New Artwork Teases The Next Mass Effect

This past N7 day, BioWare VP and Studio GM Casey Hudson announced that the next installment of the Mass Effect series is in the works in a blog post. Today, three new images from the upcoming game were posted online.

The images originated from the newly-released Bioware: Stories and Secrets from 25 Years of Game Development coffee table book, and were subsequently posted on Tumblr.

Today's images saw the first image of the new game presented in the N7 Day blog post make a return: a ship on a shiny planet surface with four crew members walking beside it while two suns hang above them. The outline of one crew member appears to be an Angaran, the alien species native to Andromeda. This stoked ever-present speculation that the new Mass Effect will possibly be continuing its story in the Andromeda galaxy, and the newly posted images have added a bit of fuel to those speculations.

The ship from the previously released image makes another appearance in one of the new photos, on what appears to be a foggy, maybe swampy planet. There's another that shows architecture that looks strikingly similar to the Remnant ruins we saw in Andromeda. Finally, one image shows what looks like the construction of a new Mass Relay, one of the relays that make advanced space travel possible in the Mass Effect series. This one is labeled M-7, indicating that there might be others in the works as well, though of course it's unclear where this structure is being built or which areas of the universe it may be connecting.

There are plenty of possibilities for where the series could go next. There are still loose ends to tie up in the Andromeda series, and many fans feel it's important to wrap those up before moving on to whatever's next. Mass Effect's project director Mike Gamble said himself in the BioWare book: "There's an incredible universe of history to draw from, and many more stories for us to tell. We're focusing on creating something truly for the fans." For now, only time will tell. Mass Effect fans will have to make good with the upcoming Legendary Edition collection until we get more news.