New Mass Effect Game Next

I was cracking in all morning. I hope some of it got through to people who matter, but it seems like they just don't care? I just don't know anymore. 

Getting older is remembering how much Pride meant to you as a teen and young adult... only for it to feel empty now. I love a good party, but I’m tired of corpos flying a rainbow flag while donating to republican American politicians, supporting housing discriminatory practices, profiting off horrors like genocide or child slavery, or even just throwing scraps with insidious messages, tropes, or no quality/quantity and expecting us to be happy.

Especially cause they do this shit for one month and then go back to not caring. And especially gross cause many corps are using pride as like a “make money after a year of lower non government/stock based profits” so pride kinda feels like a cow being milked this year. But I really wanna get drunk and party with lgbtq people after a year of horror so I can’t process it.

But BW is basically dead to me. DA4 better look like a fun, satisfying game or I may not even buy that now. I’d rather take a nap than playa mediocre video game any more.

LGBT Wrath month on twitter has been so enriching for my soul. BioWare is getting roasted on the daily, and if they don't do better then it won't be because we didn't give them all the tools they needed to do so. WE'VE BEEN TELLING THEM WHAT THEY ARE DOING WRONG FOR YEARS! So I don't feel very optimistic, but at least this is good to see action taking place.

I get being frustrated but some people really seem to have unrealistic expectations of what can be done with existing content, and at some points really betrays an ignorance of how programming works.

Saying that all the content is already there is only true if romances exist in a vacuum, but they don't, in the first game most of all. The lack of a Kaidan vs Ashley or a threeway confrontation in the first game does matter because its absence impacts event flags. If an event flag tries to trigger without the associated content present, the whole thing grinds to a halt at best. Modders got around this by manipulating the gender flags to essentially jury-rig the dreaded Gay Toggle. That's fine for fan-made content but a published game is held to a higher standard.

The fact is that Kaidan's m/m romance not being added back in is not a slight against us specifically. We're collateral damage to the fact that no new voice-work is being done at all.

I'm all for holding their feet to the fire to make sure that they don't repeat their mistakes in the next game, but we need to keep our eyes on what it's really about and what's realistic. That's why I had a problem with the MakeJaalBi campaign.

It's not unrealistic. "Unrealistic" would be asking for Jacob's romance to be fully restored based solely on existing assets. That's impossible, and we know it (Though I'm gonna come back to this point).

The content is THERE. Okay, there's no three-way confrontation, or version between just Kaidan or Ashley, but there's enough there to make the content for the game proper. And, frankly, if you're a male Shepard trying to romance Kaidan, you're probably not looking to Ashley or Liara as a romance anyway, and that can shut things down quick.

But the ultimate thing at this point is not just the absence. Oh, that's certainly a part of it, to be sure. But at this point? It's as much about the combination of silence and absence. The absence part is obvious - it is patently unjust to have a game published in 2021 still be bound by the homophobia of 2007. Yet that is what we have when the Mehgendary Edition comes along and doesn't offer a same-sex romance for Kaidan until ME3, that in making trophies linked to romances, gay men are not able to ping them unless they actively play outside of their sexualities (you'll note that Dragon Age has abandoned this strategy and it's just a single romance that leads to an achievement being received).

The silence, however, is all the worse. Not just is there no official word, no official response to the campaign, but the few times it even gets brought up in interviews, we get crap like the interview with Mac Walters that this open letter responds to - he leads off with a laugh, and then basically dismisses the idea of restoring the content by saying that it "would make things unravel," which... HOW? How does making a bisexual character, who IS established as bisexual by way of ME3, be able to express that bisexuality in ME1, make anything unravel?

Or, here's another thing on that silence front, the fact that there is NO mention of MShenko in the advertising for this game. The community video just featured Cortez on the M/M relationships, and during the cast read put together a while back, the dialogue between Male Shepard and Kaidan was only for the friend dialogue, even though there was friend and romance versions for other romances.

BioWare is actively avoiding representing Male Shepard/Kaidan as a relationship, specifically BECAUSE bringing it up makes it clear that this is something that COULD have been managed.

This is from a separate but connected open letter from the campaign where this was discussed intensively with modders.



Now, here's the other thing to bring up - at this point, considering that there has been NOTHING, no response, no word, at best these gross excuses that don't hold up to scrutiny and basically come down to "we're going to uphold the homophobia of fifteen years ago BECAUSE"... When negotiations get to the point where one side is offering nothing, it's time to just demand EVERYTHING. Even if it'll take more time, even if it seems unfeasible.

Because now it's a matter of how EVERY game has had some level of erasure going in to it - and yes, I include ME3 in that, because there's an active cut to the Male Shepard/Kaidan romance from the female Shepard version, where Kaidan picks Shepard up. And there was no "I love you" between Male Shepard and Kaidan until the Extended Cut was released. EVERY MASS EFFECT GAME HAS HAD QUEER CONTENT CUT.

Like dataminers did the work to discover that Jaal was meant to be bi and it was hacked out at the last second - that's why Ryder had no ability to flirt with him, not even open himself to be turned down, on release.

Want to talk about realistic? Here's a realistic conclusion - If we don't crack down on them, demand active improvement, demand that they change, they'll keep doing this. They will keep pulling the rug out from under us. They will continue finding ways to undermine the queer content that they do offer. So demanding improvement, demanding patches that put this content back in the games, is demanding that BioWare honor their words about inclusivity and representation, and not just keep spouting these words while cutting corners ONLY on the queer content, never the straight stuff.

BioWare can afford to bring back the voice actors. Kaidan's voice actor made it very clear that he was hoping they would fix this, and Mark Meer has been promoting the ship with him so I doubt that'd be a twist of his arm. As For Liara-one would only venture that they have her voice actor under some sort of contract. As for Ashley I don't know, but at worst they could find someone to play the part if not her for what 2 or 3 lines, but I suspect she'd happily do it for the fans.

If you grant that adding an m/m Kaidan to the game in 1 and 2 is too difficult, the problem is also they never took ownership of that. They acted like it was an evil secret society that blocked them in the past and that of course now they would never do such a thing, even though MEA happened in 2017 while BW had cultivated a pro lgbtq image and to be frank the discussions by most BW staff concerning the way that game treated lgbtq issues were pretty toxic. They never really apologized for their strange slowness on m/m, they never really did much but deflect onto some vague “the games industry is terrible too, we couldn’t make Jacob bi” and moved on. They added romance based achievements but when they could have added a “waiting for three games just for some gay content” achievement for male Shepard’s who romances no one until Steve or Kaidan in three, they didn’t. There’s other things they could do besides change MELE to make Kaidan available. Hell they could do a publicity video where they have the VAs in character acknowledge ME’s failure and say some pride jumbo jumbo, but no, because at the end of the day, the ME side of BW is not really interested in change or doing better. So sure, maybe adding Kaidan m/m content is beyond the effort level of BW, but their response to the issue was a warning sign.

I'm glad to hear it. I had a feeling she'd be pleased to do it. Almost all people in media seem far more open to being allies than the people in charge.

Ignoring the rest-this point you make is somewhat worthy of a response. The simple fact is the marketing for Mass Effect Legendary edition is largely over. The game is out. Unless you wish to build a time machine, and change years of them excluding us from almost ALL MARKETING including the dragon age team that is oft marketed as the "better" team-I wish you luck with that. The fact is-a patch adding content is far more likely than EA/BioWare's marketing becoming more inclusive (especially retroactively).