The Mass Effect franchise is at a strange crossroads. The original trilogy is getting a remaster in the form of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, encouraging players to fall back in love with the acclaimed original trilogy, Commander Shepard, and the crew of the Normandy. However, the last game in the main series, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was released to disappointing reception, begging the question of when and where Mass Effect 5 should be set, and what story it should try to tell.
There are some great reasons for Mass Effect 5 to be set during the Rachni Wars. This event would give BioWare opportunities to explore some familiar settings and to give players greater insight into the history of some of the iconic alien races they’ve met so far. Not only that, but as a setting the Rachni Wars could also help avoid some traps the series may risk falling into to produce a game which provides exciting new roleplaying opportunities without abandoning parts of the setting which make Mass Effect unique.
The Rachni Wars were a huge conflict which took place between the Citadel races and the rachni, a hive mind of super-intelligent space-faring insects. The wars began around 1 CE, when salarian scientists with the Citadel Council activated a dormant Mass Relay. Unbeknownst to them, the relay opened to a part of space inhabited by the rachni, who quickly captured the scientists and began reverse engineering their technology to create their own ships capable of travelling through the relays at faster-than-light speeds.
The biggest advantage that the rachni had was their numbers. No matter how many Citadel forces destroyed, more kept coming through and continuing their waves of attack. The Rachni Wars would last for around 300 years.
The solution was found in the krogan, a race of warlike reptilians who had decimated their own planet with nuclear war. The salarians helped introduce the krogan to the galactic community with an ulterior motive: the extremely fast rate of krogan reproduction made them the perfect troops to finally take down the rachni once and for all. The plan worked, and the krogan chased the rachni all the way back to their homeworld, which they then bombed into oblivion, destroying the rachni queens.
The krogan themselves would then become a new threat, expanding to many other worlds including some inhabited by other Citadel races like the asari. This would eventually lead to the breaking out of the Krogan Rebellion, which was in-turn only solved by the introduction the militaristic turians into the Citadel races, and the use of the genophage to leave the vast majority of Krogan infertile.
The Rachni Wars take place over centuries, giving BioWare a huge amount of flexibility in terms of the stories the studio can tell in that time. Like the reapers, the rachni were a galaxy-wide threat, so the next game wouldn’t feel like it was lowering the stakes from the original Mass Effect trilogy. Setting Mass Effect 5 during the Rachni Wars would also force BioWare to make one bold move with the potential for big pay-off: there could not be any human characters. Humans would not join the galactic community until the 21st century.
This would force BioWare to make the player character a non-human, perhaps even giving players the option to choose between which species they’d like to play as, though unfortunately for Garrus Vakarian fans, the turians would also not make sense for this time period. However, this could help bring some of the lesser known races of the Mass Effect galactic community to the forefront, giving the next game a familiar feel but a unique focus.
Writing a Mass Effect game without humans might not have worked when the series first launched in 2007, but after over a decade with the franchise, the species of the Mass Effect universe are far less foreign now than they were when the games first released. Just as Dragon Age: Inquisition introduced the qunari as a playable race after the series had been around long enough for players to understand their culture and its roleplaying possibilities, the same can be said for the asari, salarians, and krogan.
Though a Mass Effect prequel would necessarily take place at a time where players would know the final outcome of the Rachni Wars – the defeat of the rachni by the krogan – that would not necessarily undermine an independent narrative told within that time period. If BioWare did want to tell a story which lasted over the full course of the wars they could do so with a long-lived asari or krogan protagonist, with each species able to live well over 300 years.
The big balancing act facing the Mass Effect series is this: how can BioWare tell stories which feel fresh while still including the key features of the Mass Effect brand. This problem came to a head in Andromeda, where Jaal Ama Darav, the only companion of a new species endemic to Andromeda, was better received than most of the squadmates of the old Citadel races.
The Rachni Wars could encourage BioWare to move away from a human protagonist while still telling a story with a galaxy-wide threat and many of the races Mass Effect fans have come to know and love. As a prequel, the Rachni Wars could even offer more insight into the events of the original trilogy. The Rachni Queen Shepard encounters on Noveria tells them of a “tone from space which hushed one voice after another,” perhaps implying that another force made the rachni hostile, maybe even the Reapers.
In any case, if BioWare is going to continue to tell stories in the Mass Effect universe, some bold moves will need to be taken and some sacrifices will need to be made. It is unlikely that the series will be able to revive the sense of originality from the first trilogy if the next story takes place with a human protagonist, most of the same Citadel species, and no clear way to emulate the galaxy-wide threat of the Reapers. Whether Mass Effect 5 takes place in the Rachni Wars or not, those key challenges will likely remain.
Mass Effect 5 is in development.
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