In celebration of N7 day (Nov. 7), BioWare released a new teaser video for the untitled upcoming Mass Effect game, which fans immediately picked apart in excruciating detail. The initial version of the trailer featured an extended shot of a Mass Relay, the technology used to achieve faster than light travel in the game’s universe, with a garbled message.
Fans cleaned up the audio to seemingly discover an audio recording of Liara T’Soni, the Asari archeologist and information broker, speaking about the Council Citadel. The game’s project director Michael Gamble confirmed part of the message on Twitter before BioWare released a new version of the video with the full decoded message. Liara can be heard saying, “I can see it, how did we miss this? Exactly, the Council will be furious. Although, they should know by now not to underestimate human defiance.” Some have pointed out that Liara seems to be speaking to a Geth, synthetic life forms that would have been presumably wiped out if Mass Effect 3’s “Destroy” ending was canonical. Additionally, Liara mentioning the Council insinuates that this governing body remains intact.
As reported by Kotaku, fans also observed that the mass relay in the video is delineated as MR7 and it’s implied to have been built by the human supremacist group Cerberus based on its paint job. A code in the bottom left of the video reads “11_07_90_000_1000-2013313,” which some have taken means the next game will take place in 2190, four years after the events of Mass Effect 3.
In 2020 BioWare released an initial teaser video, which showed Liara seemingly searching for traces of the Normandy and Commander Shepard. At one point, the trailer depicts both the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, which are the settings of Mass Effect: Andromeda and the original trilogy, respectively. While Andromeda takes place several hundred years after the third game, some fans have taken this to mean the new game will somehow incorporate both settings, leading to speculation that time travel may be involved. While fans continue to buzz with the possibilities, BioWare wrote in a blog post yesterday that the title is still in pre-production, meaning it is likely quite a ways off.
The decoded teaser can be viewed below:
Thank you to all the agents who decoded the footage. Here’s a clean transmission https://t.co/iADrTHnU6spic.twitter.com/ALNBNNM05a
— Mass Effect (@masseffect) November 7, 2022