As the dust continues to settle after the closure of RPG studio BioWare and cancellation of Mass Effect: Universe, the fifth. game in the sci-fi RPG series, more information keeps trickling out about the game the studio’s skeleton crew was working on before EA pulled the plug. This time, more concrete details about the game have been shared by someone claiming to be a member of a community council giving BioWare feedback on the game as it was in development.
A video by YouTuber Dantics breaks down several elements of the story and world. As a heads up, the video does tout some anti-woke nonsense and comment on “masculine” women while talking about the details, so if you don’t want to watch it, we’ll cover the broad strokes. Kotaku wasn’t able to verify Dantics’ involvement (though ex-BioWare Executive Producer Michael Gamble does follow him on Twitter), but a separate source tells us that the information in the video is accurate.
- The game would take place 600 years after the events of Mass Effect 3, lining it up timeline-wise with Mass Effect: Andromeda.
- After the destruction of the Mass Relays at the end of 3, humanity was cut off from much of the galaxy, though the Citadel space station remained parked over Earth
- Humanity formed an alliance with the remaining krogan and batarian
- The council races (turian, salarian, and sari) formed their own superstructures and alliances
- It’s been 600 years, so the Relays have been rebuilt and technology has advanced so far that it has reached a “singular point”
- The game would have found ways to recognize the choice the player made at the end of Mass Effect 3, using this distance to make the differences between the three somewhat negligible. The Reapers that survived in the Control ending would have been “outdated tech” by the time Universe began, cybernetics have become more common place so Synthesis choosers would’ve gotten to this point in synthetic/organic hybrid sooner than other players in history, and then if you picked Destroy, Shepard is still long dead because it’s been 600 years, with their legacy still “very known” to people hundreds of years later with their choices coming up as the story went on.
- The Geth is a third faction in part of a “Cold War” with the other two, which is being orchestrated by some unknown force the player is setting out to investigate.
- The Geth’s role would likely have been somewhat informed by Shepard’s choice at the end of the game, as many of them would have been killed in the Destroy ending, though the video doesn’t go into detail about this. What they do say is that the Geth would have been creating structures that link the Milky Way to Andromeda.
- The player is an N7 agent, and the gameplay would have been more evocative of James Bond and John Wick with hand-to-hand combat in enclosed spaces. The new hero would have had experimental tech in their head that would allow them to interact in the world in ways similar to Cyberpunk 2077’s hacking, allowing more freedom to explore and manipulate situations, with missions being structured more like the more concise ones in the original trilogy than Andromeda’s open-world.
- The game would have included character customization, and the hero seen in the leaked trailer would have been a “default” male version.
- Your squadmates would have internal conflicts similar to ME2’s spats between Jack/Miranda and Tali/Legion
Some of this could be inferred from the leaked trailer, but what is most interesting to me is that BioWare seemingly had no intention of picking a “canon” ending for Mass Effect 3, and would instead write around it in a way that it could feasibly tell the story it wanted to without stepping on players’ toes. This is in-line with some of the studio’s statements on the idea of overwriting player choice in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
“Honestly, we try to avoid the idea of there being a single canon,” Veilguard creative director Epler said in 2024. “I mean, it’s a game about choice. This is a game about your decisions as a player. […] The philosophy is we never want to invalidate your choices. And if we don’t feel we can do something respectful of the choice we made, we oftentimes just don’t necessarily reference it. […] So we never want you to feel like your world is being invalidated.”
For me, this was the best case scenario. If BioWare insisted on going back to the Milky Way, making sure to not invalidate the player’s legacy would have been top of mind for me, and has been since the studio confirmed it was going back when the game was first teased in 2020. Now, I just have another reason to be angry at EA for what it’s done to BioWare and Mass Effect. Now we just have to see if Amazon’s TV show is even half as concerned about respecting player choice.