BioWare’s Casey Hudson May Make ‘Mass Effect 4′ a Prequel

Though DLC is still in development, Shepard’s fight in Mass Effect has now been concluded for the better part of a year. It’s no secret that Casey Hudson, who helped pen the entire Mass Effect trilogy as an executive producer, has been looking at what fans want for the series. The possibility of a prequel has been floating around ever since the trilogy itself ended, but today Casey Hudson outright asked fans if they’d prefer a prequel or a post-trilogy Mass Effect title.

BioWare has stated the Shepard trilogy concluded with the reaper-centric showdown in ME3, meaning they have little interest in detailing Shepard’s early days. With that out of the question, there’s still a lot of open space (no pun intended) for the game to take place in. While it’s rare for gaming studios to choose a setting completely devoid of humans, there are several great historical events like the Rachni Wars, the founding of the Council or perhaps even the demise of the Prothean Empire.

Given that players were given a choice of potential endings in Mass Effect 3, it would be considerably harder to write a post-trilogy title taking all of those different scenarios into account. The downside of binary-based decision making games is that after a finite number of titles, it’s almost impossible to keep writing as even the starting scenarios are dependent on the results of thousands of older choices. With that in mind, a prequel seems like a much more viable solution for Hudson and his team to tackle.

There’s great potential in detailing massive events like the First Contact War, whereupon humanity first met other intelligent life. Due to a hostile Turian reaction to the misinterpreted actions of humans, their first contact resulted in a Turian fleet obliterating several explorers. What followed was a hostile war between humanity and the Turian armada nearly ending with the Turians sending in their entire fleet before council intervention. It’s a great point of the game’s history that would still allow for human’s to be heavily involved, and Shepard wouldn’t be a factor – though his parents potentially could feature in the game, which would be a neat tie-in.

Of course, there’s still no guarantee that Mass Effect 4 will take place before the events in the trilogy, but Hudson is certainly taking the words of fans to heart. There’s already a plethora of responses to his tweet with numerous fans vying for both sides of the table – though it’ll be some time yet before we know who wins out.

Which would you prefer, Ranters? Would you like to see the events that shaped the galaxy of the trilogy, or would you like to see the ramifications of your actions in a world post-reaper threat?