BioWare has already announced that the studio is working on Mass Effect 5, with a release set for some time after Dragon Age 4. However, after the disappointing critical and commercial reception of Mass Effect: Andromeda, the future of the series has rarely been so uncertain.
Mass Effect 5 will need to revive interest in the franchise and BioWare may be willing to take some radical steps to make that happen. This makes it entirely possible that Andromeda will remain a standalone game and that Mass Effect 5 will mark the sun setting on Ryder’s adventures in the Andromeda Galaxy.
Mass Effect 5 has some big shoes to fill, but it also has some recent disappointments to overcome. The original Mass Effect trilogy was one of the most critically acclaimed RPG series ever made and achieved broad mainstream success while packing the punches BioWare had consistently delivered over the studio’s storied history. Many fans are even hoping that November 7 – N7 Day – will see the announcement of a Mass Effect Remastered Trilogy, if not sooner like the October rumors.
Andromeda was poorly received for a few key reasons. The game wasn’t handled by BioWare’s main Edmonton team but was instead handed to the developer’s new Montreal team, since merged with EA Motive. The Montreal team was made to create the game in EA’s Frostbite Engine, but since Frostbite did not come with its own animation system out of the box this caused a lot of problems for the Andromeda team, and the animation bugs were a main criticism of the game.
The troubled development of Andromeda also saw top BioWare employees like general manager Aaryn Flynn step down from the company just a few months after the games’ release, and saw plans for an Andromeda sequel almost immediately put on ice.
This makes it very likely that Mass Effect 5 will attempt to revive the series without being a sequel to Mass Effect: Andromeda. This could mean that players return to the Milky Way Galaxy, which could make a Mass Effect prequel more likely in order to avoid the radically different implications of the three endings to Mass Effect 3 for life in the galaxy. There is less than half a century between the events of Mass Effect and the first discovery of faster-than-light travel in the Mass Effect universe; however, making the window for a totally different story quite small, especially with long-lived species like the Asari hanging around.
BioWare is faced with a lot of challenges in the coming decade. Not only was Andromeda a disappointment for the studio, but one of its other big releases, Anthem, proved to even more poorly received. This puts a lot of pressure on BioWare’s upcoming games Dragon Age 4 and Mass Effect 5, and while Dragon Age has to finish the story of the Dread Wolf, it is Mass Effect which remains BioWare’s most flexible IP.
If the game is set after FTL travel is discovered but before Mass Effect 1, BioWare could still make the game feel fresh by including features like multiple playable alien races, space combat, or a myriad of other things fans want to see in Mass Effect 5. It is very likely, however, that the story of Ryder and the Andromeda Galaxy will be left behind in search of greener pastures.
Mass Effect 5 is in development.
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