Leaked Mass Effect: Universe Trailer Gives A Taste Of Wha…
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Those mourning yesterday’s shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our best look at what that game could have been with a short, leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe.
In the roughly two-minute montage—which describes itself as “in-engine footage from our small team” that “uses our pre-production assets”—an ex-military officer wearing an N7 trenchcoat (similar to the one seen in that 2020 teaser) encounters an Asari at a bar. He talks of his frustration with military life—“by the time you put out one fire, another had already started”—before discussing his new line of work “stopping [the fires] before they start” and “making the choices no one else is willing to make. Going where others are afraid to go.”
Mass Effect: Universe Trailer
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As the intriguing Asari at the bar reveals herself to be the one who metaphorically “start[s] the fires,” N7 allies reveal themselves as backup. The cutscene transitions seamlessly into an all-out group gunfight in the bar, complete with hostiles being stuck in place inside mass effect fields and others being crushed by furniture brought down on top of them.
The action-packed bar scene is interspersed with short vignettes from around the game’s universe, including a hovercraft speeding over an icy planet, an examination of a truly gigantic alien suspended in a glass cylinder, and a team looking at a holographic map dotted with dozens of points of interest.
We hardly knew ye
The existence of the internal Mass Effect: Universe trailer was first revealed by an anonymous Reddit poster yesterday and then confirmed by IGN early Thursday morning. The trailer video appeared on Reddit slightly before noon Eastern time, with mods there saying they couldn’t “independently verify the authenticity” but that it “seems legitimate.” Within hours, both IGN and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier had confirmed that the trailer was authentic and came from someone inside EA.
ing yesterday’s BioWare closure announcement, sci-fi authors Catherynne M. Valente and Derek Kunsken bothrevealed they had been working on the game for years. “It was one of the greatest privileges & GLORIOUS challenges of my life. I smiled every day. I worked HARD for the fans, every day,” Valente wrote. “What we were cooking was really cool,” Kunsken added.
A nice establishing shot.
A nice establishing shot. Reddit
Mos Eisley cantina music begins playing.
Mos Eisley cantina music begins playing. Reddit
Our dashing protagonist.
Our dashing protagonist. Reddit
Mos Eisley cantina music begins playing. Reddit
Our dashing protagonist. Reddit
It’s a great big universe, and we’re all really puny…
I said, we’re all really puny.
Diving into action, literally.
Whoosh!
That’s gotta hurt.
Despite the existence of a 6-year-old teaser for the game, EA executives Cam Weber and David Tinson said in a memo to staff yesterday that there was only “a small team at BioWare working on early-development for Mass Effect.” The decision “not to move forward with this development” led to BioWare’s closure, which the note calls “a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not take this decision lightly.”
In an N7 Day blog post last year, Executive Producer Mike Gamble said, “The team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect. We have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out. We’re excited by what we’re building, and we promise you: when we’re ready, it’ll be a lot of fun to show.”
“Your support has meant everything to me over the past 17 years at BioWare,” Gamble wrote yesterday on social media.
Despite the game’s cancellation, the Mass Effect universe will still be represented on streaming TV screens. IGN cites “sources inside Prime Video” in reporting that the streaming series first announced in 2024 is still in active development.
As for the series’s future in gaming, an Internet petition has predictably popped up urging EA to continue funding development of the series or license the IP to an outside studio. The petition has nearly 17,500 signatories as of this writing, though those petitioners face an uphill battle convincing EA’s new private ownership to focus on a massive narrative action RPG and not more profitable franchises Battlefield, The Sims, and annual sports releases.
Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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Arstechnica.com