With BioWare being shuttered by the now Saudi-owned EA, we’re starting to get more details about the Mass Effect game that the team was working on. A leaked internal trailer gave us a look at the visual style and tone, and now we have people who were involved with BioWare giving us insights into what Mass Effect: Universe was going to be.

Dantics is an Australian YouTuber who claims he was a member of the Mass Effect council. In his video discussing the cancelled game, he explains: “They would send me what they were working on and I would provide feedback.”

In other words, his involvement was advisory, but assuming his claims are true, he would have had access to a lot of information. There is indeed such a thing as the Mass Effect council — it popped up in the credits of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, for example — and council members have previously discussed providing feedback on marketing and development on other BioWare games. What I can’t verify is whether Dantics was actually a member, but my gut instinct is that he’s telling the truth.

According to Dantics, Universe was going to take place more than 600 years after the original trilogy. The galaxy has split into three main factions: an alliance led by the humans that also includes the batarians and krogan; another alliance made up of the Council races; and a third faction in the rising geth superpower, which has also been making megastructures.

“Now, the three factions aren’t in open war,” he says. “Rather, it’s a cold war situation with an unknown enemy seemingly pulling the strings, which you are sent out to investigate.”

Shepard and crew were fairly straightforward operatives, but Dantics describes the new protagonist as more of a secret agent/spy. Like Shepard, this customisable lead character is an N7 agent, although the developers apparently had a different style of action in mind.

“They wanted the gameplay to feel more like James Bond meets John Wick,” Dantics explains. “You’re a super spy, an agent, being tactful if you want and forceful when you need.”

The character would also have “experimental tech in your head that uniquely interacts with your physiology.” Dantics compares its abilities to Cyberpunk 2077’s hacking, including looking through walls and remotely exploding pipes behind enemies.

Missions would use handcrafted maps like the original trilogy, but offer something closer to Hitman’s freedom of approach.

“Your missions would be similar to Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3’s traditional handcrafted maps, but you can approach them freeform, similar to the Hitman series or the start of Noveria. You can talk to people, assess, analyse, and execute with more freedom. But if you wanted, you could go in guns blazing.”

Liara would return as a powerful asari matriarch, which we glimpsed in the leaked trailer. Other companions included a krogan, a quarian and a human woman available to romance. Again, we caught some glimpses of them in the trailer.

The setting would also attempt to accommodate Mass Effect 3’s three main endings. After six centuries of technological progress, Reapers would be outdated and people would already be partly synthetic, reducing the differences between Control and Synthesis.

“Reapers are outdated tech, so if you chose Control, they’re not going to be as impactful as they were,” Dantics says. “Everyone at this stage is part synthetic, so picking Synthesis works out a similar way.”

Shepard would be long dead even if they survived Destroy, but their legacy would remain. Exactly how earlier decisions would be represented isn’t clear. Dantics says “your choices might even come up,” which suggests references to the trilogy rather than establishing how much those decisions would affect Universe.

As for how much of this BioWare had actually made, Dantics claims: “Not to rub salt in the wound, but they were a lot further in development than their statement suggested.” Insider Shinobi602 has offered a similar account, although neither has supplied a completion percentage or demonstrated a near-finished game.

In ResetEra comments reported by TwistedVoxel, Shinobi602 says the story was established, squadmates were implemented, hubs had been built and new combat and quest systems were being developed. He also claims development was progressing well, rather than suffering the problems associated with Andromeda and The Veilguard.

Shinobi602 describes the leaked trailer as an internal mood piece made for leadership, using placeholder assets to communicate the game’s direction. He says the team had been diverted to help finish The Veilguard before returning to Mass Effect following its release. His account is that EA leadership had been enthusiastic about the project, with the cancellation reflecting changing priorities at the publisher.

There is some first-hand support for the team’s ambitions. Former BioWare cinematic supervisor Tony de Waal wrote on LinkedIn that the project aimed for “a level of autonomy and choice that no other game has been able to match.” He cited Larian and CD Projekt as inspirations while stressing the team’s desire to stay true to the trilogy. De Waal also said he was among roughly 50 remaining BioWare employees who lost their jobs, a number which was also mentioned by Jason Schreier in his reporting.

However, ambition and progress don’t tell us how much work remained. Jason Schreier confirmed the leaked trailer was authentic, which establishes its origin rather than how representative it was of the wider game. BioWare’s closure statement still described the project as being in early development, and the footage itself uses pre-production assets.

Regardless of how close the game may or may not have been to release, Dantics’ details paint a pretty interesting picture. The idea of a Mass Effect game with more freedom to tackle objectives and the option to approach situations more like a secret agent than a soldier sounds awesome. But of course, it’s also easy to make a game sound good on paper — most cancelled games can be made to sound like they would have been spectacular. It looks like we will never know, unless this version of Universe gets handed off to a different team.