Alleged Leaked Mass Effect 5 Trailer Captures the Sequel That Died With BioWare

Yesterday Electronic Arts closed BioWare after more than three decades and ended work on the next Mass Effect game, which the company described as still in early development under a small team of roughly fifty people. Hours later a burner account on Reddit posted a two-minute internal trailer that Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and IGN both confirmed as genuine footage created for the project. The clip opens with a disclaimer that it is in-engine material built from pre-production assets by that limited crew, then ends on a title card reading Mass Effect: Universe.

A guy in a N7 trench coat looks exactly like the one in the 2020 teaser, seated at a bar next to a blue-skinned Asari, which appears in many Mass Effect games. He begins telling her that being in the military was a never-ending game of putting out one fire only to see another one start, which is why he left the Alliance to pursue a new line of work that gets to the root of the problem and makes the difficult decisions that no one else will. The woman then reveals that she was the one who started all of the fires in the first place. Just then, Liara T’Soni appears, and the two of them engage in a full-fledged bar battle, complete with gunfire, Asari biotics, and mass effect fields freezing people in place, as well as some furniture being tossed from one end of the bar to the other.

Some quick cuts show a hovercraft racing across an icy world, a massive alien bloated and floating inside a glass cylinder, a holographic map of the galaxy with various points marked on it, a nightclub scene, a brief and intimate moment, and then travel through one of those Mass Effect relays that allows you to jump from one location to another in the galaxy in a heartbeat.

As for what this all means, BioWare has previously announced that the next part of the series takes place in the Milky Way a few hundred years after the Reaper conflict. Former staff who spoke after the closure described a project aimed at giving players more freedom of action and choice than previous entries while staying faithful to the original trilogy’s tone. One cinematic supervisor wrote that the team had looked at the scale of recent work from Larian and CD Projekt and set out to match it with a much smaller group.

Meanwhile, an Amazon Prime Video series set immediately following the original Mass Effect trilogy is still “in the works,” according to those in the know. Not surprisingly, EA is remaining quiet about the whole issue for the time being, but all of this comes only a few weeks before the studio’s annual N7 Day celebration, which is the one time of year when they disclose some fresh and exciting Mass Effect news.
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