There Was Going to Be A Mass Effect First Person Shooter
\
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.)