BioWare was shut down yesterday by EA, bringing a sudden end to a studio whose legacy of legendary role-playing games stretches back nearly 30 years. This meant that the studio’s Mass Effect project, being developed by a relative skeleton crew after a downsizing in January of 2025, was canceled, and fans likely won’t get the chance to return to the beloved science-fiction universe unless EA sells the IP. However, we got a new look at what the team was working on thanks to a leaked trailer, revealing that the game was going to be called Mass Effect: Universe.

The trailer is short, but there’s a lot to extrapolate in the two minutes we see. We can also make some educated guesses based on the years of teases BioWare put out before EA shuttered the studio. So let’s try to make heads or tails of it all.

The trailer starts with an outside shot of a bar, and we can see a giant skyscraper outside that doesn’t look quite like anything we’ve seen before. It perhaps most closely resembles architecture seen in London after it gets rebuilt post-war in Mass Effect 3 ’s Extended Cut . There’s a pretty big mix of alien races here. We see Salarians, Turians, Volus, Asari, Quarians, Krogan, even a Drell or two. Part of me would be surprised if this was supposed to be on Earth considering just how diverse the bar’s clientele is, but given that Universe was supposedly meant to take place hundreds of years after the original trilogy and Earth was the final battle ground of the Reaper War in ME3 , maybe our planet became more of a tourist attraction.

Source link