I managed my expectations on a new mass effect game. Of course I wanted to be back in the world.
But this still really hurts to hear. Wish something could have happened to help them. Not sure if dragon ages poor performance quickened this result.
On another note, I wish studios would stop announcing games before they have something concrete. What was the point of that teaser all those years ago if they are still considering it early development today?
I imagine they put out those teasers so they could go back and tell the publishing execs "See? People are still excited about Mass Effect! There's still a market for it!"
Guess even that wasn't enough, though. An ignominious end for one of, if not the single most important studio in western RPG history.
Tbf, I feel like any excitement for a new Mass Effect game has always been tempered by a lot of skepticism. And given that these comments are filled with people saying that it probably would have been a disappointment, can you even really blame the execs for not being convinced?
What’s frustrating is people don’t thinka new Mass Effect itself would be disappointing just one made by current Bioware would be.
Mass Effect has the name recognition to be a successful franchise it just needs to made by a team that understands what made the OG trilogy so beloved. Strong characters and good writing is what the franchise needs.
Kind of like how WotC (I know, I know) brought Larian on to develop BG3. They realized those folks probably understood what made BG great better than any of the people still at Bioware. And considering how long it had been since BG2, I imagine hardly any of those same devs remained anywa, similar as how few of the people that made Mass Effect great were still there either
And then WoTC let go or lost pretty much all of the D&D team that worked with Larian on BG3 since the beginning, resulting in Larian turning down the option to do more with D&D and instead returned to their own IP.
Modern popular game IP owners are largely horrible stewards of their worlds.
I feel they at least deserved one last attempt to prove themselves. If ME5 came out and it was received like Veilguard, so be it. I wouldn't have been that upset if that was what did them in. Mass Effect was always the bigger IP to begin with, so if that couldn't save them, nothing could have.
But to just unceremoniously kill off the entire studio because it'll help Jared Kushner's bottom line? Fuck that. Fuck EA. Fuck private equity. The entire western AAA development landscape is a goddamn joke because of shit like this.
Well you'll get no arguments from me about that last section, Bioware was dying because EA has been strangling them for years But Bioware was dying, and the fact that Mass Effect 5 was only being thrown around as a hail Mary does not give me hope that it would be a triumphant return to form.
How many hundreds of millions of dollars and failed projects need to be had until they got their "last chance". Dragon age was a huge flop. Anthem was a massive failure and a bigger embarrassment. It's not like EA didn't want those games to succeed. They had a decade working on a game they rush finished and put out in less than 12 months and then were shocked that it released in the state that it did and blamed fans for expecting too much. If you wanna make the argument that veil guard was fucked with through development I'll give that to you, but why wouldn't they helicopter parent the team that hadn't released a successful video game in over 13 years? And this isn't even getting into Andromeda, a game that I was a fan of.
People were begging for ME3 Legendary multi-player for ages, I remember them saying they were gonna look at it and then just nothing. And from an EA studio not doing multi-player should've been a sign
i like the changed they did to ME1 but they barely did anything in ME2 and ME3. Why couldn't they simply rework the inventory so you could use whatever weapons you wanted for ME2, still limit the slots but give it a bit more flexibility. it's not like it would have taken a lot of time either.
Guess even that wasn't enough, though. An ignominious end for one of, if not the single most important studios in western RPG history.
This has been the way throughout EA's history. Doesn't matter how important your IP is culturally, doesn't matter how much money it might make, you're always 1-2 underperforming (by EA's standards, not yours) games from being shut down entirely.
Honestly even The Sims, a simple cash cow sales performance-wise (i.e. always makes vastly more money than you put in) has been on a knife edge several times.
I imagine they put out those teasers so they could go back and tell the publishing execs "See? People are still excited about Mass Effect! There's still a market for it!"
Yeah, I would be surprised if there was anything seriously in the works, at least for this long. I'm sure there was plenty of pre-production and churn, but I'd be shocked if there was anything resembling a finalized script and design, ESPECIALLY considering how notorious Bioware was for changing critical narrative points very late in the process even in their heyday.
The ME3 ending stain never got washed away, ME:A underperformed and put another big stain on the company for the criticism it received, and I'd be willing to bet a LOT of the vague teasers were more just trying to prove to INTERNAL audiences that the appetite was still out there. Less about you or me seeing them, and more about going to an executive and showing all the Kotaku and IGN articles getting posted speculating about the "next Mass Effect."
I don't know anybody outside a very specific niche that ever seriously thought another Mass Effect was on the table after Andromeda.
It's going to be forgotten now but that ME4 trailer was the last thing played at that Games Awards. That's huge, and goes to show the goodwill this series had even before the Legendary Edition came in and got a whole lot more people into it.
Unless this Amazon show that'll probably never be made interferes with the rights (God, it's like 1990s Doctor Who all over again), I do think the IP will be snapped up for that reason. The trilogy has cachet, and not just amongst us lot who've played it ten times.
I mean, we gotta hope EA's new management are willing to licence out or sell off IPs. The problem with EA for the last 25-ish years has been that, even when they stop using an IP, they generally refuse to licence it out or sell it off, and rarely even use it again with an EA studio (usually only in a one-off mobile game, if at all). The legendary "EA Vault" people sometimes refer to where the IPs all go to be hoarded for no reason.
But maybe the sheer greed of the new owners will change that?
I played 1 and 2 about ten times. Never played 3 or any of them again after experiencing that ending, and was hoping ME4 would retcon it so I could finally replay the trilogy
Yea I had a feeling this was coming. It was announced years ago, but all anyone had to say was that it was Early pre prodcution for so long. Wonder if they knew it was coming after veilguard and were just riding it out ?
Feels awful to know so many people just lost their livlihoods cus EA is disgusting
I hope they genuinely tried to make things work to keep the studio open. But once shareholders are involved, cuts are so much more brutal and it’s not fair and a disservice to the people creating these things and trying to make the company money by making good games. Someone needs to keep games releasing on time but that should not come at the cost of the creative process.
I just assumed it wasn't coming out when we stopped getting new news about it for years. I figured it was in dev purgatory and never going to really happen.
According to Todd Howard of Bethesda, his ideal time from announcement to release is a single week. They also decided to shadowdrop the Oblivion remaster. On the other hand, they did release the announcement video for ES6 back in 2018 and we've yet to receive any other details.
This does make me wonder when the ideal time to announce a game would be? 3 months before release?
I actually think Todd and Bethesda nailed it with FO4. 5-6 months was enough time to build hype, but with the game functionally complete, marketing wasn’t making promises that devs might not be able to keep. Why they didn’t stick with that model is beyond me.
For sure! That was such an utter disappointment. I was hoping with good will from legendary edition that would have given them enough steam to another ME release but with veilguard bombing too, sealed their fate it seams.
As long as a studio is publicly traded, they won't. The main reason they do that is to generate intrest which brings the investors on board. Bioware was already floundering when they announced ME5. It was one of their last ditch efforts to get money on board.
Same here. Beyond BioWare even, we're in an age of commercialized, consultant-produced sequels ruining IPs. LotR, Star Wars, the Witcher (show, not game).
If Shepard's story ended in 2012, ya know what? It's fine. At least ME dies before it gets ruined.
Because those teasers aren’t for gamers, they’re for investors to convince them to give the studio money.
Another example would be Star Wars Eclipse. It was teased years ago, showed a bunch of random “Star Warsy” stuff, and literally no other new information has been revealed in all this time.
Hear hear to your last point. I also believe that other studios and companies should learn from this and not announce things until they’ve got something concrete. It should be called ‘the BioWare effect’
A lot of those teasers are done for recruiting purposes. By announcing what you’re working on you can more easily draw talent in and your recruiters can poach people for something that might be more personally interesting to the talent.
Also, the project being announced means devs can put it on their resume. There are many devs in the industry who have worked over a decade on various AAA titles and never had any of them ship, and subsequently have to go into job interviews like "I have worked 11 years on three different AAA games. Sorry, I am not allowed to tell you more."
I never thought about recruiting! Always thought it was for hype and funding. Seems hard to believe BioWare would need to build hype for people to work there.
My theory is that the capitalist enshittification of the gaming industry has acted as a prototype for every other industry.
A multinational corp bought it out and steadily gutted them and their projects for spare parts, anyone with half a brain has vacated this industry post-haste, and the people left are the ones who can’t go anywhere else due to being low skilled or otherwise.
And not only that, but those left are under extremely under resourced and given no ability to succeed, short of a miracle.
This is happening at an earlier stage in every other industry.
I kind of explained it in my comment, but to put it in diff wording:
Every inch of the company has been squeezed dry for profit.
First it was interference in games to force a model of ongoing profitability (micro-transactions), or other creative interference with a pure profit motive.
Then gutting schedules and resourcing to reduce project costs while aiming for the biggest return on investment for least expenditure.
Then gutting staff to save on wages.
All of this while the people making these decisions reap record profits. This post is evidence of the late stage it has reached.
There is still Exodus and Osiris Reborn to look forward to as replacements. Those will hopefully be our new Mass effects. And likely will be infinitely better than anything Bioware is going to put out in 2026
What was the point of that teaser all those years ago if they are still considering it early development today?
You can't keep such big projects a secret for very long. Not with so many developers and contractors on the project. News will eventually be leaked. So, it's better to control the narrative than let the leak control the narrative.
Honestly, I genuinely don’t know how a Mass Effect 5 would work
You’d have to canonise an ending. But you’re also needing to canonise outcomes. Are the Geth exterminated? Are the Quarians an endangered race? Are they living together in harmony? Krogans? Squadmates fates?
Even if you chose the popular fan outcomes. All the Squadmates live. Krogans are cured, Geth and Quarians are cool. Etc.
Now anytime someone goes back to play, they’re only going to be going for the canon play through because what’s the point?
Well for it to be successful, they would need to accommodate for all endings which is challenging but what made the series popular. It would be no different than jumping straight into ME2 with no save pulling over from ME1. There is a “cannon” for all games but that can be adjusted based on the outcome of the previous game.
This is what made th game feel so lifelike and lived in but it also requires an attention to detail and depth that I am not sure the company had anymore. Wanted them to but it would have been tough to scratch the surface of making the game feel cohesive to the story worth telling/playing.
I think being owned by a big company makes it really hard to move forward. There's so many stakeholders that you have to convince in order to green light a project, that it's hard to even get off the ground, and that's how studios die. Halo Studios had a similar fate, where they didn't have any game under active development when they got killed, which is kinda shocking, but also not surprising.
They had three back to back failures since ME: Andromeda, it was only a matter of time until someone put the studio out of its misery. Still stings it ended being the Saudis and some Trump cronies that did it.
They apparently were going to start working on it closer to the teaser, but a lot of the team got moved over to help dragon age ship. They've apparently only been working in it for the last year or so according to schreier.
I think it had alot to do with dragon ages failure but also Anthem shutting down & mass layoffs/quitting. I blame EA most of all but Bioware hasn't been the same for years unfortunately
This may have been a mercy killing. Imagine the veilguard writing team in the mass effect universe? Shepard teaching Jack and Miranda that they aren't so different and we can all get along
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u/CobraShelby95 8h ago
I managed my expectations on a new mass effect game. Of course I wanted to be back in the world.
But this still really hurts to hear. Wish something could have happened to help them. Not sure if dragon ages poor performance quickened this result.
On another note, I wish studios would stop announcing games before they have something concrete. What was the point of that teaser all those years ago if they are still considering it early development today?