Another piece of the canceled Mass Effect 5 puzzle has fallen into place, as Journey and Stray Gods composer Austin Wintory was apparently in talks to compose the soundtrack for the game that would have been Mass Effect: Universe. While it wasn’t finalized (and that’s part of why the internal trailer that’s been leaked uses a licensed song), Wintory revealed in a YouTube video that, last year, he created some musical concepts for the game and recorded them with a Los Angeles orchestra. Having listened to them, I feel they’re pretty evocative of the orchestral electronic music that was synonymous with the series, but they’re also pretty string-heavy in a way that previous compositions for the games weren’t.
Crucially, Wintory says he didn’t know anything about what the game’s story was going to be, so while the titles for these tracks make references to original trilogy protagonist Commander Shepard, this was mostly a vibes thing rather than a reference to anything that was going to be in the game. He has some production notes to go along with each track, which talk about the instrumentation and the scenes he imagined while composing the music. He also says he wanted to pay tribute to original trilogy composers Jack Wall and Sam Hulick, treating their music as a “starting point” to build upon. It may not be as exciting as a new trailer or new plot details, but it does make one wistful to hear another piece of what could have been.
Welp, that’s another thing to bum me out again. It’s been less than a week since EA announced it was shutting down BioWare and canceling further work on Mass Effect: Universe, and it feels like every day we’re learning something new about the project that never came to be. Developers, collaborators, and consultants have revealed some pretty extensive information about how the game was going, and it sounded like the small team was pretty excited about what they were doing before EA pulled the plug.