I have spent so much time these past three days writing about the closure of BioWare that I feel like I’ve not really gotten to stop and take a moment for myself. Yeah, I vented about how avoidable this whole thing was, but that’s anger, not grief. I braced myself for years, anticipating the moment when EA would finally bring down the hammer on the Mass Effect studio, so you’d think I would have already given some serious thought to what I’d want to say when the day finally arrived. In all honesty, however, I haven’t been able to figure it out.
The night it happened, I reinstalled my copy of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the 2021 remaster of the original trilogy. I hadn’t accessed my save file on there in years, but that playthrough had been completionist one. That last time I played through the games, I devoured them. My encyclopedic knowledge came in handy; I didn’t have to use a guide to make sure I saw everything, completed every quest, and soaked in every drop of my favorite video games on a modern console.
So when I booted this save file up, I was caught off guard by the deafening silence of the Normandy SR-2’s CIC. My Shepard, an idealized version of myself from over a decade ago (hence why he has hair, unlike most of the RPG protagonists I make nowadays), stood in the glow of the ship’s galaxy map, and there was nothing left for me to actually do. I checked my in-game email to find no unread messages. Every time I spoke to someone on the ship, they’d give me the generic “Commander” greeting that they said when you’d run out of dialogue. All that was actually left for me to do was attack a base belonging to the human supremacy group Cerberus and then head on to the final mission, taking the fight to Earth where my version of Shepard would use the Crucible, a super-weapon passed down by untold numbers of generations in a desperate that someone, anyone, would be able to stop the Reapers harvest of all organic life, instead destroying all synthetic life and living with the consequences.
I’ve done that final mission dozens of times over the years, but this was the first time I’d done it in a post-BioWare world. I’ve mourned Mass Effect multiple times over the years. When Mass Effect 3 first ended, when I saw the Extended Cut that altered the controversial ending, when the Citadel DLC ended with a loving exchange between my Shepard and his lover Kaidan Alenko, who he’d been pining for over the course of the two previous games. Then, Mass Effect: Andromeda came along with its various stumbles that put the series “on ice” for a few years.
In 2020, BioWare announced the game that would have become Mass Effect: Universe would bridge the gap between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, and I’ve waited six years to go home again. Now I never will.
Booting up Mass Effect 3 to find myself on a Normandy whose every interaction and questline had been exhausted was a reminder that there’s nothing “new” for me to see in this world, and there likely won’t be again. Yeah, there’s an Amazon TV show coming, but with the exception of a few people working on it in varying capacities like ex-BioWare Executive Producer Michael Gamble, that’s not going to be from the people who made this world to begin with.
Even then, though, when it comes to talking about the final years of BioWare, many love to point out that the studio had so much turnover throughout the years that it was a real Ship of Theseus situation. Is BioWare even the studio we knew and loved anymore? For me, yeah, there were enough people still there who’d had a hand in the games I loved. Mass Effect: Universe had several people working on it that were veterans of the Mass Effect franchise, and even if figureheads like Casey Hudson, Mac Walters, or Drew Karpyshyn are no longer at the studio, the people who were there had done more than enough for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.
The leaks about what the fifth Mass Effect game was going to be, including those that confirmed BioWare wasn’t going to do things I spent years fearing it would like canonizing a specific Mass Effect 3 ending choice, have stung. I had one day to process the news of BioWare’s closure, and then it was immediately followed by more reveals about a game that looks like home. Now, I only have the memories of what I’ve already seen and done, and I won’t make any more.
Video games are best when they’re finite. The chase for forever games that never actually end is depriving us of singular experiences like the Mass Effect trilogy. In a perfect world, I would have grieved Mass Effect only once, maybe twice, once when I wrapped it for the first time and once when the remasters came out. But instead, it has been a ghost, haunting me for as long as I held it close. After years of back and forth as BioWare struggled under EA’s thumb, years in which it still seemed possible that a new Mass Effect would see the light of day, I finally know that all I’m ever going to have are the memories I already do. I will have no new experiences in this series that put the world into perspective for me at a young age and helped me find out who I was through the decisions I made and the relationships I fostered. I am who I am today because I was once Commander Shepard.
Something that I run into a lot in this line of work as a professional video game knower is that my desire to leave things behind is often an anomaly. I wince every time Naughty Dog teases a new Last of Us or Uncharted, but then I’m met with a superfan telling me there are still “so many more stories to tell” and holding a plate out asking for more. For a long time, I never did that with Mass Effect because I was content to leave it behind after 3. The story of Commander Shepard was something very singular to my life, something that neither Andromeda nor Universe would have been able to truly replicate. It often felt like nothing ever could, and now, nothing ever will. But the uncertainty surrounding BioWare’s fate has kept me in a limbo state, oscillating between cynicism, excitement, dread, and relief. Now, all I have is the low hum of the Normandy’s engines in the vacuum of space, beckoning me to that final mad dash to the Citadel once more.
In a way, it’s helpful to know it’s over, and now I can finally let myself feel the grief I haven’t been able to sit in for years. It’s just as painful as any anger I feel toward EA for what it’s done, but at least it’s born out of missing something I love rather than hate for the ones who destroyed it.
“Greatest challenge of my life, and the greatest reward. It’s been a good ride.”
“The best.”