It Appears The Next Mass Effect Game Will Use Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine 5 Not 4 Certainly

I wonder if they’re using the Legendary Edition engine as a starting point? That could certainly help to maintain the feel and look established by the trilogy, although I wouldn’t mind if they kept Andromeda’s jet pack.

Unreal engine 5 is looking like the go to engine for next gen games. Will be exciting to see how amazing games look

Sounds good. Whatever the team feels comfortable using go with that. I know its far away but I'm really excited to see how the next Mass Effect turns out. I'm rooting for ya Bioware!

@Justifier At the end of the day it is an engine that was only made for Battlefield and EA had the genius idea of pushing it for use in all its games.

@Justifier absolutely and using an engine that's not fit for purpose and you have little confidence in will never produce a great end product. Bioware needs this next title to be at least decent or EA will likely switch things up yet again. I hope this next one is an absolute banger tho.

Good. The change to frostbite to make Andromeda really hurt them.

Wow, 7-8 years between entries AND they completely abandoned the cool-but-flawed Andromeda premise AND they're likely canonizing a bunch of choices from the original trilogy...Bioware makes me so sad.

Definitely a better choice than frostbite. I do wish BioWare would give a procedurally generated universe another shot, but only if it doesn't come at the expense of the story. Gameplay was never mass effects forte, so they might as well give exploration a chance.

@tameshiyaku You say that gameplay was never ME's forte, but for me, had the ME games not have that gameplay, I would've never continued past the first. The dialog choices you make are part of the gameplay, not just story elements. The way you choose how shepard will fight also affects the game. People hated the Mako. I freaking loved exploring with it. I love to headshot everyone with the sniper while being infiltrator, just like others loved to melee their way out. That versatility in the gameplay and how it affected the story was ME's forte indeed.

So basically we'll wait till 2025 allowing our imaginations to run wild at all the possibilities UE5 could bring to the Mass effect universe...and then learn it's using UE4.

Unfortunately bioware is but a shell of itself now. And EA fills me with zero confidence. I really hope they can bring this franchise back and it end up being great...but I refuse to get my hopes up. See how they handle Dragon age first.

The first reveal teaser should definitely just be them standing in an elevator though!

Wow, EA ditching Frostbyte. That's shocking.

Guess that means EA games can come to WiiU now?

Though I'm slightly worried that the only engine anyone seems to use outside Bethesda is pretty much controlled by China....

@Alan_cartridge_ @BrilliantBill More to the point they had to justify to shareholders the money they spent on DICE and got the genius idea that "we acquired their amazing bleeding edge engine tech that we're going to use for absolutely everything we produce" was what they landed on....

@NEStalgia Most of Sony studios use their own in-house engines. Several of Xbox studios also use their own engines (ForzaTech,Slipspace,...). Next to that you have CryEngine as well which is very capable. UE is a big deal but not the only deal out there.

@BrilliantBill Sony's starting to shift into UE, and they purchased a large investment into Epic specifically to secure rights and customization authority in UE, so I think it's a safe bet they're going to be shifting more heavily into standardizing on UE. You don't buy part of the engine tech company only to occasionally use it...

MS has a whole mess of different engines in play at the moment. I can't see them getting rid of the very very customized engines of ForzaTech and Slipspace, but I would be surprised if ForzaTech were to be used in, say, Fable, since it's custom built for racing games.

But I've theorized since last year that part of the purpose behind MS buying Bethesda was to get their hands on idTech. With UE consolidating so much of the industry, Sony buying into Epic, Tencent really controlling Epic, the engine market would be a very rare and valuable commodity for MS to control, and that was a very respected and high end engine that's fallen out of favor for licensing and was up for sale. With Bethesda they picked up 3 engines to own, "ESOEngine" (a custom MMO engine), Creation Engine, which will be Creation Engine 2 starting with Starfield...we don't know where it stands be we know it's a big RPG engine that started as Gamebryo junk and has been increasingly fitted with idTech, and is being totally overhauled into a new engine, Starfield being the first game to use it), and idTech itself. The little detail that MS acquired a dedicated engine juggernaut in the deal tended to evade reporting, but could be significant, especially with Tencent really locking down the industry on UE, and Sony buying partially into that.

CryEngine.....CryEngine is the digital version of the American shopping mall. It looks impressive on the outside, then you go inside and it's dark with empty spaces everywhere, and the 3 things that are there are Cash 4 Gold buyers, a sketchy rug store, and a student art exhibition from the local high school. Who uses CryEngine? The last major game that used it was Ryse: Son of Rome. And the WiiU version of Sonic Boom. Does Homefront: Revolution count as "major game?" The rest are all budget indies on PC-only that nobody's heard of. I'm not actually sure how Crytek makes money anymore, other than selling ports of Crysis, which probably mostly funds EA. They moved from being a licensed engine to basically being a charityware engine with a "pay what you want" Humble style model, to a few percent revenue share, and their only customers are budget indies that probably make little money. I'm pretty sure Robinson: The Journey isn't keeping the lights on. They must have a sugar daddy somewhere, but I can't figure out who. Probably government contracts for modelling military scenarios or something. Or film rendering.