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.
Where is this bar?
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. Or this could be somewhere the series has never taken us before, which is probably the more likely explanation.
We meet the third Mass Effect protagonist
While previous teases for the game that would have been Mass Effect: Universe implied it would somehow bridge the gap between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, most figured that we wouldn’t have been playing as Andromeda protagonist Pathfinder Ryder. A loud and annoying contingent of fans wanted BioWare to bring back original trilogy hero Commander Shepard despite most of Mass Effect 3’s endings resulting in their death, as well as BioWare’s previous teases implying this game would take place closer to the events of Mass Effect: Andromeda. Thankfully, it looks like BioWare had no intention of bringing Shepard back.
Instead, we would have been playing as someone who seems like a kind of galactic James Bond–type. An Asari approaches him and says that he looks like he’s military. He says he isn’t anymore, and we get a flashback to his time fighting in the human Alliance military. He and his squad have a firefight against a group of Krogan. Last year’s N7 Day teaser revealed that there were plans to feature some kind of Krogan civil war in the story, but it’s unclear if this is part of that conflict. Was this new guy’s squad intercepting some kind of Krogan mission, or were the big scary aliens just a formidable foe to show our new hero fighting off big baddies? Whatever the case, he’s out of that line of work. Too many fires to put out.
The Mass Relays have been repaired
Now that he’s no longer with the Alliance, he’s entered a “new line of work.” He’s still traveling throughout the galaxy, though, and is using the Mass Relay transit network to do it. Notably, these were all destroyed at the end of Mass Effect 3, though the Extended Cut DLC made a big hoopla about how that gutwrenching, galaxy-altering choice could be patched up, no big deal.
Manning a new ship with a new crew
We see a few shots of what would have been the new ship, and it looks a lot smaller than the Normandy from the trilogy or Tempest from Andromeda. Inside, we see our space-faring not-Bond talking with some crew members, including a human and Krogan, and looking at a galaxy map of the Milky Way. It’s unclear if these would have been party members or part of the ship’s crew.
Wait, is that Illium?
Though the previous teasers imply that the Andromeda galaxy would play a part in the story, it does look like the majority of the game would have taken place in humanity’s home galaxy. One place we see our hero touch down looks an awful lot like Illium, a planet primarily occupied by the Asari that players visit frequently in Mass Effect 2.
Secret agent man
Though Shepard dabbled in some secret-agent hijinks over the course of the trilogy, it looks like Universe would have leaned into them more heavily, being primarily made up of espionage and more intimate firefights. We see our trench coat–wearing protagonist spying on people arriving on the planet that may or may not be Illium, getting into hand-to-hand scraps, and wielding both biotic abilities and tech skills to take down his enemies. He even scans a Salarian’s skull like he’s hacking into their systems for some kind of intel.
Love is in the air
Every Mass Effect game has love and sex in it, and Universe would have been no exception. We see a few shots of the new guy with someone who likely would have been one of his potential love interests. In one, he walks arm-in-arm with a woman into some kind of event; in the next, they’re doing the horizontal tango in low lighting.
…Alright, what the hell is that?
Next, we see a party made up of the main character, a Krogan, and a Quarian teammate finding some kind of almost squid-like creature? My brain immediately goes to it being related to the Reapers or the Leviathan, as those are the most notable cephalopods in the franchise, though it looks like it has almost human-like skin. Whatever it is, it appears to be in some kind of stasis. The Quarian starts to scan it, but the only real information we can see from his screen is that this thing is in critical condition.
The queen has arrived
After a few more mood shots of the ship flying through a snowy area and trench coat boy getting into some more close-quarters combat, we’re back at the bar where the Asari whispers into our hero’s ear and threatens him. Her goons are ready to rough him up, until one of the bar patrons interrupts. It’s none other than the Asari Liara T’Soni, the only party member from the previous games that had been confirmed to return in Universe’s original teasers. Then, a bar fight breaks out, and the new guy starts rocking the shit out of everyone in the bar. We even get a quick shot of Liara tossing some folks with her biotics, but the action is cut short and we see the title card.
As the trailer says at the beginning, Universe definitely looks like it’s still in an early concept phase to some extent, as the action doesn’t look quite as polished in some places as it does in others. But man, as a vibe setter, this trailer would have hit hard on N7 Day or at the Game Awards. Still, if BioWare hadn’t been shuttered and we’d seen it as intended, there would have been a lot of questions, such as how the Andromeda galaxy factors into all this considering that the 2023 teaser implied someone from the Milky Way would be answering a distress call from there. Hopefully, whether it be through more leaks or through developers being allowed to talk about what they’re working on, we’ll hear and see more about Mass Effect: Universe down the line. Unless someone with a lot of money and no live-service aspirations wants to be super cool and swoop in to save it? That would be even better.
