While BioWare has been working on a new Mass Effect game for quite some time now, little in the way of details about the game have been revealed so far. However, in a recent social media post, director Michael Gamble has teased that the new game might continue the franchise’s tradition of featuring quite a bit of lens flare.
Responding to a post that said “Mass Effect 5 better stick to tradition and have an excessive amount of lens flair,” Gamble simply responded with an “okay” emoji. While this is far from confirmation that there will be a lot of lens flare in the new Mass Effect, the fact that Gamble has responded positively and playfully does indicate that development on the game might be going smoothly.
It is worth noting, however, that as of reports from earlier this year, the new Mass Effect title hadn’t yet entered full production yet. While quite a bit of time has passed since the initial reports from back in January, at the time, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah indicated in a video that the game was still in its early stages of development.
According to Darrah, this was because the studio was still busy at the time with post-launch support for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. BioWare has been turned into essentially a single-game studio, which means that there aren’t multiple projects being worked on simultaneously.
What we do know about the development of the next Mass Effect game is that it is being made using Unreal Engine 5. The reveal came about as a result of the studio advertising that it was hiring more developers all the way back in 2021. At the time, the job listings indicated that BioWare was looking for programmers that had experience with working on Unreal Engine 4 and 5.
If rumours are to be believed, the switch from the in-house Frostbite engine to Unreal Engine was made because BioWare had faced quite a bit of trouble with DICE’s engine during its time developing Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda.
Back in January, BioWare general manager Gary McKay had revealed through a blog post that development on the new Mass Effect game was being handled by developers that had previously also worked on the original Mass Effect trilogy. The team, according to McKay, includes Gamble, along with Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, and Parrish Ley. McKay also spoke about changing how things work at BioWare.
“In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect, we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans,” wrote McKay. “We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.”
“Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.”
The next Mass Effect doesn’t yet have a release date or even an official title. The game is likely coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
