A purported trailer for EA’s canceled Mass Effect 5 leaked online just one day after the company shut BioWare down.
The trailer surfaced on the internet after EA closed BioWare and canceled the next Mass Effect on October 21 as part of 400 layoffs, with its memo describing the game as being in early development, though BioWare first teased it in 2020.
Because the public had seen only brief teasers since, the news landed with no real footage to point to, but a Reddit comment changed that a day later.
Leaked Mass Effect 5 trailer breakdown
On October 22, a user named Random_Hyabusa_Ninja replied to a fan’s plea of “I need that trailer. Just give it to me and let me dream” in an r/masseffect thread.
“Ask and you shall receive,” they wrote, explaining that they could not make it its own post because the account was a new burner. The clip, which ran just over two minutes, was a cinematic with no gameplay.
It opened with a tense sit-down between a weary human ex-soldier and an Asari at a bar. Flashbacks followed with gunplay, a hulking Krogan, and a steamy human-Asari moment. In the end, the soldier’s squad ambushed the Asari, who had been masquerading as an ally all along, just before a Mass Effect: Universe logo and a coming-soon sting closed it out. Neither the footage nor the account has been verified.
Even so, the leak arrived with some circumstantial support. An alleged EA worker wrote on an Austin subreddit that there was “a trailer ready for Mass Effect 5 that I saw a few months ago.”
Commenters reacted quickly, with one user writing that the first few seconds “brought me back to that world for a bit,” while another said, “I [thought] I was gonna get Rick rolled but it’s real.”
The closure came roughly a year after EA agreed to a record-breaking $55 billion buyout, and EA has not said what happens to the Mass Effect franchise next.
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