BioWare was shut down yesterday by EA, bringing a sudden end to a studio whose legacy of legendary role-playing games stretches back nearly 30 years. This meant that the studio’s Mass Effect project, being developed by a relative skeleton crew after a downsizing in January of 2025, was canceled, and fans likely won’t get the chance to return to the beloved science-fiction universe unless EA sells the IP. However, we got a new look at what the team was working on thanks to a leaked trailer , revealing that the game was going to be called Mass Effect: Universe .

The trailer is short, but there’s a lot to extrapolate in the two minutes we see. We can also make some educated guesses based on the years of teases BioWare put out before EA shuttered the studio. So let’s try to make heads or tails of it all.

Where is this bar?

© BioWare

The trailer starts with an outside shot of a bar, and we can see a giant skyscraper outside that doesn’t look quite like anything we’ve seen before.…