I remember the first time I went to Ilos. On a long-dead planet, I felt cosmic foreboding in a rickety alien elevator overrun with swamp grime and rot. As my company of soldiers and mercenaries fell silent, an eerie but wistful hum kicked in; the opening of a non-diegetic track, by Jack Wall, titled “Vigil.” Even if you’ve never played a video game, let alone Mass Effect, hit play and listen. What do you feel? What memories come to mind? What stories do you suddenly want to tell?
Mass Effect, created by BioWare, was full of stories. While the games had an overarching plot centered on the galaxy’s collective survival against an ancient threat, its three main titles—released between 2007 and 2012—were filled to the brim with smaller stories that could leave a mark the size of an asteroid. (There was a standalone sequel in 2016, Mass Effect: Andromeda, but it’s less beloved than the first games. Also, I didn’t play it.) Stories about love and loss, revenge and redemption, bravery and betrayal, and pleasant surprises made up the hundreds of hours of adventure. Though it was all just ones and zeroes on an Xbox 360 disc, Mass Effect felt alive. Which is why the news that BioWare is closed—and with it, Mass Effect—hurts like hell.
In case you missed it, on October 22, the prolific Canadian game studio announced its closure on its social channels, including the announcement that development on the “next Mass Effect project” is “ending.” The blame lies with parent company EA, the long and short of which boils down to private equity doing what it does. So suddenly and without fuss, Mass Effect is over.
There are a million reasons to mourn. Right now the gaming industry looks less like a bustling marketplace and more like triage. But the demise of BioWare is especially painful, and the unambiguous end of its still-beloved Mass Effect series hard to process because it just doesn’t make sense. Since it was founded in 1995, the studio enjoyed industry acclaim and commercial success behind almost all its multi-installment games: Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age. Mass Effect was BioWare’s signature sci-fi, spiritually an amalgamation of the genre’s biggest hitters—Star Trek, Dune, and the works of Asimov, Bradbury, Burroughs, and Lovecraft—that confidently stood on its own with an original universe.
The games took place in a far distant future in which humanity achieved interstellar travel and engaged in interplanetary diplomacy with alien races. The saga followed Commander Shepard, a human soldier whose background, appearance, and gender are up to player preferences. (My Shepard kinda looked like Donnie Yen.) As Shepard follows signs of a race of sentient machines that can bring about complete annihilation, he/she gathers allies to give the galaxy a fighting chance.
While all three Mass Effect games were a hybrid of military shooters and dungeon-crawling role-playing games, their biggest draw was . . . chit-chatting. The series notably featured a branching narrative that threaded across all three games, meaning some missions and even random conversations with non-playable characters will have ripple effects into Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. Buoyed by exceptional character work and movie-quality dialogue, “talking” winds up as one of the most important and legitimately entertaining things you’ll ever do in the games. Even more than shooting. (Which, if I can be brutally honest, was always just “fine.”) Making decisions informed by your own moral compass was the primary thrust of Mass Effect’s immersion and appeal; few games have replicated that same magic since.
Really, my fondest memories of Mass Effect have nothing to do with the spectacle of becoming Space Jesus. They had to do with growing close with characters whose voices I still hear in my head, and making choices I knew I would regret. I remember Wrex, a party member whose species is plagued with an inability to procreate, holding up a shotgun to my face when I considered bombing a facility that houses a cure; my body still remembers the way I shook when I signaled Ashley to shoot him dead.
Later, in Mass Effect 2, I was overjoyed when I reunited with Garrus, a cool-as-ice ally and the closest thing you make to a best friend. Imagine my devastation when I watched him die in the game’s climactic mission. I’m not much of a heartbreaker IRL, but when I was playing the games as a teenager, Mass Effect made me choose between formidable “romantic interests” that could only end with someone walking away hurt. (Good training for adulthood.) I am only scratching the surface here.
To play Mass Effect was to get lost inside a living universe whose vast corners were waiting to be discovered—by you. There is always someone with an ulterior motive, a derelict spaceship hiding secrets, or abandoned outposts that aren’t abandoned after all. It has been almost twenty years since that one Saturday night when I first stepped on Ilos, slack-jawed by the brutal awe of a bygone civilization’s extinction and the painful sacrifices their survivors made in the hope that maybe, one day, someone else can prove that not all was lost.
I still play video games in the hope I might find the same highs Mass Effect gave me all those years ago. I hoped the fifth Mass Effect might have been what I was looking for. But if this series taught me anything—other than that diplomacy can be had if I do enough side quests—it’s that the end is always a prelude to a new beginning.