During PAX East, Mass Effect: Andromeda creative director Mac Walters compared the newest title's character count to Mass Effect 3. As impressive as Mass Effect 3 was, Andromeda has double the cast.
Mass Effect 3 had around 670 unique characters while Andromeda has over 1200.
"When you look at the dialogue options, we're basically [at] the equivalent of Mass Effect 2 and 3 put together," Walters said.
Walters and crew were livestreamed at PAX East talking about this and showed a few interactions with some of those characters.
"The lines of dialogue we have in Andromeda is like Mass Effect 2 and 3 combined," said Producer Michael Gamble. "So the number of characters is vaster, but the amount of stuff you and that character can talk about is also larger—especially the squad, we definitely focused in on the squad. We made sure the squad was beefy, and developed, and that you could do different things with them and then that information would basically carry through the conversations. That was a large focus. Yeah, in terms of the amount of writing, that was increased, and the number of characters was also increased."
When asked if this includes small background characters like shopkeepers, Gamble clarified that they weren't even counted in the 1200 number.
Mass Effect: Andromeda launches March 21 in North America and March 23 in Europe.
