Those mourning yesterday’s shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our best look at what that game could have been with a short, leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe. In the roughly two-minute montage—which describes itself as “in-engine footage from our small team” that “uses our pre-production assets”—an ex-military officer wearing an N7 trenchcoat (similar to the one seen in that 2020 teaser) encounters an Asari at a bar.
He talks of his frustration with military life—“by the time you put out one fire, another had already started”—before discussing his new line of work “stopping [the fires] before they start” and “making the choices no one else is willing to make. Going where others are afraid to go.” Mass Effect: Universe Trailer by u/Random_Hyabusa_Ninja in masseffect As the intriguing Asari at the bar reveals herself to be the one who metaphorically “start[s] the fires,” N7 allies reveal themselves as backup. The cutscene transitions seamlessly into an all-out group gunfight in the bar, complete with hostiles being stuck in place inside mass effect fields and others being crushed by furniture brought down on top of them.
The action-packed bar scene is interspersed with short vignettes from around the game’s universe, including a hovercraft speeding over an icy planet, an examination of a truly gigantic alien suspended in a glass cylinder, and a team looking at a holographic map dotted with dozens of points of interest. The existence of the internal Mass Effect: Universe trailer was first revealed by an anonymous Reddit poster yesterday and then confirmed by IGN early Thursday morning. The trailer video appeared on Reddit slightly before noon Eastern time, with mods there saying they couldn’t “independently verify the authenticity” but that it “seems legitimate.” Within hours, both IGN and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier had confirmed that the trailer was authentic and came from someone inside EA.
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