Mass Effect Director Teases Huge Upgrade From Previous Games

The fact that the next Mass Effect game — tentatively dubbed Mass Effect 5 by many, and even Mass Effect 4 by some — is making use of Unreal Engine is a huge advantage for it compared to Mass Effect Andromeda, which was made with the Frostbite Engine, an engine made for first-person shooters that EA has tried to adapt many of its games to in order to save money. The problem is it’s not a very good engine for anything but first-person shooters. And it showed with Mass Effect Andromeda, which has many problems, but the Frostbite Engine is one of the biggest of these problems. The first three games in the series were not made on Frostbite, but Unreal Engine 3. And again, it shows. So, the fact that Mass Effect is getting back to Unreal Engine, and the latest high-tech iteration of it at that, is great news for fans of the sci-fi RPG. 

More than this, it looks like the next Mass Effect game is going to make use of Meta Human, a piece of software that allows for hyper-realistic characters to be created in Unreal Engine 5. How well it will work when creating alien characters, remains to be seen, but if the next Mass Effect game is making use of Meta Human, it’s a big upgrade from previous games. Whether the animation work will compliment the fidelity to create a truly immersive experience, only time will tell, but it’s a promising sign. 

That said, this is assuming a recent tweet from BioWare project director Michael Gamble is any indication of everything above. Gamble recently replied to an Unreal Engine developer asking developers making use of the technology if there was any improvement they’d like to see made to the software. Gamble replied to this with a Mass Effect GIF featuring a Salarian. Many have taken this as a confirmation the game is using Meta Human, and it may even be Gamble’s answer to the question, as you could imagine creating a Salarian model with Meta Human is a bit tricky. 

For now, take all of this speculation with a grain of salt. We don’t have a hard confirmation of anything right now, and so far Gamble has not offered any type of follow-up or any type of comment on the speculation his tweet has created. If this changes, we will update the story accordingly.