Ex-BioWare director details canceled Mass Effect: Universe

Romain Toutain, former Mass Effect franchise technical director at BioWare, revealed new details about the canceled Mass Effect: Universe during a Twitch stream in which he commentated over the project's internal trailer, according to kotaku.com.

Toutain said all choices made in earlier Mass Effect games were taken into account in Universe. Players could plug saves together to create parallel universes and timelines — a system he compared to Zero Time Dilemma — and could make decisions that contradict things already done, creating branching points in the timeline.

He described a system that paused the game to check whether a state was valid and, if not, determined what conditions were needed to make it valid. The main character would be customizable, and players could swap between gunplay and hand-to-hand combat at a moment's notice.

Toutain also said the game would include lore explaining how the Mass Relays were repaired after their destruction in Mass Effect 3. The leaked trailer, he said, was an internal trailer meant to convey mood, which is why it used the song Quartz by French 79. He added that the squid-like asset people theorized was an organic Reaper was internally named Billy.

BioWare closed this week, ending development on Mass Effect: Universe after years of work. In the days since, fans and Mass Effect community members have urged EA to sell the studio and its IP to save the game. Earlier BioWare releases handled prior choices differently: Dragon Age: The Veilguard used a three-choice import system, while Dragon Age Keep was an online app that let players create world states to import into Dragon Age: Inquisition.