Mass Effect 5 was set in a 'galactic Cold War,' new leak claims, and all 3 endings were wrapped into 1

Electronic Arts shuttered BioWare earlier this week, and that sucked. A concept trailer for the Mass Effect game the studio had in development subsequently leaked, and that made everyone feel even worse because—keeping in mind that it was an early-development concept piece—it looked really good.

YouTuber Dantics has now revealed more about what BioWare was actually working on, which he claims to be aware of because he was part of the Mass Effect community council, meaning he "saw what BioWare was building, and provided feedback during development."

We haven't directly confirmed Dantics' role on the council, although others on social media have vouched for him, and BioWare community councils are definitely a real thing: The studio has referenced them in past updates, and they can also be seen in credits for games including Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Members of the ME5 council aren't known, but Mass Effect veteran Michael Gamble, the project lead on the next game, follows Dantics on X.

So, suitably caveated: Dantics said in a post on X that the next Mass Effect game was set 600 years after the Reaper War, and would put players in the role of a customizable N7 agent who would be "a cross between John Wick and James Bond." The galaxy in this future timeline was divided into three major factions: Humans, Batarians, Krogan, and others in one alliance, the "Council Races"—Asari, Salarians, and Turians—forming the second bloc, and the Geth emerging as the galaxy's third superpower. Instead of an existential crisis like the Reaper invasion, the new game would take place amidst a "galactic Cold War."

Dantics also said there would be connections between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, that there would be "brutal close-range executions"—certainly something I want from my heroic space opera RPGs—that "romance wasn't being sanitized," which in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 I assume means the full monty, and that Liara would return as a powerful Asari matriarch.

In a separate video, Dantics said the new game was being designed to accommodate all three Mass Effect endings, rather than committing to one of them as canon: 600 years into the future, the Reapers are "outdated tech," and thus not nearly the danger they were back in Shepard's day, and advances in cybernetics, which would be in common use, fit the synthesis ending. And if your Shepard opted to just blow everything up and survived the war, well, he didn't survive the passage of 600 years, although his "legacy" would have lived on.

I'm always a little iffy on fictional settings that extend themselves centuries into the past or future, and yet don't seem to meaningfully change: It bugged me in KOTOR, and it bugs me here. 600 years is a long time, but everyone's still walking around wearing the same clothes, shooting the same guns, and flying the same ships. Six centuries of technological evolution, and what did we get? The Normandy with aftermarket ground effects.

(Forgive the resolution, the trailer is only 720p.)

Anyway, with that off my chest, Dantics' rundown of BioWare's plan for the game sounds pretty great: Similar enough to the Shepard trilogy to bring back fans put off by the poisoned well of Mass Effect: Andromeda, yet distant enough to enable BioWare to do new things. Not all that terribly new, obviously: There's big trouble in the shadowy corners of the cosmos and we're sending our best super-shooter to clean it up (with a little help from his friends), well, that's just Mass Effect. But Mass Effect is what we want, and sometimes you just have to admit that 'more' is good enough.

Alas, it's almost certain there will be no more. Unless EA is willing to offload the Mass Effect property to someone (the government of Canada, perhaps?)—and at this point it's shown no interest in doing so—then this is as close as we'll ever get to it.