After yet another uneventful N7 Day and the looming failure of Andromeda, Mass Effect isn’t quite at its peak. But that doesn’t mean it is dead. Tweets from the team last week vaguely pointed at the notion of a new Mass Effect, but a new report makes those cryptic teases a little more concrete.
In a report by Kotaku detailing Anthem‘s rumored overhaul, reporter Jason Schreier noted at the end that another Mass Effect game is in “very early development” at BioWare Edmonton. The game would also be under Mike Gamble, who is a longtime BioWare producer with experience on the three prior Mass Effect games as well as Anthem. Schreier spilled no more details about this Mass Effect game and was only coupled with the previously announced Dragon Age 4, which we haven’t heard from in quite some time.
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BioWare had previously said it wasn’t done with the franchise and the aforementioned tweets from the creatives there support that sentiment, but recent failures and shakeups in the studio have made people less confident in the team’s ability as well as EA’s patience. Mass Effect Andromeda was critically panned in 2017 as was Anthem in early 2019. Both titles were eventually patched and updated multiple times, but didn’t quite undo the damage that their launches had already done. Kotaku also reported how difficult the development was for both Andromeda and Anthem, citing technical problems, a lack of vision, and more.
These games were not what people expected from a studio with such a legendary pedigree and put the future of Mass Effect in question. But it seems as though BioWare is getting another crack at the beloved series.
BioWare Edmonton, despite having different leadership now, is most likely the studio people think of when they think of BioWare. It was the original team the three founding doctors, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, started in 1995 after they studied together at the University of Alberta.
