BioWare's Montreal studio was developing a competitive first-person shooter called Mass Effect Team Assault in 2010 before transforming that effort into the third-person multiplayer mode in Mass Effect 3, according to a new behind-the-scenes iPad app created by gaming journalist Geoff Keighley.



"The goal was simple," Keighley reports in The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3, "to create a standalone multiplayer experience in the Mass Effect universe that would mix the play styles of Unreal Tournament and Battlefield 1943 — and likely be released as a downloadable game."



The game was in development for four months and was presented, in March 2010, as the prototype seen in the images in this story. (Those images are captured from Keighley's app, which features video of the prototype.)



The powers-that-be at BioWare liked the idea of a multiplayer shooter, because it presented an added view of the wide-ranging war occurring during Mass Effect 3. The idea morphed into the development of a co-op mode for Mass Effect 3 itself. The main game's engine wouldn't allow gamers to play co-op in the main campaign of Mass Effect 3, but it would allow them to team up in a separate skirmish mode, which is what BioWare delivered in the sequel that finally came out earlier this month. As the BioWare developers shifted to that, Mass Effect Team Assault "was put on the back burner."