Additional details about BioWare's canceled Mass Effect game have leaked online, revealing a story that would have taken choices from the Commander Shepard trilogy into account if EA hadn't shut down the studio.

The long-awaited and currently canned follow-up for the sci-fi RPG franchise, which was working under the title Mass Effect: Universe, was built around decisions made in the original games, according to comments shared by former technical director Romain Toutain during a recent livestream (via Kotaku). As more details about the project leak, there's no telling exactly how thorough this system would have been, but he did his best to give fans an idea.

"All the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taken into account," Toutain said (translation via Bluesky user @loustica-lucia.bsky.social). "One of the reasons why it was called 'Mass Effect: Universe' is that you had so many choices. That you could plug your saves together to create parallel universes, to keep it simple. It's not exactly how it worked. You had different timelines, basically."

Mass Effect fans know how crucial the series' overarching story is, especially when it comes to Commander Shepard's first three installments in his/her fight against the Reapers. Outside of the ill-fated Andromeda follow-up that launched in 2017, players were able to carry major choices from each entry over to the next, resulting in a trilogy of games with a highly personalized story.

Relationships, major character deaths, and even the fate of an entire species are just a few of the ways Shepard can be steered to shape the galaxy, and although whether it was all worth it in the end is still up for debate, it seems Mass Effect: Universe would have offered an opportunity to right some wrongs .

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