The upcoming ‘Mass Effect’ will be using unreal engine 5 according to the ‘BioWare’ producer Brenon Holmes recent tweet about a job opening at the company for an associate technical director, and the candidate should have experience with Unreal Engine 4 and 5.
“BioWare is hiring talented programmers with UE4/5 experience! Come, join our team and work with us on the next Mass Effect game!” he wrote. This does not confirm that the new Mass Effect game will run on Unreal Engine.
On the other hand, reporter Jeff Grubb who was among the first to report that the next Mass Effect will use the Unreal Engine followed up to say this is indeed the case that it’s Unreal Engine 5 specifically.
“And just to confirm, I’ve heard from a handful of sources now that this is the case. Obviously. And this was a choice made by the team putting the game together, which is how it should work.” He replied to the tweet. He also tweeted “Unreal confirmed for Mass Effect.”
It seems like BioWare is done trying to master the power of Frostbite Engine for its open-world action RPGs. After so many not-good attempts with both Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, and now the team has decided to change the tools for the next Mass Effect entry which can be promising given how impressive the tech demo was shown.
The original Mass Effect trilogy used Unreal Engine 3 during development, the Mass Effect: Andromeda used EA’s Frostbite engine, which was reportedly difficult to work with.
Speaking of the trilogy, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition ran on Unreal Engine 3, and BioWare opted to not use the Unreal Engine 4 for the re-releases. BioWare confirmed that they will continue to run the game on Unreal Engine in order to continue experiencing the feel of the original games.
Back in September, Grubb also hinted that BioWare was indeed considering different possibilities for Mass Effect. According to Grubb, the company is looking to experience the next-gen visual tech by 2023, as a matter of fact, Frostbite could be far behind Unreal Engine.
On the other hand, we still haven’t seen much of Dragon Age 4 which will be powered by Frostbite. It is believed that is not suitable for massive third-person RPGs which can cause multiple problems to the studio. It is to be noted that BioWare has its hands full with Dragon Age 4 currently. So far, we have only seen some teasers and concepts of the game, hopefully, the game will release not too far in the future.
There is one more important point to note here that ‘BioWare’ has not announced anything related to launching for the next Mass Effect, or Dragon Age 4 yet.
