Mass Effect Was My Ultimate White Whale”: Journey Composer Shares 20 Minutes of Music From Talks to Work on BioWare’s Recently Cancelled RPG

“It’s been hard to see dear friends lose their jobs, and this beloved franchise seemingly vanish forever”

The gradual trickle of details and glimpses at what BioWare were planning for the cancelled Mass Effect 5 continues, this time courtesy of a composer who was in talks to join the project and score the RPG’s soundtrack. That composer, Austin Wintory, has chosen to share around 20 minutes of music he assembled as an attempt to explore where he might take things had he ended up hired to score Commander Shepard’s next adventure. Naturally, with BioWare’s closure, that never came to pass.

The eight tracks in the YouTube video Wintory, whose compositions have graced the likes of Journey and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, range from a main theme to intense battle tunes and the sorts of ‘ooh, there’s something happening’ songs that usually accompany key story moments. The opener, dubbed The Legacy of Shepard, blends pensive piano tinkling with bombastic sci-fi swells. The final track is a funkier remixed version of it. I think my favorite might be track seven, Forever Calibrating, just because it’s the sort of relaxed and atmospheric backing tune I tend to put on for ambience while working.

“Working on Mass Effect 5 was my career’s biggest dream project, my white whale,” Wintory wrote in the video’s description. “It is my favorite franchise of all time, and for the last couple years I’d been in serious conversations with BioWare and EA to jump in. My suggestion was to treat the original game’s masterful Jack Wall/Sam Hulick score as a starting point, and to build on it from there with deeper use of physical, analog synths and a more tightly interwoven use of the orchestra. But a love letter first and foremost (not unlike my approach to the Aliens franchise with Fireteam Elite).

“As part of the ongoing dialogue, I decided last year (2025) to surprise the folks with an elaborate production: nearly 20 minutes of music, fully recorded and produced with synths, vocals and a large orchestra here in LA. I’d not yet learned any narrative details of what they were planning so this was just pure musical exploration. Receiving the news alongside everyone else that EA had decided to not only cancel the project but shutdown BioWare entirely was a deeply felt loss. It’s been hard to see dear friends lose their jobs, and this beloved franchise seemingly vanish forever.”

The composer closed by thanking BioWare and EA’s music department for giving him the chance to put together these experimental Mass Effect tracks.

While this outpouring of info about what BioWare were up to with Mass Effect 5 is likely all we’ll ever get of it, given the folks who were working on it have been scattered to the winds, some fans of the series have begun petitioning for Shep’s space adventures not to end up rotting in EA’s big shed of disused game IP. Though, surprisingly, they appear not to be teaming that call with the assertion that it should ideally be the same devs who were working on the series prior to BioWare’s closure that get first dibs on any opportunity to carry on making Mass Effects.