The next major installment in the epic space opera that is Mass Effect is apparently coming sometime in either late 2014 to mid-2015, developer BioWare has revealed.
We first learnt of the sequel’s existence in November, shortly after BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk decided to leave the company and retire from gaming (at least for the near future).
“You’ll hear more about the new Mass Effect game in 2013,” revealed an anonymous BioWare staff member in an interview with Gamer Syndrome.
While the launch window is hoped to be in “late 2014 to mid-2015”, unsurprisingly, there’s no exact release date as of yet.
We don’t really know who the speaker is; EA confirmed it to be Mass Effect 3 producer Mike Gamble but retracted this assertion pretty quickly, though it was admitted that this was a BioWare staffer.
BioWare recently looked to the fans for ideas about where and when to set Mass Effect 4. The subject of who the game will follow was also brought up in Casey Hudon’s inquisitive tweets.
The interview also revealed that there’s at least one more Mass Effect 3 chunk of DLC on the way, and that multiplayer support will continue.
The interview also revealed information about scrapped plans for Mass Effect 2 multiplayer, which apparently became too much work.
“We had actually wanted to do multiplayer in Mass Effect 2,” he said. “We started working on it and found out that it was just going to be too much, so we had to take it out of Mass Effect 2 and put it into [Mass Effect] 3.”
There were plans for ME3 at one point to include a mission to the turian homeworld Palaven (whose moon you can visit in the game) and even a massive boss battle at the end.
“One of the mission ideas that got scrapped was actually going onto Palaven, the turian home world, and being able to see what their world was like,” Gamble revealed.
“We also scrapped the original ending for Mass Effect 3. We were gonna have it as a ‘boss battle’, where Commander Shepard would go up and fight The Illusive Man who has been transformed by the Reapers. We scrapped that idea because way too many [games] have that as their ending, some final boss fight.”
The BioWare dev also mentioned plans for Wii U, which may include the much-wanted trilogy pack (speculation).
“Wii U is a console we feel is really cool and that more Mass Effect would look great on it, so we do have plans for Wii U but nothing to announce at this moment,” he explained.
What I’d personally love to see is a massive update to the first game’s combat and graphics; make it look and feel like ME3. That, would be sweet, what would you like to see on the Wii U?
