Mass Effect boss may have dropped a hint about the next game: 'Make sure you play Lair of the Shadow Broker'

We don't know much about the next Mass Effect game yet, except that it's happening and Liara T'Soni will be in it. That's left fans of the series eager for whatever scraps of information they can get their hands on, and BioWare's Michael Gamble, who's heading up work on Mass Effect 4, might have just thrown them a bone.

"So many new Mass Effect fans popping up in my mentions," Gamble wrote recently on X (via Game Rant). "Maybe because it’s like 5 bucks or something. Awesome to see. There’s like an extra game worth of DLC content in there but make sure you play Lair of the Shadow Broker. Thx."

First things first, Mass Effect Legendary Edition is indeed on sale for less than a fiver in the Steam Autumn Sale, which is an absolutely bonkers price for literally hundreds of hours of outstanding sci-fi RPG action. It's a great game (the original ending was fine) and more than worth your time if you haven't played it yet—trust me, you will not get more out of five bucks than you will here.

What's more interesting, though, is Gamble's seeming insistence that if you're new to the whole Mass Effect thing, you should really play the Shadow Broker DLC. For those not in the know, Lair of the Shadow Broker is a Mass Effect 2 expansion that sees Liara beefing with the mysterious—one might say shadowy—knower-of-things who first appeared, more as a plot device than a character, in the original Mass Effect. I didn't care for the DLC all that much: It was fine but served mainly as a way to bring Liara back into the action (she isn't a playable character in Mass Effect 2), and since I didn't particularly care for Liara, I found the expansion largely forgettable.

(I have nothing against Liara, for the record, I just preferred to roll with Zaeed and the krogan. As Teddy Roosevelt said, be a Paragon, but always bring a couple heavy hitters along for the ride.)

Liara's involvement in Mass Effect 4 has been effectively confirmed already, but Gamble's message could be construed as a hint about the broader basis of the game, especially since Liara returned as a playable squaddie for Mass Effect 3. If it was simply a matter of being aware of the character, that (along with ME1) would be sufficient. The specificity of "make sure you play Lair of the Shadow Broker" suggests to me that there might be something more to it.

And now is the time for these sorts of oblique hints to drop. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out the door and doing quite well, and with no DLC for that game planned, the focus has shifted to Mass Effect. And Gamble has been something of a hint-dropper in the past: In 2023, for instance, he teased N7 Day "packets" in a little online game that eventually led to the release of a new Mass Effect promo image.