Mass Effect 4 Editorials

While we have no reason to believe that BioWare’s next installment in the Mass Effect series will carry a “4” behind its name, that hasn’t stopped people from around the world to do some speculation based on the information made available about the game to date.

A summary on NeoGaf suggests that new alien species will make their debut:

Then this was followed by asking us whether we wanted a direct sequel, a prequel, or something somewhere completely different at a different time. The resounding majority wanted a sequel series, which I think they knew already. And this is based completely off of my opinion but by judging the concept art it has absolutely got to be a sequel.

First concepts were of two new races. The first one being described as “Arrogant”. They were really skinny, almost skeletal. Their bodies vaguely looked like a boney Turian. They had glowing eyes and a neck that frilled up from their chest (once they show it off you’ll see how hard it is to describe. Their heads almost remind me of the aliens from Independence Day. The second new race was described as “Ancient, Advanced, and Guardian”. They had a similar color scheme to reapers and they looked like classic fantasy/sci-fi golems. Sleek rocky or metallic bodies with bright glowing lines flowing all over them. Some had fragmented pieces and shattered bits floating in place around them.

So I’m thinking sequel because new races are kind of hard to explain in a prequel especially when it does take place in the current cycle and I definitely know that for sure because the next few things they showed us were really nice cg models of an asari, salarian, human, and krogan running in the new frostbite engine. They looked amazing by the way. Also they stated that, like humans having many different features from each other, they wanted to do that with other races. That showed off some salarians and krogans with interesting face and bone structures. They also asked an odd but hard question for everyone. They showed a lineup of a character from each main race in the series and asked us which two would we get rid of if we had to. I couldn’t do it but I was sadly surprised at how many people said quarian and krogan.

While a feature on Unigamesity attempts to decipher whether the Reapers will return if it’s a prequel or sequel:

If Mass Effect 4 will go back in time, then perhaps the reapers would be featured at some point. As the reaper Sovereign stated before, his race is eternal, it has no beginning or end; its own existence is a mystery. Besides the reapers are responsible for endless extinction cycles, which means they had to crush many other races that came before the ones that we know from the ME universe, such as the proteans. But unless the new story is about another extinction struggle, then the reapers won’t be the main theme as it happened in this trilogy. They’ll most likely become a secondary matter, a mystery to unveil just as many others in the galaxy. But the chances are that they won’t show up anywhere if the timeline is normalized, after all reapers hibernate for long periods of time in the starless space, so the probabilities to ever find a dormant reaper are minimal.

Now, if in a prequel case the reapers have great chances to return, in a sequel the scenario is way different. At the end of ME 3, players had the option to decide which way they wanted to terminate the reaper threat, so they either got destroyed or neutralized. This means that in the future the reapers are simply part of history; they’re now a peaceful race, controlled or synthetized and they won’t be causing troubles around anymore. Or so we hope, things could perfectly change. The geth worships the reapers as true gods, for this synthetic race the villains are the supremacy of I.A. independence, so, they could perfectly start another war to free their (lords).