Tony de Waal, former Director of Cinematic Production at BioWare, revealed the original direction of the project after the studio closed and the next Mass Effect was cancelled.
He stated that he had accumulated over 29 years of experience at BioWare, having left for a period after the release of Mass Effect 2 and returned in 2021 to work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
After completing this work, he became one of the members who stayed at BioWare to develop the next Mass Effect. According to him, around 50 people were involved in the project before the studio shut down. de Waal believed the team was crafting special content aimed at delivering autonomy and choice “unmatched by other games.”
However, these are merely the developer’s subjective assessments of an unfinished project, not features validated by a final product. He also mentioned that the team observed the standards set by recent titles from Larian and CD Projekt, hoping to elevate Mass Effect to new heights while staying true to the original trilogy.
Additionally, regarding Dragon Age: The Veilguard, he described the tremendous effort the team put into handling variable player characters, over three hours of cinematic content, and numerous conditional endings within the Frostbite engine. After BioWare’s closure, the project’s results will not be made available to players, and de Waal and other members needed to find new jobs.
