Everything you need to know about the next Mass Effect

It’s been years since we’ve been able to sink our teeth into a truly new Mass Effect game, and while the stellar re-release of the original trilogy was a welcome boon, the next game is still at the forefront of our minds.

With a teaser emerging from BioWare every so often, we know it’s on the way and it looks like it’ll feature some returning characters, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. Find out all the details we do have, right here.

Next Mass Effect release date

Even getting confirmation that the next Mass Effect game is in active development has taken plenty of time, so the headline news here is that a firm release date is still very much a ways off. However, we’ve made real progress nonetheless!

It was only in November 2020, on N7 Day, that BioWare made the small announcement that it was working on the next game, along with a single piece of concept art that’s above, as the header image for this piece.

Next Mass Effect trailers

We got our most recent teaser for Mass Effect’s next outing in November 2023, on N7 Day once again – and it’s a brief one!

It shows someone who has big Main Character Energy in a snazzy N7 coat – clearly intended to make us think of Shepard from the first three games, before quickly ending.

Before that, our last glimpse had been at 2020’s Game Awards, and while it’s a bit longer it’s still a pretty ambiguous trailer.

It’s a brief look, and we’ll get into its implications for the new game’s story down below, but it conspicuously doesn’t end with any sort of indication of a release window, which is hardly a surprise. It’s therefore vanishingly unlikely that we’ll see the game release this year – 2024 feels more possible, although you shouldn’t get too disappointed if 2025 ends up looking more likely.

The team at BioWare recently published a blog post that mentioned that the game is in the prototyping phase, so it’s only at an early stage of its production right now – another strong indication that it’s still at least a couple of years off.

Next Mass Effect platforms

Those rough conclusions we can draw about the game’s release window being far off can lead us to some fairly obvious guesses about platforms, too. By the time it comes out, it’s all but guaranteed that it will be geared squarely and exclusively at the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on the console side, taking advantage of next-gen power and speed.

The games have also always historically come out at the same time on PC, too, so we see no reason why that would stop. Nintendo’s joyous Switch is a console marvel, but we’d be enormously surprised if it could hold a candle to the sort of power the game will need in a couple of years’ time, so without hardware updates, it won’t be on Switch, sadly.

Next Mass Effect Story

This is where things get a little more speculative, but also a bunch more interesting – there are so many possibilities for what BioWare could choose to explore with a new Mass Effect, but that teaser trailer gives us a few firm hints about what to expect.

Firstly, it clearly takes place after the conclusion of Mass Effect 3, so this isn’t another major time jump for the series. Unlike Andromeda, the middling follow-up we’ve had so far, it looks like it’s also going to commit to making one of the optional endings of Mass Effect 3 the canonical choice. We know this since the trailer clearly features a defunct, floating wreckage that was once a Mass Relay, the fast-travel service around our galaxy.

However, it doesn’t look like Andromeda is getting abandoned by any means – in fact, the most likely bet is that the game will follow from Andromeda on a timeline basis, but deal more directly with the events caused by Mass Effect 3’s ending.

BioWare

Fronting the show for now, too, is Liara, the beloved blue-skinned alien from the original games, older and wiser. In the trailer, we see her searching among the wreckage of a defeated Reaper and finding part of the helmet worn by your old player character, Commander Shepard. That’s enticing and encouraging news.

The figures in that concept art, meanwhile, have drawn some attention and look an awful lot like the silhouettes of Thane and Mordin from the first trilogy, as well as Jaal from Andromeda – the latter being an alien of a race that was new in Andromeda, further indicating that it’s part of the new canon.

In July 2022 we got an interesting bit of news where the game’s story is concerned – veteran writer Mary DeMarle is working as a Senior Narrative Director on the project. She was instrumental to the story of the recent Guardians of the Galaxy, and the modern Deus Ex games, which is a good pedigree to bring in.

That’s less good news for her old home, Eidos Montreal, but suggests that we can expect a well-crafted story from the team working on the next Mass Effect.

N7 Day in early November 2022 brought another bit of concept art for the game, which you can see below – it’s a gorgeous piece hinting at some sort of reconstruction in space. We can’t confirm that it’s an attempt to build a new Mass Effect relay, but the shape of the structure is similar and it’s labelled MR7.

BioWare

A bit of text on the image (which you can see in full on the official blog here) calls it a Vacuum-dock relay, so we’ll have to wait to find out what that means in due course.

What exactly the story will look like is still entirely unknown, of course, but the inclusion of returning characters, and the hint that Shepard might not be quite out for the count, will be getting pulses racing.

Next Mass Effect gameplay

Finally, we come to gameplay, and while we can’t be sure of much on this front either, there are some fairly sensible guesses to be made. The Mass Effect series has always been a third-person shooter fused with an RPG, but it’s fair to say that it’s become heavier on the shooting as it’s gone along. Or, at least, the shooting got better over time.

We see no reason this should change in the new game and, in fact, one of the areas where Andromeda made some good strides forward was in combat, which was punchy and variable once you started to embrace and experiment with the many powers and options available to you.

BioWare

You should also expect a chunky story filled with side quests, all offering up choices for how you want to resolve matters, along with a roster of companions to gather and choose between as you set out on missions. Who these will be is anyone’s guess at the moment.

Similarly, it’s hard to predict how many locations and planets we’ll be able to visit, but we’re hopeful that BioWare is setting the bar high on all these counts. For now, all we can do is wait to find out.