Every year, Mass Effect fans celebrate on November 7. Based on the in-game ranking of certain personnel, “N7” has become a calling card for anyone who enjoys BioWare’s spacefaring RPG series. It has also become a day when the studio traditionally teases what it’s working on, and we’ve been treated to a new mysterious piece of concept art.
As seen on EA’s website (and at the top of this article), the image shows some sort of station in orbit. Fans are speculating that the prominent “MR7” branding could stand for “Mass Relay 7,” making this one of the stations that allows for interstellar travel. Alternatively, it could stand for “Monitor Relay 7,” seeing as the EA post has called the image “strange footage from one of the monitoring stations in known space.”
There’s also some text to pick apart, and we’ve included a zoomed-in version for you to look at below. It’s a filing record that fits in with the monitoring station concept, owned by a company called Green Dagger — that’s a new addition to the lore. So is ship captain Soa-Rhal Zhillian-Jones, although their name sounds Quarian. The Mass Effect community is sure to have a lot of theories from this simple sequence of letters and numbers.
They definitely did last year, when a previous piece of artwork teased the Geth, a new ship, and more. Since then, Commander Shepherd’s name was also mistakenly associated with the next game in the series. Mass Effect is expected to make a clean break from the original trilogy, although you can play the Legendary Edition on Game Pass if you feel the urge to revisit it.
As for what the next game will entail, we know very little. BioWare has promised an “amazing future” for both Mass Effect and Dragon Age, though. Mass Effect will also be moving to the Unreal engine for its next entry.
