Editorial: Alleged Mass Effect: Universe Trailer Leak Changes Nothing About BioWare Closure

The writing was on the wall for years when it came to the studio.

Developer BioWare was shuttered yesterday after 30 years of making video games. The likes of Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, and many other beloved, legendary games were produced by the studio across those three decades, cementing it in the hearts and minds of countless gamers. However, as time went by, the studio was slowly but surely becoming something different than what it had been before. Where once the studio was focused on tight, intelligent storytelling and compelling gameplay, that all started to take a back seat for something else: social messaging.

I talked about this a little in yesterday's article discussing the closure of BioWare, but by the time Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched, it was clear that the studio was more fixated on identity politics than it was on gameplay. This isn't to say representation and progressive themes can't be in video games, but rather that they can't overshadow the gameplay or the narrative (or both). Dragon Age is a dark fantasy series set in a medieval-style world; yet, throughout the game, there are lectures on preferred pronouns and misgendering, mastectomy/top surgery scars in the character creator, and cloying, sacharine dialogue that wasn't likable in any setting, medieval or otherwise.

And while that all could have been forgiven if the gameplay really rocked, it didn't. Veilguard was largely bland and generic, without a real hook to keep players invested even if the story wasn't very good, even if the themes didn't match the series. Players were subjected to vanilla mechanics and a narrative that practically clubbed people over the head with its progressive ideology. In many ways, Veilguard felt like someone's Dragon Age fan fiction come to life. A fan fiction that cost EA hundreds of millions of dollars when it failed to hit sales prognostications and ostensibly killed the franchise for the foreseeable future.

Now, someone has supposedly leaked a trailer of the in-development Mass Effect: Universe that BioWare was working on before the studio was closed. The footage (see above) is a little over two minutes long and features a new player character, who isn't named, stepping into a bar and speaking to an asari. The clip features beta footage built with in-engine assets depicting the new lead talking about his time in the Systems Alliance Military and his frustrations with being reactionary to problems instead of proactive against them. It ends with he and returning character Liara T'Soni taking out the people in the bar in a big fight.

The footage, given that it's early in development, given something like 50 people put it together, looks fine. It's inoffensive. But it's nothing special. It's a proof of concept that walks and talks like it's Mass Effect. And we've seen another game that also walked and talked a lot like Mass Effect before taking off the mask at launch: it was called Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was also made by BioWare and was a major letdown. It was the beginning of ideology superceding gameplay as the most important aspect of the studio's games.

Complaining about social messaging overunning a game isn't a complaint about the message itself. Fans wouldn't be any happier playing a Madden game where the announcers, instead of commentating on what's happening on the field, were instead discussing the dangers of climate change. No one would assume that if a person said, "Hey, I can appreciate what you're saying, but what does this have to do with the football game? Why am I hearing about climate change in Madden?" that they were actually saying climate change is bunk and they hate you for believing in it.

Now, I'm sure some would argue, "well how is being inclusive pushing social messaging?" Uh, it's not. The issue isn't the diversity, or preferred pronouns, or top scars. The issue is, again, when the messaging puts gameplay, narrative, and everything else on the backburner. When your game will only cast a straight old white man as a villain, that's messaging run amok. When your characters can't experience adveristy or fail because they're of a certain identity group, that's messaging run amok. When the game launches filled with bugs and glitches but the multiplayer mode makes sure to restrict references to anything Christian or Catholic, that's messaging run amok.

All of these things are problems that BioWare and many other Western game studios are presently plagued with. The message comes before the game. The Message dictates the direction of the game. The Message mandates characterization. The Message is everything. And at the end, it seemed to be everything for BioWare. Why would any fan want more Mass Effect if The Message was going to continue to be at the forefront? When there was no guarantee that it wouldn't, slick trailer notwithstanding?

This is the same BioWare that censored scenes with Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition that dared to prominently feature her butt, but we're supposed to believe that Mass Effect: Universe would have been a return to the glory days of the series? How can you trust a studio that labels some pretty mild sex appeal as mysogny and "problematic" to produce a game that will appeal to the sensible center of the audience? Because that's what has been lost across all these years of politicking and sanitizing; the core, mainstream audience that isn't offended by the gender binary, sexy women and men in games, off color humor, and so on. As devs push aside, and in some cases attack, this segment of their fandoms, they are shrinking the player pool down to virtually nothing.

All the Mass Effect: Universe trailers in the world can't erase the decline of quality in the product that BioWare was putting out. With so many key legacy personnel gone, with so many failures under the studio's belt, it's pretty clear why EA decided it was time to pull the plug. Make no mistake: the decline of BioWare was as much the fault of management as it was anyone on the dev team. But the buck ultimately stops with EA's top brass, and someone decided that they'd seen enough with the decimation of the Dragon Age franchise, and it's hard to fault them. It was a good run, and the trailer might be fun to speculate about, but BioWare was already, is, and will remain, dead.