'Mass Effect 5' Is Probably Moving Back To Unreal Engine After 'Andromeda' Mess

Though Mass Effect one through three and the remastered Mass Effect Legendary Edition are considered some of the best space-adventuring in games, Mass Effect Andromeda wasn't well liked. Though many do consider it to be a decent or good game and at least fairly enjoyable for the most part, as a whole it's considered as the Mass Effect game that we collectively agreed to not talk about.

EA and BioWare, of course, know this. The companies still probably get tweets daily about how the game could have been better and where the team went wrong. And so now looking forward, it seems like the developers are considering going back to the series' roots and using the Unreal Engine to develop the next Mass Effect game.

Here is an easy way to see the improvements Mass Effect Legendary Edition made to the original BioWare games...

As reported by GamesBeat, a job listing on the EA website suggests that Unreal Engine will be the basis for the next Mass Effect game. The company needs a technical director to work on the Mass Effect series and under the requirements, there is a sign that the team are no longer using EA's own Frostbite engine to develop the franchise.

After the job post lists requirements like five years of professional coding experience or working on triple-A projects, the listing says: "Experience with UnrealEngine4+ is an asset." Which, yeah, feels like almost entirely a confirmation that the series is returning to its UE roots. Which makes sense if we're being honest. It's not just where the original games were made, BioWare was also committed to using Unreal Engine 3 for Mass Effect Legendary Edition so its currently well-versed in the system.

Frostbite, according to GamesBeat, was only used for Andromeda because it was cheaper. Using EA's own development software means it wasn't going to have to license anything from Epic Games, the developers of Unreal. Though perhaps EA has accepted that it could be better to just cut their losses and go back to what made the series a success in the first place.

Topics: Bioware, Mass Effect, EA, unreal engine