BioWare Edmonton hand over development duties to Montreal branch.
A new community blog from BioWare has confirmed that Mass Effect 4 will utilise the Frostbite 2 engine and won’t come from the series’ creators BioWare Edmonton.
Mass Effect will return, but Shepard won't. Unless this groovy fan-made wallpaper is right and the Montreal-developed sequel involves zombies....
Casey Hudson will remain in charge of the franchise as Executive Producer, but development duties will transfer over to BioWare Montreal. The Edmonton branch of the house that the two doctors built is currently in the middle of developing Dragon Age 3, so it isn’t surprising that EA has delegated both highly anticipated sequels to two separate studio entities.
“That evolution now takes its next step, with the news that the next Mass Effect game is already in development, driven by the team here in Montreal. This is the goal we have been working toward for years now, and every member of our team is proud, excited, and humbled to take on the responsibility for the next game,” explained Yanick Roy, studio director of BioWare Montreal.
“To ensure a proper and effective transition, we’ll continue to be supported by the Edmonton studio through the game’s development, working with and learning from them on some critical initiatives. On top of that, Casey remains the Executive Producer, but he will have a Project Director under him, working in Montreal, leading our development team and making day-to-day decisions for the game. We all care very much about Mass Effect and make our decisions based on what’s best for the game.”
BioWare Montreal are planning to simultaneously “be very respectful of the heritage built over the course of the first three games” while “ exploring new directions, both on the gameplay and story fronts” – what that means in practice we have no idea, but we really hope it doesn’t involve magic space children explaining away every mysterious in the ME universe in a matter of minutes.
With Dragon Age III set for release next year, we suspect that Mass Effect 4 won’t appear on PC and next gen consoles until 2014 – at least that’s the release window we’d put our money on…
Picture Credit: Art by Patryk “Garrett” Olejniczak,
Tags: Mass Effect
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Comments
I dont know and care whether its going to be Sequel or Prequel, only thing i bleive is ME4 is going to be amazing!!
Though i have heard bad things about Frostbite engine.(i have heard, i realllly dontknow!)
Please remember “there will be no red, green , or blue ending for ME3″
- one of the devs from Bioware.
What did we get?
The ghost child stays, deal with it.
And
Red, Green and Blue.
Don’t be a sellout.
Never forgive. Never forget.
EVERYTHING you did in ME 1, 2 & 3 ultimately meant NOTHING.
Don’t be a sellout, boycott Bioware!
Sellout? Wait, I can get money for playing worthwhile games made by an amazing studio? Where do I sign up, I’m selling out right the fuck now!
EA assumed direct control.
Darned godchild, screwing up my games and making it so my choices don’t change anything.
At least with Dragon Age they told me how things changed. (Referring to origins, of course.) What, couldn’t spend some of your millions of trillions of dollars on some cheap concept art with words on it? It wouldn’t even take you more than 2 days, at most. You decide what happens, get some art from your workers, do some coding and viola.
“Mass Effect will return, but Shepard won’t. Unless this groovy fan-made wallpaper is right and the Montreal-developed sequel involves zombies….”
If there will be no Shepard then Im out. You can’t just erase the most important character of a game with that large history. I only wish it wont be the same disaster like Gothic 4 Arcadia.
Who said anything about erasing the character? Have you read the books? They could very well just take a path similar to how Drew Karpyshyn wrote the books, making mentions here and there to provide basis to a timeline. If you can’t have Mass Effect without Shepard then you best stop dreaming about any future Mass Effect games, because Shepard is dead.
The words Mass Effect give me a boner!!
You cant have mass effect without shepard and the other main characters like garrus liara tali etc. I will never buy a bioware game again. I also agree with the person above BOYCOTT BIOWARE
Actually you can, if Halo Reach is any indication you can still make a great game without the franchise’s poster character.
Infamous: Second Son isn’t going to have Cole McGrath in it, and do you hear anyone complaining? KOTOR 2 didn’t have Revan either.
Joy, we get another installment of Massive Mess. Fuck You EA, and fuck you Bioware!
Nah, I’ll check it out, only after a month or two and plenty of player reviews.
I will say one area Bioware and EA can go fuck themselves in…that’s pre-orders…never again.
If they are smart they’ll return to the rpg heavy template of mass effect 1. The sequels were just more shooters, but with very, very slight rpg elements. That pissed me off.
And suddenly Shepard couldn’t have more than a paragon response and a renegade response. I understand that for talking to people in “yes or no” situations, but come on… By the third game I was just sprinting into cover, shooting things so I could move on and not even really bothering with conversations any more. Not to mention there weren’t even the mini-puzzles from ME2. Simple, fairly easy, yes. But at least it broke up the nearly straight combat.
After dragon age two i never bothered to buy another bioware game. They are turning ME into call of duty more and more every game, and dragon age will be dynasty warriors by the time they get done