Did the success of Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars The Force Awakens affect Mass Effect Androm

That is definitely technically a question.

As I said right from the start, humor is in the eye of the beholder. If you take the humorous approach, you automatically exclude a lot of persons who don't find your sense of humor funny. There's an audience for Adam Sandler and other comedians, but others hate their guts.

Humor is a very dangerous tool if you want to be inclusive to as large an audience as possible.

It wasn't Guardians of the Galaxy or Star War, it was the fact that people loved the Citadel DLC so much that someone thought it would be a good idea to create that atmosphere for an entire game.

The reason for the tonal shift in MEA can be traced directly to the response to ME3 and to the Citadel DLC.  But done without properly reflecting on WHY they got the reactions they did.

So how do you feel about SW 9?

I would rather say the success of the Citadel DLC lead to MEA being as lighthearted as it is.

The light-hearted feel-good tone and jokey/campy on-the-nose surface-level dialogue was definitely a Marvel-inspired attempt to attract a broader, younger (less-discerning) audience but it didn't materialise ultimately.

Talk about identity crisis... MEAs young-adult writing and tone-based dialogue system is stilted and restrictive and is ultimately a pale imitation / poorer replacement of the old games systems and did very little for the remaining traditional BioWare consumer who have become accustomed to significantly richer interactive experiences in the past. BioWare have neglected their base too long, their games have become unfocused and now they are firmly in the wait for reviews and heavy discounts category for many former hard-core fans myself included.

I hope if anything is learned from MEAs failings that can be applied to future BioWare games it's that BioWare games live and die on the quality of the writing and the expressiveness of the dialogue / morality systems to create a convincing sense of self and attachment to the game-world which is their bread and butter... When they loose sight of their core strengths and become overly focussed on the wrong things which they are ill-prepared and ill-suited to develop like multiplayer-orientated skinner-box rng loot systems, open-world sandboxes with procedural lite-mmo / ubisoft-style filler content they loose their identity and no longer stand out from the conga-line of mediocre hacks chasing the same gaudy fads.

In fiction? OK, if they said gaming, I could buy that. I'd disagree, but I could understand, but c'mon. Well, whatevs. I'll still take Hawke any day. 

I feel like I remember you predicting this exact outcome long before MEA's release. Am I remembering correctly? I am certain that someone predicted it, whether it was you or someone else.

Or at the very least hiring a writer that can write a storyline for MEA and not F it up. Unlike Supermac.

I remember him. Didn't he walk out? I can't remember.

He did...

and I agree. Two consecutive lead writers walked out, with Mac eventually taking on a progressively broader role simply to get the project to completion. There seem to have been a great many failures, many due to poor choices on BioWare's part. I like MEA, but I expected more well considered choices following the ME3 fallout.