Farflame spotted this GodisaGeek interview with Fabrice Condominas:

Interview with Fabrice Condominas, Producer of Mass Effect: Andromeda

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Was there much worry in moving away from Shepard, given how popular the character was?

I wouldn’t say worried. Anxious, probably. You get a lot of pressure, expectations, and all that. But it was necessary. As simple as that. I think at some point, it’s better to end the trilogy and say it was always a trilogy than to keep going and dragging that story out until people stop liking it. So I wouldn’t say worried, but certainly a bit anxious and nervous doing it. We barely had any doubt it was the right decision.

I played as FemShep in the Mass Effect trilogy and Pathfinder doesn’t seem to be quite as strong or badass. Was this deliberate? Was there a feeling of ‘we can’t repeat the same character’?

It’s not only that, it’s that we started from scratch. We wanted our character to reflect that. What is important is when your character arrives in the galaxy, the player doesn’t know anything about the galaxy and the character doesn’t either. That was important. So whether you decide your character is an incredible bad-ass soldier or a softer explorer, that was your choice. The important point for us, narratively, was that you started the same level as your character and you always have the same level of knowledge as your character. So on that basis, you cannot start the game with someone like Shepard, who obviously is experienced because otherwise you create a disconnect from the beginning.

I noticed Renegade and Paragon has gone, and has been replaced with new dialogue options like intellectual, professional, and so on. Why make the change?

What we wanted to move away from was any binary choices. What we found out, during the trilogy, was that offering binary choices kind of forced people to take a stand. What happened was when players decided what side they were on, they stuck to it. Then they, for example, they will stop reading the dialogue, they’d just pick the side they wanted to be on. We wanted the player to feel the freedom to make the choice they wanted to make without feeling judged. We also removed it because people on one side will judge people on the other side. We wanted to completely remove that feeling. So that forces us to get out of the binary system. And then when you need more than two choices, the resulting question was okay, how do we do it? And another dimension is when you want to build personalities and characters, it’s not only about what you say, it’s how you say it. That notion of tone becomes central to our choice. We also wanted tone to be part of what defined the choice and the relationships because two characters can say the same thing but depending on tone, it can be perceived very definitely.

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