// KOTAKU — GAMING
Mass Effect 5’s Leaked Trailer: 9 Things We Noticed
BioWare was shut down yesterday by EA, bringing a sudden end to a studio whose legacy of legendary role-playing games stretches back nearly 30 years. This meant that the studio’s Mass Effect project, being developed by a relative skeleton crew after a downsizing in January of 2025, was canceled, and fans likely won’t get the chance to return to the beloved science-fiction universe unless EA sells the IP. However, we got a new look at what the team was working on thanks to a leaked trailer, revealing that the game was going to be called Mass Effect: Universe.
The trailer is short, but there’s a lot to extrapolate in the two minutes we see. We can also make some educated guesses based on the years of teases BioWare put out before EA shuttered the studio. So let’s try to make heads or tails of it all.
Mass Effect: Universe Trailer byu/Random_Hyabusa_Ninja inmasseffect
The trailer starts with an outside shot of a bar, and we can see a giant skyscraper outside that doesn’t look quite like anything we’ve seen before. It perhaps most closely resembles architecture seen in London after it gets rebuilt post-war in Mass Effect 3’s Extended Cut. There’s a pretty big mix of alien races here. We see Salarians, Turians, Volus, Asari, Quarians, Krogan, even a Drell or two. Part of me would be surprised if this was supposed to be on Earth considering just how diverse the bar’s clientele is, but given that Universe was supposedly meant to take place hundreds of years after the original trilogy and Earth was the final battle ground of the Reaper War in ME3, maybe our planet became more of a tourist attraction. Or this could be somewhere the series has never taken us before, which is probably the more likely explanation.
While previous teases for the game that would have been Mass Effect: Universe implied it would somehow bridge the gap between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, most figured that we wouldn’t have been playing as Andromeda protagonist Pathfinder Ryder. A loud and annoying contingent of fans wanted BioWare to bring back original trilogy hero Commander Shepard despite most of Mass Effect 3’s endings resulting in their death, as well as BioWare’s previous teases implying this game would take place closer to the events of Mass Effect: Andromeda. Thankfully, it looks like BioWare had no intention of bringing Shepard back.
Instead, we would have been playing as someone who seems like a kind of galactic James Bond–type. An Asari approaches him and says that he looks like he’s military. He says he isn’t anymore, and we get a flashback to his time fighting in the human Alliance military. He and his squad have a firefight against a group of Krogan. Last year’s N7 Day teaser revealed that there were plans to feature some kind of Krogan civil war in the story, but it’s unclear if this is part of that conflict. Was this new guy’s squad intercepting some kind of Krogan mission, or were the big scary aliens just a formidable foe to show our new hero fighting off big baddies? Whatever the case, he’s out of that line of work. Too many fires to put out.
Now that he’s no longer with the Alliance, he’s entered a “new line of work.” He’s still traveling throughout the galaxy, though, and is using the Mass Relay transit network to do it. Notably, these were all destroyed at the end of Mass Effect 3, though the Extended Cut DLC made a big hoopla about how that gutwrenching, galaxy-altering choice could be patched up, no big deal.
We see a few shots of what would have been the new ship, and it looks a lot smaller than the Normandy from the trilogy or Tempest from Andromeda. Inside, we see our space-faring not-Bond talking with some crew members, including a human and Krogan, and looking at a galaxy map of the Milky Way. It’s unclear if these would have been party members or part of the ship’s crew.
Though the previous teasers imply that the Andromeda galaxy would play a part in the story, it does look like the majority of the game would have