The highly-anticipated Mass Effect: Andromeda made an appearance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show keynote, and finally showed off some of the nitty gritty of the game. Who cares about the fine details of Andromeda ‘s RPG systems? Nerds! Nerds like me.
During the brief new trailer, we see snippets of the game’s UI, which give us a number of interesting details. You will be working with an inventory limit, as seen in the top left-hand corner of the screen. There’s an auto level-up option for people who prefer shooting aliens and kissing blue ladies to micromanaging their characters.
Later on, we get some brief looks at the game’s class and skill systems. We already know that unlike the original trilogy, which required you to choose a character class, Andromeda has a freeform class system. You can choose skills from a multitude of career paths. Based on this new trailer, it appears that you choose a main “profile” from choices within the Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Sentinel, Vanguard, Infiltrator, and Explorer classes. This gives you your main statistic boosts and provides a framework for the character’s build. It looks like you can switch between these profiles during the game.
Skills are found on a separate screen from profiles, and are separated into combat, biotic, and tech. The trailer shows the player delving into the flamethrower skill, which can be upgraded numerous times. The back half of the flamethrower skill tree features choices, such as between higher damage and a faster recharge rate. Upon purchasing some flamethrower skills, the player receives a message saying that the “Technical Overseer” profile has been unlocked, which raises the parent Engineer profile to Rank 4. Though we can’t see the full details in these brief UI flashes, this does give us a better picture of how the game’s skill system works overall. Note that this kind of flexibility is only available to the main character, Ryder. Teammates have more traditional character classes.
Here’s the official trailer so you can check it out for yourself. Mass Effect: Andromeda releases on March 21, 2017.