Following EA’s decision to shut down BioWare, the game that would have been the fifth installment in the Mass Effect series is being shunted out of an airlock, never to become a finished article that will reach players as its creators envisioned. The biggest tragedy is, of course, the job losses and the closure of a studio with a legacy of RPG royalty, but it’s still sad that the next Mass Effect will never come out, and some of the people who worked on it have started to offer insight into what the team hoped to accomplish.
“I was one of the lucky ones who stayed at BioWare to start the next Mass Effect, where I believe we were creating something special: a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match,” cinematic supervisor Tony de Waal wrote in a statement. LinkedIn message revealing that one of BioWare’s 50 remaining employees was laid off as part of the shutdown. “We saw what Larian and CD Projekt were bringing with their latest offerings, and we began to take the path to take Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the trilogy.
“I’m sad that you never got to see what we were cooking up, and sad for the small group of talented developers who all punched above their weight to create something special. Think of those who stayed with BioWare until the very end. They are truly some of the most talented people I’ve had the pleasure of working with throughout my career.”
Writers Catherine M. Valente And Derek Kunsken didn’t delve further with their own Twitter posts, but also echoed that they were excited about what the studio was sketching out and building with this Mass Effect game.
While it’s worth maintaining the idea that Mass Effect 5 was still in the early stages of development rather than minutes away from release, it’s infuriating that BioWare never even got the chance to see if its plans could result in an RPG capable of pushing the genre forward like Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher 3 did over the past decade. Like some of their long-time RPG-making cousins, like Bethesda, BioWare’s path hasn’t been a straight line to massive success in recent years.
2017’s Mass Effect: Andromeda wasn’t as critically acclaimed and nearly universally loved as the trilogy that preceded it. Anthem failed to stick the landing live despite some promising ideas. Then there was Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which had a well-documented and messy development cycle that saw it switch and push between multiplayer and single-player to suit the whims of EA management. The game it ultimately became was a Nic (RPS at Peace) summed up in its review as “a reluctant RPG, but a compelling and heartfelt action adventure”. Unfortunately, it is I didn’t sell tons of copies. a game has to be considered a success under EA these days, and so seemed to instantly become the latest black mark against BioWare that saw their corporate overlords begin to fatally close in on the walls.
Could BioWare have fully regained its master RPG mojo if it had achieved its goals with Mass Effect 5? We will never know. Major publisher game studios rarely have such chances these days, as obvious as it may seem to those of us who don’t just care about making short-term financial gains to compensate for being saddled with debt in a Saudi-led buyout by giving up anything that doesn’t make EA FC-level cash.
