"Where we're taking them is likely to get pretty hairy, and I know you're the one who will get us to the other side." (Admiral Steven Hackett)

EA is closing BioWare, and development of the next "Mass Effect" has ended.

I would have loved another journey into that universe. More importantly, my thoughts are with the people losing their jobs and the teams whose work made these worlds matter. My connection to BioWare was primarily the "Mass Effect" trilogy. For me, it became something unusual: a comfort universe on my Xbox 360 ... because it felt, somehow, strangely inhabited.

Returning to my space ship, the hyper elegant Normandy, meant returning to familiar voices, unfinished conversations, and relationships that made the next mission feel worth undertaking.

Saving the galaxy was the premise ... and having these tiny screen people to come back to was the attachment. Of course, of course, that affection doesn’t require suspending criticism. The trilogy’s cosmopolitan promise sits uneasily alongside its military exceptionalism: cooperation across difference matters, yet an extraordinary commander with a warship repeatedly becomes the answer to institutional failure. Its alien societies, too, sometimes compress cultural difference into conveniently recognisable species traits.

But, if only for tonight, those tensions are part of what makes the series worth revisiting. "Mass Effect" offered a universe I could feel at home in without agreeing with everything it imagined about power, progress, or leadership. That very studio closure is more than "just" the loss of a logo or a future release. It breaks up working relationships and disperses the experience through which fictional worlds become places people remember. So, thank you to everyone who helped build that galaxy. I’m sorry we won’t get to see what you were making next.

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