I'm not entirely confident that Mass Effect 5 will ever see the light of day. Between the Andromeda debacle, the dismantling of BioWare after Dragon Age: The Veilguard missed whatever expectations EA had for it, and the upcoming acquisition of EA by Saudi Arabia, the environment just doesn't seem entirely conducive to another big sexy space adventure.

But the wheels are continuing to turn. The most recent sign of progress comes from Mass Effect executive producer Michael Gamble, who's looking for help getting the new game done. "Hi, I’m hiring a very important senior leadership role," Gamble wrote on X. "They’ll report to me and it’s gonna be awesome."

The post includes a link to a job listing for a production director on the next Mass Effect game. Before you get too excited, this is a high-level position (pay range is $187,000 - $259,400 CDN plus benefits), so you're not going to get any details about the game itself except that it will be the next chapter of "one of the highest-rated and most celebrated series in video game history." Except for the last chapter, I suppose.

But if you're curious about what it is a production director actually does, here's the lowdown:

• Act as a strategic bridge between creative intent and development execution, translating high-level vision into a clear direction that enables teams to deliver at AAA quality.
• Provide leadership across the full development lifecycle, anticipating needs, setting executional direction, and ensuring teams are positioned to succeed at each phase.
• Build and sustain strong coalitions across creative, technical, production, and partner teams, fostering alignment and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Break down complex creative and technical goals into understandable, actionable components, ensuring teams understand both the why and the how behind their work.
• Identify and mitigate risks early, drive resolution of cross-team challenges, and make informed tradeoffs that protect quality, schedule, and long-term franchise health.
• Represent the project and production organization in communications with studio leadership, EA partners, and external stakeholders, including press as needed.
• Establish and reinforce clear objectives, transparency, and accountability across teams to maintain alignment and momentum

It goes without saying but just to ensure everyone's on the same page here (and maybe save Mike some unnecessary rejection emails), this is not an entry-level gig. You'll need at least 10 years of game-dev experience "including senior-level leadership on multiple large-scale AAA titles," expertise in the RPG and action RPG genres, and "strong executive presence with an influence-based leadership style," among other things. So that lets me out, then.

What matters here is not the likelihood that I might one day get a real job, though, but that EA is hiring—and more pointedly, that it's hiring for a role that will usher Mass Effect 5 from concept to reality. The fact that the team doesn't already have someone like that indicates that work is still in the very early stages, but that they're looking for someone to take the job means EA is, at least for now, serious about moving ahead with it. I call that good news.

The pre-patch for World of Warcraft: Midnight has rolled out ahead of the expansion's launch in March, and that means the first stage of Blizzard's big revision to UI addons is here. The devs have presented this change as a way to "level the playing field" for players, but there's always been a big question lingering: why now?

Addon use goes all the way back to WoW's beta days, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas tells our friends at PC Gamer. "What we started to see 10 years later in Warlords of Draenor was increasingly bespoke add-on solutions that were designed to simplify and solve specific mechanics," he says.

"That was just the beginning," Hazzikostas continues. But there was no "one specific function" Blizzard could block to address the issue, and since addons were by then fully ingrained into WoW's player culture, the team essentially said, "'Okay, I guess this is how it's going to work now." But the issues the team began to take notice of in Warlords of Draenor had only become more "pervasive" in modern WoW.

"We've probably let this go farther than we should have," Hazzkostas admits. "But we really just boiled down to the question of, do we want this to be what WoW is forever? We probably should have done something sooner, and it would have been a less-jarring transition for the community."

Hazzikostas puts it another way: "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today."

The addon crackdown – or "disarmament," as Blizzard has put it in the past – is intended to keep combat addons from changing the expectations for how high-level content should be balanced. Players with a ton of information naturally have an advantage in high-end raids, and Blizzard doesn't want to have to keep balancing around both addon users and those who stick with the native UI.

But the team doesn't want to kill UI mods entirely. "Our goal was never to stamp out the add-on ecosystem," Hazzikostas says. "It was to move away from it being something that feels like a required competitive aspect of the game."

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