This is an IGN opinion piece by Jackie Thomas, who has been playing and replaying Mass Effect for nearly 20 years now.
I'm the sort of person who replays my favorite games whenever there's a big gap between releases. And those favorites usually end up being from the Mass Effect series, whether it's just the first game or a run through the entire original trilogy. So, for me, a Mass Effect 5 that captured the magic of the first three games has been something I've been looking forward to since before it was even announced in 2020. Now, that game will never exist, thanks to EA closing down BioWare. And that f**king sucks.
When Mass Effect came out in 2007, I stood in line to get it on release night, and I played it incessently until I finished absolutely everything in it. I did the same thing when the second and third games came out, except I also played the previous games again ahead of time so everything would be fresh in my mind.
Ever since Mass Effect 3 came out, I've replayed the original games maybe a dozen times. I don't even drastically change the way I play Mass Effect each time I play it. Even after nearly 20 years of experiencing the original game, I still play an Adept every time, because pistols are OP and biotics are cool. And I still ultimately do a paragon playthrough, even when I tell myself that I'm going to be bad and play renegade. Mass Effect has felt like home to me for years, and it became my ultimate comfort game.
But eventually, Mass Effect Andromeda came out, and even though I tried to power through it, I ultimately gave up after a deluge of bugs and weird writing turned me off. I still haven't gone back and finished that game, but I still find myself downloading and playing Mass Effect when I run out of other games to play. Hell, with the amount of times I've played the first game, I can probably navigate most of its empty optional planets with my eyes closed. After today's news, I might just download it and play it again in solidarity.
You'd think that after getting burned on Mass Effect Andromeda, I would've learned my lesson. But in the years since Bioware teased what should have the fifth Mass Effect game, I let myself hope that it would redeem the series once again and land in that annual ME replay rotation.
And I know that after Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard's weird shift to a straight-up action game, I didn't have much of a reason to believe that Mass Effect 5 would have been this magical return to form. But I think what's hitting me the hardest about BioWare's closure is that we'll never know whether or not Mass Effect 5 would have been good.
The truth is, we didn't know much about the next Mass Effect game at all. Hell, I don't even know if it would have been called Mass Effect 5, but that's just easier to say than 'the next Mass Effect game' over and over again. Ever since it was announced, BioWare had been pretty quiet about the project, only really speaking up to reassure fans that it was still in development. And look how that turned out.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/mass-effect-5-was-supposed-to-redeem-the-series-after-andromeda-and-now-well-never-get-that
