An internal trailer for the cancelled Mass Effect game that was in development at BioWare prior to its closure this week has surfaced online. It has been confirmed to be genuine, amid some initial suspicions that it may have been an AI-generated fake.
The trailer was intended for internal use, and was created for EA leadership rather than the public. It opens with a short message: “The following is in-engine footage from our small team. It uses our pre-production assets.”
The trailer gives us our first (and likely only) look at Mass Effect Universe, an entirely new entry following the adventures of a new protagonist. We see them navigate the galaxy in their own ship with a new crew of various known races including a Krogan, and get into fights using guns and biotics. There are some quick cuts to a saucy romance scene, a tense standoff with weapons drawn, and a mysterious creature being researched in a big test tube. We also see a returning character from the original trilogy—Liara—make an appearance near the end of the trailer before a big bar fight kicks off.
When first released, skepticism about whether this trailer was real was naturally present given the prevalence of AI, however IGN quickly verified its validity. In addition, Bloomberg’s Jason Schrier went on to corroborate the trailer’s authenticity on his personal BlueSky account.
We know very little about this game aside from this trailer. According to a former BioWare employee, Mass Effect Universe would have learned from Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Witcher to deliver “a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has.” The game would have also seemingly “remained true” to the original trilogy.
Reactions to this trailer are bittersweet, given the reality that the 50 developers working on Mass Effect Universe have recently lost their jobs as part of EA’s layoffs which impacted 400 employees across the company. “A spy thriller is such a cool concept for a re-entry to the series,” wrote Reddit user Harrywilko. “Man, I’m just so sad and angry.” User TerraxFormer shared similar sentiments, writing: “God this makes me even more distraught lol. I know a trailer is not an indication of how good it would have been but I was looking forward to this damn game so much.”
The EA job cuts, which took place only a few months after Saudi Arabia’s $55bn leveraged buyout of the company, also hit developers at Respawn, Maxis, Full Circle, EA Motive, and other EA-owned studios. While such cuts were anticipated by experts given EA’s new debt obligations, the news of BioWare’s closure nonetheless drew out many messages of sympathy and anger from across the industry.
It’s hardly a silver lining, given we saw this unfinished trailer while we all said a sad farewell to BioWare. But at least those staff can know they were onto something that could have been great.
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Mass Effect 5
Masahiro Sakurai has spoken about the pitfalls of generative AI use in game development, saying that while he believes the technology will result in a surge of unoriginal video games, human creativity—such as that shown by designers like Ico’s Fumito Ueda—can’t be replicated.
In an interview with Japanese news outlet Denfaminicogamer, Sakurai was asked about his time judging for the Game Designers Awards (a role he recently retired from) and his thoughts on the massive increase of game releases since the awards began. In 2010, 275 games were published on Steam, whereas more than 19,000 released this year.
“When it comes to things created with AI… or things mass-produced with poor quality, I think most of them will simply be reproductions of systems seen in various other games. I think there are already a lot of those now.”
Sakurai then spoke about a recent (and lovely) release called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, which challenges players to organise books on shelves, and pointed to other puzzle games with similarly simple premises, such as finding a needle in a haystack or organising a supermarket. These kinds of games, he suggested, will be very easy for AI to replicate.
We’ve already seen this happen, of course. Needle in a Haystack Simulator, for example – which asks players to find a needle buried among 5 million pieces of hay – went viral thanks to its absurd yet compelling premise. Following its surge in popularity, copies were quickly created, prompting Needle in a Haystack developer Studio Bitdot to plop a bright red “original” tag on its Steam artwork.
But Sakurai continued, saying generative AI may become powerful enough to replicate more complicated games, like acclaimed designer Fumito Ueda’s Ico or Shadow of the Colossus. However, he emphasised that Ueda’s future games will be “something that AI simply cannot replicate … What kind of artistic style will his future works possess? That’s something only he can create. I think that’s where human creativity lies.”
“Basically, AI refers to things that have been created so far, but it can’t refer to things that haven’t been created before,” Sakurai elaborated. “I think this is true not only for AI, but for various kinds of creative works as well.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘pioneers’, but rather people who forge their own path… people who understand and can create their own unique flavour… will become increasingly important from now on. I think this is especially true in an era of mass production and low-quality goods.”
Quickly made AI games have become an increasing presence in the games industry of late. Valve’s current Steam Next Fest features more than double the number of demos compared to last year, due in part to the influx of ‘AI slop’. Some indie developers have even pulled planned demos and playtests out of fear their games might be copied by AI before they’re properly released.
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