Mass Effect 5 would have let players generate alternate timelines based on their choices in previous games, according to the series' technical director

The more information that dribbles out from BioWare's cancelled Mass Effect game, the sadder I feel about the whole sorry situation. We've already seen an in-engine trailer that introduced a new protagonist and reintroduced Liara T'Soni, and we've heard that the game was set in a 'galactic Cold War' that combined all three of Mass Effect 3's possible endings. Now, it seems the new Mass Effect would also have had a sophisticated system for dealing with the choices players made in the original trilogy.

This is according to Mass Effect's Franchise Technical Director Romain Toutain, who ran a Twitch stream during which he provided commentary on the recently leaked trailer, offering some insight into the game that trailer was supposed to reveal (via Kotaku). Although the stream was in French, a clip was posted on Bluesky by user @loustica-lucia, who added English subtitles to Toutain's commentary.

During his stream, Toutain mentions that BioWare was working on a novel way to account for the many choices players made while playing the Mass Effect trilogy, pointing out that "all of the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taking into account."

Indeed, this is partly the reason behind the cancelled successor's name as shown in the leaked internal trailer. "One of the reasons why it was called Mass Effect Universe is that you had so many choices that you could plug your saves together to create parallel universes." Toutain quickly clarifies that his explanation is "to keep it simple," adding "It's not exactly how it worked. You had different timelines, basically. You could almost generate timelines, kinda like Zero Time Dilemma."

It sounds like a significantly more complex version of Dragon Age: The Veilguard's choice import system. Indeed, Toutain goes on to explain that "everything was stateful" in reference to Universe's tech, and BioWare had a system that let them pause the game and ask a "system that solved logical equations" about the game state and the possible consequences of choices being made by the player. "'Is this valid? And if it isn't valid, what conditions must be met for it to be valid for the game to set these conditions? And if the content doesn't exist, then we know the content doesn't exist, so we'll either have to create another branch, either that, or we know we have to create the content.'"

Toutain then cites an example: "So, if you killed a guy and you needed that guy for your mission, the game will make sure you can complete that mission. Or, if that's what the designers have decided, well, no, the mission's failed because you killed that guy. Or else, something that was bound to happen doesn't happen just so that a path remains open, so that you can get [around] the problem."

According to Toutain, the ultimate goal of the next Mass Effect was to give players "absolute autonomy". How well these ideas would have worked in practice is another matter, of course. But it certainly seems that BioWare had some ambitious plans that reached beyond the scope of the original trilogy, and it's a darn shame that we'll never know how they would have shaken out.