Before we get into what to do we have to get into what not to do. There are several ideas that I bet the head honchos at Bioware are currently considering, and before I do anything else I have to talk them out of them, because they’re bad. Let’s go through them in order.
“Let’s reboot Mass Effect and make it an MMO/MOBA/Battle Royale/whatever”: Let’s do this one first, because I know you have to be thinking about it. Your thinking is probably a combination of “if the problem is the ending, let’s just rewind the timeline” and “MMO’s make lots of money.” First of all, the ending isn’t really the problem. You sent players to a whole other galaxy in Andromeda and the game was still a disappointment. We’ll try to nail down the real problem later, but it’s not the ending. Second, World of Warcraft made a lot of money. League of Legends makes a lot of money, Fortnite makes a lot of money. And for every one of those, there are a half-dozen flops.
You should know this. The Old Republic wasn’t exactly a flop, but it didn’t make the dent in the market you hoped it would, even with the Star Wars license. Anthem did worse. Announce a Mass Effect MMO and everyone will brace themselves for disappointment, including me. Instead, I declare that you must spend forty years in the wilderness of single-player, to rediscover the virtues of peasant labor. Or if not forty years maybe thirty-six months or so.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Hypothetical ME4: What Not to Do”
Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.
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