BioWare veteran Tony de Waal has revealed in a LinkedIn post that the new Mass Effect game, which was sadly cancelled by EA after the published decided to shutter the development team, would have allowed for unprecedented levels of autonomy and choice unseen by any other video game.
I was one of the lucky ones who stayed with BioWare to start on the next Mass Effect, where I believe we were making something special: a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match. We saw what Larian and CD Projekt were bringing to the table with their latest offerings, and started down a path to bring Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the trilogy.
I’m sad you won’t ever get to see what we were cooking, and sad for the small, talented group of devs who were all punching above their weight to make something special. Please consider 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.
The next instalment in the Mass Effect series was announced back in 2020, and six years on we never got to see much of the project apart from a very brief teaser and some artwork. When EA revealed the closure of BioWare overnight, it said the game was still in early development, so presumably it would have still been years off from release had it not been scrapped.
Earlier this year the new Mass Effect game was still hiring for staff, with BioWare advertising for a production director to join the project. A year prior, BioWare announced that was downsizing its core development team for Mass Effect 5 (as people usually refer to the new game as), just a a few months after Dragon Age: The Veilguard shipped.
[Source – Tony del Waal LinkedIn via PCGamer, Eurogamer]