New Mass Effect Trilogy in Development at BioWare Montreal

[Shawn Zipay]

Unlike the original Mass Effect trilogy which was developed at BioWare Edmonton, the new trilogy that's in the works is being developed by BioWare Montreal. The studio will be utilizing the Frostbite 2 engine for the next iterations of the series.

BioWare Montreal has not yet released a game of its own, it did have a huge hand in creating the cinematics and N7 missions for Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. They also did a "large piece" of the upcoming Omega DLC for Mass Effect 3.

For those hoping for a completely fresh start, you may be sad to hear that Casey Hudson will stay on as Executive Producer.

"We are exploring new directions, both on the gameplay and story fronts. You can still expect the pillars the franchise is known for to be fully intact though, including diverse alien races, a huge galaxy to explore, and of course rich, cinematic storytelling."

(via Shacknews)

[K-16]

I'm fine with Mr. Hudson staying on as Executive Producer as long as he learns to be vague in all of his interviews. All I ask is that he promises not to ****ing imitate Mr. Molyneux and be clueless about your own product; don't ****ing say the ending will have more sophistication and variety in that we can't count how many there are, or label them as A, B, or C. If you can promise you won't promote your product in such a way that will be easily misinterpreted and exaggerated by excited fans, then you can do whatever the hell you want with Mass Effect.

For the record, I'm not worried about future Mass Effect endings; I'm worried about features that are misinterpreted and exaggerated, and stories that contradict DLC plotlines (or at least the severity of the information pointed out in the DLC becomes completely ignored later due to laziness and convenience purposes or vice-versa). For all we know we can be promised 1,000,000 unique characters with speaking lines, only to find out they're all the same model with different colors of the same clothing, and the same voice with the same line under different pitches tuned per person. Of course I doubt that will happen, but those are the kind of examples I'm concerned about.