According to a recent post in Bioware’s social forum, community coordinator Chris Priestly revealed that the next Mass Effect title is being developed by a new team at Montreal studio, and that the team is also getting additional help from the Edmonton branch.
“The way our games at BioWare Edmonton/Montreal work is that there is always a core team. So there is a core Dragon Age team (Mark Darrah, Mike Laidlaw, David Gaider, Matt Goldman, etc) and there is a core Mass Effect team (Casey Hudson, Preston Watamaniuk, Mac Walters, Derek Watts, etc). The core teams don't change between Dragon Age Origins to DA2 to DA3 or ME to ME2 to ME3 (unless someone quits or similar),” Priestly writes.
“The next Mass Effect game is being developed at our Montreal studio (with support from Edmonton) and has a new team of mostly Montreal staff. The core ME team is now working on a new IP (and helps Montreal if they need it).”
A number of members from the Dragon Age 3: Inquisition team, according to Priestly, are also set to lend helping hands to the ME project once the development is completed for the next Dragon Age title.
“The other staff that are not core team leads, the artists, programmers, audio, writers, animators, QA, etc move between projects when they are needed for the workload. Someone already mentioned Patrick Weekes. He's a good example. He was a writer on the Mass Effect series, now he is writing on Dragon Age Inquisition. Same with many staff here,” he adds.
“When DA3 is done, much of the DA3 team will move on to the next Mass Effect game or the new IP depending on where they are needed. That is kind of how we do things here at BioWare.”
Mass Effect 4 is said to incorporate a lot of changes, and among them is the speculation that the game, this time around, will not feature Commander Shepard because the game’s plot, supposedly, could be set before or after the events of the original trilogy.
