Mass Effect 5 Lead Dev comments on the original trilogy’s Paragon / Renegade system, teasing its return

with this Dragon Age: Veilguard right out of the gate, BioWare fans have taken notice Mass Effect 5 and they are trying to form a picture of what kind of game it will be. One of the big questions about Mass Effect 5 is whether the famous Paragon / Renegade morality system will return. Now, the game’s lead developer has teased fans with a cryptic answer.

For the uninitiated, the Mass Effect games allow you to select from a variety of dialogue options, some of which are on the Paragon (good) side of their morality system, some on the Renegade (bad). Your dialogue choices affect not only the outcome of the quest, the main story, and your relationship with various characters in the game, but also the appearance of Commander Shepard. Go all in on Renegade, for example, and your Shepard starts looking bad for a Jedi, the dark side of the Force, as it were.

Mike Gamble, Mass Effect 5 project manager and executive producer at BioWare, took over X/Twitter following fan questions to discuss the original trilogy’s Paragon / Renegade system and whether or not it was worth having all that Renegade content, seeing as how most people played Paragon.

Gamble admitted that most people played Mass Effect’s Paragon, but pointed out, “it wouldn’t make sense if Renegade didn’t exist.”

He added: “The ability to choose is more powerful than the number of people who consider any option, in my opinion.”

This captures one of the main appeals of role-playing games: that they react meaningfully to your choices, whether those choices are good, bad, or ugly. This is something Baldur’s Gate 3 it does amazingly well. Larian’s RPG contains a large amount of content that most players will never see because their choices take the game in a certain direction, but the experience is all the richer for it. It’s also something that some BioWare fans criticized Dragon Age: The Veilguard for no doing

Now we come to Mass Effect 5, and one fan’s observation that we may see the return of the Paragon / Renegade system due to hints hidden in a BioWare Mass Effect image released in 2023.

Gamble’s response: “I was talking about the trilogy. You’ll just have to wait and see…”

I was talking about the trilogy. You’ll just have to wait and see…

— Michael Gamble (@GambleMike) January 3, 2025

It may be a while before we know. Things have been quiet in Mass Effect since then BioWare released a 30-second trailer for Mass Effect 5 in celebration of N7 Day 2023.leading fans to search for fresh information once again.

The biggest revelation was that the long-awaited sequel would be somehow connected to Mass Effect: Andromeda. There were doubts that BioWare would quietly drop any references to its infamous spin-off, but it seems it’s still fully part of the canon, with Mass Effect 5 potentially set long before the events of the original trilogy.

Wesley is IGN’s UK News Editor. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.