Earlier this week, EA announced the closure of BioWare, a game studio with a 30-year history of compelling role-playing games, complex characters and bold, choice-driven narratives. Its forthcoming game in the Mass Effect sci-fi series has been cancelled, and more than 400 people are losing their jobs. As someone who has worked in the video games industry for 15 years and spent almost 20 as a BioWare fan, I am among millions of mourners today.
It’s not terribly hard to see why BioWare got the chop. Its parent company has been saddled with $20bn of debt thanks to a recent leveraged buyout involving Jared Kushner and the Saudi wealth fund. EA was looking for weight to cut loose, and despite its hardcore fanbase and reputation for genre-defining RPGs such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age, BioWare hadn’t put out a critical or commercial hit in over 10 years.
Its forthcoming game, titled Mass Effect: Universe according to a leaked trailer, was announced back in 2020. Despite some flashy teases, it was still years away from release. The three games that comprise original space-faring Mass Effect trilogy count as my favourites of all time.
I first played in 2010, shortly after buying my Xbox 360 and being reassured by my friends that the game was a worthy investment, and have replayed them countless times since. Depending on the day, the top spot fluctuates; more often than not it’s the character-driven sequel Mass Effect 2, which ends with one of the most iconic missions in gaming, that takes the top spot. Released over a five-year period from 2007-12, the trilogy follows the adventures of Commander Shepard: a lawless Spectre special agent who is empowered by the galactic Citadel Council to use any means necessary to protect its interests and get the job done.
Shepard’s appointment as the first human Spectre in a galaxy where humans are the new kids on the block aligns with the arrival of the Reapers, an ancient synthetic race that raze all organic life every 50,000 years. Shepard must convince the galaxy that the threat is real and gather its top soldiers, scientists and scoundrels to defeat it. When I played Mass Effect for the first time, I didn’t get it.
Its controls felt janky and awkward, and I was thrown headlong into a galaxy full of history and politics that I didn’t understand: the game didn’t spell things out, throwing out names and jargon and expecting me to follow. After one exceedingly frustrating encounter with the Mako, the game’s infamously awkward land buggy, I quit entirely. Some months later, something drew me back: the feeling of a job left half done.
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