It’s been a while since we’ve seen anything new about the Mass Effect universe, the last releases being the Citadel DLC, released over a year ago, and a novel a few months before that. It’s been nearly two years since the release of the last games in the franchise, Mass Effect 3 and, Mass Effect: Infiltrator. But chatter from Bioware management makes it clear that they’re still hard at work on the franchise.
@aarynflynn: Two years to the day since we launched Mass Effect 3. Time flies. Can’t wait to get everyone back to that universe.
Mass Effect 3 left the universe between a rock and a hard place—so much so that the first DLC pack for the game was a set of revisions to the ending, fixing what many fans perceived as setting-ruining mistakes. Even with those fixes, major changes to the setting seem likely to push developers toward a prequel rather than a sequel, as a way of avoiding having to reflect three different status quos based on player choices in the ending to the last title.
Tweets from Bioware management, like Yanick Roy, Studio Director for Bioware Montréal, and Aaryn Flynn, GM of Bioware’s Edmonton and Montréal studios, have been apologetic about the subject, almost as if they’d intended to have something to show by now but went back to the drawing board, or perhaps just a bit jealous of their cohorts’ impressive showing with the new Dragon Age: Inquisition trailer.
Either way, as painful as waiting can be, it’s a good sign that Bioware is taking their time with the development of next-gen installments of their major franchises. The transition between hardware generations has been tough to many game franchises, and it seems like Bioware is intent on reinventing them to make them survive another hardware generation rather than just pushing another installment out the door to meet a quarterly earnings report.
