Yanick Roy, BioWare Montreal's studio director, submitted a post today on BioWare's blog announcing that not only is the next Mass Effect game in development, but that BioWare Montreal will be taking the reins from the Edmonton studio.
However, Roy pointed out that the Mass Effect series is not new to the teams in Montreal.
The Montreal studio has made significant contributions to the Mass Effect franchise. We started by building about half the cinematics for ME2, then most of its N7 missions, and finally we played an important role in the development of much of its post-release content. Then on ME3, we took charge of the multiplayer portion as well as making significant contributions to the single-player campaign. Most recently, we built a large piece of DLC that will be released on November 27 and that you know under the name of Omega. With each new portion of work, we took on deeper and broader responsibilities, but we always worked in conjunction with Casey, the Mass Effect leads, and the developers in Edmonton.
Casey Hudson will remain as the Executive Producer, but he will have a Project Director liaison in Montreal.
Roy also confirmed that the next Mass Effect game will run on DICE's Frostbite engine, which isn't too much of a surprise since BioWare has already announced that Dragon Age III will run on the same engine.
He wasn't able to say much else about the game, but he did close the post with a bit of reassurance for Mass Effect fans.
The other thing I can tell you is that, while it will be very respectful of the heritage built over the course of the first three games, with the original trilogy now concluded and the switch over to a new engine, 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.
Good or bad thing that the series is moving studios? Quite frankly, I'm eager to see what fresh hands will do with this series next!
