More information about the now-canceled Mass Effect: Universe keeps trickling out following this week’s closure of BioWare and the end of years of development of the next game in the studio’s sci-fi series. After an internal trailer featuring a new protagonist and original trilogy party member Liara T’Soni leaked, more information came out about how the game would handle choices from the previous games, as well as how the galaxy gradually built itself back up after the cataclysmic events of Mass Effect 3.
Now, some folks who were working on the game at BioWare have started talking about the game, and while they’re not exactly going full spoiler mode for the canceled game, they are teasing a bit of what they were working on. One such developer is franchise technical director Romain Toutain, who held a stream on Twitch where he watched and commentated over the trailer and gave a few new details about what BioWare was cooking.
Toutain speaks in French, but Bluesky user @loustica-lucia posted a clip of some of his commentary with English subtitles.
Throughout, he confirms a few details from the leaks, including that the main character would be customizable (though he doesn’t say what their name would have been), teases that there would have been some “incredible” lore that would explain how the Mass Relays were repaired after their destruction at the end of ME3, and says that some of the hand-to-hand combat we see in the trailer wasn’t just for show, and that players would be able to swap between gunplay and throwing punches at a moment’s notice.
That’s all known information, but one point he does make that wasn’t in the initial leaks was that players would be able to “generate” timelines in a way that sounded like it was going to be a lot farther reaching than Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s three-choice import system.
“All the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taken into account,” he says. “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. You could almost generate timelines, kinda like Zero Time Dilemma.”
He responds to a chatter saying that fans “have no fucking idea just how great it was.” When someone asks if it’s similar to the Dragon Age Keep, an online app that allowed players to create world states to import into Dragon Age: Inquisition, he says “kinda,” but clarifies that you would have been able to make decisions that “contradict things you’ve already done,” essentially making branching “points” in the timeline.
“I mean, that was the theory,” he continues. “It worked in practice. I’ll tell you about the tech one day because it was really exciting. We got worked up, fuck. Everything in the game, everything was stateful. At any time, you could stop the game — I mean, you could pause it and ask a system that solved logical equations, ‘Is this valid?’ And if it isn’t valid, what conditions must be met for it to be valid for the game to set these conditions. And if the content doesn’t exist, then we know the content doesn’t exist, so we’ll either have to create another branch, either that, or we know we have to create the content. So if you killed a guy, and you needed that guy for your mission, the game will make sure you can complete the mission. Or, if that’s what the designers have decided, well, no, the mission’s failed because you killed that guy. Or else, something that was bound to happen doesn’t happen, just so that a path remains open, so that you can get [around] the problem.”
Toutain says that getting this set up was difficult, but “worked so well” in practice. The studio wanted Universe to be built around the player having “absolute autonomy.”
Outside of the narrative design talk, Toutain also talks about how the trailer wasn’t meant to be viewed by the public, as it was an “internal” trailer meant to convey the mood to the studio at large, which is why it uses the song “Quartz” by French 79 rather than something composed by BioWare. He also reveals that the squid thing people theorized was some kind of organic Reaper’s asset name was “Billy.” Cute.
In the days since BioWare’s closure, fans and members of the larger Mass Effect community have been rallying around online to try and “save” the game from cancelation by urging EA to sell the studio and its IP, but Toutain says he doesn’t think that will happen because “EA never actually sells anything” and just “[shuts] things down and sit on their licenses.”
