Mass Effect 5 Setting Officially Confirmed
Mass Effect 5's Setting Has Been Staring Us In The Face
Custom Image by Lee D'AmatoThe setting of Mass Effect 5 may have already been revealed without us noticing. One of BioWare's flagship series, Mass Effect offers space-exploring action with a great degree of player choice and a built-in morality system. While the franchise has gone downhill since the end of its original trilogy, many hope the next game, announced in 2020 and still in active development at BioWare, could be a return to form.
Things have been quiet at BioWare following Mass Effect 5's initial announcement, especially since layoffs last year, following lackluster sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, saw the company undergo significant downsizing. But Mass Effect 5 is apparently still on the way, and we may have missed an important hint towards its setting.
Back in 2022, Mike Gamble, a project director and executive director at BioWare, responded to an X (formerly Twitter) post showing a simulation of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies colliding with a pair of thinking emojis. This was subject to much discussion at the time: was Gamble just responding organically to an image of Mass Effect's two settings colliding, or was there something deeper behind it?
The original Mass Effect trilogy is set in the Milky Way, home to Earth, as Commander Shepard and their ragtag crew attempt to save the galaxy from a rising threat. The controversial follow-up, Mass Effect: Andromeda, was set in the galaxy of the same name. Since ME 5's announcement, many players have come to wonder whether it would be set in one of the aforementioned galaxies, or somewhere else entirely - and if the former, which one?
In a Reddit thread discussing potential settings for Mass Effect 5, a user surmises that Mass Effect 5 may take place across both galaxies. "BioWare has to somehow decide whether Mass Effect 5 returns to the Milky Way, continues a story set in a galaxy we have barely touched, or finds some new technology that finally bridges both."
Another user seems to agree in the comments: "There was a reason why they showed Andromeda in the background at the end of the teaser." Indeed, you can briefly see the Andromeda galaxy in the initial announcement teaser for Mass Effect 5. "So both. It most definitely starts in the Milky Way and later on Andromeda features to at least some capacity."
Gamble's 2022 post could suggest a method that allows us to travel between the galaxies in Mass Effect 5. Perhaps their collision — an eventual, astronomical inevitability billions of years in the future — is accelerated for some strange reason in the sequel, shortening the distance between them and allowing us to jump between Milky Way and Andromeda while we search for the root cause of and attempt to prevent the calamity.
But how will a Milky Way-set Mass Effect game deal with the ending variations created by Mass Effect 3? Another fan theorizes, "Honestly, a big timeline jump is a convenient way to establish a new status quo and not even have to address... the situation."
But even if this was the initial plan, it's not clear how much of it has survived BioWare's recent restructuring. The developer could've settled on a "crowd pleaser game" (a return to the Milky Way and the characters of the original trilogy), suggests one commenter, in the hopes it'd sell better. For now, all we know is that Mass Effect 5 is still coming; it's on BioWare to reveal more details.