Mass Effect Voice Actor Says Andromeda Was "Done Dirty" By EA

Tom Taylorson, the voice actor behind Scott Ryder in Mass Effect: Andromeda, told fan site We Are Mass Effect that EA pushed the 2017 RPG out before it was ready and locked it to an engine that didn't fit the story BioWare was trying to tell. The interview, picked up by IGN, lands more than nine years after Andromeda launched to middling reviews and sales that fell short of EA's expectations for the franchise.

Andromeda followed Mass Effect 3 and dropped Commander Shepard for the customizable Ryder twins and a fresh Tempest crew. The pitch was a smaller-scale adventure built to seed future sequels rather than close out a trilogy. EA shelved the franchise before any of those planned sequels or single-player DLC arrived.

Taylorson placed most of the blame for the reception on the publisher. He said it was rushed, undercooked, and forced onto Frostbite at a moment when most of BioWare Montreal had no experience with the toolset.

"It was done dirty by a publisher expecting too much from it, not being fully cooked, forced out the door too early, forced to use corporate's shiny new engine when many of the team didn't know how to work with it and it was NOT suited to the storytelling part of the game."

— Tom Taylorson

Frostbite belongs to DICE and was pushed across EA's studios at the time. BioWare's first Frostbite release was Dragon Age: Inquisition, which was widely praised. Andromeda and the live-service shooter Anthem followed and ran into much rougher receptions. The studio later shipped Dragon Age: The Veilguard (its devs, as we know, were in a bad relationship with Mass Effect devs) on Frostbite in 2024, a release that arrived in a more polished state than either of those earlier attempts. Mass Effect 5 has since moved back to Unreal Engine, the toolkit BioWare used across the original trilogy.

Taylorson also turned to the launch reception. He described the climate around the game as openly hostile and tied it to a pattern he saw repeat on a later project.

"It was released to a VERY toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space. Their love of hate sealed the deal. What saddens me is that this would not be the last time I was in a project doomed by online haters picking a game for Punching Bag of The Week: I also worked on Highguard."

— Tom Taylorson

I think the Highguard comparison is the more interesting half of that comment, because it groups Andromeda with a much more recent example of the same dynamic rather than treating 2017 as a one-off. The Frostbite complaint is harder to lean on cleanly, given Veilguard's outcome on the same engine.

The structural problems behind Andromeda are well documented. BioWare Montreal led the project while the Edmonton headquarters concentrated on Anthem. Reports during and after development described a long stretch spent on procedurally generated planets that were ultimately scrapped, with much of Andromeda's final content built during the last two years of a five-year cycle that began in 2012. Post-launch patches focused on facial animation and other rough edges that critics had singled out at release, but EA pulled the plug on the franchise before any DLC or direct follow-up could build on the foundation Andromeda had laid.

That last decision is what Taylorson said hit hardest.

"It hurt most because I knew that was it — Ryder wouldn't be coming back. I, and others, thought we'd have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that — gone."

— Tom Taylorson

He said he was disappointed by the reception and felt for the BioWare Montreal team whose work was singled out. He also pointed to a slower reappraisal among fans who came to the game later, including players who told him it landed for them during difficult periods in their own lives. He said there was something to be said for a 7/10 that arrived in a time of need.

BioWare has since regrouped around the Milky Way for the next entry, with trilogy veterans staffed onto Mass Effect 5. The next game was first revealed in late 2020 and remains in early development, with EA recently advertising for a director on the project. Fans have already pulled apart early teases suggesting elements of Andromeda's story may resurface, though nothing concrete has been confirmed.

I see Taylorson's framing as part of a broader rehabilitation cycle that often catches up with games of this kind, where the loudest period of the launch window stops defining the title once the original argument cools. Whether that goodwill is enough to bring Andromeda's threads back into a future Mass Effect is a separate question.

Beyond the next game, the franchise also has a TV adaptation in development at Amazon. The series is set after the events of the original trilogy and will not feature Commander Shepard. Casting, production start, and a release window remain unannounced.

Mass Effect showrunner Daniel Casey publicly denied a recent report claiming Amazon's new head of Global TV, Peter Friedlander, had asked for the show's scripts to be rewritten for a non-gaming audience, saying on Bluesky that no such instruction had been given to him and that the quoted line had caught him off guard as much as anyone.