Watch on YouTube: The Next Mass Effect – Official Teaser Trailer (2020), the one that promised “Mass Effect will continue”.
Four days after Electronic Arts closed BioWare and switched off the next Mass Effect, the fans have done what Mass Effect fans do best: they have organised. A #SaveMassEffect petition went up within a day of the news and, according to Dark Horizons, gathered nearly 100,000 signatures in its first 48 hours, against an original target of 30,000. (IGN’s earlier count was 50,000, so the exact number depends on when you looked, and the total is climbing.) The petition is cannier than most. It does not ask EA to reopen BioWare, which would be like asking a debt collector to return the sofa. It asks EA to license the Mass Effect name to another studio, so that someone, anyone, can finish the job.
Whether anybody could afford to is another matter. Games industry analyst Joost van Dreunen told IGN that BioWare’s IP is “in the same boat as some of the other studios we recently saw being divested. They are all well-known and too expensive for most buyers.” EA has said nothing about the petition, and nothing about what it plans to do with Mass Effect or Dragon Age. In the meantime, a pre-production pitch video titled Mass Effect: Universe has leaked online, and YouTuber Dantics, a member of the series’ fan Council, has described what was apparently planned: a story set six centuries after the Reaper War, a cold war between three factions, and an N7 hero pitched as a cross between John Wick and James Bond. None of that has been confirmed by EA, and a leaked pitch video is not a game, but it does give the mourners a clearer idea of what they are mourning.
Mass Effect fans also have form. In 2012 the Retake Mass Effect campaign, furious about the trilogy’s ending, raised money for charity and bombarded BioWare until the studio released the free Extended Cut that summer. It remains one of the few times a fan campaign has actually changed a finished game. More recently, fans of The Expanse flew a banner over Amazon’s offices after Syfy cancelled the show in 2018, and Amazon picked it up for three more seasons. The Browncoats got Serenity made, and the Snyder Cut happened in the end, for better or worse. Campaigns sometimes work. They work best, though, when there is a buyer with money on the other side of the table, and at the moment nobody has come forward.
Which brings us to the other games project in trouble this week, one that has an actual deadline. Marvel’s Blade, the third-person, single-player vampire hunt that Arkane Lyon unveiled at The Game Awards in December 2023, has been in limbo since Xbox announced plans in July to divest the studio. Le Monde reports, via Gematsu, that under France’s Florange law a company planning a closure of this kind has to seek a buyer first, and that the consultation with Arkane’s staff committee ends on 13 November. Around 217 jobs are at risk. A union representative told Le Monde that the game is nearing the end of production and that it “would be a monumental waste” if it never came out. Microsoft says it is “actively seeking a partner to support the next phase of development and enable the commercialization of the project.”
There is some cause for optimism. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who usually knows about these things before the people involved, wrote that “there are multiple paths actively being explored that would save” Arkane Lyon, and that “at this point I’d be surprised if the studio is shut down.” So Eric Brooks may yet get to stalk the rooftops of Paris, which is where the game is set, and which would make it the first Blade story in which the vampires have to worry about the pastry as well as the daylight. The studio that made Dishonored deserves at least that.
Put the two stories side by side and you can see the pattern in AAA games at the moment. Big publishers carrying big debts are cutting anything that is not a guaranteed annual earner, and what is left behind is valuable intellectual property with nobody to look after it. For Blade, the French labour code has at least bought some time and a deadline. For Mass Effect, there is only a petition and a fanbase that has done this before. The Normandy has been written off once already in the series, at the start of Mass Effect 2. It came back then, rebuilt by a shady organisation with very deep pockets. Fans may have to hope history repeats itself.
Sources: Dark Horizons, Gematsu and Le Monde (in French).
Join the conversation (0)