This week’s been rough on anyone who enjoyed a BioWare or Mass Effect game, and it appears to only be getting worse.
Thanks to Australian YouTuber Dantics, a slew of previously embargoed information about the canceled Mass Effect Universe game has been revealed. And damn it, it sounds amazing.
Dantics was part of a “Mass Effect Council” of content creators and people who were brought in to provide feedback for the game, and they’ve gone into detail about a lot of what Mass Effect Universe was going to entail.
For example, Dantics says the player character was a customizable N7 agent, “a cross between John Wick and James Bond,” and it was set 600-plus years after the Reaper War during the events of the original trilogy. He said that Shepard’s legacy was “preserved, regardless of your ending,” and the game was based around a “galactic cold war” and “a galaxy divided into three major factions.”
Tying it all together was Liara T’Soni, the Asari love interest and squad member from the Shepard games, who was “now an incredibly powerful Asari Matriarch.” That alone is a gut-punch to me. I loved Liara, as did anyone who played those games. We could’ve had her back in a new way. No longer.
Here’s a list of more info from Dantics’ intel, with each facet sounding more exciting than the last:
- Humanity, Krogan, Batarians, and more allied together
- Council races forming their own alliance
- The Geth emerging as a third superpower
- A galactic Cold War instead of another Reaper-style invasion with a shadowy adversary
- Geth-built megastructures
- Connections between the Milky Way and Andromeda
- Experimental technology implanted in you as a unique point of difference
- Hacking and manipulating the environment
- See through walls, identify systems, remotely trigger hazards and more
- Handcrafted missions like ME1-3
- But with Hitman-style freedom in how you complete them
- Brutal close-range executions
- Squadmates who can clash with each other
- Romance wasn’t being sanitized
“From what I saw, BioWare was making Mass Effect for us, the fans, not for people who don’t exist,” Dantics said. “It looked incredible. And now we may never get to play it.”
This sucks.
