New flock: BioWare teases concept art from next Mass Effect game

B-but Mass Effect had no controller support on PC. And that controller isn’t even switched on.

Over the past couple of hours, BioWare staff have been tweeting out images of people working on concept art for the next Mass Effect game. Diligently collected by the chaps over at NeoGaf, the four images so far appear to show a player-character (maybe … we’ll get to that,) another in-game character and a couple of planetary locations.

The first image was posted by producer Mike Gamble, accompanied by the text “The next chapter of Mass Effect is upon us.” This is the weirdest picture, because it’s staged to look like the game is being played … except it kind of looks like a Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and the controller doesn’t appear to be switched on. Is he just playing a desktop background image? Anyway, it shows a humanoid figure (player-character, perhaps) in … a room, I guess? It’s hard to say.

Another tweet added the text “with new characters to fall in love with,” accompanied by some Turian-esque concept art being drawn. This one was followed by two more, stating “new enemies to encounter” “and new worlds to explore.” Both of these came with images of artists working on what appear to be new locations.

You can see the collected images in a gallery, below (click to expand and take a closer look.) BioWare has made it pretty clear that the upcoming Mass Effect title will not feature Commander Shepard or any of her/his familiar crew-mates. Not directly, at least.