Recently, former Technical Director Romain Toutain revealed that the canceled Mass Effect 5 was originally planned to build its story around player decisions from earlier titles, incorporating "all" of Commander Shepard's choices from the trilogy into the subsequent narrative.
"Mass Effect" was the internal working title for the project. Toutain discussed the above proposal during a livestream, but currently available public content does not list which specific decisions were involved, nor does it explain how choice inheritance, save file handling, and story branching would be implemented. Therefore, the actual scope of "all" remains unclear.
This design aimed to identify and respond to the numerous choices players accumulated throughout the original trilogy. However, existing materials only prove that the development team had this plan; they are insufficient to confirm whether the relevant systems were completed or if they could have been fully implemented as envisioned.
Meanwhile, a petition to save the project has garnered over 75,000 signatures, with some players calling for a boycott of EA.