In some ways, 2025 is the year of the AA game, with the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Split Fiction running the table of critical consensus. The next Mass Effect game, whether it brings Commander Shepard back or goes in a whole new direction, should follow their lead.
AA games are a bit nebulous to define, but sit somewhere between the AAA blockbusters that dominate sales charts (like Ghost of Yōtei, Battlefield 6) and indie games from small teams (like Öoo or And Roger). BioWare’s Mass Effect has always had the trappings of AAA games. High budgets, large development teams, and expansive adventures, the Mass Effect titles are the quintessential AAA games. They’re Hollywood summer tentpoles in video game form.
Mass Effect Andromeda might be the AAA-est of all the Mass Effect games. The maligned 2017 offshoot went big with open-world-like hub planets that were large enough to drive over in the Nomad, the game’s marked upgrade over the original trilogy’s Mako. Its runtime was once again a 40-hour affair with dozens of side quests to pursue alongside the main story; Andromeda also included a multiplayer mode, like Mass Effect 3, for those who didn’t want to leave the new galaxy once credits rolled.
Yet, some of Andromeda‘s failures stemmed from its “go big or go home” approach. Mass Effect has never needed big empty maps or vast desserts to drive across (let alone two). The highlights of Mass Effect have always been when it scales down in scope; a tight hallway for cover shooting, the confines of the Main Battery on the Normandy for long talks about calibrating. The series’s best moments shine through its smallest lenses.
Mass Effect 2 does this better than any other. While the overarching plot is another galaxy-at-stake affair, the game’s appeal stems from its more personal moments. Over the course of Mass Effect 2, Shepard recruits a mighty impressive team, from Biotic Jack to the assassin Thane, and gets to know them all in intimate ways (some more intimate than others). Getting to know a companion culminates in a loyalty mission where Shepard helps their companion work through some sort of trauma from their past.
These missions, like most in the game, take only about an hour to complete and take place on small, tight, and linear maps. They’re scaled-down in design, and successful because of it. Andromeda has similar quests that are some of the game’s best, like traipsing around a gravity-distorted ship in Liam’s loyalty missions. Andromeda is at its best when it focuses on character moments and not yet another galaxy-saving mission.
Scaling down might be Mass Effect’s future, whether BioWare intends it or not. After EA announced in September it would be purchased for $55 billion by a group of private investors, headlined by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, speculation bubbled as to what that purchase might mean for its various studios and franchises.
We don’t have to belabor the entirety of BioWare’s history from the past decade, but it hasn’t had a hit since 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. Anthem was a disappointment in 2019, while last year’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to sell well, despite a strong critical reception. EA responded by laying off BioWare developers, and the studio now sits at less than 100 employees. With EA in the process of being sold, industry analysts suspect BioWare will not remain with the publisher. Whether sold off entirely, or the Mass Effect and Dragon Age properties being sold to separate buyers, it’s possible BioWare doesn’t have a future with EA.
That would be quite the unceremonious end to one of the most recognizable game studios around. While “BioWare Magic” may have been code for “crunch,” there’s no denying the studio’s output from its first two decades around — Baldur’s Gate and 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age — was a bit “magical.”
That level of success may not be achieved again by BioWare, especially if it’s sold for parts. But the best way to get back on that hit-producing track — if BioWare is given the chance — might be to go smaller scale for Mass Effect 5.
I don’t need another space opera starring Shepard. Just give me a tight, AA space shooter with personal stories and fun Biotics skills. (And bangable aliens, of course.) I’d much rather play a scaled-down, 20-hour, linear Mass Effect 5 than a bloated open-world Mass Effect 5 — or, worse yet, no Mass Effect 5 at all.
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