"I'm sad you won't ever get to see what we were cooking"
Following EA's decision to shut down BioWare, the game that would've been the fifth entry in the Mass Effect series is being dumped out of an airlock, never to become a finished article that'll reach players hands as its creators envisioned. The larger tragedy is, of course, the job losses and the closure of a studio with a legacy befotting RPG royalty, but it's still sad that next Mass Effect will never come out, and some of the folks who worked on it have begun offering some insight into what the team were hoping to accomplish.
"I was one of the lucky ones who stayed with BioWare to start on the next Mass Effect, where I believe we were making something special: a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match," cinematic supervisor Tony de Waal wrote in a LinkedIn post revealing one of the 50 or so remaining BioWare staff let go as part of the closure. "We saw what Larian and CD Projekt were bringing to the table with their latest offerings, and started down a path to bring Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the Trilogy.
"I'm sad you won't ever get to see what we were cooking, and sad for the small, talented group of devs who were all punching above their weight to make something special. Please consider those who stayed with BioWare until the very end. They are truly some of the most talented people I've had the pleasure of working with throughout my career."
Writers Catherynne M. Valente and Derek Künsken didn't go into as much depth in their own posts on Twitter, but similarly echoed that they were excited about what the studio were sketching out and building with this Mass Effect game.
While it's worth maintaining the perspective that Mass Effect 5 was still early in development rather than minutes from being out of the door, it's galling that BioWare will never even get a chance to see if their plans could make for an RPG capable of pushing the genre forwards as the likes of Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher 3 have over the past decade. Similarly to some of their long-established RPG-making cousins, the likes of Bethesda, BioWare's path hasn't been a straight line to massive success in recent years.
2017's Mass Effect: Andromeda wasn't as critically acclaimed and near-universally beloved as the trilogy that preceded it. Anthem failed to stick the live-service landing despite some promising ideas. Then, there was Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which had a well-documentedly messy development cycle that saw it pulled and pushed between multiplayer and singleplayer to suit the whims of EA management. The game it eventually turned into is one Nic (RPS in peace) summed up in his review as "a reluctant RPG, but a compelling, heartfelt action adventure". Sadly, it didn't sell the oodles of copies a game must to be deemed a success under EA these days, and thus seemed to instantly become the final black mark against BioWare that saw their corporate overlords start to fatally close in the walls.
Could BioWare have gotten their RPG master mojo back in full if they'd achieved their aims with Mass Effect 5? We'll never know. games studios under big publishers these days are rarely afforded such chances these days, no matter how obvious it might seem to those of us not just concerned with achieving short-term financial gains to offset being loaded up with debt in a Saudi-lead takeover by ditching everything that isn't turning over EA FC-level amounts of cash.