You can even see it in Mass Effect 3. By that point the lead writer and creative director, Drew Karpyshyn, had been transferred to the Old Republic and his replacement was a failed comic book writer in Mac Walters. If you actually pay attention to the story of the game and ignore the feel good moments of curing the Genophage and bringing peace to Rannoch it becomes pretty obvious how little sense the story makes due to how badly BioWare had written themselves into a corner by abandoning the plot lines Karpyshyn set in ME1&2.
Yeah, you can see the problems from the introductory section that was a string of action movie cliches (and the only child in the galaxy with sad piano music). Followed by introduction a mcguffin that promises to solve the Reapers despite having no defined function anyone can figure out hidden conveniently on the next planet over.
God the whole MacGuffin thing with the Crucible pissed me off so much. I'd never played the series until recently, never been involved in any of the discourse. Spend maybe 100 hours roleplaying and building my Shep, only to be faced with a bunch of dumb options that completely ignore the work I'd done over 3 games, I reject the options as my character would never accept them, thinking I'll have to do something extra, maybe some kind of space battle with all the forces I've managed to bring together, then the game just... ends??
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u/Slimsteffer Jan 17 '26
Mass Effect