It's November 7, which means it's time for your tiny annual update on the status of Mass Effect 5. As malaise over the big EA buyout takes hold, BioWare is taking this N7 Day to say that the upcoming RPG is still in development and offer a tiny – I emphasize, tiny – handful of teases about what to expect.
"Like you, we’ve heard the rumors lately," executive producer Mike Gamble says in a new blog post, gesturing toward the EA buyout news that is very much fact rather than rumor. "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."
Gamble says that "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."
Simply dropping the word "romances" into the blog alone will be enough to send a fanbase rabid for alien booty calls into overdrive, but there is one more teaser in here – a series of italicized letters that spell out either "URL KROGAN" or "URL MASS EFFECT KROGAN N7" depending on what's meant to be italicized here. I assume there'll be some web page you need to append these terms to in order to see some secret teaser, similar to the 2023 Epsilon videos, but it doesn't seem anyone's yet discovered the key.
Gamble also offers a quick update on Amazon's Mass Effect TV series, confirming that it'll fit within the existing timeline, similar to the Fallout show, and tell a new story set after the original trilogy.
We've now spent a lot of years waiting for news on the next Mass Effect game, and morsels of information have been few and far between. This is still something of a crust of bread tossed to a fanbase starving in the desert, but with anxieties running high about what the EA buyout will mean for the future of series like Mass Effect, any assurance is appreciated.
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