Mass Effect director says the next game won't feature any Veilguard-style aesthetic switchups: 'Mass Effect is photorealistic and will be as long as I'm running it'

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"Mass Effect will maintain the mature tone of the original trilogy."

Garrus in Mass Effect Legendary Edition
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)

Just two days out from the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one of BioWare's lead developers is telling us what we can expect from its next long-awaited series revival. Michael Gamble, project director on the next Mass Effect game, took to X yesterday to offer an idea of what kind of look and tone we'll find when we return to Citadel space.

In a series of tweets, Gamble said that, as The Veilguard's launch neared, he'd been fielding questions about what kind of direction BioWare's pursuing with Mass Effect. While he didn't offer any specifics, Gamble said players shouldn't expect Mass Effect to reinvent itself in the same ways as Dragon Age.

"Both are from the studio, but Mass Effect is Mass Effect. How you bring a sci-fi RPG to life is different than other genres or IPs," Gamble said, "and has to have different kinds of love."

However well received Gamble's statement might be by Mass Effect enthusiasts, the timing feels a little awkward. While he delicately avoided mentioning Veilguard's aesthetics—in his first tweet, anyway—I have a hard time reading the post as anything other than an attempt to say 'hey, our long-awaited sequel isn't going to overhaul its visual style like our studio's other long-awaited sequel that made people on the internet very upset.'

In our Dragon Age: The Veilguard review, we found the game's indulgent high fantasy visuals to be one of its stronger points. Its stylized reworking of the Dragon Age look, however, has been a topic of heated discourse dating back to the first official Veilguard trailer, which left some of us thinking the sequel looked more hero shooter than BioWare RPG.

While Gamble didn't make any comparisons to Veilguard's visual rework in his first tweet, it only took him around 20 minutes to answer replies that did. When another X user asked him not to "Pixar ME like you guys did with DA," Gamble tweeted "I'm not sure I agree with the Pixar thing, but Mass Effect is photorealistic and will be as long as I'm running it."

Gamble returned a few hours later to elaborate on the sequel's tone. "Mass Effect will maintain the mature tone of the original trilogy," Gamble continued. "This is all I'm gonna say for now."

Me, I'm at a comfortable neutral on Veilguard's look; frankly, I think a lot of disgruntled fans are remembering Inquisition as being a lot closer to Dragon Age: Origins in tone than it actually was. As far as Mass Effect goes, I'm fine with whatever as long as it's executed well. Mostly I'm just hoping Wrex is hanging around somewhere.

Lincoln Carpenter
Lincoln Carpenter
News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.