BioWare has confirmed Shepard will not be the protagonist of the next Mass Effect. I think this is correct.
Shepard’s arc is complete. Not neatly — Mass Effect 3’s ending has been argued about for over a decade. But complete in the sense that the arc ran its full course. The Reaper threat is over. Everything Shepard was defined by no longer exists.
The argument for bringing Shepard back centres on continuity. Players built three games worth of choices and relationships. That weight is real. Discarding it for a clean slate feels like leaving something valuable behind.
The problem: Shepard without the Reapers is not the same character. Every alliance, every sacrifice, every moment of galactic stakes was filtered through that specific context. Remove it and you have someone wearing the same face in a different story. That story would spend most of its runtime either rehashing what came before or apologising for not being it. Neither is interesting.
The Mass Effect universe is enormous and almost entirely unexplored. The games cover three years of Shepard’s life during a galactic war. There are centuries of history around that conflict, dozens of species who experienced it from entirely different positions, and entire regions of the galaxy that were named and never visited.
The setup worth making: a protagonist who grew up after the Reaper War. Someone for whom Shepard is mythology, not lived experience. Filtered through history, simplified, probably misunderstood. The gap between what the legend says happened and what actually happened is a story only a new character can tell.
BioWare has to commit to that framing without constantly gesturing back. That is where previous attempts at this kind of transition have failed.