Slick-looking trailer for the Mass Effect game that just got murdered leaks online

Per The Verge, the authenticity of the trailer (which initially popped up on Reddit) has been confirmed by multiple sources, including Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier, who’s devoted a decent chunk of his career to tracking what goes down when corporate overlords toss their employees and all their hard work away. The trailer itself shows a human agent chatting up a member of the franchise’s Asari species, explaining that he’s a former soldier who’s decided to start “putting out fires” in the galaxy before they start; inevitably, the whole thing breaks out into a brawl, apparently built from in-game assets, that features gunplay, psychic effects, and, of course, the looming sensation of a massive and colossal waste of everybody’s time. The result is, undeniably, shiny and impressive, and speaks to both a gameplay focus and a narrative hook for the new game, which would have been the fifth set in the Mass Effect universe, had it been allowed to be made, which it won’t, because they killed the thing stone dead.

As several commentators have pointed out, the closure of BioWare and the cancellation of Mass Effect: Universe arrives even as Amazon MGM Studios continues to develop a TV series based on the franchise; we can’t wait for the show to actually arrive one of these days, only to have no choice but to direct new fans, energized by the series, to flaming piles of video game rubble like this.