Mass Effect 4 Release Date, News: BioWare Game Developments In 2014

Where are BioWare at in developing Mass Effect 4 in 2014?
Mass Effect 4 Release Date, News: BioWare Game Developments In 2014
(Youtube screenshot)
8/30/2014
Updated:
7/18/2015

Where are BioWare at in developing Mass Effect 4 in 2014?

Earlier in the year, BioWare Montreal Studio Director Yanick Roy noted that the team are “somewhere in the middle” of game development.

At video presented at E3 2014, BioWare designers and developers at Edmonton suggested that the game will be set in a completely different region of space from the events of Mass Effect 3.

“We think fans of the series will be surprised at just how far we are going,” one of the developers said in the video.

The Edmonton developers also said that they are “developing a completely new IP,” and are going to build a “fictional world that feels real and is alive, and is constantly changing.”

Clearly, BioWare is going to steer clear away from the Mass Effect 3 storyline as much as possible, given how they came up with endings for the game that were generally hated by Mass Effect fans.

Indeed, Yanick Roy said last year that BioWare won’t call the next Mass Effect game “Mass Effect 4” because it would “imply a certain linearity, a straight evolution of the gameplay and story of the first three games.”

“That doesn’t mean that events of the first three games and the choices you made won’t get recognized, but they likely won’t be what this new story will focus on.

“If you had three games centered around a group of key soldiers in the US army during World War I and then decided to make a game about another group of people during the Second World War, the games could have many points in common and feel true to one another.

“You likely would have to recognize how the events of the first war influenced the ones of the second, but you would not necessarily think of it as a sequel.

“Again, the analogy is not great, but what I’m trying to say is that the ME universe is so rich that we are not limited to a single track when coming up with a new story,” Roy concluded.

BioWare has not announced a release date or schedule for their upcoming Mass Effect title, or what platforms it could be launched on.

 

 

Larry Ong is a New York-based journalist with Epoch Times. He writes about China and Hong Kong. He is also a graduate of the National University of Singapore, where he read history.