Thread by @davidgaider

I'm relieved to see that the Mass Effect/Amazon deal is for a potential TV series and not a movie. Even so, the possibility (and likewise for Dragon Age) makes me cringe just a little, unlike many fans who appear... excited?

Let me explain. (Thread)

For starters, ME and DA have a custom protagonist. Meaning said TV show will need to pick whether said protagonist will be male or female. Boom, right off the bat you've just alienated a whole bunch of the built-in fan base who had their hopes up.

Secondly, those protagonists are designed to be a bit of a blank slate, one that the player fills out with their decisions. That's not going to work for a passive medium. So, suddenly, the protagonist will have their own personality... and their own *story*. That will be weird.

You think I'm wrong? Consider just how MUCH of the story is off-loaded onto the companions. They are the cyphers through which the player gets most of their emotional engagement from. On their own, the DA and ME protagonists are... well, pretty boring. That's not going to fly.

And think of those companions. Think of how MUCH the fanbase is attached to them. Now consider the fact that there is no way in hell any single story could encompass them all equally. Think of the howls of rage when companion X is relegated to a cameo... or not there at all.

Having a TV show instead of a movie allows for more companion options, sure, but consider your own playthrough: only a handful of them had any meaningful presence in a single game. That will need to be the case for this story, to maintain coherence. A few companions, one romance.

And that's IF the TV show makers consider the companions to be all that important. They might toss most of them aside in favor of the PLOT. In my mind, that would be a mistake. Both ME's and DA's plots were, at best, serviceable.

And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

Those plots had to take into account the player's agency. They were kind of the shell upon which that player's emotional engagement was delivered -- usually through the companions and the choices themselves. Choice heightened engagement. Interactivity was the star, not the plot.

Take all that out, lose most of the companions, and you potentially end up with... a pretty run-of-the-mill fantasy or science-fiction show, one where a lot of the built-in audience has possibly been turned into outraged, howling malcontents before it's even released.

All that is, of course, if the DA or ME series is mishandled. I can think of any number of ways it could be done better... but that involves doing more than a strict adaptation, and that comes with its own complications.

Anyhow, good luck to the showrunners. They'll need it!

EDIT:

I'm seeing responses along the lines of "they could do some story within the DA/ME universe and not just the story of the games" -- that IS what I meant by an adaptation in my last tweet above. In many ways, not simply adapting the story of the games would be wiser.

BUT

BUT consider this from the perspective of those making the TV show. They are not making it solely for the fans, those who already know the entire story and would be fine with moving onto something else.

The far larger audience are those who know nothing about ME or DA at all.

At some level, this TV series needs to answer the question "what IS Mass Effect?" ...and that means making something that is *recognizeably* Mass Effect. It means retreading ground in a way that fans don't need, and will likely react poorly to.

Maybe. I guess we'll see.