Update: It seems that the game will have over 200 planets according to this update by the industry insider.
Speculation about the next Mass Effect game was kicked up a notch recently when a Reddit user alleged to have taken part in survey that seemingly dropped a lot of information regarding the nature of the game. If what has been posted is to be believed, then Mass Effect 4 may well be beyond the scope of what many previously thought it to be.
Some questioned the legitimacy of the survey itself, calling into question why Bioware or EA would leave such crucial information floating around. Others said it was likely thrown together by interns. This was swiftly shot down, and the survey given some legitimacy, by industry insider Shinobi602 who dropped in on the conversation, saying, “Trust me, the folks that sign off on these surveys are no interns.” He then went on to flat out state that, “it’s real”.
Seeing as how he had shown his face, questions were put to him regarding what he knew about the game. Regarding whether the game was set after or before the original trilogy, Shinobi replied, “pretty good deal after”, later expanding on that to say, “Seemingly a lot more than several decades.”
Commenting on what appears to be the sheer scale and ambitiousness of the project, Shinobi said, “I also want to share that it was mentioned to me that being able to focus solely on PS4, Xbox One and PC has probably had the biggest impact in terms of design and possibilities of the game. Dragon Age Inquisition was held back considerably to accommodate 10 year old hardware (as noted not too long ago by Mike Laidlaw himself). That is most certainly not the case here, and honestly what has me excited the most.”
He also spoke a bit about what players can expect from planets. “About the planets: I was told they have a certain toolchain or some program (forgive me, tech isn’t my strong suit) that’s crafted for them in Frostbite 3 that’s allowing them to generate terrain/create planets through a random generator. They go in afterwards and tweak and detail each planet to make them unique and their own thing. With that, the target was around 100 planets so I’m unsure where that stands now.”
As usual this piece of information should be taken with a massive grain of salt. The next Mass Effect is expected to launch sometime next year on PS4, Xbox One and PC.