BioWare Devs Talk Next Mass Effect, Likely Won’t Be Called Mass Effect 4

In a series of forum posts on the official BioWare forums, community manager Chris Priestly and BioWare Montreal studio director Yanick Roy have commented on the next Mass Effect title, on which we currently have no information besides that it’s in development.

Community manager Chris Priestly strongly hinted it won’t be called Mass Effect 4, and also that it might be a reboot, although I’m inclined to take that second hint as just a result of a poor choice of words:

To call the next game Mass Effect 4 or ME4 is doing it a disservice and seems to cause a lot of confusion here. We have already said that the Commander Shepard trilogy is over and that the next game will not feature him/her. That is the only detail you have on the game. I see people saying “well, they’ll have to pick a canon ending”. No, because the game does not have to come after. Or before. Or off to the side. Or with characters you know. Or yaddayaddayadda. Wherever, whenever, whoever, etc will all be revealed years down the road when we actually start talking about it.

I do not call the game ME4 when I talk about it ever, bucause that makes people think of it more as “what happens after Mass Effect 3” rather than “what game happens next set in the Mass Effect Universe”, which is far more accurate at this point. Obviously fans are going to speculate content, character and story until we actually reveal details in the years or months to come as you have almost no actual details, just don’t get bogged down in “well how are they going to continue ME3…”.

While studio director Yanick Roy has a dramatically better-worded, although equally non-committal, post, which implies several mechanics might be rethought from the ground up:

What Chris is saying is that thinking of the next Mass Effect game as Mass Effect 4 would imply a certain linearity, a straight evolution of the gameplay and story of the first three games. But because we are switching to a new engine and need to rebuild a bunch of game systems, we have an opportunity to rethink how we want these systems to be going forward instead of just inheriting them from the previous games. Story-wise, the arc of the first trilogy has also been concluded, and what we will do is tell a new story set in the Mass Effect universe. That doesn’t mean that events of the first three games and the choices you made won’t get recognized, but they likely won’t be what this new story will focus on.

In other words, because the game takes place before of after the first trilogy does not mean it necessarily is a straight prequel or sequel.

Thanks, Eurogamer.