The Mass Effect Andromeda gameplay was great, but made N7 Day feel like a washout

The Game Awards, also known as The Annual Geoff Keighley Video Games Pageant and Game Trailers Revue, aired last Thursday at approximately I’m-not-staying-up-for-this GMT. Despite the fact that I went to sleep instead of waiting up I was still excited to look it up on YouTube the next day, because it was a dead cert that there would be some Mass Effect Andromeda footage shown off.

As expected, publishers took the opportunity to drop some interesting new stuff, to whit: a teaser announcement trailer for Telltale’s Guardian’s of the Galaxy, which we all had to pretend was still a surprise after a leak a few weeks ago; a new trailer for Zelda: Breath of the Wild which possibly had actual Zelda’s torso in it; a Death Stranding trailer with Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro in it (and later del Toro started tweeting stuff like ‘F*** KONAMI’, which is not a joke and 100% actually happened). There was also, as promised, a five minute gameplay trailer for Mass Effect Andromeda.

The Game Awards this year came only about three weeks after N7 Day, an event for Mass Effect fans that rolls around every November. I’m a Mass Effect devotee, you see, so I await each N7 day with excitement. This year I was particularly on edge for it because we were so clearly going to get some new Andromeda stuff, after all the E3 teases and other N7 day teases and the gameplay tease at the PS4 Pro announcement. I was more than up for some actual gameplay, and expected some kind of date, at the very least.

I got rack all. It was a rack all that initially excited me, obviously, but still rack all. A nice looking trailer with a fancy voiceover, about 0.5 seconds of gameplay (maybe, if you squint) but mostly lovely shots of starships and some nice cinematic clips hinting at the story. The whole thing was accompanied by a load of exclusive information on Game Informer. Watch the cinematic trailer, then find out what it was you actually saw. There was also the launch of the Andromeda Initiative, styled as an info centre where you can sign up to join the trip to Andromeda, but really a website where you can watch videos giving more glimpses of the framing narrative. By watching all six you get an exclusive in-game helmet! That’s pretty neat, right? So the N7 Day video required two entire other websites to contextualise it.

The new trailer, on the other hand, I love without any further qualification necessary. I thought it was great. Where some of you may have seen the standard fare space shooter bollocks you’d seen in three other games, I saw the limitless expanse of the stars. I looked upon the bustling hub world, and I saw that it was good. The terrifying monsters that can eat you to death, the strength of the new biotics that can slam you half way across the map, the crafting and survival gameplay elements: I love it all! Even the weird murder mystery bit where you scan for bloody footprints that kind of feels like it was ripped from a different game. I liked the look at some of the new squadmates, a krogan and a turian who both look like they came ready to throw down, and throw down hard. I especially liked when Ryder ended up in a Mexican standoff against a gun-toting badass with a shaved head, just two hardcore space-bitches ready to f*** each other up. That was great.

And the strange but beautiful landscapes! Driving into the sunset across an alien savanna of red earth! Blue thermal pools on white rocks, next to bright red coral-like plants! The promise of truly explorable areas on planets, not just a square of a grey/green/brown/snowy landscape identical to the last one that has (maybe) a crash landed escape pod and/or a thresher maw ambush you have to deal with. Be still my beating heart.

I only wish that this trailer had been the one we saw on N7 Day. N7 Day is named after the prestigious military rank that Shepard, former Mass Effect protagonist, was able to attain. Every year the two voice actors who performed the female and male versions of Shepard wish each other a ‘Happy N7 Day commander’ and it makes me quietly very happy. People post new fan art, old fan art, cosplay photos, and gifs of Garrus doing stuff like calibrations, the absolute lad. It’s a day for the fans, so it’s just a bit of a shame that the most exciting footage was held off until an industry awards show.

It’s an understandable move on BioWare’s part. The Game Awards last year had an audience that was comfortably over two million, and this year Keighley wrangled a deal with a Chinese media company that meant it could be potentially streamed to over a billion more. Those are some tempting numbers. I understand how these things work, and even if you didn’t know there would be game footage Kojima getting an award is a reason to tune in just in case he does something proper weird on stage (which, as it turned out, The Death Stranding trailer definitely qualified as).

But on the other hand I’m a wistful fan, and there’s precedent for giving fans the first taster of a game. In 2014 attendees of Quakecon were the first people to ever see footage of the new DOOM gameplay, with nothing officially released to press or public for ages afterwards. I know we only had to wait three weeks after N7 Day to see the Andromeda gameplay, and I’m still obviously going to buy the game because that footage looks amazing, but it just would have felt nicer to get it on the fan celebration day, somehow. I just want to feel like a giant multi-national development company cares about me. Which surely isn’t a lot to ask.