EA announced that it was closing BioWare on October 21, while also canceling the next Mass Effect game. An anonymous employee responded by leaking an internal trailer, giving us our best look yet at what the team were cooking up. But it still wasn't clear how far along development was.
YouTuber and Mass Effect council member, Dantics, claimed that "they were a lot further in development than their statement suggested", and argued that "we were going to get something truly magical," but Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier alleges that the next Mass Effect game was in fact "years away from completion" and still in the pre-production phase.
Unfortunately, this was a knock-on effect from the tumultuous behind-the-scenes production of Dragon Age: The Veilguard—as development on Mass Effect: Universe was paused for two years to try and salvage the game. So, while the new Mass Effect may have been announced in 2020, it wasn't anywhere near finished when BioWare was shut down six years later.
Bloomberg also alleged in its report that the decision to close BioWare and cancel Mass Effect Universe ultimately boiled down to Star Wars, as Lucasfilm offered it the opportunity to develop a third Battlefront game. Schreier claims that EA was unwilling to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on two sci-fi action games, and that it saw Battlefront 3 as the safer bet. Even though the company said just two years ago that it wanted to focus less on licensed IP.
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