The people who were writing the next Mass Effect are finally allowed to say so, and the first thing they want fans to know is that it was good. “What we were cooking was really cool,” Canadian science fiction author Derek Künsken posted on Bluesky, hours after EA shut down BioWare and cancelled the game.
Künsken, an Aurora Award winning novelist best known for his Quantum Evolution space opera series, says he spent the last five years on the project, first as a contract writer and then as a senior writer on staff. He couldn’t name the job until the studio closed.
“Unfortunately, the light turned green because #Bioware is being shuttered. Over the coming weeks, I’ll get more clarity on what I can say about what I did and saw and learned. I hope it’s more than nothing, what we were cooking was really cool.”
He worked alongside the author of Mass Effect: Annihilation
For longtime fans, the most exciting detail is who he was writing with. Künsken says he pitched “story and character and lore and #scifi wonder for this next chapter of the Mass Effect world” with Catherynne M. Valente, the award-winning novelist who wrote the 2018 tie-in novel Mass Effect: Annihilation and the comic sci-fi novel Space Opera. He calls it “the most energizing, in-the-zone collaboration I’ve ever had.”
Valente returned the compliment the same night: “Working with Derek was beyond special and I’ll never forget it. Keelah Se’Lai, my brother.” She has also said she will “have some things to say about Mass Effect,” just not yet.
Künsken also named BioWare’s Parrish Ley and Mary DeMarle, the narrative lead behind the Deus Ex prequels, as highlights of his writing career, and had nothing but praise for the team. Everyone he met at BioWare, he wrote, “was a decent human being, an expert in their field, and was ambitiously imaginative about what a future experience of Mass Effect could be.”
What we know about the game they were making
EA closed BioWare on October 21 as part of about 400 job cuts, taking the next Mass Effect with it. We covered the shutdown here. A day later, a two minute trailer for the project leaked, revealing its name, Mass Effect Universe, a new lead in an N7 coat, and a cameo from Liara T’Soni. Our breakdown of the leaked trailer is here.
Künsken says the roughly 50 people still working on it “deserve to be lauded and to land safely in new jobs,” and asked fans to support them. He hopes to share more about the story “in a few weeks” once he knows what he is allowed to say.
What’s next
For now, Künsken is back to novels. The fourth book in his Quantum Evolution series, The Quantum Dawn, is out now in the UK and as an ebook worldwide, with the North American release on November 3. If he or Valente share more about Mass Effect Universe’s story, we’ll update this post.
