Bioware has confirmed that they have now shifted their attention completely to their next Mass Effect game.
Rolling Stone had an interview with Bioware’s John Epler, the creative director of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Bioware’s latest game dropped just a few days ago. While EA has yet to share sales numbers, the game has tracked a record 89,418 concurrent player count on SteamDB. It also stands at a MetaCritic of 84 on PlayStation 5, 79 on PC, and an exceptional 93 on Xbox Series X|S.
To quote Rolling Stone:
“With Dragon Age: The Veilguard now complete, BioWare confirms that there are currently no plans for downloadable expansions. The developers’ full attention has now shifted entirely to the next Mass Effect as their current project.”
It goes on to say that Epler won’t share any details about the next title, and he believes that telling the kind of story that Mass Effect has would be better accomplished if it stayed a single player game, instead of venturing towards multiplayer.
Bioware is still reeling from 2017’s Mass Effect Andromeda, widely regarded as the black sheep of the franchise. While that release did real damage to its brand and reputation, it did win some of that reputation back with the release of Mass Effect Legendary Collection in 2021.
We made a video at the time that actually talked about why Mass Effect Andromeda was received poorly. Since then, the common consensus that seems to have formed is that the game was buggy at launch at an unacceptable level for a AAA, and the bold new direction that Bioware chose for it was also a mistake that they didn’t execute well, and so they failed to justify.
So I think it’s safe to say that most gamers expect this new Mass Effect, hopefully to be titled Mass Effect 4, will be mostly a return to form for what the franchise is known for, but still an iteration on everything they had done before.
Because all three Mass Effect games are still very different from each other, with the real connecting thread being the overarching narrative that shows us how each character has grown and changed through the years. Real fans will remember that even back then, Bioware did not consider Mass Effect Andromeda to be Mass Effect 4.
They said that for the reason, that reason being that they know fans are looking for a grand finale. Without spoiling too much, we know that everyone got different endings for different characters, but the overarching story around Commander Shepard hasn’t quite been fully resolved.
Maybe part of the reason they held off is they were facing a storyline dilemma that wasn’t easy to resolve. We’ll see how Bioware resolves this now that they’re finally in place to make a proper Mass Effect 4.
