Tag Archives: Commander Shepard

Technology

Mass Effect 4 Merch Has Fans Talking About Shepard’s Return

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Screenshot: EA

If there’s one thing Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard has earned, it’s some goddamned rest.

Over the past 24 hours, flavor text for a promotional product, as spotted by a YouTuber, sent fans into a tizzy of speculation that the galactic hero would be returning in some sort of new adventure. But the fan-favorite role-playing series’ project director quickly put the rumors to rest, to which I can only say: Good. Bringing Shepard back is an abjectly terrible idea.

Though the main Mass Effect trilogy culminated in 2012—and its follow-up, Mass Effect: Andromeda, came out to middling reception five years later—BioWare’s seminal series of bang-an-extraterrestrial RPGs is in the midst of a resurgence. The developer teased the “next Mass Effect” at the 2020 Game Awards. Though details are slim, it purports to connect the threads between Andromeda and the core trilogy. That announcement was followed by last year’s Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a 4K-resprayed compilation of the original trilogy, plus like 99.99% of its DLC, which resurfaced its operatic narrative in cultural consciousness.

And if there’s one thing our collective replays drove home—Ah, sorry, one sec…

Spoilers follow for Mass Effect 3, 10 years old as of this year.

Ahem. As I was saying, if there’s one thing our collective replays drove home, it’s that Commander Shepard’s story comes to a definitive end. For many, that means Shepard meets perhaps the most definitive end: death.

Most of Mass Effect 3’s story focuses on Commander Shepard’s last-ditch effort to defeat the encroaching army of Reapers, a collective of sentient machines who roam the galaxy every 50,000 years and eliminate all traces of moderately intelligent life. At the end of Mass Effect 3, though there are various endings, you’re given a series of broad choices as to how you defeat the threat.

One choice allowed you to destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, including the Reapers. Another allowed you to subsume them under your control. A third, available only if you did enough side-questing, gave you the option to fuse all synthetic and organic life. (Post-release DLC infamously added a fourth potential ending, which allowed you to simply blow up the Catalyst, condemning the galaxy to death.) All are available in Legendary Edition, and all show Commander Shepard making that ultimate sacrifice (y’know, death). But if you manage to get to a maximum “military readiness” score—meaning you basically did all of the side-questing, and the collect-a-thons—you’d see a cutscene of Shepard taking in a single breath.

Since-deleted text for an N7 Day poster sold on BioWare’s store suggested that the hard-to-achieve, 3.4-second long cinematic was canon. (N7 Day is BioWare’s annual fan celebration of the Mass Effect series.) As pointed out in a recent video by MrHulthen, a YouTuber who specializes in covering Mass Effect, the flavor text initially read: “While Shepard and the survivors are left to pick up the pieces, fans are left wondering what’s next.”

That text was revised—see if you can spot the difference—to “The threat of the Reapers might have been ended, but at great cost including Earth itself. While the survivors are left to pick up the pieces, fans are left wondering what’s next.” And currently, the poster’s product page doesn’t contain any reference to plot details regarding Mass Effect.

Representatives for EA, which publishes Mass Effect, did not respond to a request for comment. Mike Gamble, Mass Effect’s project director, said on Twitter that the original text mentioning Shepard’s survival was put out in error. But if it’s even the barest indication of what the next Mass Effect is about, the potential ramifications are flummoxing, to say the least.

I mean, if Commander Shepard truly makes a comeback, does that mean time travel is in play? After all, if this new game is meant to connect to Andromeda, which takes place six centuries after the events of the main trilogy, the narrative would need to do something to bridge the gap in time. Or, oh, maybe there’s a multiverse thing going on, though I certainly hope not; we’re already at peak cultural multiverse fatigue, and I can’t imagine such sentiment subsiding by the time the next Mass Effect comes out. (The next game does not have a name or a release date.)

Given that we know next to nothing about the plot of the next game at this point, I suppose it’s impossible to rule out the laziest of all worlds: that Shepard actually survived getting disintegrated in an incandescent flash of heavenly blue light, or disintegrated in an incandescent flash of heavenly red light, or disintegrated in an incandescent flash of heavenly green light, or, uh, trampled by an ageless species of intergalactic machines who are strong enough to level cities.

Read More: Everyone Makes The Same Choices In Mass Effect, Apparently

But all speculation is, ultimately, beside the point. The return of Commander Shepard would likely come as a disappointment to fans—it would essentially do away with the entire thrust of the original trilogy, whose appeal was predicated on making tough choices at key narrative moments, of living with the consequences, and seeing the ramifications all the way through to the finale. That finale was pretty damn definitive. Fans have had a decade to let it gestate. There’s no reason to rewrite that history.

Plus, c’mon, if there’s any supposedly dead character who should make a comeback, it’s not the good commander (who, again, has seriously earned some peace and quiet 10 times over). It’s Thane.

 



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Technology

Amazon’s Mass Effect TV Show Shouldn’t Star Commander Shepard

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The shadow of Commander Shepard looms large over the idea of a Mass Effect TV series.
Image: BioWare/EA

After years of wondering when, not if, Mass Effect would ever make the leap from video games to film or TV, it would seem we’re at last on that precipice: Amazon has eyes on bringing BioWare’s sci-fi shooter/Garrus Vakarian dating simulator to streaming. But the question should be less if the Mass Effect series should come to TV, but how—and the answer is without its “main” character.

Commander Shepard is the star of the first three video games in the Mass Effect saga—in the fourth game, Andromeda, it’s Ryder, a character similarly largely defined by the player. Shepard is beloved, although not perhaps necessarily because they are a great character. Shepard is, in some ways, hard to define as having a personality when you scrape away the thing that makes Mass Effect still so loved, and the thing that makes an attempt to adapt Commander Shepard’s story to another medium such a dangerous prospect: so much of what we see in Shepard as players is what we ourselves put into them. Mass Effect is a game franchise defined by its incorporation of player choice, no matter how clear sometimes the limitations that influence can be made within its systems. Even if, on a macro scale across the games, players’ choices are relatively binary, or more about filling in the little flourishes here and there rather than the broadest strokes of its overarching tale, Commander Shepard remains a deeply personal character to people who play the Mass Effect games. We do more than just control Shepard from one plot point to the next, we guide what they say and what they believe in, we forge their friendships and their loves, we craft them as a person. Are they man or woman, paragon or renegade, are they queer, are they war survivors or orphaned soldiers, tech experts or psychic space-wizards? All the little choices people pour into that character make Shepard less of their own person, for better or worse, and instead our window into their place in Mass Effect’s universe.

This is Commander Shepard. There are many like them, but this one is mine.
Screenshot: Bioware/EA

Shepard’s nature as that kind of powerful cipher makes the possibility of a Mass Effect show simply trying to adapt them and the events of the original trilogy of games something of a nightmare. It’s not that it can’t be done—the games have long prided themselves on their cinematic framing and values, making it about as easy an adaptation as it could possibly be if literally translated. But bringing in a Shepard, whoever plays them, and trying to set a defined frame around the nebulous idea of who Commander Shepard is, feels like asking for trouble: and asking for it from a fanbase that has, to put it diplomatically, very much proven how vocal they can be about things they don’t like about the ways the series handled their choices. Even what might seem like the simple choice of whether or not adapting Shepard as John or Jane would be a decision that upends Mass Effect’s fanbase, and that’s before you even get to the granularity of weaving about their personality, their romances, or the way they conduct themselves across their story. So much of ourselves is wrapped up in our interpretation of Commander Shepard as Mass Effect players that the thought of seeing some version that is not just our own would be jarring.

So why even do it? It’s not just that adapting Shepard is a guaranteed way to disappoint the Mass Effect fan base in one way or another. Mass Effect’s world is home to more than just one story, and Shepard’s story has already been told. It’s a setting ripe for exploration beyond the conflict between the Commander and the Reapers. A Mass Effect show could follow in and around the shadow of Shepard—following characters we know before or after they crossed paths with Shepard, familiar favorites like Kaidan, Liara, Garrus, Thane, or Tali (or perhaps an anthology that could encapsulate the lives of its beloved expanded cast). It could show us the events that brought us to Mass Effect’s start point, like the Rachni War and the Krogan rebellions that came after, the Quarian’s creation of the Geth, or even the First Contact War between the Turians and Humanity. There are tales in between the games, especially the period of time in Mass Effect 2‘s opening where Shepard is, well, quite dead (they get better). With the addition of Andromeda to the canon, Mass Effect’s universe and potentiality exploded onto the scope of whole galaxies—and a show could explore what Andromeda set up, seemingly left behind after that game’s lukewarm reception, while we wait for whatever comes next in the franchise.

We know what Shepard’s story is already, and most importantly to Mass Effect players, we know what that story is to our own experience of the shape of it. If we’re going to take the next Mass Relay to TV stardom, Mass Effect should stand ready to do so beyond the shadow of its first hero—and get ready to lay the groundwork and introduce us to new ones beyond the Commander’s reach.

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