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BioWare teasing mystery game

Series of clues begin countdown to December 11 reveal during Video Game Awards televised ceremony.

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Until recently, BioWare used its official site to tease a "New Next Gen Game" as being in the works. In summer 2009, the Canada-headquartered developer posted a job listing for an "unannounced AAA project," which was described as a "new IP."

Now it looks like that new IP may in the process of being outed. Today, BioWare leaked a teaser image (attached) via Twitter, which showed a man in futuristic battle armor leveling a sniper rifle out a broken window. Though the man has the same close-cropped look as the default Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 2, the rifle looks significantly lower tech than the expandable weapons used in the sci-fi shooter.

BioWare is already teasing its
BioWare is already teasing its "next big game."

The image was just the first clue from BioWare. The developer then used its Twitter feed to leak two bar codes, the first of which translated into a length of binary text that according to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, converts to 55.845--the atomic weight of iron. Given iron is the main component in steel, the number has led to speculation that the game in question is a reboot of Shattered Steel, BioWare's 1996 mech combat game.

A second BioWare-posted barcode scanned by Rock, Paper, Shotgun offered up -128.5 Fahrenheit. That's the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, in Vostok, Antarctica, July 21, 1983. Since there is a star system called Vostok in Mass Effect, some are taking this clue to mean the game being teased is, in fact, Mass Effect 3.

Finally, a few seconds of footage of the new game were featured inside a TV spot promoting the Video Game Awards on December 11. The footage shows the man in gray armor leaning out a window covered in broken glass to snipe something on a greenish field. According to the TV spot, the title is BioWare's "next big game" and will be revealed during the VGAs next month.

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