Lately I keep seeing comments like:
“It’s just virtue signaling devs whining.”
“Saudi Arabia isn’t open-minded, so at least games will finally be more neutral, without ideologies shoved down our throats.”
“They also have big stakes in nintendo, activiosn, capcom and nothing changed”
Let me be clear: if BioWare actually goes “neutral tone,” Dragon Age and Mass Effect stop being Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
also, Nindendo’s franchises (Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, Smash), Capcom’s (Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter) and Activision Blizzard’s games (Call of Duty) don’t touch LGBTQ+ themes or social commentary in the first place. There’s nothing “controversial” to censor…”
So of course nothing obvious changed, those publishers already weren’t leaning into progressive storytelling.
These games have always been political
Mass Effect: Entire arcs are about systemic prejudice (krogan genophage, geth/quarians, council xenophobia). Shepard is literally trying to unite clashing civilizations. Romances — including queer ones — aren’t optional fluff; they’re woven into the emotional heart of the trilogy.
Dragon Age: Mages vs. templars = authoritarian religion vs. oppressed class. The Dalish = displaced, colonized people. Party members like Dorian (gay), Krem (trans), Zevran, Leliana, Anders, etc. embody themes of identity and resistance.
This isn’t “virtue signaling.” It’s core BioWare storytelling. If you remove the politics, you’re left with generic swords and lasers.
🛑 “Neutral” ≠ neutral
“Neutral tone” under authoritarian or ultra-conservative ownership doesn’t mean “fun escapism.” It means stripping out diversity, sanitizing themes, and avoiding messy questions.
The result? Games that look AAA but feel hollow — worlds without queerness, without marginalized voices, without allegories that hit close to home. That’s not Dragon Age. That’s not Mass Effect.
Why this matters now:
People point to PIF’s investments in Nintendo, Capcom, Activision and say “nothing changed.” True, but those companies weren’t pushing queer or political themes in the first place. BioWare is different. Its brand identity is built on exactly the kind of representation that makes authoritarian investors squirm.
David Gaider (lead writer on Dragon Age) already said it bluntly: guns and football are safe, queer content is not. If EA’s new owners steer BioWare toward “neutral,” it won’t just be censorship., it’ll be the death of the very thing that made these games beloved.
TL;DR
If you’re saying “good, make games neutral again,” you’re really saying:
“Make Dragon Age not feel like Dragon Age.”
“Make Mass Effect not feel like Mass Effect.”
These games have always been about politics, identity, queerness, and resistance. If you want them stripped down to “apolitical escapism,” you might as well play something else.
Both of these franchises suck ass
People are dragging on ME for being reactionary (which it is), but it’s also terminally End-of-History brained. Humanity and multiple advanced alien species all somehow came to the conclusion that free market capitalism with representative liberal democracy (albeit with matriarchs, scientists and military officers being politically prominent for Asari, Turians and Salarians respectively) was the zenith of civilization and should be made the default on galactic scale. Poverty is a natural phenomenon which no one questions when productivity is stupidly high and literal FTL travel is ubiquitous (Shepard even goes as far as to say it at one point). Governments being slow to do anything, much less get off their asses in an extinction level event, is simply politics (which leads to the reactionary stuff like the very concept of a Spectre) and surely isn’t an indication for a much needed galaxy-wide reorganization if not revolution in the immediate aftermath of the Reaper war.
The Mass Effect games are fascist as fuck though
Bureaucracy and rule of law is weak and effeminate, in order for the galaxy to be saved from itself, it needs a badass who doesn’t play by the rules and punches journalists.
Also space racism is bad, but is it really though?
Also what if the blue alien space babes’ society was based on the maiden, mother and crone trichotomy completely unironically lmao
Also space racism is bad, but is it really though?
ME fans on most alien races (including the goddamn krogan who literally launched a war of extermination on the rest of the galaxy) vs ME fans on Batarians
The fact that Batarians more or less act as caricatures for the DPRK meets post-Cold War Islamic World and thus “acceptable” punching bags really sells it.
and punches journalists.
i wouldn’t call a space ny post “reporter” a journalist
I mean you’re right but that also wasn’t the reason a lot of the fanbase delighted in being able to do it
idk she was very obviously a tabloid shitter not Sy Hersch or somebody good. if the default male shep soldier players thought differently they should play cod instead of an rpg
Working for the space CIA as an elite operator outside of the law where you decide who lives and dies at a whim isn’t leftist?
What if you also died and were resurrected by a trillionaire who’s acting as a stand in for Weyland-Yutani, so that he can have you do his self centered bidding? Oh yeah and he may have founded and funded an explicit ‘human first’ fascist group that has committed a lot of atrocities
Mass Effect 2 has a godawful story and damages the entire trilogy, and I am not afraid to say it
I’m kinda disappointed they used something as fantastic as the dynamic of the suicide mission for the collectors. And then mass effect 3 you barely see any of the characters. So we went to hell and back together and you’re relegated to cameos?
It’s the classic problem you face in this type of series, where your choices in older games can’t actually matter very much, or else by the third game you’d have to be developing the equivalent of multiple games with drastically different narratives. So nothing that happens in older games can really matter.
they could have done something with this where each person is contributing something important to the effort in 3 but if they died you just don’t get that part and that’s why you die at the end.
And added the need for ammo
and put abilities on shared cooldown. at least keep tech and biotic separate ffs
Mass Effect 2 has a godawful story and damages the entire trilogy, and I am not afraid to say it
Mass Effect 3 has a godawful story and damages the entire trilogy, and I am not afraid to say it
Real daring hot take. Honestly I do think some of ME3’s problems stem from the place ME2 left things. Instead of building up the Reapers, we got all this focus on Cerberus and the Collectors. The Alliance and Council are so distant and brushed off in 2, because the story wants to give an excuse for why you are with Cerberus.
This series of blog-posts by Shamus Young on the entire trilogy in order does a great job of arguing how we got here with 3.
the star child stuff is it’s own fault. outside of the game they pulled a writer over to make that star wars mmo instead of kotor 3 and that probably fucked both series.
Only ME1 was interested in cosmic horror and Lovecraftian stuff. It is a shame the series moved away from that at all. I recently played Leviathan, and I enjoyed parts of it, but fulling committing to them making the Reapers, and knowing what they are was a bad idea.
" gotta decide on giving a cure for a genocidal condition that causes the majority of pregnancies to miscarry based on who is leading. "
I’m going to share something I’ve noticed being old and grumpy, there is no such thing as neutral, not irl, not in any form of media. Everything you interact with, or dare I say consume has a tone by virtue of political reality and being at once point shaped by humans.
Those supposedly neutral games? They’re still pushing themes, its super subtle but it totally is there, however, I agree 100% Bioware games being equally vague on these themes will kill the storytelling-immersion framework in their games resulting in blander slop and a shitter experience.
Anyway, even Tetris has themes, based ones for sure, nothing is neutral
dragon age veilguard is so good and i’m happy to see nonbinary characters in my fantasy rpg
the templars are oppressed?? don’t they go around killing all the mages and confining them to their college lol. (note I last played Dragon Age: Origins in like 2010 so don’t quote me on this)
They just flipped the a v b between examples
Also, there’s like a justification written for it, because using magic in DA is written like how magic is for 40k, in that using magic can invite a demon taking over your body. Which i imagine most normal people in the DA world don’t exactly want that happening around them.
i would and i think the mages shouldn’t be corralled into a big ass tower and made to do a ‘yearly’ ritual where they might get eaten by a demon…
i should play DA:O again
I have a different take. The problem in the writing room of these companies is not diversity, it is class.
The style of writing and the topics and conflicts that writers choose is often tied to their personal experiences, writers write what they know. The issue in these large corporate tech companies is that these people are, by and large, from middle-income suburban families with good backgrounds and good upbringings and nice middle class experiences.
What they write ends up being largely informed by the only political conflicts they see in american life as a suburban liberal. Which is largely what we see in culture war battles online day to day.
They also tend to write content that lacks edgyness, often because they themselves lack edgyness, or have never really been around edgyness to understand it. They write boring middle class liberals, without trauma, without edge, without neuroses, without mental health issues, without particularly compelling motivations or fears.
The people that write the good stuff have seen it. And the people who have seen it are not liberals from good upbringings in middle class families in the suburbs.
Put a queer writer in that room who has seen trauma, struggle and conflict from living at the edge of poverty and you will get completely different and significantly more compelling writing than you will get from the current people who make it to these positions in tech companies.
The problem is that this queer writer with that background does not get the opportunity. Or at least it is rarer.
And this isn’t just a thing in games either, you have it in tv and movies too. That’s specifically why we have film groups actively seeking out people from those class backgrounds and telling the kinds of stories you can only get from that experience. Gaming has no such thing though. There has never been a conversation about the class of the writers in videogames like there has been critical analysis of the same in tv and film.
The bad writing that the chuds hate is, in my opinion, a product of class rather than diversity but they do not have the class consciousness to recognise it so they just see the boring writing tropes that middle class liberals put out and scream at the wrong thing.
This reminds me of something Dave Anthony said when talking about the West Wing, that he was in a writing room for some project and was frustrated with everyone’s complete disinterest of understanding of framing something from the POV of oppressed people. He was confused at first cause it was a decently diverse writing room, eventually he asks “who here didn’t go to an Ivy League?” and no one raises a hand. It hit him that while several people there had plenty of sympathy and could understand their own specific oppression ag the black writers know police are often racist, NONE of them have ever been black and anything under upper middle class. Any progressivism is purely intellectual and academic and even then not something anyone seemed deeply interested in.
Yeah that’s exactly what I’m getting at here. This issue is rampant across gaming because the tech industry hires are only from well educated middle class backgrounds or above.
Someone else suggested an exception to this rule is when these people are doing adaptations of other works, such as books or manga written by people from those backgrounds. Then they do a good job. Netflix adaptations and anime are fairly good examples of this.
I have never watched One Piece, but iirc the Mangaka was directly involved in casting for example. So many of the things chuds complained about in the netflix adaptation are things he directly wanted to drive home the purpose of his stories
in fact chuds don’t even notice it when it’s been done competently, or they bark up the wrong tree like being mad about the wrong last of us 2 character in their fit of transmisogyny
Yeah exactly. They don’t complain about diversity when the writing is really good. They don’t even really notice the existence of the lgbt themes or characters either, they’re just “good” and “not the entire personality of the character”, usually because their stories are about other things the character is struggling with while also being queer or something, like growing up in a fucked up deprived poverty stricken neighbourhood and struggling with family illnesses - but also queer. Along with a whole cast of characters that have all kinds of fucked up personalities that derive from the trauma that lifestyle gives each of them.
Time and time again I see a lack of depth in character writing and it is usually a lack of trauma, I suspect that a lot of these people writing who come from good backgrounds simply do not have that much trauma so they don’t even imagine writing it. Maybe a family member died but that’s often the extent of their experience with trauma.
Anyone from poor backgrounds will be able to tell you that there is not a single person around them without half a dozen traumas. Whether it’s from drugs, drink, abuse, desperate struggles for money, or incredible fallouts that occurred over the terrible days that just surviving in these lifestyles can bring on. We are moody animals that get tired, stressed and crotchety as things stack up, and we fuck things up for ourselves when all these things stack on one another causing outbursts. But none of this shit is ever in middle class writing.
What do I see in middle class writing most? Superheroes. Superheroes in a fantasy world. With mostly the same depth as marvel superheroes, which again is practically none outside of Spiderman, the hero deliberately written for the working class.
Interesting stories come from people who have lived interesting lives to write interesting experiences. The problem is that the people with interesting lives do not get the opportunity to be writers in these kinds of companies, and in fact, often have personalities themselves that make being in these kinds of companies very difficult. They are not environments designed to have sympathy for those with problematic dispositions or life stories.
Also the other side of this is that the middle class people are scared of even talking about trauma. They are scared of being edgy too. It’s uncouth in their social rules.
I’d add that a television writer’s room might have some class diversity, but ultimately any trauma-informed ideas need to gel with the room and the showrunner, and then somehow pass muster at the studio and network level. It’s the bodies in those executive roles that are most likely to have no experience or interest in those stories.
I think a huge exception is when a trauma-informed work is adapted - something like the memoir that became the Netflix show Maid. It helps that the tone is clear to everyone at the outset, they don’t need to spin the story into two or three seasons, and the underlying message is (I’m assuming) an American Dream success story.
I think a huge exception is when a trauma-informed work is adapted
Yeah this is a really good point. It’s also how this makes it into anime writing often too as they’re adapting manga written by a single person most of the time. Someone like Tatsuki Fujimoto (chainsawman writer) would not be able to write the things he has written if he were in a large corporate team. They wouldn’t get it but Fujimoto has a knack for writing interesting characters with very clear traumas and issues.
I agree it’s political but ME’s politics feel so War on Terror coded.
Recently replayed Mass Effect and it felt more reactionary than when I play thru the franchise 12 years ago as a lib
One thing I did like is how realistically useless a lot of lib or chud politicians will act in the face of impeding civilization collapse (hell fascism too I reckon) despite all evidence shown. They don’t want to rock the boat. They saw sovereign’s technology and just concluded it was the geth. They didn’t do extensive study on the leftover tech. Carbon dating, radiometric dating or similar scans would show that these things are far older than any species in the galaxy. Again… In ME2… No one thought to investigate that derelict reaper? Hell just seeing what sovereign did on his own should have awoken them in what fucking world did any race have a single ship that takes on the entire citadel fleet and the human alliance fleet on its own? If shep didn’t stop that there they all would have been destroyed.
Matriachs on thessia had info on protheans that they kept hidden to keep an edge and only bought it out when they were doomed. Such would have revealed the existence of reapers long before the series. Fucking VI even knew of the catalyst. In fact evidence points to the council knowing about the reapers after saren but not doing anything to avoid panic… But really I bet they cared more about their ratings. Edit:files on citadel dlc showed they believed shep about the reapers but did jack
No one thought to investigate that derelict reaper?
iirc they did and got indoctrinated even though it was supposedly “dead”
And in typical movie fashion no one follows up on that
That mission did give us the line “even a dead god can dream” so I can’t hate it too much
It was weird when in the first game Cerberus is earth-first human supremacist organization and then in the second game you join them.
There’s a whole quest line where Cerberus kills an admiral you’re working with in the first game and it just never comes up in ME2
Only time their atrocities are bought up is when the rogue spectre you kill rightly brings that up along with experimenting on kids and torturing them to death like jack holy hell they’re evil
When you scratch a lib
More than that, they are Alliance black-ops gone “rogue” allegedly. That got completely retconned in ME2
bioware is already dead and even they already made those games not like those games. play the first one then the second one in each series
they’ve been dead for at least 10 years. It’s not their fault AAA gaming is a wasteland.
iirc that change followed acquisition by EA lol.
They’re not going to “change” the game studios, they’re going to sell off all the most valuable properties to pay for the acquisition then load EA down with debt to their own credit lines and bankrupt the corporation after transferring all the value to themselves.
I wonder how many times EA did the same thing to smaller studios.
difference is that those were some cultural loss and the death and dismemberment of EA will probably be net-positive.
Listen, I was too young to understand the deeper themes of these games when they came out which means that they are now woke and political, but only the remakes! And no, I can’t just go back and play the original, because the remakes retroactively transformed it to be woke too! That’s how wokeness works, it’s like a time virus that makes my nostalgia bad and therefore is the worst thing ever!
Agreed, no notes.
I also agree, but the one note I have is Bioware was somewhere between dying and dead before the recent acquisition of EA
