BioWare veteran says the cancelled Mass Effect had about 50 developers and big ambitions

A longtime BioWare developer has described the studio’s plans for its cancelled Mass Effect project. In a LinkedIn post reported by PC Gamer, he said a team of about 50 people was working on the game when Electronic Arts closed BioWare.

Tony de Waal was a cinematic supervisor at BioWare. According to PC Gamer, he first joined the studio “29+ years ago,” left shortly after Mass Effect 2 launched, and came back in 2021 to work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Once that game was done, he moved over to the next Mass Effect, where he said the team aimed for “a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match.”

De Waal wrote that the developers had studied recent releases from Larian and CD Projekt. Their goal, he said, was to move Mass Effect forward without breaking from what made the original trilogy work. He also expressed sadness that players will never see the project, and he praised the small group of developers who stayed with BioWare until the end.

The post also covers how hard it was to make The Veilguard, which PC Gamer notes was BioWare’s second game built on EA and DICE’s Frostbite engine. De Waal called the work “a herculean effort.” He pointed in particular to how complicated it was to make a customizable player character work across more than three hours of cinematics. He ends the post by saying he is looking for work in cinematic production.

As reported by Nintendo Life, BioWare confirmed its closure in an official statement on its website and said that early development on the next Mass Effect would end. According to PC Gamer, the shutdown is part of a wider restructuring at EA following its acquisition by Saudi Arabia’s PIF and two other investment firms. More than 400 people have been laid off as the publisher shifts its focus to live service shooters and sports games.