Canceled Mass Effect Was Planned to Give Players Almost Total Freedom of Choice
BioWare was developing a system that would account for decisions from the original trilogy and create different timelines.
More details about the canceled Mass Effect sequel are gradually emerging, revealing just how much BioWare had planned. A trailer created directly in the game engine leaked earlier, introducing a new protagonist and the return of Liara T'Soni. We also learned that the story was supposed to unfold against the backdrop of a galactic cold war and somehow bring together all three possible endings of Mass Effect 3. Now it appears that the developers had also devised an exceptionally ambitious system of choices and consequences.
New details were shared by Romain Toutain, technical director for the Mass Effect franchise, during a Twitch stream in which he commented on the leaked trailer. According to him, BioWare was working on technology designed to account for practically every major decision players made in the original trilogy. It wasn’t just a handful of dialogue options or story changes, but a complex system of interconnected events.
This was also tied to the working title Mass Effect Universe, which appeared in the leaked trailer. Players were supposed to be able to combine save files to create different parallel timelines based on their previous decisions. Toutain compared the system to Zero Time Dilemma, though he stressed that this was only a simplified explanation of how it worked.
More interesting is how the technology was supposed to work behind the scenes. According to Toutain, the entire game world was built around states and logical conditions. The developers had a system capable of determining whether a particular situation was even possible in a given timeline, and what conditions needed to be met for it to occur. If the system detected that content needed for a particular combination of decisions did not exist, the developers would know they had to create another story branch or resolve the situation in a different way.
Toutain also gave a simple example. If a player had killed a character in the past whom they later needed to complete a mission, the game would be able to evaluate the situation. Depending on the designers’ intentions, it could offer an alternative way to complete the objective, let the mission fail, or adjust the course of events so the player could still continue.
Toutain said the goal was to give players almost total autonomy, with their decisions genuinely affecting how the game world worked and how the story unfolded. Compared with the traditional approach of carrying decisions over between games in the series, this would have been a significantly more complex system.
Of course, it remains unclear how much of these ambitions could have been turned into a functioning game. Such a system would have been exceptionally challenging not only technically, but also in terms of content creation, as different combinations of decisions could have required numerous alternate scenes and story branches.
Still, the leaked information is making it increasingly clear that BioWare wasn’t looking to create just another Mass Effect with a new story. The studio was trying to significantly expand one of the series’ core pillars: freedom of choice and the consequences of players’ actions. We’ll probably never know whether the result could have lived up to those ambitions.
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