Yesterday, the video game industry lost one of the best RPG studios when EA announced that they are cutting 400 jobs, and shutting down BioWare as part of moving forward towards its next chapter. The next Mass Effect game, which had been in early development under a small team at BioWare, has been canceled with the closure of BioWare. Today, a new trailer of the next Mass Effect game, Mass Effect Universe, has leaked.
Can confirm that this is a real trailer of the Mass Effect game that BioWare was developing up until its closure yesterday www.reddit.com/r/masseffect…
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier.bsky.social) October 22, 2026 at 10:30 AM
Someone purporting to be an EA employee on Reddit said that BioWare had a trailer ready to go and could be been this year’s big surprise for N7 Day. When it made its way online, many were wondering whether or not the trailer was real or not. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has confirmed that the trailer is real.
The trailer starts with a disclaimer that the following footage is in-engine from the small team that was working on Mass Effect Universe and uses pre-production assets.
It starts with the protagonist making his way through a club/bar and meeting with an Asari. As they talk, he explains that he is ex-military and decided to go a different route after what he feels like nothing changed while he was active. Fires would start, and he would come in and put them out.
As he explains this, we see what is presumably a flashback of a mission during his time in the military. Then, he talks about what he does now. He and his team try to stop the fires before they start, making the choices no one else can make, going to places no one is willing to go. The footage then cuts to a very quick cut of the ship the protagonist and his team would be using and goes through various missions that they have gone through: one is taking down a Salarian, one is dealing with a Krogan and a Quarian in a standoff with each other, one involves dealing with what looks like a new alien race, and one has the protagonist taking on a group of Turians
The footage then cuts back to the conversation between the protagonist and the Asari. She makes it clear that she is in charge and is someone who starts the fire. As a Turian gets ready to take down the protagonist, a Quarian and another Asari, revealed to be Liara, say that they know who she is and that’s why they’re there.
This leads to an all-out bar fight in typical Mass Effect fashion, a combination of guns, melee, and biotics. As all of the Asari’s crew is taken out, the footage fades to the classic view of a Mass Effect start menu and title screen with a vast, starry deep-space background and the fade in of Mass Effect Universe.