Just a scant few days ago, at time of writing, it was announced that the beloved and foundational RPG developer Bioware was finally being shut down and disbanded by EA. This news was not exactly unexpected, but it was unwelcome nonetheless.
As with any video game related catastrophe, everyone and their aunt started opining on what they thought it was that had struck the killing blow. Many put the blame on EA, long known as a killer of veteran studios, while others blamed EA's recent Saudi takeover to be responsible for ending EA's only outwardly queer-adjacent developer. Others still pointed to the recent string of Bioware titles all underperforming despite their costly production periods. Of course, the internet's biggest brains all knew the real reason was because Bioware had become "woke and gay," though when precisely it was that Bioware became "woke and gay" few could actually agree upon.
Suffice it to say that the news led to an absolute outpouring of bad takes. I saw someone claim that Bioware hadn't made a good game since Dragon Age Origins, which means you'd have to disregard Mass Effect 2 (their most critically well regarded game,) and Inquisition (their best seller.) In the words of Logan Roy, these are not serious people.
1. Come and Take a Look at What You Could Have Won.
I'm not here today, though, to litigate the death of Bioware. Other, more smarter people out there would probably be better at that. Because the story didn't end with Bioware's end. A few days after the closure was announced a leaked trailer for the still in-development Mass Effect 5 (or 4 depending who you ask,) hit social media. After initial speculation that the trailer may have been a convincing fake, despite passing the smell test, it was eventually revealed as being the real deal.
The trailer, for what it is worth, depicts a somewhat generic looking video game protagonist bro entering a seedy bar and having a seductive conversation with a sexy Asari woman, while through flashbacks he relates his tragic backstory of war and banging hot chicks. When things look as though they are about to take a turn, protago-bro is revealed to be working for Shadow Broker Liara, the only returning face from the original games, and then a fight breaks out.
There's action, excitement, and a montage of familiar planets and brand-loyal visuals. There's a couple of mysterious intriguing plot threads dangled, before the trailer finally whacks us over the head with the title. Mass Effect Universe.
All things considered, I thought the trailer was pretty effective. Nearly every Mass Effect trailer usually goes for the lowest-common-denominator sex and violence stuff, while never really advertising the interesting world building and deep character dynamics, so I didn't take it as as anything more than a tone-setter. It definitely looked like they had a handle on what kind of game they were making, even if at times it felt like it was going out of its way to assure the straights that it wasn't going to make them feel gay, like the video game trailer equivalent of that Dan Hentschel sketch.
Were the game actually going to see release, I think this trailer would have reassured me that they were on the right track. My big worry for Mass Effect 5 (4?) was that it was going to bite off more than it could chew, stuck between trying to resurrect Shepard's already concluded story, to trying to please both fans and haters of Andromeda, to forging it's own path and kicking off a new saga.
It knew what it wanted to be, and had a strong sense of its own identity. It didn't feel beholden to the past, or that it was re-treading old ground, instead taking us on a new story with different priorities while still feeling like a Mass Effect game.
The thing is, though, this is only one trailer. One trailer that wasn't even intended for external release. By all accounts we can glean nothing about what the actual quality of the game would be. It was nothing but a scant few moments of a pre-rendered cinematic movie with no gameplay footage in it at all.
But you wouldn't know that from the way some people have been talking about it.
2. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale
As soon as the trailer was known to the public social media was abuzz with outrage over the game's cancellation. Many fans and internet commentators were aghast that a game that was "nearly completed" had been shelved at the last minute. This, despite the fact that nothing about the trailer spoke to the actual stage of development and featured no gameplay footage. All of a sudden folks were acting as though this was a Coyote Vs Acme situation where a finished product had been shelved at completion.
Then came the so-called leaks. Certain individuals who claimed to have worked on the project started passing around supposed details of what the final game would have looked like. Many said that the game was further along in development than fans had expected, which only fanned the flames of people assuming the game was "nearly finished."
As was depressingly inevitable, a petition and campaign was started to "save the game." Fans began circulating the petition on social media, and numerous videos popped up on YouTube declaring that the outpouring of support showed that EA should, no, MUST resume work on the game. They owe it to the fans!
It should come as no surprise that this was all starting to feel dreadfully familiar.
3. You and I are Going to Live Forever.
Mass Effect 3 was released in 2012. It was the culmination of a years long story arc stretching over three games and multiple DLC expansions. Expectations were high. Upon release, while not considered a masterpiece, the general consensus was that the game was a mostly satisfying action RPG that built upon what came before and managed to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.
Except for that ending, of course.
The backlash against Mass Effect 3's ending was so severe that it was almost like the entire internet had come down with a case of delusional psychosis. I myself was not immune, and found myself sharing and promoting the "Take Back Mass Effect" campaign that demanded a complete re-write and re-release of the game's ending.
The entire effort was, as mentioned, entirely delusional. The idea that Bioware, a studio that was already being run ragged by its EA taskmasters, was going to go back and basically re-create a brand new ending and work it seamlessly into the game, from scratch, was about as likely as Beyond Good and Evil 2 seeing a release before 2020.
All the campaign achieved was a bunch of mostly blameless devs getting harassed into producing a free DLC that made the endings just a little more palatable, but ultimately didn't change anything. The ending of the Mass Effect trilogy is what we got, and remains so, whether you like it or not.
I bring all this up to point out that video game developers are not restaurants. You can't just send something back if you're dissatisfied and expect them to serve you a fresh new dish. These projects take years of work and huge amounts of manpower and resources, both of which EA has explicitly jettisoned.
EA is not going to look at these petitions and fan manifestos and decide to resume the project. The studio has been closed. The staff have been laid off. They already decided that whatever work was already done it wasn't worth completing. Even if they were going to resume the project it is likely they would farm it out to third party contractors just to get it out of the door. Mass Effect Universe would come out feeling incomplete and unsatisfying.
All of this effort, this self-assured campaigning, is nothing but back-slapping and ego-stroking, in the name of a game that we don't really know anything about.
4. Truth is Usually Just an Excuse for a Lack of Imagination.
What we know so far about Mass Effect Universe is from a trailer and a few titbits the studio revealed here and there. It is possible that it could have been good. It is just as likely it could have been an uneven mess, tonally inconstant with its source material, or overall unfinished and bland.
The way you hear some people talking about the project you'd think that we knew for certain this would have been the second coming of Mass Effect.
Since the trailer dropped, a bunch of folks claiming to have a had a role in the game's development have taken to social media to leak what they know about the game. Naturally these are filled with platitudes of how great the game was going to be. How it was going to win everybody back. How it was going to be everything the Mass Effect fans were waiting for and more.
Such ridiculous levels of hype are obviously exaggerations, but I think what stands out to me the most is all the talk of what the "fans" supposedly want.
I'm not going to put anyone on blast, but I saw a supposed leaker claiming that the game was focussing specifically on "the real fans"(whoever they are) and made a particular effort to draw attention to the fact that the female characters were "cute" and "feminine" and "not unnecessary masculine." No guesses for which side of the culture war our leaker is apparently dog-whistling to here.
The irony, of course, is that said leaker was immediately dog-piled by people saying that the game sounded shit and was going to be a Veilguard-level disaster anyway, mostly around the claim that the plot of Andromeda was not going to be incorporated and that Humanity had supposedly broke away from the Council. I find this aspect particularly funny to already to be considered a deal-breaker, especially over unverified information for a game that hasn't been finished. Still, I think this emphasises that "going back to the fans" is a fool's errand.
More information, however, has come out from more reputable sources, but these are, once again, so vague and non-specific that it can basically mean whatever you want it to mean. There has been much talk of the game having some kind of "timeline" system where players can jump into other player's game-states and experience the story branches differently. It isn't exactly clear how all of this was supposed to work, and if I'm being perfectly honest it sounded like the same kind of high-concept pipe-dream ambition as Andromeda's attempt at procedurally generated planets, which was one of the major factors that contributed to Andromeda's chaotic production cycle.
All things considered, the evidence points to a game that is far from finished, and a lot of the bits and pieces coming out suggest a story and a plot that was still a work in progress.
What I'm trying to say its here that it sounds like Bioware were making enough rope to hang themselves with. It is possible that Mass Effect Universe would have come together and been a satisfying game in the end, though more likely not one that would re-unify the fanbase, but it is just as, if not more, likely that it would have ended up an ambitious disaster, not unlike Andromeda before it.
It's very easy to say how damn good the game would have been when it is now never going to see the light of day.
5. Now Reality Can Be Whatever I Want
In many ways, Mass Effect Universe has become the ultimate game video. It can never disappoint you. It can never offend you. It can always be on your side of the culture war. Most importantly, it will never have an ending.
I'm not here to say that people should stop having fun. I think using the great what-if of Mass Effect Universe to do fan art, fanfic, cosplays and otherwise good-natured speculation is not only healthy, but inspiring. On the other hand, the campaigns, the petitions, the taking every supposed leak at face value, all of this is an unhealthy relationship to have with a piece of media we basically knew nothing about before yesterday.
The simple fact of the matter is that Mass Effect Universe will most likely never see the light of day. We're never going to know if it would have been good or not. We're never going to know if it would have been 'woke' or not (whatever that means to you.) We're never going to know if it would have saved the franchise, undersold, or been a divisive entry with as many defenders as detractors.
So you can spend an inordinate amount of free time exerting huge reserves of emotional energy getting worked up over a game that only exists in your mind, or you can face reality, grieve what could have been and say "Huh. Interesting," about whatever titbit of trivia eventually comes out about the game.
Because I've been through all of this too many times already and I'm not doing it again.
Post Script
I think what has pissed me off more than anything is the people outwardly stating that they only care about the Mass Effect IP and not the developers who worked on it simply because "Bioware died long ago" and that they didn't even like what the studio had been putting out recently. (Why would you even want to resurrect a game when you've have no confidence in the people that created it?)
The sheer callous indifference, as well as the re-writing of history (at time of closing, Bioware still had plenty of veteran devs employed there,) just betrays the self-centred motivations around some of the people involved in these campaigns. It isn't about respecting the work they love, its about wanting to keep getting their treats.
With that in mind, I thought I'd end discussing a more viable, if still unlikely, path to victory here, rather than the proposed fruitless attempt to pressure EA into finishing the game.
Avi Lewis, of Canada's New Democratic Party, has proposed that Bioware should be entitled to a studio buyback. That, if the will is there, the former studio should have the right to reclaim its brand name and IP. The chances of this happening are also pretty unlikely, but if you want to see a finished version of Mass Effect Universe that wouldn't be a chaotic rush-job, this is by far the better path. It also has the added bonus that means at least some of the laid-off devs get to stay in work.
Of course, what Lewis is proposing is a labyrinthine process that would take concerted effort and political pressure, not a fan-petition and a bunch of self-aggrandising YouTube videos, so the chances of getting the public support it needs is pretty unlikely.
Still, who knows, sometimes good things do happen, but as Commander Shepard saw during their fight against the Reapers, sticking your head in the sand and denying reality isn't going to get you anywhere.
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Jack Harvey 2026. Images used under fair use.
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