Dear BioWare,
Hi. It’s me. Austin. Big fan. I heard you’re pushing back the release
date for Mass Effect: Andromeda from Holiday 2016 to the first quarter of 2017.
Haha, I’m just kiddin’. You do what you gotta do. With the departure of Chris Shlerf,
the lead writer of previous Mass Effects, and, hoof, the Senior Development Director
Chris Wynn, you’ve got quite the creative vacuum over at BioWare Montreal. I’m certainly
not going to suggest that you try to rush out a game while trying to get a new team
to coalesce. So, no, the delay? It makes total sense to me.
I’m actually not quite as doom-and-gloom as some folk are about the departure of Wynn
and Shlerf. Sure, the first three Mass Effects were great, Yes, even 3. So I understand why
folk are disappointed to see old members of the team move on to other projects. But while
it was important for the first three games to have a coherent and cohesive vision and
feel to them, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a really fantastic opportunity to reinvent aspects
of the franchise and explore entirely new themes and elements of this really great universe
you’ve created.
With Andromeda being an entire galaxy far far away, and Mass Effect 3 being a long time
ago, having a fresh pair of fingers at the helm to help us explore a wild frontier? Yeah,
I can get into that. In fact, this illustrates pretty well how “Mass Effect” is such
an excellently-titled franchise. A lot of really well-conceptualized games have a title
that’s a little too married to the original story of the first game they make, and making
new iterations gets kinda awkward. Dragon Age suffers from this a little bit. You’re
basically fucked to staying within a certain timeframe there. God help you if you make
a game and don’t put a dragon in it.
But “Mass Effect?” pure brilliance. Naming a Science Fiction franchise after the core
scientific breakthrough that made all of the game’s technology possible? Fucking perfect.
Let’s talk about Mass Effect technology for a second. Mass Effect, or mass effect
fields, are created by manipulating unobtaniu--er element zero. Anyway. Depending on the electrical
current being run through it, element zero is capable of both raising and lowering the
mass of matter within its sphere of influence. This technological marvel is applied to, shit,
just about everything, from things as massive as faster-than-light warp drives, to weaponry,
the fucking force, and, um, toothbrushes.
Sound like science fiction? Yeah, kinda. It is. It sounds about as ridiculous as, I dunno,
compressing space time in front of you while expanding it behind you to circumvent relativity
limitations to travel faster than the speed of light. Oh. Except. That’s an actual thing.
Well, sorta. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre theorized that faster-than-light travel could be possible
if you forgo traditional methods of kinetic-energy based propulsion and acceleration and instead
directly manipulate gravity to warp spacetime, effectively, um, like, moving a vessel without
actually exerting any kinetic force on it.
Initial tests are...promisingish. Huge limitations are the enormous amount of energy needed to
power such a thing, if it could ever actually be built. Also, um, it’d probably invite
a host of space Cthulhu’s from beyond the galaxy here to assimilate us.
Oh, which brings me back to Mass Effect: Andromeda. So, BioWare, let’s chat a bit. To reiterate,
I’m really stoked about Andromeda, and I’m glad you’re taking time to get it right.
That being said, I have to talk to you about a couple things. Y’see, Andromeda is an
opportunity to do some new stuff, but we need to make sure that you don’t, um, fall into
a few tragic pitfalls that are pretty common. So here’s some things I really don’t want
to see in Mass Effect: Andromeda:
No synthesis ending bullshit. I don’t mean erasing the past or anything like that. And
honestly, you’re unlikely to find a more vigorous defender of Mass Effect 3’s ending
(more on that another time) than me, but the Synthesis Ending was a huge misstep. You know
why? Because it completely circumvented the main themes you had built the entire first
franchise on: dichotomy and making a tough choice between limited options. So the Synthesis
ending was, at its heart, a lazy subjugation of the core themes and concepts you had spent
three games and hundreds of game hours building. Don’t cheap out on choices on the 11th hour,
and don’t compromise your core vision. So whatever themes you go with, stay true to
them, and don’t be lazy.
2.
No MMO bullshit. There’s this weird fucking tendency among singleplayer games nowadays
to insert fucking mechanics and quests from Massively Multiplayer Online Games. I even
started catching whiffs of this shit in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Stoppit! If you make me
collect 7 Rachni dicks or something just because your boss at EA said you needed to put more
content in and you panicked, I will...well, I won’t do anything. And I’ll probably
still buy the game. Fuck. I’m part of the problem.
No reapers. Please, I cannot emphasize this enough. You had a nice trilogy. You did. You
got to introduce Space Cthulhu and wrap up that plotline. 9/10, you did it. So I swear
to fucking fuck Christ if you fucking make Reapers the enemy in Andromeda I will fucking
scream. And don’t you cheap out and try to be like “Oh, it’s not the Reapers,
it’s, um, the Schneapers! The Reaper’s Even Bigger and Scarier bosses! Yeah! They
can make you bleed right out of your nipples!” In fact, I’d try to avoid the “bigger
and scarier” route altogether. At some point the whole “you are insects to us” bad
guys just bleed together. You made a sweet choice by going to a new galaxy a long time
in the future. Don’t waste that rebirth telling the same story over and over again.
And #4, the best for last: keep EA’s marketing team’s mitts as out of your creative process
as much as you possibly can. I cannot emphasize this enough. I know. They’re huge and terrifying.
But if they do something to fuck up your game like, I dunno, splitting it all up into different
episodes to be released every month for $20 a pop, or introducing microtransactions so
you can buy the best gunz ever for $5.99--whatever it is, don’t let ‘em do it, because if
they mess it up, YOU will be blamed, because it’s YOUR game that’s fucked.
And that’s it. I don’t have a lot of faith anymore for the AAA games industry, but I
try to believe that anybody is capable of rising above the challenges that plague us.
Be the hero I know you can be, BioWare. Don’t disappoint me.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
What does Shepard’s dick look like?
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