The second video in Electronic Arts and BioWare‘s Mass Effect: Andromeda gameplay series focuses on profiles, favorites, and your squad.
As you level up in Mass Effect: Andromeda, you’ll gain access to dozens of skills and over 300 skill upgrades. You’re free to pick any skill without being limited to a class, which allows you to create a Pathfinder suited to how you want to play.
As detailed in the first video, there are three main types of skills in the game: combat, tech, and biotics. As you unlock skills over the course of the game, you’ll also gain access to profiles. There are seven types of profiles. Here are two of them:
- Adept – The Adept profile is perfect for players who want to specialize in biotics. As you choose more biotic skills, the Adept profile will give you bonuses to suit your play style. Choosing Adept gives bonuses to the duration and damage of your biotics. And the more you invest in your skills, the higher level profiles you can unlock.
- Explorer – Maybe you want to be more versatile, choosing some combat mixed with biotic and tech skills. This will unlock the Explorer profile, giving you perks and buffs that enhance all your abilities.
You can swap between these profiles at any time, giving you a number of ways to tackle each battle and never locking you into a particular style of play.
Favorites are a quick way to map three skills and a single profile to one slot. At any time during combat, you can switch between these four slots, giving you access to up to 12 of your favorite skills during a fight.
As for your squad, each of your six squad-mates has three active and two passive skills. In the video, we see Cora use her biotics as a support character and Drack able to soak up damage as a bruiser. You can set your squad up around the battlefield, ordering them to defend locations, attack targets, or rally to your side, as well as team up with them for Power Combos. These activate when you or one of your squad-mates primes an enemy or group of enemies, setting them up for the kill, then you or a squad-mate jumps in to detonate and finish the job. You can level up your squad-mates to make them specifically good at priming or detonating targets.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is due out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on March 21 in North America and March 23 in Europe.
Watch the footage below. View a new set of screenshots at the gallery.
Update 9:00 a.m.: Electronic Arts also released a video featuring voice actress Natalie Dormer, of Game of Thrones fame, who stars as Dr. Lexi T’Perro in Mass Effect: Andromeda. Described as one of the game’s central characters, Lexi is one of the first characters players will meet when they wake up from their 600-year cryo sleep. She is “is calm and compassionate with a feisty edge. Her role is to maintain crew fitness, both physical and mental, and research how the environments and situations they are exposed to throughout the Andromeda galaxy affect human biology and psychology.”
