Still needing a gaming diversion from the grind of Guild Wars 2 legendary armor acquisition, I quickly burnt out on The Sims as well.

When I say “burnt out,” I don’t mean “meh… this sucky game got boring quick.” I mean, “I sunk another 200 hours into this game and now I see floating green diamonds above my dog’s head any time she moves.”

It’s the same with Guild Wars 2, really. I complain on occasion, but really when I hit the wall in GW2 it’s because I lost track of time. You don’t do that with bad games.

It looks like I need yet another diversion to keep me balanced while I pursue my second set of Obsidian Armor. I started off a new Dragon Age: Veilguard campaign as I found a few mods that would at least make a new play-through interesting enough to start, but that got me thinking about how much more I enjoyed Inquisition than Veilguard.

Which got me thinking about the next Mass Effect game. We probably won’t see it for another five years (ffs!), and after all that time my favorite interactive space opera being reduced to an episode of Scooby Doo will well and truly piss me off.

Why? Well, I have monotropism. It’s a fairly common trait in autistic people that causes me to focus on a few things, rather than have broader interests. I love music, but I couldn’t tell you the names of the musicians in my favorite bands, and I can’t remember the names of most artists… just the sounds. With video games, I’m just an extreme version of most gamers. My Steam library is filled with games I purchased thinking they would be awesome, but then didn’t hook me into wanting to play.

BioWare RPGs have always been unique for me, in that I can play Dragon Age games (mostly Inquisition. I came late to the DA party and going backwards is tough) and Mass Effect games over and over again, and still enjoy them more than most new games I try.

I tried starting another Dragon Age: Inquisition campaign, but Veilguard ruined the magic for me. There’s so much closure and discarding of the past DA story in Veilguard that Inquisition no longer matters, story-wise. Which makes Dragon Age 2 superfluous, and why even bother trying to get Origins running on a modern CPU when BioWare and EA won’t put forth the effort to support it?

Veilguard was a decent game, but it closed too many doors in the DA universe for me to want to spend anymore time exploring lore or stories I might have glossed over previously. They just don’t matter anymore. They won’t factor into any potential future games in the series.

Veilguard itself is a one-off. No DLCs will be made. No content updates. 10 years of waiting for a game you can finish in 20 hours, with less content than several of the Inquisition DLCs, and that successfully put a nail in the coffin of the past Dragon Age games by going out of the way to make them irrelevant.

Welp. There’s 300 GB of disk space I get back, I guess.

As you might have guessed, my interest in playing a new Veilguard campaign with a few QoL mods installed faded quickly. There’s still nothing new there, only a constant reminder that BioWare is aging me out of their RPGs.

So I turned to my go-to games in time of stress or boredom: Mass Effect.

There’s still potential there. What happened to the Quarians and the Geth? People gave Andromeda a luke-warm welcome at best, but I think the story was a brilliant counterpoint to the original trilogy. In MEs 1, 2, and 3, you have a battle waged against synthetic lifeforms that believe in a balanced universe through a cycle of systemic evolution and then species culling. In Andromeda, you have organic lifeforms turning all other forms of life into genetic mutations of the Kett.

BioWare has already announced the Shepard’s story is over. The commander will not be the hero of the next Mass Effect. But they’ve also hinted that it’s a sequel to the original trilogy, even though screenshots have indicated that Andromeda is somehow involved. This potentially means no Ryder as well. Does this open the door for another precocious, throwaway hero like Rook who will wind up lecturing us on how some stories end and others just change?

I’ll be honest. If Ryder only gets one game I’ll be a little disappointed. I loved playing Ryder. But I love Shepard more, and the fact that the commander will play no part in the future of Mass Effect just doesn’t sit right with me. So I have… concerns. From five years out.

Because with Mass Effect, there’s still hope for a future where the decisions I make as Shepard and as Ryder matter. That was the whole thing with BioWare RPGs… they did such a good job of carrying forth decisions and outcomes from one game to the next. Especially with Mass Effect, where the first three games are effectively one very long story. So brilliantly done people are still playing the originals.

BioWare is worried about attracting new gamers, but gamers half my age are constantly making Occarina of Time references and talking about Super NES games they’ve played on an emulator. OK… 8-bit has a kitschy nerd-nostalgia factor. Still, it’s not like older games are inaccessible.

To wit: I started a new Mass Effect campaign last night. I’ve never really modded BioWare games before. Never really felt the need. This time, I spent about 10 hours setting up mod managers, content and quality of life mods, and then texture and lighting mods. Just to give myself something new to look for. An unexpected dialogue choice or a renewed sense of awe at the Mass Effect world.

It’s nice. The graphics updates alone were worth the download time.

But it’s still the potential for the story to continue that will keep me going through all four ME games. What happens next?

I really hope Mass Effect gets more thought and courtesy than Dragon Age did. If the answer to “what happens next?” turns out to be, “something completely different so just forget about all that other crap… we’re done with that mess,” then I’m going to lose my favorite game series of all time.

BioWare seems afraid that progressing old and “out-of-date” stories will fail to attract new gamers, but new gamers are still playing games about might and magic, dragons and space lasers. Why would any gamer new to Dragon Age via Veilguard want to go back and play any of the previous games knowing that none of what happened before matters?

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing. BioWare made its own games irrelevant. They could have written a story that offered a fresh perspective but still carried forward the central characters in a meaningful way, or at least failed to negate the previous games in a thoughtless end monologue as the torch is officially passed from Varric to Rook.

It was a thoughtless lecture that lost fans.

Mass Effect has more promise, at least, in that we know Liara T’Soni will be making an appearance. She’s older. Perhaps around 600 years or so? Is she there to carry the central story of the Reapers versus organic life forward, or is she just there to pass the torch and die?

BioWare has long had a habit of lecturing its users. Constant reminders on how to use basic game mechanics. In Veilguard, the whole game was a lecture in social behavior, team work, and an almost toxic level of positivity. It was a strangely streamlined and forced experience for a company that made its mark creating choice-centered games with such intricately threaded outcomes.

It’s time for BioWare to stop thinking it knows best and to start listening to its long-time fans. Don’t shit all over us for a chance at the new hotness? You know what’s really new and hot? Great games. Give us another ME3. Hell, give us another ME2. That was by far the most streamlined of the Mass Effect games, and it still offered way more real choice-based gaming than Veilguard. By a lot.

You want to update graphics? Fine. You want to update the style of writing to appeal to a younger crowd? OK, I guess. But younger people do know things beyond memes and the five subjects they spend all their free-time arguing about on Twitter. I liked the characters in Veilguard, but the story was clearly tailored to suit the headlines. Timeless stories and characters are always relevant. Stories too closely bound to current events or current social concerns remain tethered to the time they were created.

BioWare fans don’t need to be hit over the head with constant reminders on how to play the game. That’s the part *we* do best. What BioWare needs is to be hit over the head with their own past success, and realize what made Dragon Age and Mass Effect games great was the ability to choose whether to be a hero or a raging dick. And to suffer the consequences of either choice. The stories were relatable to everyone, because all of humanity was at existential risk: first by the Reapers, then by the Kett and the Scourge.

Within that context, there were straight characters, gay characters, characters of all ethnicities. There were heroic characters and rat bastards. But the previous games were large enough in scope that the personal traits of the various party members wasn’t half the game. And they just were who they were. Sure, Krem would give you a mini-lecture on whether he was a man or not if you asked. And male Shepard and Ryder could strike up romances with same-sex partners if they wanted. But the romance options and the social themes were still subservient to the larger story, not a series of morality lessons one endured to finally get to the point.

So… I’m the protagonist. The Commander or the Pathfinder. Whatever. I’m concerned about the well-being of my colleagues and friends, sure. Comrades in arms. I got your back. All that sort of thing. Only… the REAPERS ARE COMING so maybe right now isn’t the time to stop everything for some consciousness-raising?

We used to believe that it was actions, not words, that defined a person. But these days, it’s not the concern one shows their fellow human, it’s the manner in which that concern is conveyed. It’s all about image.

Yes, it is.

There is a group of people who goes to airports specifically to photograph the trays filled with their personal belongings when they go through security. They are careful to not hold up lines while they do this, but they pack their belongings just so they can arrange them very artfully and then photograph the results and post it to the internet.

This is ridiculous. “Look at the type of person I want you to think that I am.” Uh… if you were that type of person, you wouldn’t have had to stage the photo. But more importantly, who cares?

There is another group of people unreasonably angry with the first group, claiming that these folks are creating choke points at airport security when the evidence says that’s not true. Many security tray photography enthusiasts even bring their own trays. Airport security trays? How gauche.

But it’s a stupid thing to be pissed off about. Every generation has it’s shallow trends and obsessions, but they aren’t defined by those moments. My generation had satin bomber jackets, parachute pants, and shirts with Japanese writing we didn’t understand. Sure, the music was great… but we looked like idiots all the time.

Social trends change. The way we think about the same social issues changes over time. Another thirty or forty years from now, people will still have strong opinions about all the same social issues: economics, racial inequality, representation, reproductive rights. Guaranteed. The other guarantee is that people then will look back on our opinions now and cringe. Just like we do with the stuff produced by generations that came before.

Whether one liked Veilguard or not, in another 10 years it’s going to feel hopelessly dated. Not because of the graphics or the mechanics. We’re all still playing older games and enjoying them. But because of the way the story cemented itself to a particular social and political tone. One that brooks no disagreement or counterpoint.

I’m all for trans rights. I’m all for “let people be who they want to be” in general. Identity is important. So is representation. People want to play themselves, or at least feel like they belong. Still, I don’t want to play a game that feels the need to bludgeon me over the head with those ideals for a good portion of the time. I play video games to escape things like enraging headlines and endless Twitter fights. I’m willing to bet a lot of other gamers do, too.

I don’t feel the need to wear t-shirts with slogans that display my beliefs, or to constantly signal. I don’t feel the need to please little ol’ church ladies of any stripe, and I don’t see why anyone else would either.

If BioWare is going to abandon both Shepard and Ryder in the next Mass Effect, then I don’t care if they make the new protagonist a multi-racial, trans, polyamorous, autistic parapalegic as long as the story isn’t all about struggling with their identity, or a lecture on tolerance.

I want to know what happens with the motherbleepin’ Quarians, and to see whether Liara drags the Reapers to Andromeda with her. What? No one else wants to see the Reapers go up against the Kett Empire in a sweeping epic that brings the whole Mass Effect story to a head, but still points it in a new (yet continued) direction?

And has no one ever noted the similarity in language between the Kett Empire and the Collectors?

What if the Kett conversion tech and the Reaper pods were based on an even older technology by an even sneakier guiding hand? (For instance)

Or would we rather get a DLC-length swan song that throws all of that away in favor of luring in a few folks who normally spend their time ranting about conflict free yogurt on TikTok, culminating in a dismissive epilogue delivered by a protagonist so devoid of personality all they could do the entire game was smile and nod?

If BioWare wants to continue its lecture series, then the first pupil should be itself. Go back to doing what you do best. Combat intensive TED Talks? Not it.

#ShepardLives