Electronic Arts held their EA Play Press Conference earlier this afternoon to highlight its upcoming games and franchises, including new Star Wars titles, sports titles like Madden 17, and new footage from Mass Effect: Andromeda.
While nothing official about a virtual reality component within Mass Effect: Andromeda has been announced, there is a lot of good reason to expect it when the game launches next year.
At the conference, General Manager at BioWare Aaryn Flynn said that the company is “building on the things you love about Mass Effect–amazing stories and gameplay–and now, we’re letting our imaginations run wild. This is a bigger adventure, filled with a whole new cast of memorable characters, and more freedom than we’ve ever given players in a BioWare game.”
Following that up was the statement that the game is powered by the publisher’s Frostbite engine, “which means you’re going to see, hear, and feel Mass Effect like never before.”
In a later segment of the presentation, EA announced Star Wars Battlefront would be getting a VR add-on mission, an experience coming later this year and building on another massive franchise that just happens to take place in space. Of course, that game is also powered by Frostbite, and with Flynn’s wording about how the game will look and sound and feel, it’s not a stretch to think that Mass Effect: Andromeda could follow suit.
That’s not to say that the game will be entirely in VR; it won’t be. But it could very well have a few space exploration missions, or perhaps some space combat a la EVE Valkyrie make an appearance for PlayStation VR owners.
Of course, there’s a lot of conjecture here, but there is something to be said for the way EA takes on new technologies and tries out every possible permutation of that technology, even in their biggest titles. The publisher put its logo on 12 PlayStation Move titles as well as 14 Kinect titles, showing that they try to embrace new technology wherever they can. PlayStation VR, and potentially even Oculus, will be no different.