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This is an IGN opinion piece from Carlos Morales. Mass Effect is his favorite game series, and he even wrote his major research paper for his Master’s degree on it.
For the past week, all of Council space has been in an uproar over the shuttering of beloved RPG studio BioWare and the subsequent cancelling of Mass Effect 5. The next game in the acclaimed science-fiction saga, tentatively titled Mass Effect: Universe as revealed by a leaked trailer, will now seemingly never be finished. To say that the corporate overlords at Electronic Arts have done a disservice to their employees and gamers all over would be a tremendous understatement. Both those in the game’s development and fans of the franchise have made their displeasure known to the tune of numerous opinion pieces and over 200,000 signatures for a petition to save the series from limbo. Avi Lewis, the leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, has even weighed in on the matter by saying the Canadian government should intervene and save the studio.
Whether these efforts will bear fruit is anyone’s guess, but the backlash is some of the worst I’ve seen for a gaming-related controversy in a while, perhaps aside from the PlayStation disc debacle. Mass Effect may not have been the most lucrative franchise to ever hit store shelves, but its popularity is plain to see from the passionate outcry. People love Mass Effect, they love BioWare, and they want to see what the studio was cooking with their latest entry. Instead, the studio was sacrificed at the altar of private equity debt, robbing the many to benefit the few. But to make matters even more tragic, the details we have learned about Mass Effect: Universe make it seem like it would’ve been the perfect game for where we are culturally in 2026.
When Mass Effect 3 launched in 2012, fan reception was incredibly polarized due to the much maligned ending to Commander Shepard’s journey. Despite unanimously positive critical reviews, it took the Extended Cut DLC and a long cooling-down period for a lot of fans to come around to the game’s strengths. I don’t like the ending either, but the vast majority of Mass Effect 3 is a fantastic experience, and in many ways it was ahead of its time in terms of how it anticipated the cultural anxieties of the 2020s.
For those not in the know, Mass Effect 3 features a world at war with the Reapers, a seemingly unstoppable race of techno-organic starships. The Reapers have arrived to exterminate all intelligent life in the galaxy, and basically the entire game is a gauntlet in the face of utter annihilation, with little in the way of hope or relief. Player character Commander Shepard may be a symbol for the galactic community’s resistance, but the overall tone of Mass Effect 3 is unlike any game I’ve ever played.
Mass Effect 3’s overwhelming sense of fatalism, of trying to hold on to hope in a world without a future, feels more resonant now than it did in 2012.
A profound melancholy and defeatism are baked into the game’s writing. It seems almost everyone understands deep down that this is the end of the world, or at least of the one we know. The Reapers destroy galactic civilization every 50,000 years, and they have never failed once in countless cycles. The chance of humanity’s survival is small, and even if Shepard succeeds, what the galaxy would look like after such a devastating war is hard to conceive. Friends and allies try to support each other, but the looming despair is impossible to ignore. Even Shepard’s potential victories, like curing the genophage virus afflicting the Krogan or brokering a peace treaty between the Geth and Quarians, feel like drops in the ocean compared to the dozens of worlds and billions of casualties crushed beneath the Reapers’ tentacled heels — brief moments of peace before the loudest bang of all.
Mass Effect 3’s overwhelming sense of fatalism, of trying to hold on to hope in a world without a future, feels more resonant now than it did in 2012. The 2020s have been a turbulent decade, with numerous potentially world-ending catastrophes either ongoing or just beyond the horizon. Between climate change, COVID-19, perpetual violence in the Middle East, the rise of generative AI, and unchecked late-stage capitalism, the last several years have been a nonstop cavalcade of disasters. The damage to the social contract and the realization that we’re probably all traumatized and a little bit insane is difficult to process, especially when the soaring cost of living forces people to still go to work and act like everything is normal while the world crumbles around them.
But now that we have more details about Mass Effect: Universe, it sounds like it would have been an artistic antidote to the contemporary mindset. Set 600 years after the Reaper War, the game would have depicted a galaxy that’s picked up the pieces after such widespread destruction. New alliances and factions have risen, and even the Batarians, a race that was said to be almost extinct during Mass Effect 3, have survived to the new era. Liara T’Soni, one of the most prominent of Shepard’s companions, was set to return as an asari matriarch who’s now witnessed nearly a millennium of strife but is still fighting the good fight.
Mass Effect: Andromeda’s solution to continuing the Mass Effect story after the cataclysmic events of Mass Effect 3 was to sidestep them; to have a new cast jump ship to another galaxy before the end of everything. By contrast, Mass Effect: Universe was going to tackle the problem head-on, with the developers challenging themselves to imagine what rebuilding after the apocalypse really looks like. We’ve only seen small glimpses of their solution, but a game that shows there was a path forward after the Reapers would likely resonate with people while we’re still in the trenches of the mid-2020s. Whether players picked up on it subconsciously or otherwise, Mass Effect: Universe had the potential to give people hope that we can persevere through the psycho reality we’re currently living in.
Mass Effect: Universe would not have solved the problems facing today’s world, but art does provide an outlet to reflect on and process one’s day-to-day experience. “Your words are as empty as your future,” says Reaper villain Sovereign in the first Mass Effect. It sure would’ve been nice to play something that offers a counterargument.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles, and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
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