If there's one developer whose position we really don't envy right now, it's Bioware. Having come out the back end of Mass Effect 3 most definitely scathed, the once phenomenal developer hasn't put out a single undeniably great game in almost five years. You can't discuss ME3 in 2014 without some phantasmagorical embodiment of fanboy hatred sprouting out the ether either, ready to shout down any opposers who attempt to say it was all going pretty smoothly until that endpoint. So horrifically ill thought-out and badly misrepresented in the lead-up to release was the ending to the trilogy, that it's damn-near impossible to remember the many things we genuinely loved up until those fatal last few minutes. It's like running some incredible 10 kilometre-long marathon at peak speed, surpassing all expectations and delivering on all that potential throughout each milestone checkpoint - only to stumble, get a face full of mud and awkwardly fumble through the finish line. There's no denying that the trilogy itself remains immeasurably strong, but the sour aftertaste of that ending is easily just too objectively bad to look past without considerable effort. However, Bioware's taskmasters EA aren't ones to let a marked franchise just fizzle out - instead at this year's E3 conference we got a teaser trailer for the next instalment in the franchise. Following this we saw the surprising resignation of Director Casey Hudson (not a good sign being he was with the company for 16 years and is very much the 'face' of Bioware) but nonetheless the hype machine thunders on. So, with no word since then on the project it's over to the fans to pull apart everything from a fourth instalment's very need to exist, to what it would take for us to dive back in.
