Mass Effect is a science fiction RPG created by Bioware and Casey Hudson and owned by Electronic Arts.
Mass Effect
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Mass Effect is the science fiction role-playing franchise BioWare built for Electronic Arts, starting with the original Mass Effect on Xbox 360 in 2007. The series follows Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy as they fight the Reapers, an ancient race of sentient machines that wipes out all advanced organic life every 50,000 years. Across four mainline games and a remastered collection, the series built its name on choices that carry from one game into the next. In October 2026, EA closed BioWare and canceled the next Mass Effect game, which leaves Amazon's live action Mass Effect TV series as the only active project in the franchise.
The mainline Mass Effect games follow a simple release order. Mass Effect launched in 2007 as an Xbox 360 exclusive before coming to PC in 2008 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. Mass Effect 2 followed in 2010, and Mass Effect 3 closed out Commander Shepard's story in 2012. Mass Effect: Andromeda arrived in 2017 with a new galaxy and a new cast, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition remastered the original trilogy in 2021. A fifth mainline game was announced in 2020 and spent six years in development before EA canceled it in October 2026.
The core of the franchise is the Shepard trilogy. Players create Commander Shepard, a human soldier who can be male or female, and shape that character through dialogue and story choices that carry across all three games through save imports. In Mass Effect, Shepard becomes the first human Spectre and hunts the rogue Turian agent Saren Arterius, who is working with Sovereign, a Reaper left behind in the Milky Way to open the door for the rest of its kind. Mass Effect 2 opens with Shepard's death and resurrection by the pro-human organization Cerberus, then builds toward a suicide mission against the Collectors where squadmate survival depends on loyalty missions and ship upgrades. Mass Effect 3 brings the full Reaper invasion, with Earth under siege from the opening mission.
The squadmates carry just as much of the story. Garrus Vakarian, Liara T'Soni, Tali'Zorah, and Urdnot Wrex all start in the first game and return across the trilogy, and the romances and friendships built with them give the final war its stakes. The Paragon and Renegade system lets players run Shepard as a by-the-book hero or a ruthless pragmatist, and choices like sparing the Rachni Queen or keeping Wrex alive on Virmire come back to matter two games later.
Mass Effect takes place in the Milky Way during the 22nd century, where faster than light travel runs on the mass relays and element zero, the same substance that gives biotics their powers. Galactic politics revolve around the Citadel and its Council, made up of the Asari, Turians, and Salarians. The Krogan are still crippled by the genophage, a sterility plague the Salarians and Turians unleashed to end the Krogan Rebellions. The Quarians live as nomads aboard the Migrant Fleet after the Geth, the synthetic race they created, drove them off their homeworld. Over all of it hangs the Reaper cycle, and the slow reveal of how the Reapers built the relays and the Citadel is the mystery that drives the trilogy.
Mass Effect: Andromeda moved the series to a new galaxy in 2017. The game follows the Andromeda Initiative, an expedition that leaves the Milky Way before the events of Mass Effect 3 and travels 600 years to settle the Andromeda galaxy. Players control Pathfinder Ryder, either Scott or Sara, aboard the Tempest while fighting the kett and allying with the native angara. The launch ran into technical problems and facial animation issues that spread across social media and drowned out the rest of the conversation about the game. BioWare shelved the planned story DLC and resolved one of its loose threads in the tie-in novel Mass Effect: Andromeda Annihilation, and Ryder's story ended there.
The ending of Mass Effect 3 is the moment the franchise is still known for outside its own fanbase. After three games of choices, the original finale came down to a single decision at the Crucible, with outcomes that looked nearly identical apart from the color of the explosion. A large share of players felt the ending ignored the choices that led there, and the backlash grew loud enough that BioWare released the Extended Cut, a free DLC that added new cinematics and epilogue slides along with a fourth Refusal ending. The argument over player agency versus a written ending still comes up any time a choice-driven game lands its finale or misses it.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition launched in 2021 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, bundling the original trilogy with almost all of its single-player DLC. The first Mass Effect got the biggest overhaul, with tighter aiming and reworked Mako handling, and all three games got upgraded textures and lighting with 4K support. Pinnacle Station is the one notable DLC missing, since BioWare couldn't recover its source code. With the next game canceled, Legendary Edition stands as the last Mass Effect release BioWare ever shipped.
On October 21, 2026, BioWare announced it was closing and that early development on the next Mass Effect had ended. The closure was part of around 400 job cuts across Electronic Arts, roughly 50 of them at BioWare, and it came two months after EA completed its buyout by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. BioWare was founded in Edmonton in 1995 and joined EA in 2008, and its catalog runs from Baldur's Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic through Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
The next Mass Effect was first announced on N7 Day in 2020 with Michael Gamble leading the project, and a teaser at The Game Awards that year appeared to show Liara T'Soni. BioWare showed very little after that. Layoffs in 2025 shrank the studio down to a small team, though BioWare confirmed on N7 Day 2025 that the game was still in development. After the shutdown, a trailer labeled Mass Effect Universe leaked online, showing what the team had been working on before the project ended.
Electronic Arts still owns the Mass Effect intellectual property, and EA hasn't announced any plans for the franchise or for Dragon Age. Any future Mass Effect game would have to come from a different studio, either inside EA or through a license, and a former BioWare studio lead has suggested EA could end up selling the rights. For now, the games end with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Legendary Edition.
Yes. Prime Video sources confirmed to IGN after the closure that Amazon MGM Studios is still developing its live action Mass Effect series, with every attached creative still on board. Amazon officially announced the show in November 2024 after a deal with EA was first reported in 2021. Doug Jung, who co-wrote Star Trek Beyond and worked on Mindhunter and Chief of War, is the showrunner, and Daniel Casey of F9 is writing. Karim Zreik, Ari Arad, and Michael Gamble are executive producing, and the series shares key production staff with Amazon's Fallout.
The Mass Effect TV show won't retell Commander Shepard's story. BioWare confirmed on N7 Day 2025 that the series tells a new story set after the original trilogy, the same approach Fallout took with its source material. Production was at one point targeting a late 2026 start, but there's no filming date or release window now, and Casey has disputed a report that the scripts were rewritten to appeal to non-gamers. Mass Effect sits alongside Amazon's other game adaptations, including Tomb Raider with Sophie Turner and God of War.
Mass Effect expanded beyond the games early. Dark Horse published a long run of Mass Effect comics that fill gaps between the games and give supporting characters like Liara and Aria T'Loak more room. Drew Karpyshyn, lead writer on the first game, wrote the first three novels, starting with Mass Effect: Revelation, which follows Captain Anderson and Saren years before the first game. The 2012 anime film Mass Effect: Paragon Lost is a prequel starring James Vega that leads into Mass Effect 3. With no new game coming, the tie-ins and the TV series are where new Mass Effect stories will live for the foreseeable future.
Mass Effect is a science fiction RPG created by Bioware and Casey Hudson and owned by Electronic Arts.
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