Tbf, I feel like any excitement for a new Mass Effect game has always been tempered by a lot of skepticism. And given that these comments are filled with people saying that it probably would have been a disappointment, can you even really blame the execs for not being convinced?
What’s frustrating is people don’t thinka new Mass Effect itself would be disappointing just one made by current Bioware would be.
Mass Effect has the name recognition to be a successful franchise it just needs to made by a team that understands what made the OG trilogy so beloved. Strong characters and good writing is what the franchise needs.
Kind of like how WotC (I know, I know) brought Larian on to develop BG3. They realized those folks probably understood what made BG great better than any of the people still at Bioware. And considering how long it had been since BG2, I imagine hardly any of those same devs remained anywa, similar as how few of the people that made Mass Effect great were still there either
And then WoTC let go or lost pretty much all of the D&D team that worked with Larian on BG3 since the beginning, resulting in Larian turning down the option to do more with D&D and instead returned to their own IP.
Modern popular game IP owners are largely horrible stewards of their worlds.
I feel they at least deserved one last attempt to prove themselves. If ME5 came out and it was received like Veilguard, so be it. I wouldn't have been that upset if that was what did them in. Mass Effect was always the bigger IP to begin with, so if that couldn't save them, nothing could have.
But to just unceremoniously kill off the entire studio because it'll help Jared Kushner's bottom line? Fuck that. Fuck EA. Fuck private equity. The entire western AAA development landscape is a goddamn joke because of shit like this.
Well you'll get no arguments from me about that last section, Bioware was dying because EA has been strangling them for years But Bioware was dying, and the fact that Mass Effect 5 was only being thrown around as a hail Mary does not give me hope that it would be a triumphant return to form.
How many hundreds of millions of dollars and failed projects need to be had until they got their "last chance". Dragon age was a huge flop. Anthem was a massive failure and a bigger embarrassment. It's not like EA didn't want those games to succeed. They had a decade working on a game they rush finished and put out in less than 12 months and then were shocked that it released in the state that it did and blamed fans for expecting too much. If you wanna make the argument that veil guard was fucked with through development I'll give that to you, but why wouldn't they helicopter parent the team that hadn't released a successful video game in over 13 years? And this isn't even getting into Andromeda, a game that I was a fan of.
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u/Lolaversusamogus 8h ago
Tbf, I feel like any excitement for a new Mass Effect game has always been tempered by a lot of skepticism. And given that these comments are filled with people saying that it probably would have been a disappointment, can you even really blame the execs for not being convinced?