A Mass Effect 5 trailer intended for internal purposes at BioWare has leaked online, offering a glimpse of what could have been.
The trailer, which IGN verified was legitimate, was created for EA management last year and was not intended for public viewing. It appeared on Reddit just a day after EA’s shock cancellation of Mass Effect 5 and the shutdown of its developer, BioWare.
The trailer begins with the message: “The following is an in-engine sequence from our small team. It uses our pre-production resources” and ends with the title “Mass Effect: Universe”. It is unknown if this would have been the final name of the game.
The trailer contains a number of familiar elements, including weapons, powers, and alien species that we’ve seen in previous Mass Effect games. There’s a glimpse of a sex scene, a Mass Effect relay, space travel, and a nightclub, all of which are Mass Effect staples. There’s even a map of the galaxy displayed inside your ship.
It seems that players have now taken on the role of a former soldier in a “new profession”. Their job is to stop fires before they start, we’re told. An older Liara T’Soni appears, helping the player character in a bar fight.
BioWare has spent the last half-decade teasing the setting and story of the next Mass Effect, so we know a little about what the developer was planning to do with the game. We had confirmation that Mass Effect 5 would be set hundreds of years after Mass Effect 3 and would feature a narrative that refocuses the action on the franchise’s original Milky Way setting, long after the Reapers’ defeat.
Liara’s return had already been teased well before the release of this trailer. We also knew that the Geth would have returned alongside some races from Andromeda, which suggests that contact had been made with the colonists traveling there. Romance was (of course) about to make a return, as was the Paragon/Renegade system.
Since yesterday’s dramatic news, a number of people who worked on Mass Effect 5 have spoken in vague terms about the game it was becoming. On
One person who was fired from BioWare, film supervisor Tony de Waal, said on LinkedIn that Mass Effect 5 would have been “something special,” offering players “a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match.”
“We saw what Larian and CD Projekt were bringing with their latest offerings, and we began to set out to take Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the trilogy,” he continued.
“I’m sad that you never got to see what we were cooking up, and sad for the small group of talented developers who all punched above their weight to create something special. Think of those who stayed at 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.”
Earlier today, IGN reported that a public trailer for Mass Effect 5 was ready to stream before EA canceled the game and shut down BioWare. This was first mentioned in a post on the Austin, Texas subreddit where BioWare had a studio. An alleged EA employee spoke of “a ready trailer for Mass Effect 5 that I saw a few months ago, so I’m confused about how ‘early’ they are.”
This refers to EA’s single paragraph about the closure of BioWare and the cancellation of Mass Effect 5 in the memo that Studios President and COO Cam Weber and President and COO David Tinson sent to staff on Wednesday:
“As we focus on these larger opportunities, we have a small team at BioWare working on early development of Mass Effect. We have made the decision not to move forward with this development, which means we are closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace. BioWare is a legendary studio that helped define the role-playing genre, and we do not make this decision lightly.”
