What's Next for Mass Effect: Andromeda and Its Inevitable DLCs?

Rightfully or wrongfully, Mass Effect: Andromeda was released to a sea of criticism, engulfed with complaints that ranged from being rather reasonable and constructive to embodying the very definition of pettiness. To their credit, however, BioWare has kept a close eye on the feedback that the game has received, responding with a quick patch that contains a fair number of quality of life changes, general improvements, and bug fixes, while also giving a rough idea of what they're working on for the next couple of months. As such, you can expect smaller content like cosmetics, weapons, and multiplayer maps to show up in the game sometime in the near future.

That being said, you wouldn't need to be much of a fortune teller to guess that BioWare is also working on story based DLCs for their crown jewel, especially when most (if not all) of the games that they released over the past decade had fairly substantial post-launch content that generally expanded upon the story of the main game. Plus, one would assume that all of the employees that worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda aren't going to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs for the next few years, so it wouldn't hurt to take a guess at what kind of direction they will likely take with their intergalactic tale of conflict and (optional) love.

Of course, at this point in its lifecycle, it would be a bit premature for any DLC to require you to beat the main questline to set up the story for the inevitable sequel a la Mass Effect 2's Arrival or Dragon Age: Inquisition's Trespasser DLC, so it stands to reason that Mass Effect: Andromeda's first DLC would revolve around something that isn't necessarily tied to any particular character, event, or planet from the main game. An obvious candidate for this would be anything related to the Quarian Ark; there are more than a couple of instances throughout the main game that reference the state that the Quarian Ark may be in, it would feature a species (or several) that Mass Effect fans are already familiar with, and it could tackle the fact that the Quarians didn't really have their own homeworld back in the Milky Way and how the Andromeda Initiative is more than just a fresh start for them.

Alternatively, BioWare could focus more on the Kett and the fact that the Kett that you encounter in the main game are essentially just a scouting force. As it turns out, the Kett are not just some faceless enemy, and they too have a government, individual motives, and even feelings that may clash with whatever objective they were assigned to complete in the Heleus Cluster. In fact, they aren't native to the Heleus Cluster at all, which brings up some rather large problems for the Andromeda Initiative if the Kett's larger government finds out what has been happening in the Cluster.

That being said, it is unlikely that any of Mass Effect: Andromeda's potential DLCs will spend any significant amount of time exploring the rest of Andromeda (although it wouldn't be a bad thing to be proven wrong here), given the speed of interstellar travel and such. And of course, there's the Remnant with all of their secrets, just waiting to be discovered.

Either way, Mass Effect: Andromeda and its sequels have some rather large shoes to fill, but with an entire galaxy for BioWare to work with, the only question is how and when those shoes will be filled. After all, Andromeda is more than just a fresh start for the characters and the series itself, it is a chance for BioWare to show what they are capable of when they are essentially given a semi-blank slate; the importance of which is magnified given Andromeda's chilly reception.

What do you think may be next for Mass Effect: Andromeda? Let us know in the comments below!