EA Raises Concerns About ‘Mass Effect 5-As-Service’

EA has been very up front about how it was disappointed in the performance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where it only got half the players that the company wanted to see. But this week, its explanation for why it believes that happened is baffling, and should very much concern potential players of the upcoming Mass Effect 5, possibly BioWare’s last hope as a studio.

The reason being is that the lesson learned from Veilguard, according to EA CEO Andrew Wilson, is that the game did not have live service aspects. A genuinely stunning take. Here’s what he said:

“In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category,” Wilson said.

“Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played. However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.”

The logic here is wild, the idea that what people didn’t like about the game, or why they were not interested in it, is that Veilguard did not totally break with the series and have “shared world” or live service aspects, as if that would have encouraged more play, rather than even less. Not a single person outside of EA agrees with this logic, and BioWare itself did not, reportedly rejecting an EA development mandate to make the game live service, and instead, it turned back to being a traditional single player RPG. That didn’t save it, clearly, but it also led to a lot of wasted development time and some awkward holdover aspects of the original concept.

Now, logic dictates that if Veilguard failed as a single player RPG, and EA is stating outright it’s because it wasn’t a “shared world,” what can that possibly mean for Mass Effect 5? All anyone wants from the game is something comparable to the original Mass Effect trilogy, where it was almost entirely focused on its central, single player campaign that was not a shared world at all, and didn’t need to be (currently imagining a bunch of Shepards running around the Citadel).

The first thing that comes to mind here is that it’s true that Mass Effect has had multiplayer components, ones that were actually pretty well-received, back when that was a thing single player games were sometimes doing (Assassin’s Creed, Last of Us Factions). The difference is that those modes were not “live.” There were not “seasons” to these Mass Effect multiplayer additions, but you can see how that might change.

I don’t even know if it’s possible for Mass Effect’s campaign itself to change to some sort of shared world shooter at this point, given where it is in development, which would be insane. Game director Michael Gamble has promised it will be a “traditional” Mass Effect experience, where previously that seemed to be a reference to Veilguard changing its aesthetic and tone compared to the rest of the series, but it is abundantly clear that EA is going to try to jam in live service aspects here, and this time probably won’t take no for an answer.

Can BioWare fight off this very, very bad idea? I’m not sure they have a leg to stand on after three missed games, even if they know it’s not what fans are going to want from the series. But without more than a few teasers and nothing close a release date, we don’t know when we’re going to find out.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.