Electronic Arts shuttered BioWare earlier this week, and that sucked. A concept trailer for the Mass Effect game the studio had in development subsequently leaked, and that made everyone feel even worse because—keeping in mind that it was an early-development concept piece—it looked really good.

YouTuber Dantics has now revealed more about what BioWare was actually working on, which he claims to be aware of because he was part of the Mass Effect community council, meaning he "saw what BioWare was building, and provided feedback during development."

We haven't directly confirmed Dantics' role on the council, although others on social media have vouched for him, and BioWare community councils are definitely a real thing: The studio has referenced them in past updates, and they can also be seen in credits for games including Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Members of the ME5 council aren't known, but Mass Effect veteran Michael Gamble, the project lead on the next game, follows Dantics on X.

So, suitably caveated: Dantics said in a post on X that the next Mass Effect game was set 600 years after the Reaper War, and would put players in the role of a customizable N7 agent who would be "a cross between John Wick and James Bond." The galaxy in this future timeline was divided into three major factions: Humans, Batarians, Krogan, and others in one alliance, the "Council Races"—Asari, Salarians, and Turians—forming the second bloc, and the Geth emerging as the galaxy's third superpower. Instead of an existential crisis like the Reaper invasion, the new game would take place amidst a "galactic Cold War."

Dantics also said there would be connections between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, that there would be "brutal close-range executions"—certainly something I want from my heroic space opera RPGs—that "romance wasn't being sanitized," which in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 I assume means the full monty, and that Liara would return as a powerful Asari matriarch.

In a separate video, Dantics said the new game was being designed to accommodate all three Mass Effect endings, rather than committing to one of them as canon: 600 years into the future, the Reapers are "outdated tech," and thus not nearly the danger they were back in Shepard's day, and advances in cybernetics, which would be in common use, fit the synthesis ending. And if your Shepard opted to just blow everything up and survived the war, well, he didn't survive the passage of 600 years, although his "legacy" would have lived on.

I'm always a little iffy on fictional settings that extend themselves centuries into the past or future, and yet don't seem to meaningfully change: It bugged me in KOTOR, and it bugs me here. 600 years is a long time, but everyone's still walking around wearing the same clothes, shooting the same guns, and flying the same ships. Six centuries of technological evolution, and what did we get? The Normandy with aftermarket ground effects.

(Forgive the resolution, the trailer is only 720p.)

Anyway, with that off my chest, Dantics' rundown of BioWare's plan for the game sounds pretty great: Similar enough to the Shepard trilogy to bring back fans put off by the poisoned well of Mass Effect: Andromeda, yet distant enough to enable BioWare to do new things. Not all that terribly new, obviously: There's big trouble in the shadowy corners of the cosmos and we're sending our best super-shooter to clean it up (with a little help from his friends), well, that's just Mass Effect. But Mass Effect is what we want, and sometimes you just have to admit that 'more' is good enough.

Alas, it's almost certain there will be no more. Unless EA is willing to offload the Mass Effect property to someone (the government of Canada, perhaps?)—and at this point it's shown no interest in doing so—then this is as close as we'll ever get to it.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney criticized Valve for continuing to mandate AI disclosures for games sold on Steam, calling the policy "abhorrent" following his company's full-throated endorsement of gen AI in game development.

"Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they’re helping organize is abhorrent," says Sweeney.

Steam's AI disclosures require devs who use generative AI in their games to spell out how it was used. For example, the disclosure for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 reads, "Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets."

As early as November 2025, Sweeney was campaigning against AI disclosures for games and calling Valve's approach nonsensical in a world where "AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

This past June, he doubled down, comparing Steam's AI disclosures to a "Scarlet Letter" and insisting that they make it "much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success."

Sweeney's latest message was posted as a reply to a comment from Matt Workman, whose Twitter bio says he works in "Content & Vibes" at "generative media cloud" Fal. Workman argues that "the premise of an AI Generated Content Disclosure is ABSURD in 2026, truly embarrassing [for] Valve and Steam," and Sweeney is clearly in his corner.

This month, Epic Games and Sweeney have been especially vocal about generative AI in games and in game development. "We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher," the company said of its reworked PC storefront last week.

Just yesterday, Epic announced an Unreal Engine game jam – an event where participants make games very quickly – that initially required AI usage and promised access to unlimited agentic support. Epic has walked that back, now saying, "you can use as little or as much AI as you want."

In the background, Steam users have been picking through a Steam Next Fest demo showcase that saw more AI-aided games than ever, and nearly double the total demo volume of the June 2026 event. Once Steam's recommendation algorithms kicked in, all the AI slop quickly sank to the bottom of the charts, but an influx of AI games has only made game stores more cluttered.

Meanwhile, some people are using AI to clone trending games in record time, with viral hits getting copied almost overnight and game developers canceling their own demos to make it harder to rip them off.

Sweeney's most recent comments have, predictably, kicked up two common counterarguments in the replies. If AI is so great, why do you want to hide it? And if the answer is, 'Because some people hate it,' why do they hate it?

This, I think, starts to color in the "hate mob" that Sweeney alludes to but does not define – at least not in a way that stops it from applying it to everyone opposed or resistant to AI. So, why would people push back on gen AI in games or want to see it called out in a store disclosure? Dozens of developers and experts have made the case to GamesRadar+.

Legally, it's a landmine. Creatively, it can hollow out essential processes. And ethically, AI providers have yet to address the tech's environmental impacts or the wealth of stolen material that their tools were trained on. To top it off, it's a famously unprofitable industry led by companies skirting by on outsized, speculative valuations in a top-heavy market that's just begging for a correction. So far, those companies have mostly succeeded in destroying the consumer market for a lot of hardware and poisoning the well for a lot of software, hurting peoples' leisure and hobbies during a cost of living crisis.

In games, much of the criticism of AI leans toward the generation of art, music, and similar assets. More developers seem to accept it as a programming boon, and AI is generally more accepted in Asian game markets than in the West (though many studios oppose it globally). Yet even if you want to argue that programming is just machine-assisted now – as even Valve co-founder Gabe Newell does, and then some – it's not hard to see why people want AI kept on a leash. (Deadlock devs are also using AI but, curiously, not nailing their entire brand to it.)

Heck, just look at Steam's updated AI disclosure terms, which read: "As an aside, AI in games is rapidly evolving and we want to get it right. Many artists and creators are rightfully concerned about exploitation and misuse. But we also realize that technology and tools are going to change a bunch over the years, and there are lots of creative game developers out there figuring out ways to ethically use AI to make great entertainment. If you plan to release a product on Steam and you think we're overlooking something important in regard to AI, we'd love to hear from you."

The backlash against gen AI in video games proves voting with your wallet works.

One of the big topics of conversation around Onimusha: Way of the Sword when it released last month—and even before that, when Capcom first put out a demo of the game—was whether it was too easy. Viral clips of early game enemies standing around doing nothing gave the impression of a woefully easy game for action fans coming from the likes of Sekiro, Nioh or Ninja Gaiden. Once I played the full game, I found those fears mostly unfounded, but it's true that Onimusha's basic enemies pose little threat compared to its bosses, and mostly serve as fodder for you to cut through as you explore.

Way of the Sword's harder difficulty option being locked behind beating the campaign didn't necessarily endear the game to hardcore action players, either, so I'm not shocked that one of the most popular downloads on the game's Nexusmods page is one that amps up enemy aggression.

But I still mostly loved Onimusha, and didn't find myself craving the brutal difficulty of Sekiro or Nioh while I was playing it. With more than a month of hindsight to see how players have studied the blade, Capcom also seems pretty happy with the level of challenge it settled on.

"We've been looking at the data that comes back from people playing, so we can see where people are struggling and how they're progressing through the game. What we've seen in the trends in the data is that it's close to what we set out to achieve, in terms of difficulty," director Satoru Nihei said in an interview with PC Gamer.

Nihei elaborated that Capcom has observed players being able to progress through the story, but not entirely without friction.

"There are points where they do stumble, they do die, they do get defeated. But they're able to overcome that and progress. That was what we set out to achieve in terms of pitching the difficulty for the game: We wanted players to be able to progress through the story, but also have some challenge to it, so they get a sense of satisfaction from defeating enemies. It was never an intention for this game to be a particularly difficult game, like those other games you mentioned. We think it's hit the right spot in terms of the difficulty, in terms of where we wanted to place it."

My biggest criticism of Way of the Sword was its length, rather than its level of challenge. Its swordplay feels so good that I don't mind being able to run into a group of hapless enemies milling around the hub world of Kyoto and cut them down in a few seconds, but I did tire of Kyoto's generic sidequests, samey streets and how many times the game ultimately trotted out repeats of some of its boss fights.

Nihei said that Capcom has noted that feedback from other players, too. Ultimately the size of the game came from the priorities the dev team set out to meet early in development.

"We really wanted to have a game that was around the 20 hour mark. We didn't want to have a title that would be too small, but also looking at open world games that are 40 hours-plus, we didn't want to drag it out to that extent. So from the beginning there was this clear goal of … a mostly linear experience, and then we have the exploration elements for people who want to engage with them. That was what we set out to shoot for in terms of giving players enough volume to enjoy."

As for how many times you fight bosses like Byakue and Dohatsu-ten?

"We understand that some people might find fighting the same bosses to be a little draining, and it would've obviously been nice for us to be able to make a greater variety of bosses," Nihei said. "But also, at Capcom we want to make these very engaging, fun encounters that people can enjoy fighting again and again and again, so that was what we were aiming for when we created those bosses. But we've definitely heard the feedback."