Even as the consortium led by Donald Trump’s haunted finger puppet Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund proceed with their wildly leveraged $50 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble would like everybody to know that we’re just fine, you guys.
Everything is hunkey-dorey over here at BioWare, a studio whose last few, famously difficult original videogame projects both severely undershot commercial expectations, as we gaze down the barrel of a buyout that will leave our parent organisation $20 billion in debt and beholden to new owners who may disagree with everything we stand for, and who allegedly want to juice the screws with generative AI. Happy N7 Day, you bastards. Here’s a cute coded message for you about the future of Mass Effect, 13 years since the last indisputably good one (sorry Nic). Please ignore the tears streaming down my face.
OK, so this characterisation is both mean-spirited and quite silly, but I cannot read Gamble’s smiling words without hearing somebody cocking a Kessler out of shot. “Like you, we’ve heard the rumors lately,” he acknowledges, after some seasonal preamble. “You’ve made it clear you care deeply about what’s next. So let’s start by setting the record straight: the next Mass Effect game is in development, and EA and BioWare remain committed to telling more stories in this universe.”
For context, the next Mass Effect game was sort-of-announced in 2020. Since then, there has been the occasional snippet of info about the possible return of the Geth and the definite return of senior developers from the original trilogy, but nothing of real substance, for BioWare’s attention has been firmly fixed on the completion of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The latter missed EA’s opening quarterly targets, prompting mass layoffs in a year when EA staff earned less on average while CEO Andrew Wilson got himself a pay rise. All this was before the proposed $50 billion dollar acquisition, which has led one former Dragon Age executive to speculate that EA might sell BioWare or close them down.
“The truth is, the last few years have been an incredibly busy time at BioWare,” Gamble went on. “But currently, the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show.”
He also gave an update on the forthcoming Mass Effect TV show, on which BioWare are collaborating with Amazon. Amazon, the revolting business empire that turned Sauron into an office creep, though I will concede they did an OK job with Fallout.
“The writers room is going strong, and we’ve got a lot figured out about how it fits within the Mass Effect canon, and where it sits in respect to the new game,” Gamble added. “The show will explore a brand-new story within the universe’s timeline, and will be set after the original trilogy. It won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard’s story – because after all … that’s YOUR story, isn’t it?” It is, Mike, and I’ll thank Jeff Bezos to keep his stinking space colonisation fantasies away from my precious Normandy.
If you’re wondering why the blog post text looks weird, that’s because as with N7 Day bulletins of yore, it contains a hidden message. Tot up all the italicised words, including game names, and you get “u r l Mass Effect k r g a n”, unless I’ve missed a few. Which I guess points towards a website of some kind, while teasing that the Krogan are in Mass Effect 5. I’ve jumbled the letters up several times and I can’t find a way to make it read “please Sony buy us”.
