It was during the recent Video Game Awards 2020 that we were able to abandon logic and emotional reins to the few frames of the teaser of the next chapter of Mass Effect, as yet unnamed.
The trailer says a lot about the direction BioWare can take with the Mass Effect series, but at the same time it says very little and we are here to analyze everything analyzable with you.
Let's start from the beginning
In the first frames of the trailer you can see the two galaxies that have dominated the Mass Effect franchise, namely the front Milky Way and, in the distance, Andromed. Yes, we are aware of all the baggage that Mass Effect: Andromeda involved, but one of its most interesting aspects was a silent but lethal parallelism with the first chapter of the original trilogy: how the Geth were not the real villains of Mass Effect 1, so Kett weren't for the sequel / reboot Andromeda. Then clearly the pandemonium happened, especially around the cancellation of the DLCs and the hope seemed to die… until the arrival of this trailer.
The parallels that the first frames seem to draw between the two Mass Effects may take us to a literally epic crossover.
Androme… what?
The trailer then continues pushing towards the center of the Milky Way, in a path through space and time, to arrive at a sort of cylindrical structure that for some is the base of the Collectors seen and blown up in Mass Effect 2, for others a remnant of the battle of the Quarians on the way to Andromeda.
Many avid fans have discarded the first hypothesis precisely for the sequence in progress: you can in fact listen to the words
Arcturus Station, unknown ship approaching, we need the first contact protocols
Arcturus station, for the uninitiated, is the headquarters of the Systems Alliance, a military and political structure founded in 2156 and with a heavy footprint during the events of the trilogy.
During the development of the plot of the last chapter of the saga, many fans were shocked by the presence of all those races actually relocated from the Milky Way, but much more suspicious by the absence of some well-known faces, such as the Hanar, the Elcor, the Drell and , last but not least, the Quarians, but it is the ending of Mass Effect: Andromeda that reveals their sad fate: the journey has failed and the only thing left is a distress call left pending ...
The sound of death
In the following sequence you can instead hear the disturbing sound of a Reaper, an excellent setting for a panorama of destruction and death, the only and ineluctable result of the fight against the unstoppable evil of the Reapers, executors of a universal reset that never hesitated, again and again. again, to obliterate entire races.
Immediately after this we hear this sentence:
Does anyone receive? We have lost contact.
There is no reason to think that it cannot be a communication that took place during the events of the Mass Effect 3 finale, but we cannot even rule out the hypothesis that this is instead a message that finds its temporal context in the post-final, in that ending which, with all the Relays destroyed, sees humanity relegated in an instant to the sort of technological Dark Years from which it so laboriously emerged.
Then, again, a voice, indeed a series of voices that together whisper:
All we have left is humanity.
The voices speak above the images of a ship, the one we had seen during the last N7, which rests on the surface of an icy planet, with two moons (at least). Immediately after the scene moves to someone who is climbing some sort of mountain, then revealed to be the body of a Reaver that crashed on the planet, he bends down and picks up a piece of helmet, most likely Shepard's.
New protagonists
The figure turns around shortly afterwards and we can recognize her: it is Liara, a fact also confirmed by two developers inside Bioware; the trailer continues with Liara staring at the horizon, her gaze fixed on that ship we saw landing just before. The shot seems to want to focus on two figures: if there are many doubts on the central one (human or Drell?), Those on the sides are rather unequivocally a Krogan and a Salarian.
The trailer doesn't have much more to tell us, but we are left with only one theory to share: the next Mass Effect will be set in the Andromeda galaxy, 600 years into the future compared to the Mass Effect 3 finale, and it won't have Shepard as the protagonist. The reasons are quick to explain: 600 years is the length of time it takes to travel from the Milky Way to Andromeda, Liara is still alive because in the first chapter she was about 100 years old and here she would be largely still in the middle of her natural life cycle (of 1000 years or so), and the “Destroy” ending has been suggested over and over again as the canonical ending, an epilogue in which Shepard is the necessary martyr for the destruction of the Reaper army.
Time may prove us wrong or prove us right, you just have to wait… maybe in our company.
► Mass Effect is a Shooter-RPG type game developed by BioWare and published by Microsoft Studios Electronic Arts for PlayStation Network, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the video game was released on 20/11/2007 The version for PC came out on 28/05/2008
