Mass Effect 5 was named Universe partly because it let players generate alternate timelines based on their choices in previous entries, technical director says

The system was part of BioWare's effort to give the player "absolute autonomy", according to Romain Toutain

In case you missed it, an internal trailer for the new Mass Effect game which BioWare were working on prior to EA shutting them down hit the net late last week. It offered a peek at what the studio were cooking with this new entry, dubbed Mass Effect Universe. According to its technical director, one of the reasons the game was given that name was that it had a system aimed at letting players form alternate timelines based on their choices in previous Mass Effects.

Romain Toutain, BioWare's franchise technical director since 2022, said as much during a Twitch stream that saw him react to the leaked trailer. The on-demand version of this steam looks like it may since have been yanked, but not before a BlueSky user with the handle @loustica-lucia went through, took some clips, and added subtitles translating Toutain as he chats about the trailer in French.

"All the choices made in the first Mass Effect games were taken into account," the developer said after the trailer finished. "One of the reasons why it was called Mass Effect Universe is that you had so many choices that you could plug your saves together to create parallel universes. To keep it simple. It’s not exactly how it worked. You had different timelines, basically. You could almost generate timelines, kinda like Zero Time [Dilemma]."

Asked if it was similar to Dragon Age Keep, the service BioWare set up to let folks create world states based on their Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 choices that they could then import into Inquisition, Toutain said "kinda". Though, he stressed that this Mass Effect system worked in some extra complexity by letting players make decisions that might contradict things they've previously done.

"Everything in the game, everything was stateful," the dev explained. "At any time, you could stop the game - I mean, you could pause it - and ask a system that solved logical equations, ‘Is this valid?’ And if it isn’t valid, what conditions must be met for it to be valid? For the game to set these conditions. And if the content doesn’t exist, then we know the content doesn’t exist, so we’ll either have to create another branch, either that, or we know we have to create the content.

"So, if you killed a guy, and you needed that guy for your mission, the game will make sure you can complete the mission. Or, if that’s what the designers have decided, well, no, the mission’s failed because you killed that guy. Or else, something that was bound to happen doesn’t happen, just so that a path remains open, so that you can get around the problem." Toutain summed the system up as being something that was "difficult to set up", but worked well.

It certainly sounds ambitious, if a lot of work to get right. Whether it and the pursuit of giving the player "absolute autonomy" which the dev says it was part of would've made Mass Effect 5 a return to form for BioWare is up for debate and will likely remain so forever unless someone swoops in to perform a miracle resurrection pretty sharpish. Personally, it at least sounds like something that'd have piqued my curiosity enough to see what Shep and co were up to, despite not being the biggest Mass Effecter.