What Veilguard tells me about Mass Effect 5
So, Bioware's dead then.
Honestly, I don't think anyone is surprised that EA made the decision to shutter the company - I think it's more that we were robbed of any kind of catharsis. We've had this slow, stumbling collapse of a company that basically redefined and modernised two completely separate subgenres of RPG with Baldur's Gate (later Dragon Age) and Mass Effect.
They should have crashed out in a blaze of glory caused by hubris and untenable targets, but instead they got chipped at by the management class until they were incapable of cohering a proper theme. Blamed for the making bad decisions by their bosses who mandated those decisions. Told to hit impossible targets while standing on unstable ground, all the while those driving the day-to-day work at the company saw the writing on the wall and bailed.
The Bioware that closed down last week is just a different company, of different people, a holding-house for successful IP that could later have some developers shipped in from a racing game developer or something to actually make.
There's a lot of buzz going on about what Mass Effect 5 was "going to be" - A Hitman-like secret-agent espionage thing, multiple Hugo-winning authors involved - I understand there was a trailer? idk I'm not so into self-flagellation that I actually watched it, because it's not important.
ME5 was in pre-production and likely years from completion - that's several years in which EA could see the rapidly changing winds of the industry and laser-focus on what's popular right now, and insist that this game 5 years from launch must follow them. That's great news in a year when a James Bond game from the Hitman devs did big numbers, but there's that can happen during pre-prod. GTAVI is about to make more money than the Vatican for one, but there's any number of currently unknown trends that might cause them to pivot.
That's what happened with Veilguard. The team had an idea, codenamed Joplin, that had a very distinct tone and structure focused around the hunt for the Dread Wolf - it would apparently involve some sneaking around parties or social stealth1, and from what I understand had a "heist game but make it Dragon Age" vibe.2
But EA is EA - first they pulled a bunch of the team off to fix Andromeda, then they moved the director over to run and fix Anthem, a live-service action game that was proving nigh-impossible to make with the team they had3, then they decided that same pool of developers should also make the next Dragon Age game a live-service action game. Eventually, they saw the error of their ways and pivoted the project back to a single-player game, but they did so through a series of small delays that never let the project truly reset, and that's why Veilguard is the mess that it is.
I think it's impossible to expect anything different would have happened with Mass Effect 5. If Bioware shut down in 2019 and the only media we had around Dragon Age 4 was the concept art and a description of Joplin, it'd look a lot like how people are talking about Mass Effect 5. "If only they got to make this game", "we were robbed of a true swansong" etc. But that's basically the mindset that got us Veilguard.
To be a proper little prick and paraphrase myself, I don't think Mass Effect would be better off if Mass Effect 5 got made. Because it wouldn't be whatever that trailer showed, or what the advisor said, or the writers, or the composer.
I'm glad people are just openly leaking all this stuff, because fuck EA and because it makes it alot clearer just how the sausage is made, but I'm worried people are getting the wrong conclusions from it because they don't know how to read the information being presented.
That's all, just a little downer to accompany the broader downer.
I have a whole conspiracy theory that the head writers at Bioware were all desperate to make a proper Secret Agent game - Joplin and ME5 both have strong Hitman/Bond/Heist vibes to them, and the Citadel DLC for ME3 opens with a really weirdly Bond-esque "fancy dinner turns into an action scene" thing and introduces a femme fatale double agent. idk I think they were getting tired of making the games they were known for.↩
Sounded fucking sick, gotta say.↩
See Mark Darrah's epic about his perspective on the making-of, it's some very candid stuff from the person who holds a lot of responsibility in how both Anthem and Veilguard ended up. Not blame, responsibility.↩