Mass Effect Andromeda was the star of Nvidia’s CES 2017 keynote. While it was rather short, the game’s presentation did show a few of the game’s environments, skill-trees and combat.
According to BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn, the gameplay was taken from Peebee’s loyalty mission and captured running on an Nvidia GTX 1080. Near the beginning of the short demonstration, we can see the player leveling up Peebee, a “Rogue Academic” Asari, and unlocking some familiar biotic powers like Pull and Shockwave, as well as the tech power Inversion, which weakens an enemy’s defenses and spreads to nearby enemies.
Later in the video, we see Ryder upgrading his Flamethrower ability, which gives us a look at how the skill-trees work in Mass Effect Andromeda. It appears that Ryder isn’t limited to a single class, but can upgrade abilities from three different categories: Combat, Biotics and Tech. My guess is that new skills in each category are unlocked depending on how much the player invests in it, so you can either choose to commit to one, or mix between two or even all three categories. We can even see a brief on-screen message, right after Ryder upgrades the Flamethrower (the 1:14 mark), which indicated that “The Engineer profile is now Rank 4”.
Than, at the end of the video we are treated to some combat against Remnant drones. There we see some skills in action, the aforementioned Flamethrower.
Lastly, we finally get an official release date for Mass Effect Andromeda. The game will be released on March 21, 2017 in North America, and March 23 in Europe. If you remember, Amazon accidentally leaked this release date back in October, but it’s good to have an official conformation that Mass Effect Andromeda is just a couple of months away.
