EA and Bioware have used the 2023 iteration of N7 Day, a yearly celebration of all things Mass Effect, to seemingly share a tantalising tease of the next game in the series with a bit of a (space) easter egg hunt. Mass Effect’s franchise director and executive producer, Mike Gamble, shared this blog post which touches very lightly on the future of the series before delving into a bunch of new merch available for fans to throw money at.
Over the course of the post though, a series of 1s and 0s can be found which, when treated as binary code spell out the world “EPSILON.” One of the potential original titles for the series before it was dubbed Mass Effect, sleuth-y fans discovered that Epsilon also happens to work as a URL suffix over the official Mass Effect website address and points to this page.
The page contains some cryptic text along with a very short five-second teaser of a mystery figure walking:
/////ACCESS CODE: EPSILON
/////ACCESS CODE ACCEPTED
/////SECONDARY ENCRYPTION DETECTED
/////VJBSVU-XXXX-XXXXXXXX
/////ANDROMEDA DISTRESS SIGNAL DETECTED
/////YEAR SENT: [REDACTED]
/////AUDIO TRANSCRIPT: ALTHOUGH THEY SHOULD KNOW BY NOW NOT TO UNDERESTIMATE HUMAN [REDACTED]
Folks then put a second thinking cap on over their thinking caps and deduced, from the redacted sequence displayed, the word OCULON, the year 2819 and the world DEFIANCE, which come together to reveal yet another walking video but this time with a much better glimpse at the figure in question:
And then finally, another teaser site was discovered which shows that we are, in fact, looking at a masked person wearing an N7 outfit and heading out into a very dusty and barren looking environment:
Bioware eventually stuck all of these bits together into a full, 30-second tease which it claims is in-engine, but hasn’t said much more since – we’ll be waiting to see if it has anything more to say about Mass Effect 5 itself other than these fun, if hollow, teases.
Transmission complete! Thanks to everyone that helped hunt down the footage. ? Here's the full video stitched together! #N7Day pic.twitter.com/6Q8kEQkb5b
— Mass Effect (@masseffect) November 7, 2023
