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Dragon Age 3: Inquisition’s RPG systems will form base of next Mass Effect game

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Along with the news that all of Bioware’s games will be built in DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, the developer’s general manager Aaryn Flynn says that the work they’re doing on Dragon Age 3’s RPG systems will carry over into the next Mass Effect game and the unannounced game they’re also working on currently.

Meaning we could be in line to see a truly complex space RPG.

Flynn said it “makes a lot of sense” to use the Frostbite engine across all their games, “with all the investment we’re doing into Dragon Age: Inquisition, into the RPG systems, we can make good use of those and build onto them again with Mass Effect and a new IP that we want to work on as well.”

Previously, while it was recognisable that Mass Effect and Dragon Age both came from the same developer, the two series were quite different on a mechanical level: Mass Effect was a very light RPG, hiding the numbers away off-screen, Dragon Age embraced them, offering an experience much more akin to Baldur’s Gate and the hardcore RPGs of yore. What Flynn says suggests that future Bioware games will be more homogenous in their systems.

This could mark a big shift in how the next Mass Effect game plays. By the third title in the series it seemed the game was closer to Gears of War than the original Mass Effect. If Bioware are using Dragon Age’s systems as a model for Mass Effect we might be getting our hands on a much more involved space RPG.

Flynn wouldn’t confirm whether the new Mass Effect would be open-world, he said “It could. I know they’re going through their fundamental design stuff now”.