In an interview with OXM Mac Walters, the creative director of Mass Effect Andromeda has just confirmed that the protagonist for Andromeda will not have a Paragon/Renegade scale like the previous Mass Effect games because it just doesn’t make sense in this context – instead, the player will have “Tones”
For one, the Paragon/Renegade system was removed “because they felt very Shepard – they were very tied to the Shepard character, so they didn’t really make sense if we weren’t going to have Shepard as our main protagonist.”
“What we have now is based more around agreeing and disagreeing. The reason I like that is because in the trilogy it’s like, ‘I’m gonna play Paragon,’ and then you know which way you’re moving the stick on every conversation. You don’t have to think about it, because you’re just going to hit Paragon every time.”
Now what will happen is that it will be more embedded in the conversation and make sense to the actual character.
“With agree and disagree it changes by the circumstance and it changes by the character you’re talking to. So you have to actually be more engaged in what’s going on, to know if you’re going to do that.”
Walters also noted that with the four different tones, it would “basically allow other types of characters to express them[selves] in one of four different ways, and sometimes one of two different ways. And I think that gets back to that more traditional role-playing sort of feeling which is less about ‘Do I want to be good or bad,’ and more about ‘How do I want to express myself?”
What do you think of the changes? Personally, I enjoyed the renegade paragon system, but I understand that players would often just chose either Renegade or Paragon depending on what they wanted to level – for me I was always torn between both options, I never really stuck with one – that being said Andromeda is a new game and so new adaptions should come about as we won’t be playing as Shepherd
Mass Effect: Andromeda is out on March 21st for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
