A Mass Effect 5 Trailer Featuring Liara Seems to Have Leaked After BioWare’s Shutdown

If yesterday’s heartbreaking announcement slipped past you, EA cut 400 jobs this week, and that included the entire BioWare team. The developer responsible for Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and other beloved RPGs has been closed, and its final project has been scrapped. That project was the fifth Mass Effect game. BioWare revealed almost nothing about it, not even a formal title. Since the closure, though, a trailer for the sci-fi follow-up has been spreading across the internet.

No official BioWare spokesperson has verified the footage. However, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier says it is genuine. Schreier has a strong record of reliable reporting in the industry, and he was the first to report the layoffs. IGN also says it has confirmed the trailer is authentic.

Anyone who wants to see it firsthand can watch the trailer on Reddit.

A message at the start of the video explains that the footage was rendered in-engine by a small team using pre-production assets. It contains no gameplay. Instead, it presents a polished CG cutscene in which a new protagonist talks with an asari woman in a packed bar. As he describes his past, we see flashes of him as a soldier and later as a kind of spy. He travels from planet to planet, finding conflicts and “stopping them before they start.” The asari then admits she is the one “starting the fires” he has been trying to put out. Behind her, another woman lowers her hood and turns out to be Liara T’Soni, one of Mass Effect’s most iconic characters.

Liara and the protagonist then join forces against the asari and her henchmen, using firearms and telekinetic powers. The screen fades to black and then returns with the game’s intended title: Mass Effect Universe. The trailer looks fantastic, which makes it all the more painful that the game will never be released.

To mourn BioWare along with us, read the oral history of the studio we have republished, which former editor Matt Bertz first wrote in 2016. You can also revisit our cover stories on BioWare’s latest games: Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Anthem, and Mass Effect Andromeda.

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