The next Mass Effect game – known colloquially as Mass Effect 4 – is in development at BioWare. After nearly a decade since Shepard’s last adventure, the next game appears to return players to the Milky Way in the wake of the defeat of the Reapers, bringing back old friends like Liara T’Soni and maybe even the Commander themself.
Mass Effect 4 takes place after a massive, galaxy-wide war, and its tone should feel very different to the original trilogy. The next game in the Mass Effect franchise should take advantage of its almost post-apocalyptic setting to explore some brand new factions and forces emerging in the new galaxy.
It’s all but confirmed that Mass Effect 4 takes place after Mass Effect 3’s Destroy Ending. There’s plenty of evidence. It’s only in the Destroy Ending that the Reapers are killed, and a dead Reaper is visible in the trailer. It’s only the Destroy Ending – with a high enough Effective Military Strength – that hints at the possibility of Shepard’s survival, which the trailer also does. It’s only the Destroy Ending which leads to the destruction of the Mass Relays, which art released by BioWare showing what looks like a human-made Mass Relay would also suggest took place.
This means that, when Shepard made their choice to destroy the Reapers and the Mass Relays at the end of Mass Effect 3, there were far greater consequences than those seen in game. An entire Galactic Community which once relied entirely on the Mass Relays was suddenly thrown into darkness. The image of the newly built Mass Relay implies that some of the core locations in the Mass Effect galaxy like the Sol system still have enough resources to rebuild, but it’s likely some areas of the galaxy will have lost contact forever, unable to rebuild and possibly even unable to get the supplies they need to survive.
It’s likely that Commander Shepard killed far more than just synthetic life when making the call to take out the Reapers once and for all. While it’s likely few in the galaxy would hold that over Shepard’s head knowing the Reapers would have wiped everyone out anyway, it could also mean that the galaxy of Mass Effect 4 is a far darker place in the wake of the Reaper invasion than the relatively optimistic view of the future seen in the original Mass Effect trilogy.
It’s likely the defeat of the Reapers has given rise to new political groups, new forms of extremism of both the isolationist and interventionist kind as some species in the galaxy rush to fill the power vacuum left vacant by the Citadel. Returning to Shepard’s story or just the Milky Way has the potential to feel like it’s unnecessarily reopening a door that has long since closed, but exploring the full implications of the Destroy Ending and the new galaxy that arose because of it could be one of the most interesting paths for BioWare to go down.
It should not be the case that, in whatever intervening time has passed between Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect 4, the galaxy has been able to return to something resembling the status quo in Mass Effect 1. Instead, just as the original Mass Effect took place just a few decades after humanity’s discovery of faster-than-light travel and alien life, Mass Effect 4 should take place in a world which is still reeling from a similarly enormous transition caused by the events of the original trilogy.
A new Mass Effect is currently in development by BioWare.
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