New BioWare Update Points to Next-Gen Mass Effect Release Date

A new update out of BioWare sheds light on the release date of the new Mass Effect game. It has been almost four years since BioWare announced the next Mass Effect game, tentatively dubbed Mass Effect 5 by the Internet. Some even refer to it as Mass Effect 4, discounting Mass Effect: Andromeda. Officially, BioWare has only ever referred to it as the next Mass Effect game though.

While it has been four years since the announcement of the RPG, there is still no word of a release date. And this isn’t going to change anytime soon. For the past four years, the primary focus of BioWare has been Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This focus is shifting though.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard comes out later this month on October 31, and ahead of this, the game has gone gold. In other words, it is complete. Until the game releases, it will still command the attention of BioWare. Whether it will be supported with post-launch DLC, remains to be seen, but the shift to Mass Effect development is already happening.

To this end, former BioWare lead Mark Darrah noted that in the past at BioWare, when a game went gold, part of the team would be reassigned to other projects. This is also just the industry standard.

How much of BioWare has shifted focus to Mass Effect, we don’t know, but only more and more of it will shift in the coming months, possibly years if BioWare decides to robustly support Dragon Age: The Veilguard with DLC. Whatever the case, development is about to pick up on Mass Effect.

Officially, BioWare has not said the game has left pre-production, but if it hasn’t already, it will soon do this. To this end, we can begin to extrapolate when it will release. The last time BioWare released a Mass Effect game, Mass Effect Andromeda, it took five years of development, though the bulk of the game was done in the final 18 months of this window.

There is no guarantee this will repeat with the new Mass Effect, as game development times have become more drawn out since Mass Effect Andromeda. To this end, it took BioWare more than five years to make Dragon Age: The Veilguard. That said, taking into consideration — the five years, which is about current industry standard for AAA development — the next Mass Effect game may release in 2029 or 2030. This is just an estimate though. However, if accurate, it would likely peg the sci-fi RPG as an early next-gen game, as the new consoles will be out by then based on previous leaks.