The highly-anticipated remake of BioWare's celebrated sci-fi trilogy, Mass Effect, was expected to release in October 2020, new sources claim.

Now, however, delays thought to be connected to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic might have scuppered publisher EA's plans, pushing the release back, but a source that claims to have intel on the project insists "I know it's real".

"Up until, like, this last week, I know the plan for sure was to announce it in early October, release in later in October. So good news," revealed GamesBeat journalist Jeff Grubb on a recent podcast (thanks, VGC). "Maybe bad news - it's 2020 - maybe that could start to slip, it sounds like maybe that's a possibility, nothing for sure yet."

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"Stand by for clearance Normandy," bellows Captain David Anderson as the iconic ship approaches Citadel Dock 422. Shortly thereafter the wonder of the galaxy's epicentre hits you like a sledgehammer, its empyrean skyline a majestic marvel among the cosmos. However, there exists a monumental issue that has plagued this cutscene for over a decade: it has aged like a fine wine, if only said wine had its cork removed long before it was shelved.

Fortunately, there is a fix. After the divisive denouement of Mass Effect 3 ripped a fissure in the community, a group of fans banded together to rewrite the series' disgruntling culmination. Thus the Mass Effect modding community was born, brewed from a chaotically potent cocktail of discontent and desire for more. "We only have Mass Effect 3 mods because of the terrible endings," Spectre Expansion Mod author Tydeous tells me in a recent interview. "People hated them with such passion that it spawned an entire community that wanted to fix them."

Although the ensuing ending mods were relatively renowned within Mass Effect circles, the movement didn't stop there: accepting the unlikeliness of an official remaster, these dedicated tinkerers decided to work on a complete 4K overhaul of the entire trilogy, as well as orchestrating their own original mods to boot. The aim of this enterprise is to complete Mass Effect Modding Workshop creator Ryan "Audemus" Ainsworth's own labour of love, ALOV (A Lot Of Videos), which is the result of a community-wide effort to remaster Mass Effect's inaugural iteration.

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Last night, BioWare team members took to Twitter to mark N7 Day - the annual celebration of all things Mass Effect.

And while there was no announcement of that Trilogy remaster, we did get a look at some previously-unseen Mass Effect concept art. Expand and drink in the newly-revealed images below:

Each of these pictures look like they're from the original trilogy era, and show the Normandy and Mako in various environments. Also, space cows.

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Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops, health-pick-ups and maps - a real smorgasbord! I really wanted to use that word.

Best of all, it's Friday again, which means another Five of the Best and another chance for you to share your thoughts as well as sit through mine (well, ours - I sometimes rope in a bit of help). Today, it's...

Hubs! What would a game be without one? A messy pile of level spaghetti, that's what. Where would you go to chill out? Where would you chat up other characters? Yep, games would be rubbish without hubs.

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There are no new Mass Effect games on the immediate horizon, but you will be able to role-play your way through BioWare's upcoming Anthem as an N7 soldier.

Mass Effect and Anthem producer Michael Gamble last night shared this N7 armour skin, as worn in Anthem's Fort Tarsis hub, looking polished and ready for your Freelancer hero to take into battle.

So what if Anthem is set in another universe? It must mean the stories of Mass Effect are a popular sci-fi yarn there, too.

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Narrative RPGs are arguably all about choices and your power over choices. Choosing a class and a background lays the groundwork for the whole experience of a game and provides a springboard for roleplaying. In the first Mass Effect, for example, you're given two key choices at the beginning of the game that effectively select which version of Commander Shepard you want to inhabit. You decide the personal history and the psychology of Shepard. You decide whether they grew up as the nomadic child of navy officers or on the streets, and whether they matured into a scarred survivor, renowned war hero or a ruthlessly efficient commander.

Each of these choices does have an impact on how characters initially relate to Shepard. Yet for all the backstory, it's hard not to shake the feeling that Shepard might as well have been dropped into the world at the moment you start the game. It's hard not to feel like you're merely guiding Shepard through a world, rather than truly inhabiting the character. The choices are big and can be incredibly satisfying prompts in the hands of a dedicated roleplayer, but the apparent scope of the choices - what was your entire childhood like? - compared to the minimal impact they have on what might be a 100 hour adventure means they can feel a little hollow.

The way in which character and place are crafted in pen-and-paper roleplaying games provides an interesting alternative to this approach.

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Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago. He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone; at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. I'm not coming in tomorrow. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived me because - yay! - I got out."

We're upstairs at Zero Zero, a pizza and pasta place just a 10-minute walk from the begging mothers and the babies they cradle who sit on the sidewalks that connect the buildings that host GDC, the world's largest gathering of video game developers, a place thousands come to share, to learn, to network, and, occasionally - although I sense through gritted teeth - talk to press people such as me.

Laidlaw is instantly affable, entertaining and interesting. He is willing to talk about things, which might sound like an odd thing to mention, but in this business, it is a rare joy indeed to speak to people who are willing to talk about things. I get why they do not, why developers are hesitant to say too much, because when they do, the fans sometimes come calling - as they have at Mike Laidlaw at points during his career.

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I remember not being very taken by Mass Effect's main theme, the first time I heard it. Next to what I'd read about the game, a tale of alien liaisons and sizzling gun battles amid the stars, the title music seemed dreary, the wrong kind of spaced-out. A decade later, I listen to it while crossing a certain footbridge in London, on my way to the abandoned mall food court where I'm writing this. Somebody has scrawled "change" plus a few choice sentiments about austerity policies on the wall at one end. The council has repainted that bridge a few times in the years I've lived nearby - right now it's an incongruous green and purple pattern, like a coral reef hammered flat - and every time, that unknown soul has returned to scribble the message anew. A gesture of defiance, or ironic futility? I couldn't tell you, but as the languid drone of Vigil's Theme fills my skull, I read the words again, ponder their relevance to Mass Effect's storyline and find myself ludicrously close to tears.

Every great musical composition is a survivor, struggling against the tides of history. Before written language became ubiquitous, oral artforms such as ballads, folk songs and sung epics were important ways of passing on knowledge from generation to generation - arguably, modern music continues to serve this function alongside other kinds of media, preserving scenes and sensations if not the detail of chronologies. Lyrical structures like rhyme and alliteration have their roots in a wish to codify laws, divine precepts or the genealogies of families in a digestible, memorable form.

As vehicles for knowledge, oral traditions have major downsides. The untimely death of a bard may wipe away decades of learning, and compositions mutate as they are sung or recited, misheard and adapted, losing and acquiring associations in hindsight. A famous example is the English folksong "Ring o Rosie", often taken to be a gruesome taxonomy of Black Plague symptoms, which may actually refer to a game played by 19th century children to sidestep a prohibition on dancing. But these artforms are also enduring in a way other types of preservation are not. The elusive nature of musical memory, stored in several parts of the brain as muscular performance, sensory stimulus, spoken word and malleable abstraction, allows it to weather upheavals both within the life of the individual listener and the life of a community.

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Xbox Game Pass gets Gears of War 4 in December, Microsoft has confirmed.

It's a high-profile addition to Microsoft's Netflix-style game subscription service, which lets you download and play games for a monthly fee.

The Coalition's third-person shooter was one of Microsoft's big Xbox One and Windows 10 PC games in the run-up to Christmas 2016, so it's nice to see it added to the Game Pass. The addition means all the Gears of War games are included in an Xbox Game Pass membership.

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Remember 2005 British TV comedy series Extras, written by The Office duo Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant? The one where Gervais played an actor stuck making a living as an extra, and where a string of guest stars like Ben Stiller, Patrick Stewart and Samuel L. Jackson appeared? The late, great David Bowie even popped up in Series 2. Good, wasn't it?

Anyway, it turns out the show's awkward, close conversations were the unlikely inspiration for a very well known series of video games: BioWare's Mass Effect.

Mass Effect animator Jonathan Cooper shared the detail on Twitter in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the US release of Mass Effect 1.

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