Mass Effect 5 Was Chasing Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 - and a BioWare Veteran Says It Was "Something Special"

Mass Effect 5 Was Chasing Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 - and a BioWare Veteran Says It Was "Something Special"

EA's official language was bloodless: a "small team," a project in "early development," a portfolio decision made as part of a pivot toward "fewer simultaneous, large-scale projects." The people who were actually building the game describe something else entirely.

They describe a team that had studied the two most celebrated RPGs of the decade, that had solved its creative direction, and that believed, in the words of one 29-year veteran, that it was "making something special." They describe a trailer that was finished and ready to ship. They describe, in short, a game - not a line item.

When EA closed BioWare and canceled the next Mass Effect on October 21, 2026, it ended more than three decades of studio history. But the more revealing story sits in the gap between the corporate memo and the farewell posts. That gap is where Mass Effect 5 actually lived.

What Tony de Waal Actually Said

Tony de Waal is not a peripheral figure. He spent more than 29 years at BioWare across two stints, leaving after Mass Effect 2 and returning in 2021 to help ship Dragon Age: The Veilguard. He was among the roughly 50 remaining BioWare staff laid off when the studio closed - a figure he himself echoed in his LinkedIn farewell post, referring to the "remaining 50-ish people" who went down with the studio.

His assessment of what was lost is the clearest window anyone has offered into the project.

According to de Waal, the next Mass Effect would have offered "a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match." He wrote that "I believe we were making something special."

He also named the benchmark. The team watched what Larian Studios (Baldur's Gate 3) and CD Projekt (Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher) "were bringing to the table," he said, aiming to "bring Mass Effect to the next level while remaining true to the Trilogy." For CD Projekt specifically, that meant the studio's signature blend of cinematic scale and dense, consequence-heavy world-building - the kind of production ambition Cyberpunk 2077 pursued even through its troubled launch and subsequent redemption.

That last clause carries real weight. "Remaining true to the Trilogy" confirms what the December 2020 teaser implied with its Liara imagery and N7 armor: this was a return to the Milky Way, set hundreds of years after Mass Effect 3, not an Andromeda-style clean break. The team was not reinventing the franchise. It was trying to out-build the best RPGs on the market while staying anchored to the story fans had spent fifteen years caring about.

"Early Development" vs. "We Did Figure It Out"

EA's framing of the cancellation, published in its newsroom memo, was carefully hedged. The project was a "small team" effort in "early development," cut as the company concentrated investment behind three strategic priorities: "Deepen Our Core," "Expand Our Reach" and "Transform Our Business."

The developers tell a different story, though not necessarily a contradictory one.

Former Mass Effect 5 writer Catherynne M. Valente was blunt: "We did figure it out. We were working on a great game. Just saying." And reporting indicates that a Mass Effect 5 trailer was ready for release before the cancellation landed.

It is worth being precise here. A marketing trailer being cut is entirely compatible with a game in early development - studios routinely produce cinematic teasers years before a project is shippable. What the two accounts disagree on is not the production timeline but the creative state of the thing. EA's language describes a project too nascent to justify continued investment. The developers' language describes a project that had found its answer and was building toward it.

The game's public life supports the latter reading of its ambition, if not its readiness. It was teased on N7 Day in November 2020, formally revealed at The Game Awards that December, and teased again on N7 Day 2023. Reporting indicates development had been underway since at least February 2022.

The Timing: 50 People, 400 Layoffs, and a $55bn Buyout

The scale of the closure is easy to lose inside the corporate language. EA cut roughly 400 jobs company-wide, about 3% of its staff. Roughly 50 of those were BioWare's remaining employees. The Edmonton studio and its workspace are closing entirely.

The timing is harder to ignore. EA went private in a $55bn deal backed by Saudi PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, a transaction that closed in August 2026 with roughly $18 to $20bn in debt attached. The BioWare closure arrived roughly two and a half months later, among the first major cuts since the buyout.

EA's stated rationale is portfolio prioritization - concentrating resources behind projects leadership believes can carry that debt load, including Marvel's Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game.

The financial context EA will not lead with is Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The RPG reached roughly 1.5 million players in its launch quarter against an expectation of around 3 million - a shortfall of nearly 50%. Reporting has tied the timing of the cuts to post-buyout restructuring rather than any single project's performance, and the two explanations are best understood as complementary. A newly private company carrying billions in debt, looking at a 1.5-million-player miss on its last major RPG, did not need much convincing to stop funding a long-tail Mass Effect.

What Dies With a Studio

BioWare's own farewell, published on its studio blog the same day, was gracious. The studio thanked players and noted that its games "became so much more because you played them."

The human toll extended well beyond de Waal. Mass Effect executive producer Mike Gamble said fans' support "has meant everything to me over the past 17 years at BioWare." Dragon Age writer David Gaider reflected that at its height, BioWare "was the best at what it did."

That height is measurable - founded in Edmonton in 1995, acquired by EA in 2007, Mass Effect 2 still holding a 96 on Metacritic - but what the studio lost in its final decade was institutional knowledge. Casey Hudson departed in 2014, Gaider in 2016, Mike Laidlaw in 2017, James Ohlen in 2018, Mac Walters in 2023. Andromeda drew mixed reviews in 2017. Anthem, a live-service misfire, saw its servers shut down in 2026. Each departure carried away expertise that could not simply be replaced, and the closure of the studio ends the accumulation entirely.

The franchise itself is not dead. Reporting indicates that the Amazon MGM Studios live-action Mass Effect series remains in development for Prime Video. The IP survives. The games, for now, end here.

The Trailer Nobody Will Ever See

Return to de Waal's line: "I believe we were making something special." The tragedy is not simply that a game was canceled. It is that the people closest to it, with decades of institutional knowledge and a clear-eyed view of the competition, believed it was working.

A finished trailer exists that will never air. A team of roughly 50 people, many of them veterans of the studio's defining era, had solved the creative problem in front of them and were building toward a release that will now never come.

Declaring Mass Effect dead would be inaccurate, and it would miss the point. The more uncomfortable question is what the closure says about an industry in which a team this experienced can solve its hardest creative problem and still watch the project disappear into a restructuring spreadsheet. If "we did figure it out" is no longer enough to keep a game alive, what is?