Mass Effect: Andromeda will be out Q1 2017
Wrex holiday 2016 plan.
No Mass Effect: Andromeda this year. EA has said in an investor call that the fourth main Mass Effect game will be released during the first quarter of 2017, which spans January to end of March.
That period represents the fourth quarter of EA's financial year - which begins April, ends March - and blockbusters earmarked for this period tend to come out as close to the end of March as possible. This allows maximum time in development while keeping the release within the financial year.
Mind you, Mass Effect 2 came out at the end of January and Mass Effect 3 at the beginning of March, so there's hope for a marginally earlier launch.
"We've got a great year ahead," said EA's chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen during a Morgan Stanley conference presentation - quote picked up by members of NeoGAF.
"We've got our Battlefield [5] first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it's called Titanfall [2].
"We have our Mirror's Edge [Catalyst] runner game this first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect [Andromeda], which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter."
Mass Effect: Andromeda was officially announced at E3 last year with a holiday 2016 release date, so this technically represents a delay. But with Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 5 both lining up for autumn 2016 - presumably Titanfall in Sep/Oct and Battlefield in November against Call of Duty - it makes sense to move Andromeda away.
Mass Effect: Andromeda tells a story in an entirely new area of space, and one entirely separate from commander Shepard. But there's still a lot we don't know about it. We cobbled together everything we do know in a separate article (and video, below).
