Mass Effect 5(?)

[radiofloyd]

 

https://www.gematsu.com/2020/12/next-mass-effect-the-game-awards-2020-teaser-trailer
 

Bioware love bare-bones reveals.

[Nag]

That's Liara...

[Maryokutai]

As mentioned in the other thread, I think it's a big mistake to link this in any shape or form to the trilogy. There is no way BioWare will be able to make everyone happy with their choice here and if they pick another ME3 ending than the one I chose as canon, every playthrough of this new game will feel "wrong" to me. Liara's older look suggests this takes place a couple of hundred years after the events of ME3, but that's not even remotely enough time to narratively ignore what happened in that game.

 

I'm cautiously looking forward to this. 

[Jimboxy]

4 hours ago, Maryokutai said:

Liara's older look suggests this takes place a couple of hundred years after the events of ME3, but that's not even remotely enough time to narratively ignore what happened in that game.

 

The Star Wars universe manages to forget everything after 15-20 years so a few hundred in the unofficial star wars universe should be enough shouldn't it?

[Maryokutai]

I know it's a joke but it's not only about forgetting, it's about multiple possible scenarios the player had the option to chose from. BioWare would either need to pick one of those and consider that one canon, which is never a good thing to pull off in a series that prides itself on player choice. Or alternately just not deal with any of its consequences which seems unlikely as there's already a destroyed Mass Relay and a dead Reaper in the teaser, which is straight up the aftermath of one ending (actually the one I chose).

 

It's a very dangerous direction. They should have left the Shepard saga as is and go for a new route à la Andromeda, but while staying closer to what made the franchise so beloved in the first place.

[Guest]

 

That teaser came far too early. 

[HandsomeDead]

I guess I'll start a thread for this.

 

Maybe the original teaser was posted somewhere but there was a teaser 2 years ago that features an Asari who does look like Liara.  It's the freckles:

 

 

Nothing has been said since but yesterday there was a new teaser:

 

 

Not much is shown, I guess the game may still be a long way off but we know Bladerunner jackets are in it:

 

 

It's all speculation at this point.  Shepherd returning was one thing but, spoilers I guess (but I'm sure everyone here who cares enough has played it) but with only one ending resulting in Shepherd's survival it seems like the only ending you can build off of while keeping it within a similar timeframe and having a fresh start.  I can't see it building off your past decisions in the original trilogy.  The logistics would be practically impossible.

 

And Bioware recently had some dramatic layoffs so I hope this ends up not being a mess.  There's nothing quite like the ME trilogy and I don't know how possible something like that can be made today, but fingers crossed!

[Guest]

Here’s the thread dude.

[HandsomeDead]

🙃

[one-armed dwarf]

Jeff reckons it's not going to come out until around 2028-29

 

 

really this game should head into soft reboot territory and try to be as decoupled from the Shepard stuff as possible cause its audience will all be boomers when it comes out. Up to a point anyway, given the massive universe changes in ME3

 

(No idea what happened in Andromeda, ain't going to play it)

[HandsomeDead]

That's wild if it is that far away.  Dragon Age never drew me in (I played a little of the original and that's it) so I've not been following that and didn't realise the next game was announced so long ago.

But maybe a lot is going to be riding on that game rebuilding the goodwill Bioware have lost in recent times.  It would be nice to at least know ME is in safe hands.

 

Or it's a case of letting go and wondering if the Baldur's Gate 3 devs will ever do a sci-fi epic.

[Maryokutai]

So there have been a couple of news about this lately, but the gist of it is that some people from BioWare have left, others have been laid off, while others have been (permanently) moved to other studios and projects, leaving BioWare at around 100 staff who have just begun production on this game that was announced over four years ago.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-01-31/electronic-arts-slashes-bioware-after-dragon-age-sales-miss

https://www.ign.com/articles/dragon-age-developers-reveal-theyve-been-laid-off-after-bioware-puts-full-focus-on-mass-effect

 

So what I take away from this is that this game will come out at the end of this decade and it will be the last BioWare release unless it sells a miraculous amount of copies.

 

I've also recently been made aware that neither ME nor Dragon Age (except for Inquisition, hilariously) have ever been big sellers. So their output is just fundamentally incompatible with the current AAA working budgets and yet another reason as to why stuff needs to change, and soon.

[Maf]

I haven’t looked it up but I thought ME2 and `ME3 were really big for the time. It seemed that way the amount of marketing they were putting in to it

[Maryokutai]

Keyword being 'for the time'. From what I understand they were all hovering between the 1.5m to 3m mark. Which I suppose makes EA's expectations for Veilguard rather reasonable, but it doesn't give them much wiggle room. The game being just barely a success if it performs like one of its best-selling predecessors isn't a sustainable baseline.