Mass Effect 4/5/6

The writing is not going to improve. We will get a new coat of paint over the same flavour writing we've been getting for the past decade, which arguably hasn't gone down that well so far. So either normies will gobble it up because they have no standards and will stomach everything, which is a possibility, but I also see normies being increasingly more put off by mediocre writing in all sort of productions, from TV shows (ST:D, ST:Picard, basically all Alex Kurtzman shows, Westworld, Watchmen, Game of Thrones etc.), to movies (Terminator: Dark Fate, Charlies Angels (2019), Ghostbusters (2016), Disney Star Wars etc.), to Comic Books (almost everything Marvel and DC have put out since 2017 at the latest) and finally video games (The Last of Us 2, Cyberpunk 2077, all Bioware games since 2011, etc.). It could go either way. It could be that the normies just settle, if they are continually fed these types of narratives (and by "these types", I mean bad), but I honestly don't see it. I can be wrong, but I currently don't see it. Maybe if all there is to it, is the gameplay and people just start buying Bioware games purely for the gameplay with no regard to the narrative and just get served CoD like experiences. I don't know. I'm honestly not seeing this as a possible outcome.


There's a lot of things you can do, I'm not sure how Bioware can justify them. What do I mean. Let's say they take the Mandalorian route. Just a crew of a ship, stuck in a cluster, with no Relay, because they're damaged in all endings, shortly after the Reaper War, like a few days, nobody knows what happened, all they know is that the Reapers are gone and you just do whatever. Does it matter if its in the Milky Way somewhere, or the Heleus Cluster in Andromeda? You're still confined in a single cluster, with the exception of no Angara, there's virtually no difference. The new cast will be about the same quality as in any other Bioware game, which haven't been received particularly well and certainly not to the heights of the ME2 crew and the story won't be very interesting, to justify the 8 years, at best, between releases in the Mass Effect franchise. The franchise needs to make a powerful statement with its return and the trailer already has the normies convinced that Shepard and the crew are back. Anything short and that momentum is just going to plummet.

As big fans as we are, we can't buy 3 million copies on launch. The normies will need to buy this game and for a studio that, so far, hasn't made a return to the forefront in a decade (and I know, Dragon Age: Inquisition), but the way things are going and how Bioware's reputation is currently standing, considering the writing, at least, I don't see the normie crowd backing Bioware. Maybe if the game is really technically good, like a Sony Exclusive type of polish AAA experience, as opposed to most flawed AAA games the west is releasing nowadays, like Cyperbunk, DICE's newer Battlefield games and the Battlefronts, the Avengers and the Outriders and the Dark Alliances etc. all those live service games, to be honest and how none of the Biowares future games are being developed as not live services, do I see them being successful? I don't. How many Live Service games are successful right now? Destiny 2, Warframe, Apex Legends, Fortnite, CoD, the usual sports game suspects etc. Do I see Mass Effect being that type of franchise? ME:A's MP wasn't. Anthem wasn't. Can DA4/ME: Will Continue do it? I can't rule it out, but I don't believe they can.

What can Bioware do to really strike big with the normies, then? We already said it above, just give them what they expect and are excited about.

My opinion is that the only reason why the first games story was as good as they were is because they didn't bloat out the game to keep players happy. With each game they made them bigger and longer, but really pad out the story for each game. The only reason why it works with ME2 is because there is mostly side stories for a bunch of short stories with a really small main arc. I don't think they could do that for every game for it would get old and you could see through the trick.

Now, I don't have a problem with Drew Karpyshyn, but don't give him all the credit for ME1. He wasn't the only writer on the game and frankly it was the combination of that entire team that made ME1 what it was. His work in other BioWare games isn't at that same level because he wasn't working with that group of people either. So going in and saying it needs something like that one person just won't work because it teams to try and replicate that team of writers and not just one person that the community gives all the credit to.

Now I will buy the heck out of a Mass Effect game that can be completed in 10 hours or less like the first Mass Effect game, but the tastes and what people will accept has changed and game development for some reason has decided they have to try and appease everyone and generally does the opposite.

Depends on what Bioware wants the new Mass Effect game to be. I can tell you many things that will disappoint the fanbase. All likely for Bioware to make. Because they're Bioware and doing what the fanbase doesn't care to see, is what they've grown really good at, the past 10 years now. And yes, I know, people loved DA2 and ME3 and DA:I and Bioware never burned them. They're not the market. The shrinkage is real and selling as many copies as a game in 2010, is not a success in 2021. Video games are now the biggest entertainment business on the planet, have been for a while, eclipsing even the movie industry. And they keep growing. Meanwhile, Bioware releases games whose lifetime revenue gets dwarfed by the opening weekend earnings of any Marvel movie. And I do understand, one is a powerhouse of the movie industry, the other is a Bioware game. Bioware is a triple A video game studio, or so they claim, releasing games which average $100 million, of which $40+ million goes to marketing campaigns. To put it bluntly, it's an unsustainable model that either needs a budget cut, or to generate double the revenue. Or something in between. Or even better, both. Out of all of the possibilities, which title could earn Bioware the most favourable reception? Especially since EA is now raising prices to $70 per title. Madden already costs $70, Battlefield does, as well, so it is expected that all of EA's triple A games and sports games will release at the $70 price point.

Furthermore, the LE showed us that Bioware isn't over their technical problems, as the LE is far buggier than the original games. So expect just as many bugs as before, the same quality of writing, because nothing changed in the writers room, but the gameplay will be good and the game content will be sound. And I don't know if that's good for an "RPG". It'd be better if Bioware just dropped the pretenses and just made ME into a GeoW clone, completely, with autodialogue and no choices. But they are so proud of their dialogue wheel to drop it, like it was reinventing the dialogue system, when it is so bad. So bad. It keeps getting criticized, each time and each time it gets worse. I wish they'd drop it.


Well, that's not on us. Bioware insisted on it.

And just to quote something from Chris Priestley in that interview, which always pisses me off, worse now, then back then.

"No, because the game does not have to come after. Or before. Or off to the side. Or with characters you know. Or yaddayaddayadda."

What would you call a game that involves Liara and takes place 600 years after the endings, you donkey? "It doesn't happen in the past, or the future, or off to the side". Then when does it exist? Outside of time and space? God fucking damn, that was such a stupid fucking thing to say, that would have earned a slap from me. Sue me, put me in jail, but Chris was so fucking terrible to interact with, in his later years in Bioware. Like he didn't care. Maybe he was tired of the crunch and didn't, but I've worked crunch, too. On a call center. For 6 years. By the time I left, I had 64 days of leave that I never got, meaning I hadn't seen a day off in 3 years. I worked double shifts and weekends and I dealt with people that shouted profanities in my ear all day long and I kept it cool and collected and when I quit, my department leader was at a loss, because he had nobody like me. No matter what Chris actually believed about anything, as a professional, he should have kept the many shit he spouted at the time, to himself.

Sorry for the rant.

Well, it was. Besides the money, which, as I said, it would make them money because it's basically free money. It wouldn't even need 100k copies to break even. I think it is safe to assume that. But the one thing that people say unanimously, is how much more they like the trilogy, compared to anything Bioware has done since, it is still a bunch of games from 10 years ago, that look and play as such, which new people didn't like, the games are not indicative of the quality of future Bioware products and there is no confidence in them making a return, only lament to how far they've fallen since and while the complaints about the ending aren't as prevalent, nobody is saying the endings were good, just that they were not as bad as they were on release and it usually leaves people with the same emptiness that they felt back in the day. And those that go to play Andromeda, usually come back with a bad review for it. A guy spent $40 on it and couldn't get through the first hour.

I know that people here think that Shepard and the crew's story is done, but there is nothing to substitute them with. Which isn't a positive. If you made new fans, you're putting them up against an impossible standard to hit, without going back to them. And even that won't be as good this time around, because as I said, there's no change in the writing room. But it will get sales.

Shouldn't there be? Is it better to just ... not? Pretend its all OK? Bioware isn't engaging the gaming audience like they use to. If we have only negatives, specific negatives, that we talk about all the time, then clearly those negatives are preventing the userbase from mending. And if it hasn't happened 9 years later, something should be done to change it.


I don't care what number it has. And I can't talk positively about games that were negatively received and further damaged the franchise and the brand. What am I supposed to say? At least it didn't give me cancer? That's a positive.

It reminds me of that one time Chris Priestley, God bless that man, such an endless source of memes, these days, reminds me of that time Chris Priestley told us that the endings couldn't have been that bad, if we still talked bout them.
A short list of some bad things people still talk about
-9/11
-The Vietnam War
-World War 2
-World War 1
-The Holocaust
-The Spanish Flu
-The Black Death
-Covid-19
-The Dark Ages
-Cancer
-AIDS
-Leukemia
-Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
-Mental Disorders
-Global Warming
-Nuclear Warfare
-3rd World Hunger
-Slavery
-Genocide
Can't be that bad, if we're still talking about them, eh Chris?

So you're saying that one day, collectively, the fans woke up and just decided to shit on Bioware, for no reason whatsoever. Ah, shame on the fans, then. How could they? How dare they?

Then what happens is that either Bioware addresses what made the fans react in a negative manner, because 9 years later, here we are again, or as you say, EA ultimately closes the studio. The thing is, whether you believe that pleasing the fans is impossible or not, is irrelevant, unless the studio tries and it hasn't tried. All I keep hearing from Bioware is that they "hope". They "hope" things will change, they "hope" the endings will be better received. They "hope" to capture the CoD audience. They "hope" to capture the Skyrim audience. There is a lot of "hoping" going around, not much "doing". There is a saying " Pray to God, but row for shore. " I don't see any rowing. I get that the EC was supposed to be the rowing, but it was rowing towards the deep, not the shore. The saying says "row for shore". Easy mistake to make, when you don't want to listen to what you're being told, like Bioware did and keeps doing since.

Again, doubling down on something, isn't fixing what's wrong. It's making worse what was already there. And if a company can't produce something that people want, then no consumer lost anything.

Whatever they produce will have to be much better executed than Anthem and better across the board than ME:A. Even then, fans of previous titles are not necessarily going to accept the direction Bioware go with a sequel. I've read people writing that Mass Effect went down hill after the original let alone by the time Andromeda came round! Mainly I hope that the technical and staffing problems have been addressed, allowing them to at least move forward with whatever they have envisaged.

Personally, I am not in favour of Shepherd returning. Multiple reasons but in short I think that it has run its course. I am currently replaying ME:A (a bit of MP too) and the real downside for me is still the basic scripting of characters (Ryder included) and delivery of the story. On top of that I think there are minor issues across the board.

It's not impossible to break the downward trend - the OT isn't without critique but with increasing pressure from world events and past failures you can't help but worry a little about how it turns out.

I don't have any faith that it will, to be honest.