Is Mass Effect Open World | Screen Rant
Over the years, BioWare has evolved its approach to RPG gameplay and storytelling, with its approach to world-building ranging from linear levels to open worlds. So where does the Mass Effect series fall on this scale?
Mass Effect has been on the top of everyone's mind in the last year, thanks in part to the release of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. The remastered collection contains the first three games in the series, Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, as well as almost all the DLC released in conjunction with those games. The first three games were part of one overarching story that told of Commander Shephard's fight to stop the Reaper invasion. The trilogy was followed up by Mass Effect: Andromeda, a standalone game set in an entirely separate galaxy. Unfortunately, Mass Effect: Andromeda was poorly received, leading many to speculate the recently announced new Mass Effect game will tie more closely to the original trilogy than the spinoff game.
Despite BioWare's recent trend towards open world games, the original Mass Effect trilogy was not open world. Instead, the first three games were known for their more linear levels. Players occasionally had some flexibility in the order they completed these levels, often using a galactic map to choose destinations, allowing players to decide if they wanted to go to a side quest location instead of a planet that would advance the main quest storyline. Some of the locations, like the Citadel, could be fairly expansive and contain multiple side quests within them, as well as vendors, encouraging players to return to these locations multiple times.
That formula of concise, focused levels changed with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which went with a much more open world approach. While players still chose planets to travel to, the areas a player could traverse on each planet were much more expansive, with multiple side quests, mining, roaming enemies, collectibles, and more. Some areas (which usually only had main story content) were more linear and contained, but on the whole, players were free to explore a planet as much or as little as they wanted. Unfortunately, this break from the more focused story-telling of previous Mass Effect games is one of the reasons Mass Effect: Andromeda was less well-received, as the extra content felt to some like bloated padding instead of interesting world-building.
Very little is known about the Mass Effect game currently in development, but BioWare has already signaled some recent changes to its design ethos. After its multiplayer game Anthem was cancelled, BioWare announced that the upcoming Dragon Age 4 would be refocusing on a single-player experience, rather than a multiplayer one. Perhaps if BioWare continues to look at the games that worked well for it in the past, it will shy away from making the new Mass Effect an open world game, and return to the tighter level design of early Mass Effect.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on May 14, 2021.