Mass Effect 5 is officially cancelled and EA is shutting BioWare down, putting an end to decades of some of the best RPGs in gaming—and while I don’t have too much positive to say about BioWare’s later run (Veilguard was a decent action RPG with a story I couldn’t stand), much of that has to do with EA’s management of it.
Regardless of my nervousness towards ME5, I think it’s a shame that I never got to find out whether it’d fix my issues with Veilguard’s storytelling or not. Especially since it’s just been revealed that an award-winning science fiction author was on board.
Derek Künsken is a science fiction author who won an Asimov Reader’s Award (from Asimov Science Fiction magazine) in 2012 for The Way of the Needle. Lisää recently in 2021, he also won an Aurora Award (from the Canadian SF and Fantasy Association) for Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County. He’s often a finalist in these categories, too.
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Künsken wrote on X: “I have a weird announcement. On and off for the last five years, as a contract writer, and as a senior writer on staff, I’ve been hoping to be allowed to say where I worked. Today I finally got the green light: I’ve been working on the next Mass Effect.
“Unfortunately, the light turned green because BioWare is being shuttered. Over the coming weeks, I’ll get more clarity on what I can say about what I did and saw and learned. I hope it’s more than nothing—what we were cooking was really cool. I can say that everyone I met at BioWare was a decent human being, an expert in their field, and was ambitiously imaginative about what a future experience of BioWare could be. Working closely with Parrish Ley and Mary DeMarle will be highlights of my writing career.”
I want to clarify my above cynicism: Even when I’m critically tearing into a videogame for its writing, I do so with the understanding that there’s a huge gulf between what a writer puts in and what actually comes out. Videogames are monstrously complicated beasts, and sometimes development cycles are so terribly tangled that even solid authors can’t spin a good yarn out of them.
For instance, writers who produce some of the best companions in RPGs (Tali’zorah, Mordin Solus, and Solas) don’t turn around and create a Taash because they got hit very hard with a brick in between games and became bad at their job—more often than not, the structure of the studio has changed enough to make that job very hard. That David Gaider, the guy who made Dragon Age, left partially because he was done with EA’s increasing hostility towards the craft makes me confident in that assumption.
All this to say, I don’t know if Mass Effect 5 would’ve been an incredible story: But I will say it’s a damn shame that none of the work Künsken put into it (a clearly talented science fiction writer in his own right) will have a chance to prove me wrong. Or the work of any of the game’s writers, for that matter.
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