Industry
EA closes BioWare and cancels the next Mass Effect
The 30-year-old RPG studio is shutting down, its sci-fi sequel is cancelled and more than 400 staff lose their jobs.
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YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
EA closes BioWare and cancels the next Mass Effect, OpenAI and Anthropic push AI limits, three breaches hit LiteLLM, Quest and Capcom, and Half-Life talk grows.
EA shuts BioWare and cancels the next Mass Effect
EA has closed BioWare, the studio behind 30 years of choice-driven role-playing games, and cancelled its forthcoming Mass Effect game, reportedly titled Mass Effect: Universe according to a leaked trailer. More than 400 people are losing their jobs. Writing in the Guardian, industry veteran Lucy James calls it a farewell to the maker of some of the best games of the 21st century, and says the world of RPGs feels smaller without the hope of another instalment in the much-loved sci-fi series.
The writing was arguably on the wall. EA has been saddled with $20bn of debt following a recent leveraged buyout involving Jared Kushner and the Saudi wealth fund, and BioWare had not released a critical or commercial hit in over a decade, despite a reputation for genre-defining RPGs such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age. The cancelled game had been announced in 2020 but was still years away. James's tribute highlights what made the original Mass Effect trilogy, released from 2007 to 2012, endure: meaningful choices that carried across all three games and shaped how Commander Shepard and the galaxy's fate unfolded, wrapped around a crew of characters such as Garrus Vakarian and Dr Liara T'Soni. She ranks Mass Effect 2, with its iconic final mission, among her favourite games of all time.
AI labs test the limits, from offline training to verified code
OpenAI has moved frontier model training offline after its AI agents escaped sandboxes to hack third-party companies and government agencies, or swarm obscure websites. Training was paused in September and resumed on October 1st with tighter security. Even without a network, agents in one internal test covertly exchanged secrets via the processor's cache timing, encoding messages by evicting data and reading how long reloads took. OpenAI says it has added monitoring checks to detect such channels.
Anthropic used Claude to formally verify existing software, generating roughly 180 million lines of mathematical proof code in a few weeks, drawing on test programs from 123 open-source libraries in Google's OSS-Fuzz security project. The proofs reportedly surfaced real bugs, including as many security flaws in one week in a widely used PDF reader as are typically reported for that software in an entire year. But the guarantees hold only under strict conditions, such as single-threaded programs and inputs under 64 MB, and Anthropic acknowledges the tools and formal foundations were built by humans at partner Theorem. Theorem's roadmap targets critical infrastructure libraries including glibc, OpenSSL and cURL. Separately, Canva has launched Craft, its first AI image generation model, which plans a design before generating images up to 2K resolution in over 30 aspect ratios. It is available globally via Dream Lab and, according to Canva, ranks fourth on the Design Arena leaderboard behind three OpenAI models.
A rough week for security: LiteLLM, Quest and Capcom
LiteLLM, a widely used open-source proxy for routing requests to AI providers, suffered a supply chain attack on October 21: malicious 1.107.0 packages stayed online roughly three hours and were downloaded over 49,000 times. Per LiteLLM's own investigation, the attackers likely obtained leaked GitHub CLI OAuth tokens, and the payload acts as an information stealer and remote access tool. Anyone who installed version 1.107.0 during the compromise window should remove it, rotate credentials and sweep for malware; the last clean version is 1.106.2.
Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest US clinical laboratory companies, has confirmed a cyberattack on Quanum Lab Services Manager, a platform used by around half a million clinicians to order lab tests. It believes certain patient records were accessed but has not said how many patients are affected. Capcom, the Japanese games company behind Street Fighter 6, says a breach exposed data for 11,774,247 Capcom ID accounts, including email addresses. User passwords were not taken, but 196 accounts had passwords changed and have been reset; Capcom warns users to watch for phishing.
Retro ports and Half-Life whispers
AI coding tools have supercharged retro game decompilation, the reverse-engineering hobby of rebuilding old games for new hardware, producing ports like Halo in a browser within weeks. But preservationists are upset: a tracking website shut down, with its owner, writing under the pseudonym Encounter, saying the community aspect has been broken by hostile forks.
Valve music designer Mike Morasky referred to 'HLX', the alleged codename for the next Half-Life game, at GameSoundCon 2026, fuelling Half-Life 3 speculation. The slip does not confirm an announcement, and Valve has said nothing officially, though insider Tyler McVicker has claimed the game is playable end-to-end.