Aside from it being genuinely good, the biggest surprise Andromeda had to offer for me that the folks at BioWare went and made a game about building community. Of course, that’s just part of it the framing and the gameplay is about enforcing your will at the barrel of a gun as opposed to the democracy and negotiation that real communities deserve, but I still find it to be largely more interesting that the existential struggle for survival of the preceding Mass Effect games. Still, even having the gun’s removed from the vehicular exploration isn’t enough to offset the gross feeling of showing up in someone else’s home and shooting everyone who looks at you funny. While the colonial aspect of the premise is necessitated by the variability of the previous game, there must be at least a dozen ways to better handle the material. After all, there is a distinct difference between colonialism and migration, and the Andromeda Initiative is technically a community of refugees, although the game preferred to sequester that information away at the end of a side quest rather than engage directly with it. Still, there’s one aspect of the story that does confront the topic in a more considered manner, and that’s how the process of Kett exaltation echoes the real world history of the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, although that’s mitigated in turn by the white-coded savior narrative that the game pushes.

Even then, there's something in the game's premise that compelled me, to the point where the main thing that pushed me to reach the unexpectedly thrilling and creative, albeit messy finale was how the side missions contributed to it. The Initiative's arrival in Heleus was badly botched due to unforeseeable circumstances and there are not enough resources to support the majority of the population that remains in cryo slumber, thus casting a heavy weight of imposter syndrome to hang over Ryder and the Initiative writ large. The first major benefit of this is that it helps Ryder be a more interesting character on the page than Shepard ever was, even if it comes at the cost of more more developed and explicit role-playing opportunities. The second is that helps most of the side quests feel like meaningful diversions, like everything I do has a major impact on the operation as a whole, which eventually turns one of Andromeda's biggest flaws, the bloated systems and subsystems that only exist to feed other bloated systems, into a strength as they expand the scope of the player’s participation.

Admittedly expansive and sprawling beyond reason or taste, Andromeda is a type of game that most likely will no longer be made, someday. In most ways that’s a good thing, the production style used to make them is harmful to everyone that interacts with them, most especially the workers that make them, excluding a small handful of executives and shareholders. Still, as my Nomad crested the peak of a mountain and unveiled a beautiful vista on my way to answer a SOS beacon only to discover that the only distress involved was the poor health of two stoners' weed plant, I realized that when the AAA open world model of crunch and abuse finally, thankfully collapses there will be a part of me will miss the fidelity and variety that games of this scale can occasionally provide. Hopefully, someday we can find an ethical and sustainable way of making them.