Crop of Mass Effect concept art called Krogan Civil War, showing a Krogan firing a gun with one hand.
By
Kyle Gratton
Published 34 minutes ago
Kyle Gratton is an editor and writer based out of Kansas City. He received a bachelor's degree, dual majoring in English and History with a minor in Film and Media Studies, and has been a senior staff writer and reviewer for Screen Rant's Gaming section since 2021, with roles in editorial, and various freelance projects.
A terminal Midwesterner who graduated from the University of Kansas, Kyle also has knowledge and interest in literature, film, film adaptions of literature, and history.
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Last month, Mass Effect celebrated N7 Day, and a hidden message from BioWare revealed a new piece of concept art depicting a Krogan Civil War. With Mass Effect 5 – or whatever the next entry will be titled – presumably still years away, numerous teasers have provided very little concrete information on where the RPG series is heading. While BioWare remains coy, I have some theories about the concept art and other teasers released so far.
If you're looking for granular story predictions, I hate to disappoint, but I'm willing to bet BioWare is only hitting the broad strokes because the finer points of the narrative are still being crystallized. Dragon Age: The Veilguard released just over a year ago, and BioWare was more recently hit with layoffs and restructuring, leaving fewer than 100 people working on the game. Mass Effect 5 was announced five years ago, and its development has quite literally required putting the pieces of its fictionalized Milky Way galaxy back together.
Mass Effect 5 Concept Art Is Establishing A Canon Milky Way
A major hurdle to continuing the Mass Effect series in the Milky Way is accommodating the choices made by players throughout the original trilogy (hence why Andromeda abandoned the setting almost entirely). Most signs so far point to ME5 continuing after Mass Effect 3's Perfect Ending, with the Destroy option canonized as the trilogy's finale.
The Synthesis ending can effectively be ruled out because none of the concept art thus far shows a blend of organic and inorganic life. Control is a little more likely to be the now-canonized ending to ME3, but a few details point to it also being less probable than Destroy. Above is a gallery of five crucial pieces of Mass Effect concept art that I think inform the following theories about ME5's setting more broadly.
First is a poster depicting a crater quite clearly in the shape of a Geth head, but choosing to destroy the Reapers also destroys the Geth. The poster's accompanying trailer, though, heavily implies the crater to be where Commander Shepard is recovered from after they survive in the Perfect Ending, which is only possible with the Destroy option.
Either the Geth shape is just some clever artistry, or a subtle hint that the robotic hivemind has been rebuilt post-ME3 or somehow survived the Crucible. This latter option was supported by a teaser released on N7 Day in 2022, which features audio over a version of the second concept art above. The audio is Liara T'Soni seemingly speaking with a Geth.
Arguably even more important is the image, which appears to be a Mass Relay under construction. It has many hallmarks of Systems Alliance design, indicating that the Mass Relay network is being rebuilt after it was destroyed at the end of ME3. It being under construction is also perhaps an important indicator that the Control ending was not canonized, otherwise the subservient Reapers could have theoretically rebuilt the network relatively quickly.
The third image in the gallery above is important for two reasons. First, the artwork within the figure appears to feature an Angara, a species from the Andromeda Galaxy, among the Milky Way's denizens. This lends credence to a theory that the new Mass Relay network allows relatively quick travel between the two galaxies, but also implies Mass Effect 5 will take place after Andromeda, and the requisite 634-year or longer time jump would complicate Shepard's potential involvement after surviving the Crucible.
The main figure on the poster indicates how Mass Effect's Spectres have evolved post-Mass Relay collapse. It was accompanied by the following teaser trailer for N7 Day 2023, and while the N7 wardrobe could simply be a design choice, I think the lack of armor may be indicative of Mass Effect 5 revolving around a smaller conflict than the Reaper War, which tracks with the idea that the Milky Way has not yet reached pre-Crucible Mass Relay network coverage.
The fourth image, I believe, supports a multi-century time jump following ME3, placing Mass Effect 5 somewhere after Andromeda in the series timeline. It shows a thriving city, but pedestrians are seen wearing masks. A splintered galactic society without Mass Relays for roughly 600 years may still expand under the circumstances, and this artwork presumably shows a city built on a planet without oxygen.
Liara's involvement in the audio overlaid on the Mass Relay video wouldn't be an oversight, since Asari can live to be over 1,000 years old, but I believe the initial Mass Effect 5 teaser to only be symbolic. In other words, unearthing Shepard's shattered N7 armor in the teaser is not an indication that the Commander will return in ME5, unless their lifespan is somehow massively extended.
Mass Effect 5's Latest Teaser Image Canonizes The Genophage Cure
The final image in the gallery is the most recent concept art released by BioWare, a piece labeled "Civil War" that only features Krogan combatants. At face value, it's not especially illuminating; the Krogan are known for their infighting, but it being one of a handful of images released to tease the next Mass Effect game should automatically imply the conflict has significance.
The Civil War concept art in the gallery above is much smaller than its original dimensions. Click here to see the full-size art (14,400 x 9,600) on EA's website.
In the original trilogy, the Krogan are considered a dying race. Even without a time jump for Mass Effect 5, the previously established status of the Krogan makes a civil war of galactic importance a logistic impossibility if the Genophage is not cured. I think that this new concept art is our first indication of ME5's main conflict, and it fits very well into the framework established by the previously discussed art.
My theorized setup for Mass Effect 5 is as follows. After choosing to cure the Genophage, Shepard survives the Destroy ending but only lives long enough to see the Citadel Council – or its successor, the council referenced by the Liara audio – reestablish some semblance of order to a fractured Milky Way.
Over the course of the next 600-some years, Mass Relay technology is slowly reverse engineered, and connection with the Andromeda Galaxy is achieved. The Geth are similarly rebuilt, but integrated more peacefully into galactic society, and may be instrumental in creating the new Mass Relays, possibly via data recovered from the Heretics that served Sovereign.
The lack of readily available interstellar travel, combined with the end of the Genophage, allows Krogan society to flourish without the subsequent infighting necessarily jeopardizing galactic civilization at large. By the time galaxy-wide travel begins to become commonplace again, just before the start of Mass Effect 5, the Krogan conflicts bloom into a full-blown civil war.
More than 2,000 years after the Krogan Rebellions, with the lessons learned therein long forgotten, the civil war threatens to consume a galactic society that has just recently pulled itself out of a relative dark age. Much like how Spectres were deployed in the Krogan Rebellions prior to the Turians unleashing the Genophage, a new N7 operative is tasked with finding an end to the civil war and stopping Krogan factions from gaining access to the new Mass Relay network.
Liara is poised to return, and will likely be the vehicle for ME5's deeper mystery, but this framework allows the series to follow up on many original trilogy themes and threads, while simultaneously being far enough removed that it can hand-wave many decisions made by Shepard (i.e., the player in the original trilogy) as now being inconsequential. It also provides sufficient stakes for Mass Effect 5's story to feel consequential – a whole galaxy in danger – without trying to impossibly one-up the Reaper War.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
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OpenCritic Reviews
Top Critic Avg:
87/100
Critics Rec:
96%
Released
May 14, 2021
ESRB
M for Mature: Blood, Drug Reference, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence
Developer(s)
BioWare
Publisher(s)
Electronic Arts
Engine
Unreal Engine 4
Franchise
Mass Effect
Genre(s)
Action, RPG
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