A reader is looking forward to the new Mass effect but thinks it would be better to go with a new story, rather than getting obsessed with series canon.
It was the 10th anniversary of Mass Effect 3 in March and I don’t think I’m being too negative when I say that things haven’t been going well for the franchise since then. The ending of the trilogy was an absolute disaster in terms of the fan reaction (although I still like the game overall) and Andromeda was even worse.
I still don’t understand what was going on with Andromeda, because it was so clearly under budget than the other games and basically just BioWare’s B team worked on it. The best explanation I heard is that EA realized that Dragon Age makes more money and as they went through their anti-single player phase, they decided Mass Effect was a low priority.
Thankfully, Anthem’s failure seems like the best thing that could have ever happened to BioWare, as EA freaked out and sent them back to work on the games that made them famous in the first place. In fact, it seemed to have a positive effect on the entire industry, with publishers realizing that live service games are not a secret god mode that allows for infinite profits.
A new Mass Effect was eventually confirmed, but even years later we still haven’t seen it and have no idea what it is or when it was set. The best guess seems to be that it’s a sequel, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet. So I keep hoping it’s really a reboot.
I’d say there are many good reasons for this, many of which apply to any long-running series. I love the original characters, I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t, but they’ve had their story, their arcs, and while it might not end in the most satisfying way, it did end. To continue you just end up with a Star Wars-esque situation where more and more complicated reasons have to be devised for characters to appear and rejoin adventures.
The obscurity of returning characters will inevitably grow, until the game’s appeal is no longer the story and personalities and instead just a temporary jolt of nostalgia as fans are expected to get excited at the sight of background characters and Easter eggs instead of enjoying The plot.
This happens in all media – movies and TV are just as bad – and it almost never works out well. Nothing can end and no character gets to die, at least not for long.
The other big argument for a reboot is that the story wasn’t really well planned over the three games (it’s tempting to make another Star Wars comparison there). There are many stories of how basically everything related to the Reapers was changed at the last minute, most apparently for the worse.
But the choices you made while going through the entire trilogy didn’t really turn out the way a lot of people expected either, probably because nothing like this had ever been done before and they had no idea at the beginning how popular the series would be, and so things were not fully planned.
However, restart the series, create new characters, but in similar situations, and you can make Mass Effect the ultimate version of itself. Make a sequel and you’re bound by what’s already happened, trying to explain away things that clearly don’t make sense, when it would be better to just try to move things forward.
It probably won’t happen, I can imagine the new game being a sequel anyway, but it seems to me that people are more obsessed with canon and continuity these days than with actual storytelling. And the thing about stories is that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Mass Effect is over, so it’s time to start a new story.
By reader Tribot
The reader’s position does not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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