Tag Archives: Mass Effect

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

Encouraging Dragon Age 4, Mass Effect News Shared By BioWare

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Image: Electronic Arts

Despite the turbulent development roadmap of Dragon Age 4, BioWare announced yesterday that the RPG is in the middle of the production phase. The announcement coincided with the news that a Dragon Age executive producer was leaving the studio. As the blog post tells it, the developers’ morale is reportedly high right now, and the game is hitting deadlines despite the recent and previous departures and the general lack of major updates.

BioWare explained that the fantasy RPG is currently executing on the blueprint that was set out during the pre-production phase. The studio assured its fans that the team is currently “creating amazing environments, deep characters, strong gameplay, impactful writing, [and] emotional cinematics.” It also named longtime series veterans for both the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, such as the production director Mac Walters, the game director Corrine Busche, and the director of product development Benoit Houle as directors who would be leading the production phase.

At the same time, just yesterday, the Dragon Age executive producer Christian Dailey announced that he would be leaving BioWare, and that the next installment of the series “is in great hands.” He added in a separate tweet that “the Dragon Age team is killing it and the game is in amazing hands. Don’t fall for the hate.”

If the public reaction to the four-year wait (so far) seems cynical, it’s because Dragon Age had also recently lost its creative director. Matt Goldman “mutually [agreed] to part ways” with BioWare in November. Besides these staffing changes, Dragon Age 4 had been rehauled multiple times, including an entire shift from single-player to multiplayer to single-player again.

The official blog post also mentioned that the next Mass Effect game is currently being prototyped under the leadership of its project director, Mike Gamble. BioWare emphasized that quality was important, and asked for the community to be patient.

At The Game Awards in 2020, BioWare showed off their cinematic trailer for Dragon Age 4. It confirmed that its protagonist would be facing off against Solas, a companion character from Dragon Age: Inquisition. None of this information was new to anyone who played Inquisition to the end, or its Trespasser DLC. According to GamesRadar, lead writer Patrick Weekes stated that the game will be addressing questions such as “What happens when you don’t have power?” and “what happens when the people in charge aren’t willing to address the issues?” BioWare also unveiled a trailer for the next Mass Effect game, which showed series mainstay Liara trudging through an icy landscape.

Dragon Age 4 does not currently have a planned release date.



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Technology

Mass Effect Developer Bioware Says It’s Embracing Remote Work

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“Since I ain’t gotta go into the office, I’m blasting off to space!”
Screenshot: BioWare

With the ongoing pandemic continuing to disrupt life as we know it, especially as the omicron variant fuels an increase in confirmed covid infections, developer BioWare plans to embrace a remote work ethos.

In a blog post discussing the state of BioWare, studio general manager Gary McKay said the challenges presented by covid-19 have caused the developer to reconsider what work looks like for its employees. That reconsideration has led BioWare to adopt a hybrid approach to work, meaning the studio will give workers more flexibility with where they live and how often they go into an office.

“Our goal is to lean into the things everyone likes about working from home, while also giving people the opportunity to return to the office with more flexibility,” McKay said. “Going forward, we’ll have new challenges with a hybrid approach to work and are focused on new tech that will help maximize collaboration and communication between onsite and remote people.”

McKay went on to say that BioWare will no longer require employees to relocate to either its Austin or Edmonton locations. Instead, the studio will start “looking for new talent from anywhere in North America” going forward.

BioWare wouldn’t be the first studio to embrace what amounts to a permanent work-from-home option. Back in December 2020, Square Enix made its own work-from-home accommodations, originally adopted for the pandemic, permanently available for employees. Meanwhile, Square subsidiary and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy developer Eidos Montreal shifted to a four-day workweek in October 2021. Developer Nesting Games, a new studio composed of former Ubisoft employees, also offers full and partial remote work options for its staffers. This is a good thing for the industry and a direction all studios should go in.

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Capping the blog post off, BioWare didn’t provide any new details on the in-development Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects. McKay did say, however, that he’s “seeing some incredible work from both teams.”

 

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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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Technology

Mass Effect DLC With Lost Source Code Returns Thanks To Mod

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Screenshot: Pinnacle Station

Back in February it was announced that Mass Effect Legendary Edition wasn’t going to be including everything in the trilogy, because the source code for a single piece of old DLC—Pinnacle Station, which we reviewed back in 2009—had been lost.

At the time, game director Mac Walters told Game Informer that since the code had been lost, if BioWare were going to add the DLC to the game it would have taken them six months to rebuild it from scratch, an enormous expenditure for a tiny piece of DLC that they absolutely were not going to invest in.

“I wish we could do it”, he said. “Honestly, just because this is meant to be everything that the team ever created, brought together again – all the single-player content. And so, leaving it all on the cutting-room floor, it was heartbreaking.”

Making things even more heartbreaking is that BioWare actually reached out to Demiurge, the studio responsible for the DLC, and were told that some backups of the code existed, and that they’d send them right over. But “when the backups for the code sent over contained almost all corrupted data – even vital links were missing.”

Ah well! While the retail release of Legendary Edition was missing Pinnacle Station, you can now slide it right on there thanks to this mod, which doesn’t just drop the DLC back into the collection, but makes sure that it’s an updated version of the original content as well, with difficulty adjusted, extra music and sound effects added and some other 2009-era roughess smoothed out.

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For a technical explanation of just how they managed to port the game over, this blog post goes into great detail on the processes and challenges involved. And if you want to grab the mod and try it out, you can download it here; to play it, fire up the galaxy map on the Normandy and head to the Argos Rho cluster, Phoenix system.

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Mass Effect Legendary Edition Players Make The Same Choices

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Screenshot: BioWare

Mass Effect is contingent on choice—or at least the illusion of it. Turns out, in playing (or replaying) Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a lot of you who played the remastered trilogy made pretty much the same decisions. That’s according to an infographic BioWare posted on Twitter today.

Spoilers follow for the Mass Effect trilogy, which is about a decade old by now.

The data isn’t perfect. It doesn’t account for whether or not these stats are from first-time players or from those who’ve run the trilogy a dozen times. It doesn’t even clarify whether or not the dataset is aggregated from multiple playthroughs of Legendary Edition that any given account may have undertaken. The figures are nonetheless revealing, and further affirm the notion that most people who play Mass Effect end up making similar choices.

For example, in the first Mass Effect, 94 percent of you navigated conversation options so Wrex, the krogan, survived that Virmire mission. A further 93 percent of players saved the Rachni queen. Politicians could only dream of these figures.

Mass Effect 2 followed similar lines. While addressing Tali’s treason charge, 96 percent of you successfully convinced the quarian admiralty board to pardon her. Garrus, no surprise here, is broadly the most beloved companion. The even-keeled turian was the most likely party member to survive Mass Effect 2’s climactic suicide mission. (Guess I’m an outlier.) He was also the most-used squadmate in the first Mass Effect.

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In Mass Effect 3, a whopping 96 percent of you cured the genophage—the biological weapon that restricts krogan birthrates, condemning their society. But BioWare didn’t share any stats regarding the notorious ending choice of Mass Effect 3.

Read More: Almost Nobody Played A Bad Guy In Mass Effect

So, how do today’s stats stack up against history? In 2013, BioWare released a comprehensive infographic detailing player behavior in Mass Effect 3 for those who rolled the credits. It doesn’t offer an exact corollary to today’s stats, of course, but still sheds light on some fascinating shifts.

During Mass Effect 3’s original run, the number of Shepards who sabotaged the genophage was twice as high: 8 percent. Liara was the most-used squad member, suggesting Garrus has grown in popularity over the years. Back in 2013, 82 percent of players played as male Shepard, compared to 68 percent for Legendary Edition. In 2013, during the showdown between the geth and the quarians, 37 percent of players sided with the geth, while 27 percent saved the quarians. Those figures plummeted to 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively. (Yes, 80 percent of you negotiated peace.)

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite years of trial and error proving that Vanguard is obviously the best class, both now and then, about 40 percent of you decided to save the Milky Way as a Soldier. You know there are plenty of third-person shooters without badass space magic, yeah?

 



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