Canceled Mass Effect planned timelines based on player choices

BioWare’s canceled Mass Effect project was designed to account for choices made across the original trilogy, with a system that could generate different timelines from players’ saved games, franchise technical director Romain Toutain said in commentary about the game’s internal trailer. Toutain described the planned game, known as Mass Effect Universe, as a project in which the state of the story could change according to decisions made by players. He said choices from the earlier games were taken into account and that players could combine saved games to create parallel universes. He cautioned that this was a simplified explanation, describing the system instead as allowing different timelines to be generated. The technology was intended to evaluate whether events and missions remained possible as a player’s choices changed the game world. Toutain said a system would check conditions and determine what needed to happen if a player’s actions made a planned sequence invalid. In his example, if a player killed someone needed for a mission, the game could preserve a route to completing it, allow the mission to fail, or make another adjustment to keep a path open. Toutain said the...