Patrick Söderlund on the Future of Mass Effect

The Gamereactor folks have asked Patrick Söderlund, EA’s Executive Vice President, about the future of Mass Effect when they ran into him at Gamescom. After sharing that he thinks Mass Effect: Andromeda was criticized too harshly, Söderlund said that Mass Effect, as a franchise, is just too big to be buried, and that the bigwigs at EA fully intend to come back to it in the future. Of course, his specific wording makes it sound like we may see actual FTL technology invented before that happens. See for yourself:

“Well I think, my personal opinion is, I think that the game… I usually don’t do this, but this is one of those places where I feel like the game got criticised a little bit more than it deserved,” Söderlund said. “I think the game is actually a great game. Yes, we have to acknowledge the fact that there were some things that maybe we could have done better, absolutely, but as a whole, if you go in and you buy the game today with everything that’s in it today, I believe that that’s a game worth buying, personally.”

“So that’s the first thing I’ll say. The [second] thing I’ll say is, for Mass Effect as a franchise, that has such a big fanbase, and you know I’ve seen people saying ‘Oh, EA’s not making another Mass Effect’. I see no reason why we shouldn’t come back to Mass Effect. Why not? It’s a spectacular universe, it’s a loved [series], it has a big fanbase, and it’s a game that has done a lot for EA and for BioWare.

“What we need to be careful though of is, whenever we bring Mass Effect back again, we have to make sure that we bring it back in a really [relevant] way, and in a fresh, exciting place. That’ my job, and that’s Casey’s [Hudson] job, and BioWare and the Mass Effect team’s job, to figure out what that looks like, and that we don’t know yet, but we will.”