Bethesda’s Mass Effect Tweet Confirms the Multiverse Has Collapsed

Just when we thought the multiverse shenanigans featured in the latest Loki episode were limited to the MCU, Bethesda decided to start tweeting about Mass Effect and break reality in our own seemingly tidy timeline as well.

In case you missed it, the Bethesda Store recently tweeted a promotion for a Mass Effect t-shirt. What would normally be a standard digital store tweet lost to the innocence of a Wednesday afternoon was complicated by the fact that Bethesda doesn’t make the Mass Effect games. That honor belongs to legendary RPG studio BioWare whose own store, curiously enough, was referenced in this now-deleted tweet from the Bethesda Store account:

Now, here’s what’s really funny. Despite deleting that tweet above due to what most people assumed had to be some kind of “middle of the day, middle of the week” mistake, the Bethesda Store Twitter team sent out pretty much the same tweet just 20 minutes later.

Just to be very clear, there is no formal business partnership between Bethesda and BioWare that we are aware of. They’re even owned by two different giants in the gaming world (EA purchased BioWare in 2007 and Microsoft purchased Bethesda’s parent company last year). We’re also not aware of either store using their Twitter accounts to promote the other company’s products.

So what’s going on here? Well, logical people (or, as the internet sometimes calls them, haters) will probably say that Bethesda and BioWare must somehow share social media/marketing resources and someone at some outside company sent the wrong tweet from the wrong account. Even though the specifics of this incident are bizarre (including the fact that this mistake somehow happened twice), that is indeed the most logical explanation for this.

Then again, the logical answer hasn’t stopped the Twitter gaming community from immediately forming elaborate theories regarding how this means Microsoft is going to buy BioWare or even EA. Said theories are based on this tweet, the business relationship between EA and Xbox Game Pass, Xbox’s recent interest in buying various studios, and the fact that Microsoft has so much money that they could buy the very concept of logic and make it juggle for their amusement.

It’s also more than a little funny that Bethesda is sending out Mass Effect-related tweets given that their next game (Starfield) is a sci-fi RPG that is already drawing comparisons to the Mass Effect series. Those comparisons may not be entirely fair given what we know about the game so far, but when something like this happens, you’re not exactly doing yourself any favors when it comes to cooling down some of those conversations.

Of course, there is always our multiverse theory. I’m not sure I want to live in the timeline where Bethesda developed Mass Effect instead of BioWare, it certainly would be interesting to see what would happen if these two companies swapped franchises. At the very least, it’d be interesting to see a version of Skyrim where you can hook up with everyone. Then again, I suppose that’s what mods are for.

In any case, we can all probably agree on one thing: that is not a very flattering shirt.

I love Mass Effect.
This looks like a car dealership uniform. pic.twitter.com/uRQuJWlN55

— Kevin Kania (@kkania) July 14, 2021

Here’s hoping the poor social media team member who seems to be having an especially bad day manages to make it through this, go home, pop open a cold one, and spend a little time relaxing, perhaps while enjoying one of Bethesda’s Mass Effect games.