The next Mass Effect has a lot of people to convince. It doesn’t just have to deal with the already difficult task of living up to one of the most iconic sci-fi series of all time, which is already a hurdle many games would fall at. Even after that, and the additional worry where it falls in the timeline, and how it tells a coherent story while honouring the choices of the previous trilogy, the challenge has only just begun. Mass Effect is carrying the weight of its entire studio on its back.
While I enjoyed my time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it was a step below where Dragon Age ought to be, and seemed to retreat from its more interesting impulses to deliver a game too safe and bland to cause any controversy… that then got embroiled in a huge online controversy anyway. EA was quick to blame its financial slump on DATV, despite its sports titles underperforming seeming like a larger factor, and we’ve seen many great studios culled under similar circumstances.
Add in the successive failures of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem from BioWare, and the studio is lucky to still be operational. It stands to reason then that if Mass Effect fails, BioWare’s luck will run out.
Mass Effect Needs To Avoid Dragon Age’s Mistakes
These are not ideal circumstances to make a video game in. These are not even tricky circumstances to make a video game in. These are the sort of circumstances that should only exist if a studio acts recklessly and with extreme arrogance, pouring billions of dollars into a Megalopolis-sized mess. The fact we routinely see studios shut down for a single miss (and sometimes even a cult hit that didn’t quite hit sales expectations) should tell us video game development is in an extremely bad place, despite the stream of good games that do manage to survive the blender.
I don’t want Mass Effect to be made under this sort of pressure, because fear doesn’t foster the best creative decision making. Before Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched, I worried the marketing that heavily pushed the involvement of the Dragon Age Council. This bunch of consultant superfans allegedly helped shape the game, and I worried their perspective would be warped from the regular player – too protective of their favourite characters, too keen to avoid danger, too afraid of the darkest, sharpest parts of the lore. I saw this with the Baldur’s Gate 3 patches that pushed the narrative towards these types of players at the cost of the game’s grey morality, and sadly I saw it in The Veilguard too.
It’s not entirely fair to blame the Dragon Age Council – we’ll never know what their feedback was – but the mindset of running things by fans in the first place speaks to the overly cautious approach that ended up diluting Dragon Age. Mass Effect needs to avoid doing the same. Its gameplay and lore have always been simpler than Dragon Age’s (so much so that DATV’s streamlined combat felt like a copy of Mass Effect), but it still exists. And a persistent thing I’ve seen fans ask for online is more aliens – but this is a terrible idea.
Mass Effect Has Clearly Established Lore
Mass Effect has an established canon. We know the planets in the system, and we know what life exists on them. We know that travelling from other, unexplored parts of space takes hundreds of years, and there is an established hierarchy within politics. Having a greater spotlight on the lesser explored races like drell, hanar, or batarian would be great, and I’d fully support Mass Effect going in that direction, even if it’s clear that turian, asari, and human have historically been the load-bearing races of the political system and the game’s lore.
So meeting more of lesser spotted races, such as having a hanar squadmate or even playing as something other than a human would be a solid way to make the new Mass Effect feel fresh. But what I’m afraid of is that, in order to modernise the game and try to inject some intrigue, the same sees the arrival of the Bleepblorgs.
There are no Bleepblorgs in Mass Effect.
Andromeda had its chance to do this and it blew it. Only two races, the Angara and the Kett, were introduced in Andromeda, and then the Kett turned out to be diseased Angara anyway. The Mass Effect poster seems to tease Angara, and while that makes little sense in and of itself since the Angara only exist in the Andromeda galaxy, I could just about accept that we have some Angara making that journey even if that would transparently be just because people like the Angara.
Adding any other races, even with a clever justification of having just been discovered, or brought out of hiding by the Reapers, or… anything, really, would be making the same mistake Dragon Age made. Namely, not caring about the existing lore so that you can try to win over new fans. Mass Effect already offers a much wider universe than Shepard saw, and the next game should be finding ways to tell a fresh story within those gaps, not burying that nuance to build something after.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
87/100
