I'm basically making this thread to make some arguments why Mass Effect: Andromeda is a bad idea, mainly from plot perspectives.
I'm basing this stuff off of leaks, official news, statements, videos and common sense.
Premise: Humanity is in need of a new homeworld and decides to hike over to Andromeda to find one.
What we know: From the N7 Day teaser, we know for a fact they travel to Andromeda the long way in a ship. I.e, no wormholes or Mass Relay-esque devices. We know that most of the species we've gotten used to came along for the ride, for whatever (similar?) reasons. Given that the trip takes several centuries even at typical Mass Effect FTL speeds, it's logical to presume the ship needs to have viable populations for each of the travelling species to ensure biological diversity. In other words, the ship needs to be fairly big to accomodate for these populations.
Question: Why is humanity in the need of a new homeworld? If they are fleeing the Reapers, why did they choose to leave for Andromeda when either of the Magellanic Clouds are only a fraction of the distance away?
Because the Reapers somehow can't follow them that far?
If the Milky Way species, whose civilization evolved exclusively around the use of Mass Relays, are sufficiently advanced to develop a ship that can travel 2.5 million light years without having to discharge their drives or stop to find rogue planets to mine for power generation resources, what logical reason is there for the Reapers, the more technologically advanced species by far, being unable to follow them?
It would not matter how far they run, the Reapers would be able to chase them down no matter where they go.
It is because the Magellanic Clouds are close enough to be scanned by the Reapers? Not possible. Based on information provided in the game, the Reapers are roughly 30,000 light years out from the edge of the galaxy at the start of ME1. As we find out in ME1, the Reapers rely on their Vanguard, Sovereign, to scan the galaxy for advanced life. This basically tells us they don't have the capacity to scan for life in a 30,000 light year radius, let alone the 160,000 and 200,000 light years that spans the distance between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud, respectively.
To conclude, there is no reason the Reapers could find the Ark Ship in the Magellanic Clouds unless they knew it was there.
If the "Ark Ship" is fleeing the Reapers, it must have done so during the events of Mass Effect 3. But in Mass Effect 3, the galactic economy was devoted towards building the Crucible, which was considered almost a pyrrhic endeavour from an economic perspective, in a "Building this thing will destroy the economy but if we don't we'll all die." kind of way.
So how was the galactic civilization able to fund the construction of the Ark Ship when virtually the entire economy was being funneled into the Crucible Project? Judging from the N7 Day teaser, it's quite massive, possibly on par with the Crucible itself in size, and unlike the Crucible, the Ark Ship's design would have to include technology that wasn't actually invented at that point, for example tech to travel long distances without discharging.
But let's presume the Asari Councilor's "continuity of civilization" plan is the Ark Ship. Let's even presume it was built BEFORE the Reaper War. This bypasses the funding issue and potentially the technology issue. The better question is why the Asari would spend a fortune (the kind of spending you couldn't possibly hide) on an intergalactic Ark Ship for the incredibly unlikely eventuality that something or someone causes the downfall of an entire galactic civilization.
A more reasonable (and affordable) contingency plan would be the one the Protheans - a race vastly richer and more technologically advanced - went with.
Assuming the Ark Ship isn't fleeing the Reapers, it must have made the journey after the Reaper War. This gives them ample of time to rebuild the economy, invent the missing technology and develop a realistic intergalactic mission. However, there is still the premise of humans finding a new homeworld, which implies the Earth has somehow been rendered uninhabitable.
So why would they go all the way to Andromeda for a new homeworld when they have a multitude of habitable colonies, and when the galaxy at large is rife with unclaimed garden worlds? What event could possibly have rendered every single life-bearing planet in the entire galaxy barren at the same time? Only the Reapers have the numbers and the technological capacity to carry out this kind of systematic destruction, but it would take hundreds of thousands if not millions of years to achieve - which is beside the point since this premise hinges on the Reapers having been defeated.
This idea is flawed because it stretches the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point by forcing the need to invent a threat vastly more destructive than even the Reapers, which exerts its destructive power on a scale the like of which not even supernovas and hypernovas are capable of.
If the Ark Ship isn't fleeing the Reapers, and assuming the part in the leaks about finding a homeworld is some kind of error or mistake and actually refers to finding a new colony for humans, why would they go to Andromeda before exhausting the garden planets available in the Milky Way? With only 1% of the Milky Way's stars charted, there is no reason, logical, economic or even practical, why they should skip the Milky Way's habitable systems, both Magellanic Clouds and mount a hugely expensive, hugely dangerous expedition to a galaxy 2.5 million light years away.
This idea is flawed because it makes no sense. As a comparison, NASA didn't mount a new space program to go to Alpha Centauri immediately after landing on the moon in the 1960s. There is literally no reason to even consider interstellar missions before the exploration of the solar system has been completed. The same goes for the Milky Way and intergalactic missions to Andromeda.
Moreover, this idea requires an explanation of what happned AFTER the Reaper War, which is something BioWare has been adamantly avoiding, in order to justify the move to Andromeda.
Premise: Andromeda takes place in a single star cluster called the Helios cluster.
Question: A star cluster, by definition, has at most a few thousand stars, and that's the globular type of clusters whose stellar density is prohibitive of the development of life. Open clusters, which are less volatile than globular clusters (and therefore more conducive to the development of life), usually only have a few hundred stars and are usually no larger than 30 light years in diameter.
Considering the rarity of habitable planets in the universe, especially planets finely tuned to support human life, why would the Pathfinder restrict his search for a new human homeworld to a single (presumably open) star cluster?
I can only assume the Pathfinder isn't the only Pathfinder, and that other clusters are being searched by other human Pathfinders simultaneously. Statistically, there's a fair chance to find a very Earth-like planet every 1000 stars (Earth-like in the sense that it supports life, not necessarily human life, carbon-based life or even multi-cellular life), so spreading out over multiple clusters is a good idea.
This isn't the main problem with the premise, however. The main problem is that because we're limited to a single star cluster, advanced, spacefaring species should be incredibly rare. This introduces a problem of diversity in terms of native alien species.
Looking at it this way, let's give Andromeda a generous estimate of around one million spacefaring civilizations existing simultaneously in the time ME:A is set. This means that for every one million stars, there is one planet from which an advanced spacefaring species has sprung. Even if you multiply that by 1000, you have one advanced species per 1000 stars.
Statistically, the Pathfinder should consider himself very lucky to encounter even one native spacefaring species in the Helios cluster, unless it is either:
1) Heavily colonized by other native Andromedan species, which makes the cluster a poor colonization prospect.
2) Is well-traveled by a lot of other native Andromedan species, which also makes the cluster a poor colonization prospect.
The premise is flawed because setting the game in a single cluster restricts the diversity of the Andromedan alien cast, and any means to increase the diversity of alien life in the Helios cluster will be contrived and effectively ruins the colonization aspect of the story.
Premise: Mass Effect: Andromeda is about exploring an unknown galaxy.
Question: The Milky Way is actually 99% unknown by the Citadel species count, but let's ignore that for the sake of the argument. Andromeda is a similar but slightly larger galaxy than our own. Logically, it should support carbon-based life (or the Ark Ship wouldn't have gone there to begin with), perhaps even human life. It's a rather intriguing exploration and colonization target, one that is popular in fiction.
There's just this one hitch, though, where Mass Effect is concerned - Andromeda hasn't been systematically purged of spacefaring life every 50,000 years.
The reason the Milky Way has been so "empty" (and why that 99% remains unexplored) is because of the Reapers. After all, BioWare came up with the Reapers as a sort of "solution" to the Fermi paradox. Well, that solution hasn't been working in Andromeda, which means advanced spacefaring life in Andromeda has had 1 billion years to surpass the Milky Way in every way imaginable.
Logically, the Ark Ship should arrive in Andromeda to be greeted by a hyper-advanced Kardashev III type civilization - or, if the Catalyst was correct (God forbid) - the ruins of an organic civilization with the Kardashev III civilization of their synthetic, rebellious and extremely hostile creations built on top of it.
Ignoring for a moment the poor prospects of doing battle or trying to reason or bargain with species whose potential technological advancement might rival even the Reapers, the biggest problem with exploring a galaxy without Reapers is that the factor that made the Milky Way empty and so perfect for exploration - the Reapers - isn't a factor in Andromeda. Basically, Andromeda should be explored and exploited from one side to the other, leaving nothing for our intrepid Pathfinder to discover and making the Andromeda a considerably more crowded place than the Milky Way his people left behind.
Imagine Columbus setting out to discover America but finding what is essentially a 21st century civilization with a population of several hundred million entrenched all over the continent. That's what the Andromeda is without the Reapers.
Or something like the Reapers.
Which brings me to my next point - the only way to make Andromeda suitably "empty" for exploration is to introduce a Reaper-like element, some kind of solution to the Fermi paradox. Maybe that's what the Remnants are supposed to be? Either way, it would just make Mass Effect: Andromeda feel like a rehash of the original trilogy:
"We left the galaxy we came from to evade a galactic threat, but here's a different galactic threat we need to deal with before we can settle down here."
... which is the opposite of what BioWare has said they want to do.
Conclusion: Looking at the difficulties to reconcile the premise of Mass Effect: Andromeda with the established lore and the scientific principles upon which that lore is built, the choice to move the franchise to our great intergalactic neighbour reads less like "This could make for a good story" and more like "We messed up the Milky Way so now we don't have any choice but to move to Andromeda." Especially when you consider the relative ease with which they could bypass the ending snafu without canonizing any of them.
The decision is basically an implicit admission of wrongdoing on their part in the original trilogy. What's truly mindboggling is that the reason for the choice - to avoid invalidating the player's choice through retroactive tampering with the endings - doesn't make much sense for a number of reasons. Very few people actively LIKED the endings - the rest is pretty much split between people who didn't care either way, and people who hated it with the fury of a thousand suns. So when the majority of players are either indifferent or angry about your endings, it makes absolutely no sense to cater to the minority who liked them.
What's worse, BioWare has a track record of ignoring player choice in the previous games, particularly ending choices. Remember that ending choice in ME1 where a Renegade Shepard is offered the opportunity to start an all-human council? Yeah, that choice was completely ignored.
Or in ME2, when the Collector Base choice was touted as making a massive difference in ME3? The difference? 10 war assets. 10.
Not just ending choices. The Rachni? "The presence of the Rachni has huge consequences in Mass Effect 3. Even just in the final battle with the Reapers."
Turned out that the "huge consequence" was 100 war assets, and they don't actually show up in the ending.
In fact, a majority of the choices made were invalidated in ME3, having no payoff besides an arbitrary number value to get you over the breakpoints for the different endings. So let's not pretend that BioWare considers player agency sacrosanct. I'm more inclined to believe that the endings of ME3 received preferential treatment and retcon immunity because of the people who wrote it, rather than the people they were sold to.
After all, said writers made it very clear in post-release interviews that they had COMPLETELY missed the point about why people were so mad over the endings. The way they talked about it, they didn't acknowledge that people legitimately thought their endings were bad, it was more akin to "The endings are good but the fans misunderstood them". which is a really patronising attitude to have against fans with legitimate concerns.
Is it as simple that BioWare no longer has any quality control? No peer-review of ideas? After all, they let the Deception novel ship with all its inaccuracies and plot holes, and the aforementioned writers (and some others) even praised it openly on Twitter.
Maybe Andromeda is just another bad idea that wasn't properly killed before having the opportunity to develop into something worse.
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