Skyrim's lead designer and former Bethesda veteran Bruce Nesmith has chimed in on what he wants to see from Mass Effect 5 (or whatever name the next Mass Effect game ends up with) and - surprise, surprise - he thinks BioWare could do well by ripping a few pages out of the Bethesda playbook.
"I would hope that they would try to just take their lore and make a modern game of it," Nesmith says in an interview with Press Box PR. "One of the knocks on Mass Effect that I would have is that they always felt like they were a generation behind. I know, they had very cool characters, they had great stories, but the gameplay always felt dusty and old. It just wasn’t there." Nesmith goes on to say that if BioWare could marry the studio's strengths with "more modern" sensibilities, then it could potentially have a "fantastic game" on its hands.
"I think taking lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 would fit Mass Effect really well," Nesmith continues before also naming dropping his own former workplace. "But I think they should probably try to make a more Bethesda-style game, to be honest."
Of course, Nesmith isn't implying that BioWare should fully go down the first-person sandbox route with Mass Effect 5. He just reckons fans of the series "are dying for an open world science fiction game that has that kind of flavor to it" and is "content heavy."
"Mass Effect players would be going nuts for that. But I’m a former Bethesda guy so I'm probably going to say that about a lot of things." Nothing wrong with having pride in some classics, I say.
Last time we heard from the next Mass Effect, BioWare was seemingly ramping up development by hiring a production director for the project.
