We’ve known that a new Mass Effect (which we’ll call Mass Effect 5 in this story for the sake of simplicity) was coming ever since late 2020. At that year’s edition of The Game Awards, developer BioWare shared a brief trailer showing an aged Liara T’soni and subtly hinting at a direct sequel to the original trilogy, skipping the latest franchise installment, 2017’s Andromeda.
More than five years later, we’ve still got very little to go on. Another brief teaser was published on N7 Day 2023, but BioWare was still very much focused on releasing Dragon Age: The Veilguard first. Immediately after that game launched, the studio confirmed that it would start working in earnest on Mass Effect 5, rather than making any DLCs for The Veilguard.
Last year, we finally got a little more during N7 Day, when franchise Executive Producer Mike Gamble told fans that the studio had ‘a lot of universe to cover, a lot of features to build, and a lot of romances to figure out’. In the blog post, there was also a secret message that the community decoded in a few hours; it was a new artwork that strongly hinted at a Krogan civil war as one of the themes of Mass Effect 5.
Even after all these teases, though, there’s a lot we don’t know. For example, is it going to be a linear game or an open world game? Speaking to Press Box PR, former Bethesda developer Bruce Nesmith, who was the Lead Designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, expressed the hope to see the latter, as he believes fans have long been pining for an open world game set in BioWare’s sci-fi IP.
I would hope that they would try to just take their lore and make a modern game of it. One of the knocks on Mass Effect that I would have is that they always felt like they were a generation behind. I know, they had very cool characters, they had great stories, but the gameplay always felt dusty and old. It just wasn’t there. If they can take the things that they were so good at and do it in a more modern sense, I think that they’d have a fantastic game.
I think taking lessons from Baldur’s Gate 3 would fit Mass Effect really well. They already had that kind of style in their games and Larian Studios had the advantage of having produced the Divinity and Divinity 2 games. They were able to use that engine for it. But I think they should probably try to make a more Bethesda-style game, to be honest. I think Mass Effect players are dying for an open world science fiction game that has that kind of flavor to it. A big open world content heavy game? I think Mass Effect players would be going nuts for that. But I’m a former Bethesda guy so I’m probably going to say that about a lot of things.
Truth be told, though, it doesn’t seem like a great idea. On paper, it could be amazing, but history has shown that BioWare doesn’t really do well with open world design. Mass Effect: Andromeda, for example, featured open world elements but is by far the weakest game of the series in terms of reception. Even Dragon Age: Inquisition, which won several GOTY awards and remains the most recent successful release of the Canadian studio, was criticized for its open world zones. Indeed, the following franchise entry, The Veilguard, returned to more linear exploration.
So, don’t bet too much on Mass Effect 5 being an open world game. Then again, neither are two clearly Mass Effect-inspired upcoming games: Owlcat’s The Expanse and Archetype’s EXODUS have both chosen the same structure as the original Mass Effect trilogy rather than a full open world design. Besides, even Bethesda itself struggled with making a great sci-fi open world game taking place across many planets, as shown with Starfield. It’s clearly not an easy proposition by any means.
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