7 Operative who dishonorable discharge made a lot of waves through the galactic news that his two sons were impacted. Yet Shepard, a N7 Operative and first human Spectre never heard that story or ran into drunken soldiers spilling the beans?;

-massive amounts of funds and materials were deployed and the Shadow Broker never bothered to put that in the databanks when Shepard read them oh, there is a link between the Shadow Broker and the N7 operative;

-humanity can't develop AI but Synthetic Insights is fully permitted to do so);

-ME: Next will likely deal with the Andromeda Initiative as we can hear the words Ark 6 deployed, Ark 5 was in orbit on a Batarian planet as it came under attack but it managed to avoid the attention of the Reapers as it travelled towards the events of the would be DLC turned into a novel;

-Modders managed to include a few missions that directly referenced the Andromeda Initiative and even wrote a well acted script on how Shepard might not have known, so how in the narrative Gods you don't seek to incorporate soething similar in ME LE if you are gonna continue the thread of the Arks?

At this point Bioware created two ME universes thanks to that narrative oversight:

-one with Shepard and Co tackling the Reapers with all organizations either using us or pretending that everything is fine;

-the other where the Initiative picked up speed thanks to a massive influx of cash and resources and performed very public statements of what they are doing and what will be the requirements to go there (they even write Liara knowing about the Initiative and Ryder across all three games but not mentioning that to Shepard).

If you are gonna insert events in your work of literature or in general storytelling then at least you have to plant the seeds in the first games or better yet, the second game where they came up more public according to your own work in ME Andromeda Codex. 

@EA_Mako, what do you think of this narrative oversight and how it might be a very hard tangled web to unravel?

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