Mass Effect 4 should be a reboot not a sequel – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader looks forward to the new Mass Effect but thinks it would be better going with a new story, rather than obsessing over series canon.

It was the 10th anniversary of Mass Effect 3 back in March and I don’t think I’m being too negative when I say that things haven’t gone well for the franchise since then. The ending of the trilogy was an absolute disaster in terms of the fan response (even though, overall, I still like the game) and Andromeda was even worse.

I still don’t understand what was going on with Andromeda, since it was so obviously lower budget than the other games and basically just had BioWare’s B-team working on it. The best explanation I heard is that EA realised that Dragon Age makes more money and since they were going through their anti-single-player phase they decided that Mass Effect was low priority.

Thankfully, the failure of Anthem seems to have been the best thing that could’ve ever happened to BioWare, as EA panicked and sent them back to work on the games that had made them famous in the first place. In fact, it seemed to have a positive effect on the whole industry, with publishers realising that live service games aren’t some secret god mode allowing infinite profits.

A new Mass Effect was eventually confirmed, but even years later we still haven’t really seen any of it and have no real idea what it is or when it’s set. The best guess seems to be that it’s a sequel but that hasn’t been confirmed as yet. So I’m going to hold on to the hope that it’s actually a reboot.

I’d say there are lots of good reasons for this, many of which would apply to any long-running series. I love the original characters, I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t, but they’ve had their story, their arcs, and while it