A Leaked Mass Effect Universe Trailer Shows What BioWare Was Making Before It Closed

A trailer for the canceled next Mass Effect leaked online on October 22, one day after EA confirmed it was closing BioWare. A brand-new Reddit account posted the roughly two-minute video to the Mass Effect subreddit. It showed up as a reply to a thread about a self-described EA employee who said a trailer had been ready for months (GamesRadar+). The video carries the title Mass Effect: Universe and ends on a "Coming soon" card. That moment never came.

At first, nobody could say for sure whether it was real. Fans picked through it frame by frame for signs of AI. Reddit's moderators couldn't confirm it either. Later in the day, VGC reported that Bloomberg's Jason Schreier had confirmed on Bluesky that it's a real trailer for the game BioWare was making until the shutdown (VGC). EA and BioWare haven't commented. We're not embedding the leaked video here.

What does the Mass Effect Universe trailer show?

It's a cinematic, in-engine trailer built from pre-production assets, with no gameplay (Pure Xbox). Liara T'Soni appears, visibly older, alongside a new human hero with a military background in place of Commander Shepard (GamesRadar+). Fans have also spotted a Turian who looks a lot like Garrus at around the 1:31 mark. The story seems to be a smaller, spy-thriller setup in the Milky Way after the Reaper War, built around an ambush that some fans read as corporate espionage (VGC).

The timing makes the leak sting more. N7 Day, the series' yearly celebration, lands on November 7, and GamesRadar+ suggests BioWare may have planned to reveal the trailer then. The EA employee's post also said the Mass Effect team was about 50 developers and that the project still felt surprisingly early.

Fans on Reddit took it hard, and honestly, same. One wrote, "God, this makes me even more distraught," while another called a spy thriller "such a cool concept for a re-entry to the series" (VGC).

The series isn't completely gone, at least on screen. Amazon's Mass Effect TV show is reportedly still in development, and former BioWare executive Mark Darrah thinks EA could sell the license (we covered both here). Our story on the shutdown itself is right here.

Seeing the next Mass Effect for the first time this way is rough, and the trailer makes it pretty clear BioWare had real ideas left in the tank. I'd argue that's the saddest part. It looked promising. An older Liara leading a smaller, sharper story sounds like exactly the kind of return a lot of fans wanted (Liara deserved a better reveal than a burner account).

More gaming news is right here.

Header image and the Citadel screenshot are official Mass Effect Legendary Edition screenshots from BioWare and EA, via Steam.