Mass Effect director talks up original trilogy devs returning for the new game

The Mass Effect teaser that dropped at last night's Game Awards was a big moment, even though it really didn't tell us much at all. That sure looked like Liara (and as we later learned, almost certainly is her) and the fragment of N7 armor made for a dramatic moment, but all we could say at the end is that it looks very much like the next Mass Effect will involve the Shepard trilogy, perhaps to the exclusion of or more than spin-off Mass Effect: Andromeda.

After the show was over, Mass Effect project director Michael Gamble fired off a few tweets about some of the people working on the game, and like the teaser, they also put emphasize the pre-Andromeda trilogy.

BioWare said when the new Mass Effect was announced in November that a "veteran team" was working on it, but these tweets have the tone of a more focused effort to reassure uneasy fans that experienced, steady hands are on the tiller—a reassurance that might feel especially needed after the very recent departure of Casey Hudson, the project director on the first three Mass Effect games, who unexpectedly left BioWare along with Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah last week.

We shared some trepidation about the future of Mass Effect ourselves in a recent rumination on where the series should go next: There were plenty of interesting ideas and enthusiasm, but a few (including me) felt that the series had run its course. That's a sentiment that BioWare is going to have to work hard to overcome. Mass Effect is a wonderful space opera, but it's also a very personal tale of Shepard, Liara, Garrus, and the rest of the crew coming together in the face of insurmountable odds, and that's going to be a very tough act to follow up. 

In an interesting twist, Gamble also dropped some pretty pointed hints that the new game won't entirely abandon Andromeda and its team. That'd be an unexpected maneuver, but it's not out of the question. Asari can live for centuries—some surpass a millennium—and so some sort of meeting-of-the-minds isn't out of the question.

There's still lots of room for speculation, in other words—and for those who like to dig into such things, Gamble also posted a high-resolution image of a still from the teaser that you can see in all its glory below. What do you see?