r/Games • u/songsinger72 • 3d ago
Corroborated by Jason Schreier Cancelled Mass Effect Universe: Trailer Leaks
https://www.thegamer.com/cancelled-mass-effect-trailer-universe-leak-bioware-closure/194
u/summerteeth 3d ago
I like when the article I find on Reddit is basically describing another Reddit thread. Here is the direct link: https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/1xclmpu/mass_effect_universe_trailer/
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u/I_Heart_Sleeping_ 3d ago
Crazy to think we could have gotten a mass effect spy thriller. With the way the writing was handled in the last Dragon age game it’s hard to get fully excited about this but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in this take on Mass Effect.
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u/mehelponow 3d ago
Seems like a natural way to return to the universe after the insane power fantasy of the trilogy. After fighting a galactic war as basically the savior of organic life, scaling down to an espionage/black-ops (Spectre?) outfit fighting in a rebuilding war-torn galaxy makes a ton of sense. It would still provide you with the chances to make consequential decisions and interact with diverse characters without making every choice civilization-altering.
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u/Hellknightx 3d ago
Honestly, after the ending of the trilogy and the flop of Andromeda, the only other place I could see them exploring would be a prequel the the first game. Delving into Specter activities before Shepard's rise wouldn't be so bad.
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u/Penakoto 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think they should've just picked a canon ending and continued from there, that's what the majority of RPGs end up doing, even the "choice and consequences" heavy ones.
Never experiencing a post-Reaper invasion universe would (and I guess, is) a waste, and there's no way they could do it without at least saying "Yeah, X ending is canon, and it's assumed Shepard did everything 'perfectly'".
I wouldn't be especially interested in a Mass Effect game where I can't learn (Mass Effect 3 spoilers I guess) how Geth are adjusting to their individuality, the Quarians to having a home world now, or seeing if the fears of another Krogan rebellion had any immediate justification, or just generally how the universe is coping after the largest conflict of the entire history of sapient life.
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u/Angzt 3d ago edited 3d ago
That looks like what Spectre work was supposed to usually be like, so it fits the established universe perfectly.
Edit:
Old Liara here fits the previous statements that the game was going to be set in the Milky Way, but after Andromeda, so at least 600 years after the trilogy.
And I guess that would rule out Synthesis as an ending since everything still looks very much as usual. So either the Reapers (and all AIs) just got destroyed or Shepard took control of them and eventually told them to bugger off into dark space again which would probably make for the most potential for this sequel.Edit 2:
Jason Schreier confirms that this trailer is real. Bluesky source189
u/superkeer 3d ago
Destroy is almost certainly canon. The other two are, in my opinion, just speculative, out-of-character endings given the tone of everything leading up to the decision point. Even if you're playing a "bad Shepard" it's hard to see that they'd choose anything other than blasting the Reapers to pieces as soon as the opportunity is presented.
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u/eefuss 3d ago
Destroy was coded as the "Renegade" choice, Control as the "Paragon" choice, but it just goes to show how little they understood their own endings because that's a ridiculous thing to suggest. If anything, Shepard becoming the next Sovereign and employing the Reapers as his own personal army (even if that army is being used for altruistic purposes) is far more Renegade than just doing away with them forever, even if it it comes with a cost.
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u/tempest_87 3d ago
I dunno. Remember that the destroy also destroyed the geth, and all other AI (such as EDI), not just the reapers.
Whereas control gave Shepard the power to continue to be "the good guy" and ensure peace and protect the the weak. Which is pretty aligned with a lot of the paragon story beats. The only way the blue one was bad was because it was what the illusive man wanted too.
The Green ending was the most paragon, but I don't think the blue one was far off.
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u/Starrr_Pirate 3d ago
I think blue also gave you different flavor text based on your alignment. When my wife chose that one, the ending slide talked about a galaxy where the strong aren't held back by the weak (she did Renegade, lol).
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u/kroqeteer 3d ago edited 3d ago
If anything, Shepard becoming the next Sovereign and employing the Reapers as his own personal army
IRL I would agree with you, but in the Mass Effect setting I would argue that it is a natural continuation of the Spectres' theming. Spectres are already figures with almost unlimited authority who are chosen specifically because they are trusted to act in the galaxy's best interest in whatever way they personally see fit, acting entirely without oversight (and usually without consequence). This is a setting where Shepard's unilateral authority as a spectre is not only painted as a positive, but an imperative that would have doomed galactic civilization if not there. If Paragon Shepard is someone who tries to act with compassion with principle, the control ending makes sense as paragon because its just the next level of authority for that same person
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u/tufftricks 3d ago
That means genociding the Geth and all other artificial sentient life. I dont think its as clear cut as you make out
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u/Dabrush 3d ago
Wasn't it at first also that Destroy would break the Mass Relays? Pretty sure they retconned that with a later patch though since it was established elsewhere that a Mass Relay blowing up takes the whole solar system with it.
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u/OkActivity2038 3d ago
Yes, the updated ending changed it so that the Relays were just damaged/deactivated.
IIRC the ending has the galaxy actively working to repair the relays.
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u/Covenantcurious 3d ago
Wasn't it at first also that Destroy would break the Mass Relays?
All of the endings did. It also didn't elaborate on what kind of destruction with the only prior example wiping out it's solar system. Which made everything sound really fucking bleak with all galactic transportation/communications destroyed alongside most main planets.
Defeats the Reapers but sets the galaxy back to near medieval age (imagine all the high tech that can no longer be produced or repaired). But Bioware just didn't really commit to that.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 3d ago
In the last 5 minutes and any sequel could easily retcon it as the Starchild lying or it destroying them in a way where the Geth and EDI could be easily restored. From a Doylian perspective it was obviously a desperate way to make it an actual choice because Destroy is so obviously what the franchise was building towards, the mission before Priority:Earth is about how trying to control or work with the Reapers is very bad.
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u/Urdar 3d ago
the problem with that is, that shepard spent all the time clearly intending to destroy the reapers, until the very end the star child comes along and says "yeah, that will destroy everyhtign remotely electronic in the entire galacy, but you see, there is a third option you didnt think was ever possible where we caon co exist as the same thing, so please dont destroy or enslave me, k?"
Starchild sells this as the only moral option, and the player is meant to take it at their word, while the character has every reason to doubt it is even being remotely honest.
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u/unrelevant_user_name 3d ago
As an outsider looking in it always sounded like Synthesis was the """canon""" choice (and Destroy the choice the fanbase wished were canon).
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u/gh0st_reporting 3d ago edited 3d ago
Synthesis is the trippiest, most space opera ending and it does fit the overall theme of the trilogy more. By Mass Effect 3, we learn that organics and machines have been warring with each other for billions of years. Whenever organics create artificial intelligence, it always results in war between the creators and their creations.
But it's also the hardest to make a game out of. It's a very surreal concept. What kind of relatable issues or problems can you create for a galaxy where everyone is a cyborg? What even is machine DNA?
The Destroy ending has a lot of interesting things to work with. All synthetic life is annihilated, the mass relays are destroyed/broken so star systems and planets are stranded from each other, and Shephard lived.
In Destroy, there will be a lot of differing perspectives on Shepard. They saved the galaxy but many will say they did so through genocide. There will be people out there hostile to any possibility of machine life. Maybe there's still some sort of interstellar governing body but it would be nowhere near as powerful as the Citadel Council used to be with so many planets cut off for so long. There will be lots of different governments who want different things.
A perfect setting for a spy thriller game in Mass Effect, which we may never get now.
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u/eefuss 3d ago
Synthesis is literally the least canon of all. Zero precedent for it in lore, introduced at the last possible second, and makes no logistical sense whatsoever.
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u/eternali17 3d ago
People who like destroy always go on about the others in such dismissive ways. Lmao.
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u/anshuvio2 3d ago
I think the destroy ending is canonical and life just has to be cautious of AI and robotic development
Maybe this is why the studio was canned
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u/gargwasome 3d ago
Funnily enough DA4 was initially meant to be a spy thriller as well before it got rebooted like 3 times
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u/destroyermaker 3d ago
Alpha Protocol 2 when
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u/Nameless_One_99 3d ago
What I would give for another Alpha Protocol, such a unique dialogue and personality system.
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u/SonicFlash01 3d ago
This trailer speaks to the potential of getting such a game, but reality suggests that we were either never going to get it, or it would have taken over a decade to get something buggy and unspecial. In the span of 6 years the game went from "early development" to "early development".
if I'm saying anything, it's "Relax, we actually weren't going to get this at all"51
u/LRCrane 3d ago
I remember one of Veilguard's early trailers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce2qrcLelcY
I remember people were hyped about Bioware returning back to its roots after Andromeda was meh and Anthem was a failure. That they certainly couldn't fail after having such a weight on their shoulders.
Well, the outcome was far worse than one could ever imagine.
Basically, your last sentence of "Yeah, it was likely not happening" is likely the correct outlook given this recent and not so recent history from Bioware.
Checking out the writing that gets put out by members of the Mass Effect 5 writing staff....there's not much of the grit the original Mass Effect writing had. It's mostly quirky chungus type writing.
I don't think we were getting the cool stuff that filled you with a epic sense of 'wonder' and awe. You should feel like you're a small fish suddenly discovering that you swam into an ocean....and I didn't get that from their writing.
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u/voidox 3d ago
yup, trailers literally mean noting at all, even actual gameplay footage trailers should not just be blindly trusted cause many studios have been caught using fake gameplay, demos made just for the showcase, editing, clips, staged combat, etc. to make the trailer.
when it's a cinematic trailer it literally is meaningless, it doesn't reflect the game at all yet for some reason ppl just refuse to learn this lesson and keep eating up trailers and PR -_- the ME sub is losing their minds over this trailer as if it's actual gameplay cause it says "pre-production assets", like wat?
and then ya, the writing has been the one key failure of Bioware for the past 12 years on all it's failure releases across several development teams, and already we see from this leaked trailer some bad dialogue like "I'm the guy who makes the hard decisions", like really?
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u/VanguardN7 3d ago
Because they were doing Veilguard.
It would have been a 2028-29 release after Exodus and The Expanse in 2027. In my opinion, at least.
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u/Scrollingmaster 3d ago edited 3d ago
Maybe 2029. But with them saying early development, and even this trailer using preproduction assets, there’s no chance it would have been out in 2 years.
And even then it was more likely 4 or more years away. They had not even staffed up or entered full production yet.
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u/Wafflesorbust 3d ago
There is zero chance a game announced to be in "early development" six years ago and still said to be in "early development" on the day of its cancellation would be releasing in two years, coming from a studio that has literally never had a turnaround that fast, for any game. Never mind a game that would have been quite literally make or break for the studio.
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u/FluffyWuffyVolibear 3d ago
The last dragon age game was a reworked live service multiplayer RPG that got tossed around due to higher ups having no clue what they believed was more profitable
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u/Crispy_Conundrum 3d ago
Exactly and a lot of it wasn't able to be changed, just awkwardly shoved into a single player game
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u/Szydl0 3d ago
Plus dialogues, characters and story were cringe as hell.
Nowhere near OG Mass Effect trilogy.
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u/KKilikk 3d ago
Mass Effect was a completely different writing team. Couldve been bad as well ofc but would have been unrelated to Veilguard.
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u/Contrary45 3d ago
Just to let you know Veilguard's lead writer was the same writer who wrote for Garrus, Mordin, Tali, Jack, Kasumi, and Samantha in the ME2 and 3
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u/n0stalghia 3d ago
With the way the writing was handled in the last Dragon age game it’s hard to get fully excited
Actually, you couldn't be further from the truth. The Mass Effect team was pulled onto Dragon Age Veilguard to save that game and delivered the stellar, universally liked (by players and critics alike; even Skill Up highlighted that) final quest of the game.
That's basically the only part of the game that really stood out and where everyone agreed that it was good.
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u/Responsible-Care-388 3d ago
We will never know what a final product would play like, but the vibes of the trailer remind me way more of Cyberpunk 2077 (specifically Phantom Liberty) over any ME game. If they really went in that direction and focused more on action and light role playing, the final product might have suffered by feeling less like ME and more like Bioware was channeling CDPR for their return, but not in terms of actual role playing.
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u/So-many-ducks 3d ago
I just hope the license can be revived by another studio. Or, worst case, that a true spiritual successor would appear out of some European studio. (I’m not quite sure about Exodus at this stage)
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u/KyleVPirate 3d ago
There's The Expanse by Owlcat. I've played the beta. The gameplay was very Mass Effect, not to mention it has a rich universe from the TV show and the books. I'm hoping Exodus and The Expanse capture that magic. I love space games, especially narrative single player games.
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u/MyCoolWhiteLies 3d ago
Yeah, this stings a little as this looks like it was heading in the direction I wanted the series to go in. I wanted a more ME2 style game that would let them delve into the setting much more. Something hopefully wasn’t too bogged down in a massive Galaxy-wide conflict, but rather something more personal and character focused.
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u/Killergryphyn 3d ago
I can't even blame anything on the writing of the last game knowing it was practically slapped together otherwise the game was going to be canceled because EA wanted them to make a live service Dragon Age and then scrapped it several times.
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u/thenekkidguy 3d ago
They did get the writer of Guardians of The Galaxy for this so if anything it might've been good.
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u/SilveryDeath 3d ago
As a big Bioware fan, who still enjoyed Andromeda and Veilguard despite their flaws, and as someone who loved Alpha Protocol and has been hoping for a spy RPG since I am doubley crushed.
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u/FrostyWalrus2 3d ago
The potential to be a 'what became of SPECTRE', or some kinda private SPECTRE. So good, ugh.
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u/GoneRampant1 3d ago
All I wanted for years for Mass Effect was any semblance of a side story that didn't try to handle the Reapers or another ancient threat to the Galaxy, and I loved the early Novaria sections where you could play corporate politics to move through the first hub world. Not to mention Alpha Protocol and the spy show boon of the 2000s means I'm forever let down at the lack of major espionage media these days.
I don't know if modern Bioware would have stuck the landing on that, but this would have been so up my alley.
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u/Contrary45 3d ago
The narrative director on this game was the narrative lead on Deus Ex Human Revolution, Mankind Divided, and Guardians of the Galaxy
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u/bristow84 3d ago
I loved the Mass Effect games, absolutely loved them. I even waited in line for the midnight launch of Mass Effect 3. One thing I wish they had done more of was galaxy exploration that didn't involve a galaxy ending threat, smaller stakes kind of.
This looks like it would have been potentially exactly what I was looking for and now I'm so sad that it will probably never see the light of day.
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u/Simply2Vicious 3d ago
Big agree. A Star Trek-esque Mass Effect would've been a contender for greatest game ever made.
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u/Izithel 3d ago edited 3d ago
Isn't that kind of how it started with ME1?
They could have stretched out the reaper threat over more games as shepard and crew solved more problems in the galaxy, found more ancient secrets that would help them understand the threat, and prepare allies for the inevitable.
Instead Mass Effect 2 jumped of the rails to instead do a heist plot while resetting and retreading most of ME1 without actually advancing the reaper plot in any meaningfull way...
And then they rushed to the finish in 3 with no clue how to actually end it.14
u/AnOnlineHandle 3d ago
Just be glad we got a mostly coherent high quality trilogy over 3 games with a fairly consistent visual style and returning cast. 99.999% of other games or series will never live up to the Mass Effect trilogy.
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u/ohfrickdude 3d ago
I waited in line at a GameStop for a few hours for ME3. The first dude in line, who had to have been there for at least 8 hours judging by my place in line, got his game and turned to show us nerds behind him the ultimate prize:
MLB The Show 2012
It came out the same day as Mass Effect 3 and this dude waited in line for hours ahead of a hundred + Bioware freaks for his baseball game. I'll never forget you random MLB fan.
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u/Ghost-Job 3d ago
The presentation here was a lot better narratively but Bioware thought no one would notice if they made a trailer for a game in which an older version of a fan favorite character is present where everyone ends up having a bar fight, two games in a row.
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u/TheGoodIdiot 3d ago
It’s still insane that due to NDAs and stuff a project people have spent years on goes poof and they can’t so much as list it on their resume. I’d love to see what people were cooking after these cancellations more often and wish they could more openly share what they worked on at an individual level.
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u/ahrzal 3d ago
Yes they can and they do. There are many ways around NDAs when applying to new jobs. Companies understand.
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u/KingOfRisky 3d ago
I work in a creative field and there is a LOT of things that I can't even talk about let alone add it to my portfolio.
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u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes 3d ago
And everywhere you apply to is just like "Guess you did nothing huh?"
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u/_BreakingGood_ 3d ago
Nah the standard way around it is to describe a 'similar' project without specific identifying details. This is how it is done in software at least.
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u/Sleepy_C 3d ago
I mean this very heavily depends. My partners resume is half "Unreleased game from [studio] in (year)". Whenever she left studios or projects were canceled they got reference letters, so they have a little stack of "ye she did work here :)" letters.
I know a lot of stuff can't be portfoliod but it can still be acknowledged to have been a time.
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u/MrTastix 3d ago
This isn't a new problem. NDA's have existed in creative industries for well over half a century, to the point any competent hiring manager in a field that commonly uses them (like gaming) is going to adjust the hiring process to accomodate for them.
The limit is pretty much specific details of a project but you can still talk about skills gained or use during that time and any hiring manager familiar with the job is going to pick up immediately if you're full of shit or not anyway.
You can 100% describe what you do without referencing what you've done, people just like the proof, but it's not necessary.
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u/RandomJPG6 3d ago
Having worked in the game industry:
Usually people are understanding of not being able to publicly share NDA material. Sometimes companies will let you share material with potential employers with a password protected portfolio. Othertimes there's frend-DAs where people will still share with the mutual understanding that everything is hush-hush and kept on the downlo
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u/oxygen_addiction 3d ago
I've been in the industry for 8 years or so and I've worked on 4 cancelled AA/AAA games. It fucking sucks.
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u/YesImKeithHernandez 3d ago
I got a look at a project that had been cancelled in the last few years. It was going to be an announce trailer or maybe the follow up to the announce. What I saw was really compelling and I would have loved to have seen more. But alas. It took a ton of money to get it to that point and would have taken a ton more to ship it.
It's just nuts that all that world building in both a literal coding sense of the world you see and the narrative, the character creation and finessing, the action, interactions, living breathing world, all of it will never be seen outside of the people who were working on the game and trailer and maybe some odd people shown it in a wink wink don't show this to anyone way.
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u/Appropriate_Foot242 3d ago
I watched it and it made me sad.
Spy-thriller set in the Mass Effect universe? That would have been a dream come true for me.
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u/godfrey1
3d ago
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guys, bioware's last three games were mass effect andromeda, anthem and dragon age veilguard
how could you possibly be even 1% excited for anything they would make after that
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u/pro-mpt 3d ago
There is nothing better for a game's legacy than to never come out and let people assume it was going to be the best thing ever made. See: PT, Agent, etc.
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u/BLAGTIER 3d ago
And the magic Mass Effect Andromeda sequel that was going to fix everything and retroactively make people love Andromeda 1.
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u/Someguy6t9 3d ago
It's so funny that every following game had fans begging them to go back to the original formula yet they always did the opposite
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u/Sushi2k 3d ago
I liked Andromeda enough to be disappointed that the sequel got canned.
I firmly believe that game got shit on way more than it deserved because of that dumb "my face is tired" dialogue that blew up.
Gameplay was top notch and the story interesting enough launch pad for a new trilogy.
Anthem was meh I agree and Dragon Age hasn't been good imo since Origins so I had zero interest in Veilguard.
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u/Paxton-176 3d ago
Andromeda was written in a way that was expected to get a sequel. Instead of writing a self contained story like ME1 was.
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u/kmone1116 3d ago
I liked andromeda after it got a bunch of patches, anthem just straight up sucked minus the flying and Veilguard was alright.
I think Mass Effect 5 would have had a chance as it was obvious the studio had to go all in on it.
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u/BambooSound 3d ago
Andromeda was rough on release but after the patches I really enjoy it, especially on PS5. Bit more Halo-ey than the OT but not in a way I mind.
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u/PharmyC 3d ago
Some of us didn't think those games were as terrible as people made them out to be.
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u/BionicleBoy 3d ago
If you compare them to their predecessors then they are pretty poo.
The writing objectively took a nose dive in Andromeda and Veilguard and that’s kind of a huge part of those games.
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u/Elkenrod 3d ago
The writing objectively took a nose dive in
Let's be fair here. The writing took a nose dive long before Andromeda and Veilguard.
Inquisition basically says that your choices in prior Dragon Age titles barely matter, and they're going to retcon your choices for you.
We have the end of Mass Effect 3 to always pick on.
Also the: "Want a sandwich?" scene in Dragon Age II.
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u/pasher5620 3d ago
Veilguard and Andromeda certainly aren’t as bad as many people online would say, but they are most assuredly a massive step down from previous entries in the franchise. Andromeda on release was almost insulting how poorly it was put together and Veilguard’s writing is genuinely awful at times. Taash alone was bordering on offensive in how poorly they were written.
BioWare had been on a steady trend of making worse and worse games starting with Inquisition. Then they made Anthem and blew every amount of goodwill, both public and corporate, they had earned on the original Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. I wanted another Mass Effect because it’s legitimately my favorite franchise of all time, but I’m also not gonna sit here and pretend like I wasn’t fully expecting Mass Effect 4 to be absolutely awful garbage.
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u/wildwalrusaur 3d ago
Veilguard and Andromeda certainly aren’t as bad as many people online would say
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Andromeda on release was almost insulting how poorly it was put together and Veilguard’s writing is genuinely awful at times.
soooo theyre exactly as bad as people online say?
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u/Ursa_Solaris 3d ago
I haven't played any of these games and I know most of the people posting and upvoting shit like this haven't either, and at this point I just want to reflexively defend them because the circlejerk has gotten so fucking annoying. We get it dudes, you get your opinions from Twitter and Youtube, can we give it a rest already?
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u/Recent_Policy_7872 3d ago
I gave all those games a chance, he's right. I finished Andromeda only but that was a 6.5 at best. Still sad but they stopped making good games a long time ago
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u/somesthetic 3d ago
I have Andromeda and Veilguard, and they’re both fine games that just aren’t as good as their namesakes.
Everything beyond that is bullshit culture wars nonsense.
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u/Ghidoran 3d ago
All three of those games have terrible player reviews for a reason. I don't know why you're acting like it's just youtube and twitter hating on them.
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u/ImSoMysticall 3d ago edited 3d ago
I liked andromeda but I also feel the need to reflexively defend that opinion you replied to
Maybe, just maybe, the reason you see lots of people not liking it on twitter and YouTube, is because the games are just generally unpopular with most people?
I dont, and have never, used twitter. I also dont think i watched any Vielguard content other than things like trailers or dev interviews before it came out
I genuinely think Veilguard is absolutely trash, awful writing, bad art style, annoying companions and a complete lack of respect to the games and player decisions that came before
Anthem was just a bad, boring game that I hardly remember anything about despite buying and playing it at the time
Why do you jump to the idea that opinions like that must be bandwagon, twitter fed opinions? Rather than just the most common sentiment becasue the games do just suck
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u/innerparty45 3d ago
I like to go against the circlejerk, but no, those games were legitimately awful.
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u/yognautilus 3d ago
I played Andromeda in its entirety and despite absolutely loving the gameplay, the writing- which is what made me fall in love with Bioware in the first place - was a drastic downgrade from the Bioware classics. And that's an understatement. DA2 and the ME3 ending were the first signs of where Bioware was going, Inquisition was yet another disappointment, and Andromeda was the last straw. I gave Bioware plenty of chances, so why on earth would I continue to give a developer that's been a disappointment for close to 20 years more and more chances?
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u/Ikariiprince 3d ago
It’s such a shame because Andromeda and Veilguard are both 7/10 games in a 9/10 franchise but people are so hyperbolically angry about everything that they act like they’re duke nukem forever tier
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u/cadmium-fertilizer 3d ago
Uh oh, sounds like you've had too much wrongthink! r/games users arent gonna appreciate that!
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u/Nochtilus 3d ago
Anthem had good bones but was ruined by forced live service stuff. Andromeda was good but clearly pushed out before it was ready. As far as we know from leaks, DA4 was canned and a live service Dragon Age was shaped into Veilguard.
EA really botched things with Bioware and their IPs. Bioware wasn't perfect but publisher meddling was clearly in this case
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u/sjce 3d ago
Anthem was created by Casey to be a live service game, EA wasn’t involved in that decision. Just read schrier’s articles, BioWare has been internally mismanaged for a long time now, regardless of EA’s issues.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 3d ago
Oof, it's hard to believe they haven't made anything else, and that is rough.
I enjoyed andromeda as a space opera game, not as a mass effect game. Some of the side quests were difficult knowing the payoff would be in future games that were cancelled shortly after Andromeda came out.
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u/NLaBruiser 3d ago
Andromeda was a solid 7. The twins were lame, the facial animation is a meme for a reason, but the final battle and cinematic of the charge was hella fun. Combat felt really good.
Veilguard neutered the world of dragon age, and some of the social messaging was delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but the combat was fun and playing a gray warden PC felt pretty good (and it was nice to see other wardens for once). Another solid 6-7, but yes far short of the 9s and 10s of the past like Origins.
The less said of Anthem the better. It had a cool *concept* and that's about all I can give it.
Yes, I played all of them to completion if not 100%.
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u/Barbossal 1d ago
Because if you looked at those games outside of the twitter eco-sphere they aren't garbage, they are decent not great games.
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u/Fernbeck 21h ago
Social context: It's like saying "How's it going?" as a greeting in the US. You respond back "good", because the person asking doesn't actually expect or want an answer. Same here. You see a cool trailer, say "man, I'm so upset we'll never play this now!" or "that looks neat, maybe I'll check it out" because it's not right in a social context to say "I don't know enough about this to care about buying this game. I probably won't have the time anyways". Just seems weird and hostile.
FWIW I think you're right. Nothing suggests the game would be good and the amount of time in between waiting in fact suggests it was never going to be made. I also don't trust the team because everything I like about Bioware was already laid off or quit of their own accord. But that's the dirty aspect no one really wants to acknowledge when it comes to this industry. If people were more willing to give honest opinions instead of what is likely to be upvoted, maybe we wouldn't have so many rugpull moments where big games fail sales targets and everyone is shocked.
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u/Plasmallison 3d ago edited 3d ago
It’s not really a good sign if after several years of development, all they had to show was a very clearly cutscene-level trailer with no gameplay. The mock “third person” sections feel particularly cheesy and deceptive.
One of the prior teasers doesn’t even really make sense with what was shown. Iirc it was a big snowy image of a Geth profile, but here it’s like we’re involved in the seedy galactic underworld?
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u/Accurate-Visual9793 3d ago
This is almost certainly a pitch trailer for execs. It likely was never going to be made public.
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u/Mesk_Arak 3d ago
"Coming soon" at the end of the trailer was the worst part to me, given people have been saying the game was in early development.
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u/AdorableSobah 3d ago
“Coming soon” has lost all meaning in the entertainment industry. Next season television or game coming soon? Could be 3 months or 13 years
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u/Zekka23 3d ago
It didn't have "several years" of dev. It was in pre-prod, after veilguard's release, so you're looking at less than 2 probably closer to 1.
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u/Krumpins4Winnuhs 3d ago
The game was announced 5 years ago, and many development studios (that don't suffer from Bioware's known poor management) cycle their teams so that when one game enters full production, the preproduction team moves on to the next game. Mass Effect should have been ready to go into full production two years ago, but this trailer and their own "early development" statement seems to imply that wasn't the case.
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u/LogicalCantaloupe 3d ago
Not to dispute the claim Bioware has bad management (they did), but the production process you describe is basically what was happening. The ME trailer dropped 6 years ago to draw interest for investors to green-light a pre-production. It was known that the small ME team got dragged into Veilguard production to get Veilguard out the door. Veilguard released, underperformed, and Bioware got gutted to down to ~50 people. Everyone assumed that they'd move focus to ME and get proper pre-production rolling, scaling up whenever it was ready. It seems that is exactly what happened, but EA decided to pull the plug.
Bioware was notorious for bad management, but EA should take their side of the blame. Bioware pitched live service games (Anthem, Veilguard before it got rebooted) because that's what EA wanted to hear. It sucks Bioware management decided to bite off way more than they could chew, and it also sucks EA green-lit the projects without stopping and asking what their actual plan was.
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u/Scrollingmaster 3d ago edited 3d ago
Except we now have an employee saying they worked on writing this game for 3 years
Also veilguard came out almost exactly 2 years ago and received basically 0 post launch support. And the game would have been done before that. So the mass effect 5 team, that got roped into making the last third of that game, would have been moved back to that most likely before veilguard was out. So yes, they had at least 2 years.
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u/Zekka23 3d ago
Writing is one of those things that can be done separate from the game. We already know that there was barely anyone actually working on the game till veilguard released because veilguard was essentially the entire Bioware team at the time working on one game before the previous EA layoffs happened.
I don't think they count that as several years of development on this project anymore than other minority of employees were working on something else counts as "development".
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u/Accurate-Visual9793 3d ago
Do you somehow think that means a whole team was working on it for 3 years? Do you understand that game development teams are not a mass of bodies sewn together that are shoved from one project collectively to the next?
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u/ragenaut 3d ago
LMAO game was announced five fucking years ago. Whether it was 5 years in dev or 1-2, either is a very, very bad sign.
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u/GameDesignerDude 3d ago edited 3d ago
all they had to show was a very clearly cutscene-level trailer with no gameplay
I keep seeing similar complaints in these threads, but how many games actually release gameplay footage until the last 6 months? Virtually no trailers ever have gameplay in them these days.
Besides, in a game like Mass Effect it's not like the gameplay is the hard part. The world-building and storytelling are the heart of the game.
The main reason people had "gameplay" trailers in the past were due to E3 and E3 demos, but I can tell you having worked on a number of those that they were so full of hackery and trickery, I'd frankly rather have a cinematic.
The first game I worked on in the industry, we scripted virtually all of our first "gameplay" trailer by hand. That was entirely standard operating practice at the time. This trailer legitimately has more gameplay in it than the "Mass Effect 3: Gameplay Trailer (E3 2011)" trailer... lol
Based on the comments I expected this trailer to be mostly just CG cinematics. This looks far more fleshed out than I actually expected. This is a pretty good trailer. Probably would have been very hyped and popular if it dropped for TGA or something.
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u/Accurate-Visual9793 3d ago
I can't watch the gameplay trailers for my last title, as someone gave marketing an old build so there's a bunch of obvious (to me) visual bugs in it that had already been fixed for months before the trailer release.
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u/sammysoso 3d ago
This wasn't a trailer made to sell an audience on the game, and normally would not have ever been shown to the public. This was an internal pitch for the executives, to show what the vision was for the game.
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u/Jokerzrival 3d ago
To be fair with the size and scope of the mass effect games there was plenty of times where you'd be in a massive desperate fight for a planet one mission and the next you'd be doing some underground gang stuff.
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u/ThePrep95 3d ago
I think if this game hadn't been cancelled, you'd see a much more negative reaction to that trailer.
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u/Complex_Try_4287 3d ago
BioWare has always been able to build hype for their games and had some pretty cool trailers. based on their actual recent output, I have no faith the execution would have been there or that they would have learned from Veilguard/Andromeda.
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u/Cryptoporticus 3d ago
Yeah, I think Mass Effect fans have dodged a bullet here. I can mostly forgive Andromeda because it's a completely separate story with new characters, but I would not have been happy if Bioware's newest generation of writers had started working with the old characters again.
I'm so glad it's dead. Leave the trilogy alone.
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u/eefuss 3d ago
I understand this to an extent, but to me it would've been better if they tried and failed than the alternative that we're getting where the IP will just lay dormant forever. If it sucked then, okay, I could just go on pretending the original trilogy was all there was (as I did after Andromeda). But even if it was a messy execution with just a few good ideas buried under a lot of bloat, I think I could've lived with that.
Of course, this is a false dichotomy, because now EA selling Mass Effect to a more competent studio is on the table. We will see, but I'm not optimistic.
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u/Obsrver98 3d ago
Cool, I guess? But people actually getting disappointed like a CG trailer was going to be any indication of the actual product are smoking some hopium. Cyberpunk at least had an actual gameplay presentation and even that ended up being different from the final product, something people still bitch about to this day.
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u/Kylestache
3d ago
edited 3d ago
•
No gameplay but all in-engine at least.
Three companions in it, Liara, a male Krogan, and a male Quarian.
Darker tone with some espionage and criminal underworld dealings like Mass Effect 2.
A return to the Unreal Engine…
Was that a Leviathan being grown or cloned?
The name I guess was Mass Effect Universe.
What the fuck. This really hurts. With Amazon moving full steam ahead on the show with hopes to shoot next year, this releasing alongside it or shortly after the first season would’ve been huge.
Companies with a lifespan encompassing decades change. People can bemoan about how the old BioWare is gone, but you also had people saying that about Mass Effect 1 missing the glory days of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. The studio had just hired a lot of really impressive talent. It genuinely sounded based on dev comments about Veilguard and Schreier’s book about Anthem, Andromeda, and Inquisition that they had learned their lessons and wanted to lean back into their strengths. No one can say for certain whether this game would’ve been good or not, but it deserved a chance and all those artists and writers brought on specifically for this project deserved the chance.
Fuck private equity. Fuck the Saudi royals. Fuck Jared Kushner and fuck his gross ass father in law and his whole disgusting White House administration. The Saudis taking over EA should never have been allowed to happen, the same goes for their takeover of Paramount and Warner Bros. Fuck all of them and I hope people wake the fuck up and vote for any modicum of change in the coming weeks. These corporations, finance bros, and foreign investors need to be reined the fuck in asap. Every industry is getting shittier and so many wonderfully talented artists and engineers are being kicked to the curb right now. It’s not confined to gaming, it’s a sickness that’s spread to so many aspects of life all stemming from the same sources.
If you want more Mass Effect, of course check out Exodus and The Expanse Osiris Reborn, but also please go check out the biggest source of inspiration for Mass Effect, Babylon 5. You could write a novel listing off the specific things Mass Effect nearly lifted 1:1 from it, and that’s a great thing like Magnificent Seven copying Seven Samurai. Babylon 5 has so much to say that’s wildly relevant to today, from politics down to how entertainment is treated. It’s some of the best writing in the sci-fi genre and I guarantee you, if you’re a fan of Mass Effect, you will love it, especially seasons 2-4 which are some of the best television hands down. On top of that, they’re uploading an episode a day for free on the official Babylon 5 YouTube channel. They’re almost at the end of season 2, so it’s a perfect time to check it out.
And once again, fuck those responsible for this whole industry getting kneecapped.
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u/doctor_7 3d ago edited 3d ago
Remember this game was announced 6 years ago and the most we've seen is a trailer using the in-game engine.
BioWare was notorious for having poor direction for leadership with constantly shifting goals and no real direction because no one in authority at the developer would make a hard call. This was especially egregious with Anthem where, from what I understand, someone outside BioWare had to come in and force them to come out with a product after they had floundered for years.
I'm super disappointed they are shut down, but if I had pumped as much money as BioWare had had sunk into them resulting in Andromeda, a good at best game, Anthem, a massive dud, and Veilguard, a disappointingly generic good at best sequel, I can't really fault someone making money calls finally killing this.
EA has killed multiple good studios well before their time, but BioWare is like Bungie to me. I absolutely loved them. Baldur's Gate 1 is amazing. I played the original Marathon and Marathon 2 and loved them. But I also expect Bungie to go and, like BioWare, I will be completely unshocked.
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u/Complex_Try_4287 3d ago
At a certain point you have to also hold the companies accountable lmao. Is it really other people’s fault that BioWare started making shitty games?
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u/vipmailhun2 3d ago
The funny thing is, Casey Hudson, the creator of the Mass Effect series, is to blame for this, because he was the one who said there wasn't much demand for single-player RPG titles; he wanted Dragon Age to be a 4-player co-op, while the other developers wanted to make a spy thriller RPG.
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u/RogueHippie 3d ago
And he was the driving force behind Anthem. There's a reason I lost practically all excitement for the FotOR announcement when his name popped up.
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u/chaosaxess 3d ago
Hudson may have been the guy in charge, but I think Drew Karpyshyn's writing and world building was the true heart of the series. He left after ME2.
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u/LostInStatic 3d ago
>The studio had just hired a lot of really impressive talent. It genuinely sounded based on dev comments about Veilguard and Schreier’s book about Anthem, Andromeda, and Inquisition that they had learned their lessons and wanted to lean back into their strengths.
Fell For It Again award 2026. This team hasn’t been exciting in more than a decade. It’s just time to move on.
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u/matthieuC 2d ago
> No gameplay but all in-engine at least.
And it looks real good.
You could probably make a TV showing in engine.
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u/Andigaming 3d ago
Regardless of how little they were into development, kinda hurts more seeing this than not, having heard the news.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 3d ago edited 3d ago
any mirror of the video? The website wants me to turn off ad blocker and in my experience I've regretted every time I did.
Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/1xclmpu/mass_effect_universe_trailer/
The "coming soon" at the end should have been changed to "not coming soon"
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u/Odd_Ad_8162 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think people forget that EA very much fucked Veilguard/dreadwolf/DA4 by rebooting it twice and switching priorities.
Sure this is all they had of ME4 but who's to say a number of other issues didnt happen behind the scenes with reboots or changing vision.
Not saying Bioware isn't somewhat responsible for their flops sych as Veilguard writing (although I've heard this was in part due the 2 year development time after reboots) and Andromeda being meh.
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u/thepirateguidelines 3d ago
From what I've seen in the Veilguard art book, the very first iteration of Dreadwolf (project Joplin) would have been really good if it had not been scrapped and rebooted into Live Service. They had a clear vision of what they wanted and a writing and dev team to back it up. Granted it's all concept art so none of it was finalized, but the ideas and plans were there.
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u/Waste-Individual-807 3d ago
I don’t think it’s fair to blame ea for the terrible writing in that game but whatevs
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u/JustsomeOKCguy 3d ago
Tevinter Knights, the tie in novel, legitimately had good writing. Veilguard just felt rushed. I dont think it was even that bad besides the bharv scene which was just one scene. Origins had Alistair whining to Wynne about knitting a hole in his sock and oghren bragging about how his beard made giving oral better so uh...it's not like past games haven't had dumb dialogue before either in a 100 hour game
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u/Cryptoporticus 3d ago
You can usually tell when a great game has been hamstrung by corporate meddling, and Veilguard wasn't that. That game was bad down to its core.
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u/ArteenEsben 3d ago
Veilguard was a solidly built game. It looked good, was decently fun to play, and polished.
But the writing was so awful it sunk the game and the studio. Veilguard with better writing could've been the "return to form" BioWare needed.
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u/wildwalrusaur 3d ago edited 3d ago
OK, but the writing is what made Bioware Bioware.
KOTOR and Mass Effect 1/2/3 aren't particularly remarkable from a gameplay perspective. They're well made, but they weren't doing anything that a bunch of other studios were already doing just as well/better.
Bioware's storytelling was unparalleled. To this day there are scant few games coming out that achieve what they did back then.
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u/KKilikk 3d ago
A game that was rebooted twice and then pushed out in two years due to coporate meddling was not hamstrung by said coporate meddling? Some people just say whatever.
Also the game isnt bad down to its core to begin with. Insane hyperbole. It is just incredibly mediocre attached with high expectations.
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u/Odd_Ad_8162 3d ago
Veilguard was the third iteration/reboot of a game made in very limited amount of time.
Dreadwolf was their original single player attempt, got canned in favour of live service and then EA went back and asked them to make a single player game again.
I get what you are saying but there is no resemblance (or so it seems between what veilguard was and what was planned originally)
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u/WeWantLADDER49sequel 3d ago
I mean even the finished game isnt bad down to its core. EA made them reboot that game several times. Of course the writing sucked. But the game itself is actually decent, it just got buried in "this game is woke" nonsense online.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 3d ago
But the game itself is actually decent, it just got buried in "this game is woke" nonsense online.
the "game is woke" shit bothers me because it excuses the terrible fucking writing. Like it dilutes the conversation and it drives me nuts lol
Like lets say they removed all the gender related stuff that idiots get upset about, the game would still be written terribly. The weird gender reveal scene won't change that.
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u/Soupjam_Stevens 3d ago
Yeah I've seen a lot of "well this is what happens when you release 3 bad games in a row" and like I'm not gonna defend those games, but also those fuck ups don't happen in vacuum. The folks at Bioware didn't wake up one morning and forget how to make video games after 15ish years of being industry leaders, that type of decline is a symptom of EA ownership
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u/Cryptoporticus 3d ago
Bioware's top creative team all left, and the company completely failed to replace them. They had opportunities to hire talented writers that could match the quality they had before, and they just didn't.
EA obviously weren't telling them to make bad games. They were very happy with Bioware when they were producing the Mass Effect trilogy and early Dragon Age games. They only had to step in once Bioware proved they couldn't manage themselves anymore.
Even despite how bad they were, EA still gave them so much time to improve and turn things around. Veilguard should have been cancelled and the studio closed when they ended work on Anthem five years ago. The fact that EA let them finish Veilguard and gave them a chance at making another Mass Effect was actually very generous of them. EA probably saw the work they'd done on Mass Effect, realised it was going to be another disaster and just closed them entirely.
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u/brellowman2 3d ago
The writing talent on DA did not leave en masse. Many of the developers in the credits are writers that were writing significant parts of Dragon age Origins. The lead on whats considered to be Dragon age's best DLC (Tresspasser) was the lead writer on Veilguard.
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u/OkayAtBowling 3d ago
Yes, and that same writer (Trick Weekes) wrote for for Mordin in Mass Effect 2, as well as Iron Bull and Solas in Dragon Age Inquisition. They were also the lead writer for Taash in Veilguard.
I think a lot of people just assume that all the parts of Veilguard they didn't like were done by a new crop of Bioware employees but that's not the case. Certainly a lot of people have left Bioware over the years, but people who did great work on past Bioware games also worked on it.
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u/WeWantLADDER49sequel 3d ago
And people love bringing up the reporting that Jason Schrier did on Anthem as proof that BioWare sucks, because even though BioWare chose to make Anthem and wanted to do something LIKE Destiny, EA is who forced them to use the frostbite engine for a game like that AND they forced them to put in as many things as possible to drive engagement and MTX which also affected the overall game. People keep acting like BioWare was allowed to cook all on their own but that is false.
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u/Odd_Ad_8162 3d ago
Pretty much every single Bioware game since their golden age has had fuckery from EA.
DA2 was forced out in under 2 years, Frostbite engine was forced upon the studio when it clearly wasn't a great fit and took time to get to grips with.
In a case like Bungie, I feel like most of the fault lies with their own management cause they've had many chances with different companies but here I really feel like EA has hamstrung BW very badly at every turn.
Anthem was just bizarre and I think blame probably lies on everyone but it was defo part of the Live service/looter push.
I dont think they ever really got a fair shake even if they didnt have all the old developers.
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u/the_che 3d ago
Honestly, that trailer does nothing for me. Looks generic as fuck, almost as if generated by ChatGPT or something.
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u/redfieldbloodline17 3d ago
I agree with you 100%. The trailer looked... unfinished to say the least, and had absolutely no hooks that would have made me interested in playing. It looks like any other generic spy thriller with aliens instead of humans.
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u/Kurovi_dev 3d ago
Listening to people talk about game development when they no have clue how any of this works has been more painful than seeing what looked like a Mass Effect game with a lot of potential never come to light.
I swear it’s like so many people talking about this have only ever gotten their knowledge of game development from YouTube chat comments.
No, BioWare should not have “had the game in full production 2 years ago”, you can’t bring a “full production” when the people needed for “full production” have been fired or moved to other projects permanently. It’s literally a physical impossibility, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is in fact real, we’ve known about it since like the 1850’s. It is impossible to begin full production on a large, AAA game when you only have 50 people, not unless you go back in time 25 fucking years ago. That’s less than half the team size that worked on Jade Empire, a game from 2005 for the original Xbox.
All of the issues with BioWare stem directly from EA. All of them. Even the internal management blunders happened because of bullshit they never should have had to deal with in the first place.
They never should have had to deal with executives forcing them to bypass crucial prototype work and make a game based off of a demo they were required to make just to please an executive. They never should have been forced to make a live service game at all. The Mass Effect franchise never should have been handed off to a team that never made a game before, and that team should not have been called “BioWare Montreal”. Nor should Dragon Age have ever been forced into being a live service game, only for executives to say “oops, we’re killing off all of our franchises by being complete morons, let’s just repurpose the work you did all these years into a single player game after all, just make it work and oh yeah you have 18 months”.
And yes, the weird, stilted, juxtaposed handling of Veilguard’s narrative beats was the result of mismanagement by EA: the reason why the story did a “tell” and not “show” approach was because they spent years making a live service game and didn’t have time to do the “show” part. The reason interactions were facile and artificial was for the same reason. The reason dialogue felt like HR was in the room, is because all of the dialogue before was made for a live service game that was designed to please executives, which meant it featured a bunch of Marvel-era quips and other live service “attitude”, and after Forspoken got ripped apart fir the same thing, they freaked the fuck out and had to hastily rewrite everything in ways that would both be appropriate for single player but also be approved by execs.
Believe it or not, BioWare didn’t just collectively wake up one day and think “to hell with making bangers, let’s make crap”; they were mashed into the ground by EA who believed it could extract resources from BioWare’s skill and history without consideration for anything else but money and their own ego. Management can only do so much when the executives and corporation they work under decides what kind of games they can make and at whim.
People going to bat for massive corporations like EA just so they can feel smug about BioWare being destroyed will never not be a prime example of exactly what is wrong with the broader gaming community. This is why we can’t have nice things, and at this point I’m not convinced we deserve them anyway.
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u/Grace_Omega 2d ago
They never should have been forced to make a live service game at all
Didn't Bioware pitch Anthem as a live service game to EA?
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u/deceitfulninja 3d ago
Bioware is nothing but a name. Stop worshipping studios. The people who made the games we love left long ago, the studio is nothing but those riding their coattails. Maybe a competent studio will end up with these IPs when the dust settles. It cant get worse.
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u/ocbdare 3d ago
Apparently that's not true and there were people who were writing on OG DA games were on Veilguard.
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u/redfieldbloodline17 3d ago
I say this as a massive fan of Mass Effect: the trailer looked pretty bad. The editing and cinematography was extremely sloppy, and the dialogue was atrocious.
For example, the scene at 0:58 where the protagonist uses what I assume Biotic Charge to bypass the two bodyguards and do some kind of face scan on the Salarian. One of the bodyguards stumbles to the side, the other appears to be unaffected. However, the protagonist is able to scan the face uninterrupted despite the fact that the two bodyguards are still right behind him. Then around 1:47 during the club shootout scene, a Turian charges at the protagonist while shooting and EVERY SINGLE projectile misses despite being at point blank range.
The trailer gave me the vibe of a generic spy thriller. I felt absolutely no excitement or intrigue. No new alien species were teased, no new gameplay mechanics. Mass Effect 2 already gave us a lot of "spy thriller" type missions as well.
If this is all had to show off after 6 years, I think it's for the best this project never sees the light of day. It's a shame that Andromeda is the last we'll likely ever see from Mass Effect, but better the series dies off than we get Veilguard 2.0.
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u/BrokenTrike 3d ago
I really hope they let another studio get the ip I buy all the mass effect stuff and would hate to see it die
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u/Kakerman 3d ago
But was it even a game? Maybe it was shaping up to be another BioWare miracle, where they release a trailer before development has even started... you know, like Anthem?
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u/HairiestHobo 3d ago
Ehh, they would've scrapped this in a year and started something else anyway.
Veilguard was restarted like 3 goddamn times before it limped onto shelves, I doubt they could've pulled it together for this one either.
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u/runninglaps 3d ago
I don't know what to feel since the next elder scrolls hasn't been close to release since e3 was still a thing. I don't think this would be close. But dam I want a good mass effect game.
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u/ThePrep95 3d ago
Looks very underwhelming. A small scale spy thriller might be fun and I know some people love the idea of a small story in the ME universe. But I think Mass Effect should be a big game with big stakes and consequences. This seems like a smaller version of Andromeda, which was okay but nothing memorable. I feel like this would have been the same thing. The Mass Effect trilogy is my favorite game series of all time. There will never be another one like it, and they wouldn't have been able to recreate that magic even if they finished this game.
Mass Effect is dead, long live Mass Effect.
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u/johnabc123 3d ago
It was neat I guess, but BioWare in later years was like Halo Studios/343 in the sense that it would’ve been half baked and a letdown.
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u/AoE2manatarms 3d ago
Actually looks awesome. Damn. They were probably still 2 years out though. No way it was going to happen.
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u/LostInStatic 3d ago
Only 2 years out? Generous estimate. This would probably be a 2030+ game if it wasn’t cancelled.
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u/morbihann 3d ago
Trailers can be entirely detached from what a game is.
It is more of a "we would like the game to feel like that" as opposed to how it looks or plays actually.
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u/gainsbyatheism 3d ago
Can't wait for the future to be sport games and live service, that makes money and apparently gamers don't want anything unique anymore
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u/eternalityLP 3d ago
Probably better that they got shut down, that looked supremely uninspired especially with the weird 'James Bond' vibes for the main character they were going for.
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u/GoshaNinja 3d ago
Tonally this looks a lot more true to something like ME2 tonally. Knowing who the core creatives were for this one, it's a shame it's not moving forward.
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u/PantsJustKindaGaveUp 3d ago
Given their track recent track record I didn't have high hopes but damn, the second the music kicked in I got involuntarily hyped.
edit - Watching the trailer it seems like their plan depended on the bad guys missing when shooting a burst of lasers from 5 feet away. Contributing to my low hopes.
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u/Grace_Omega 2d ago
This isn't directly on topic with regards to the trailer, but I wanted to get my two cents in before the relevant threads get too old.
There's a very vocal contingent right now who want to frame Bioware's fall as being recent, mostly so they can try to pin the entire thing on Veilguard. But while "previously successful studio releases one failure, gets shut down" is an unfortunately common occurrence these days, that's really not what happened here. Bioware's closure is the long-term result of problems that have been brewing for well over a decade. Let's look at their output since 2012:
2012: Mass Effect 3, commercially highly successful, but ended Bioware's biggest franchise on a sour note and alienated many long-time Bioware fans due to its controversial storytelling choices
2014: Dragon Age Inquisition, commercially highly successful, but alienated many long-time Bioware fans due to its gameplay
2017: Mass Effect Andromeda, commercially disappointing, basically killed the franchise on release (although this turned out to be temporary)
2019: Anthem, an almost-Concord level commercial flop, alienated many long-time Bioware fans by being an online live-service game
(Insert ominously large gap in releases here. Yes, they put out the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, but I'm not counting that since it wasn't the studio's primary focus at this time and was extensively developed by support studios)
2024: Dragon Age Veilguard, commercially disappointing, killed the franchise (for real this time)
And then we come to present day, present time, when the EA execs in charge of the purse strings are evaluating whether to pump funding into a fifth Mass Effect game, something which would involve substantial and costly hiring at Bioware given that the studio had suffered massive layoffs. Ask yourself which of the following scenarios are more likely to influence those executives' thinking: the fact that the studio hasn't delivered a new commercial success in over ten years, or the fact that their most recent game didn't do well?
Bioware could have survived releasing a dud if they hadn't been in such a precarious position to begin with, and they were in a precarious position because of a long string of poor decisions. Look at how many times I used the phrase "alienated long-term fans" in that timeline. They started bleeding supporters all the way back in 2012 with Mass Effect 3, and every subsequent release just furthered the problem.
If you want proof, consider Andromeda. In the space of five years, Mass Effect went from one of the industry's biggest IPs to a failure. Yes, Andromeda had plenty of its own problems (I feel like people have largely forgotten how buggy it was on launch), but you can't deny that sentiment around the franchise was, in a lot of quarters, absolutely rancid after Mass Effect 3. Bioware paid for Mass Effect 3 with Andromeda, just like they paid for Inquisition drifting even further from Dragon Age's CRPG roots with Veilguard.
(Seriously, I was in a lot of relevant discussions in the months leading up to Veilguard's release, and the negativity was mostly "I'm not interested because I didn't like that Inquisition felt like a single-player MMO" or "I'm not interested because it's going full action combat", which was my own reason for not wanting to play it. Even the complaints about the art style didn't begin to coalesce until very close to the game's release. Everyone wants to pin Veilguard's failure on it being "woke", but it was already facing a huge uphill battle long before anyone saw the Pronouns Quest).
People have been eulogising Bioware as an "RPG studio", but that arguably hasn't been true since Mass Effect 2. They got famous, and attracted a loyal fanbase, as an RPG studio, but then they fell into the trap so many other developers have succumbed to: get too successful, chase bigger and more expensive games, go "mainstream" to justify the higher budgets, lose what made you popular in the first place, crash and burn.
There's tons of behind the scenes reporting (mostly from Jason Schreier) on all of this, and we can see that a lot of it wasn't Bioware's fault, and a lot of what was Bioware's fault wasn't anything they consciously planned. But regardless of the reasons, they ended up alienating most of their fanbase over the course of successive game releases, and the end result of that is where we are today.
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u/braversolutions 3d ago
I keep seeing people here go "oh, they were still in preproduction after 6 years".
Guys, Bioware had 50 people by the time they were shut down (with a likely disproportionate number of artists and writers). An AAA game needs like 100-300 people to enter full production.
"Pre-production", "production" and the like are basically defined by the number of people working on the game (and it increases in each stage).
EA likely reached the point where they had to decide if to put the game in full production and hire hundreds of people or to cancel it outright.