Yes, I’m partly reporting on this because it gives me an excuse to run the image of Tibby again. It was a good sign when BioWare Montreal hired the good Mr. Frazier as the lead designer for the next Mass Effect game, and the news from NeoGAF today is cause for still yet more optimism about the next chapter of said sci-fi RPG franchise:

Aaryn Flynn chimed in on the Mass Effect thread.

I’ve seen a few thoughts like this recently, and thought I’d weigh in as much as I can right now. I have a good idea where it’s coming from. All of our games are using Frostbite now. We’ve said the next Mass Effect (and our new IP, but I won’t expand on that yet) uses some of the technology from DAI. We’ve been enjoying building larger areas that you can explore with less friction, so that’ll be there as well.

But after that, the next Mass Effect will be (and should be) drawing on its own rich and successful past more than what DAI would say it should do. Take the Mako, something we’ve already shown in prototype form. We had that in ME1, and bringing it back is more related to a feeling that we can do it much better than we did before and fulfill the original promise of that gameplay. That has nothing to do with DAI. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that dropping the older consoles has had more impact on the overall gameplay goals of the next Mass Effect game than what DAI successfully accomplished.

We’re very proud of what DAI has achieved, but that does not set a “template” for what every other game we make needs to be. Each game franchise needs to innovate and improve their experience based on what’s best for it, not just what another game had success with because “well that was successful”.

For those unfamiliar with him, Aaryn Flynn is the studio GM for BioWare Edmonton, and I suppose he can be thought of as being in charge of BioWare as a whole at present.

And this…this is mostly good news, I think. The first Mass Effect game offered some gameplay experiences that its two sequels largely did away with, and much of this was tied to exploration. The Mako (an armoured personnel carrier), and the various planets that one could wander through and explore in an open-ended fashion, were missing in both Mass Effect 2 and 3 (except for a handful of limited opportunities in various DLC releases). Granted, not all of the planets in Mass Effect were particularly interesting, nor did all of them have particularly interesting experiences to offer the player…but even so, the opportunity to just explore for a while was a worthwhile thing to have.

And it’s good that this will be making a return in Mass Effect 4…or whatever they end up calling the next game.

Of course, since it will be an exclusively next-gen game, I suppose I’ll finally have to bite the bullet and upgrade my gaming rig.