Perhaps spurred by the overly positive reception to Mass Effect: Andromeda, publisher EA has played down rumors of a potential remastered version of the old trilogy, instead delegating resources to new projects.
That’s according to Patrick Söderlund, Executive Vice President at EA, who weighed up the pros and cons of re-releasing existing titles in an interview with Game Informer.
“I won’t lie and say we haven’t looked at it. But for us, it’s about weighing where we spend our resources. Is it better for them to be working on a completely new IP, which you know BioWare is, or should they be remastering a Mass Effect?”
“I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I go back and play a game, you want the memory of what they were at that point in time when you played them,” Söderlund says. “If I go back and play the old games, I think, ‘Really?!’ Was this what it was? Because in my mind it was amazing.”
Söderlund raises a lot of valid points. The once-novel concept of revamping an old video game and slapping a price tag on it has become trite through repetition, with seemingly every publisher in the industry cashing in on the double-dipping phenomenon.
That said, the executive doesn’t necessarily rule out a Mass Effect remaster entirely, and when you consider that Andromeda is set to be a whole new adventure independent from the original trilogy, it’s safe to assume that both EA and BioWare could revisit the trio of beloved sci-fi titles at another time.
For BioWare, though, the focus is on new projects. Despite the cancellation of co-operative title Shadow Realms earlier this year, the Dragon Age studio has assured that has ample projects in the work, and a number of those embryonic titles happen to be new IPs, too. It’ll be some time yet before we learn more said games, but there’s plenty of reasons to be excited beyond Mass Effect: Andromeda.
