For years now, every time I’ve taken a day off or a full-blown vacation here at Kotaku or my previous job, there was always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind: “What if BioWare shuts down while I’m gone?” Much of my career has involved talking about this studio’s work, and with every step I heard publisher EA’s executioner take toward the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio’s execution block, I worried more and more that I wouldn’t be working that day to write about the end of a studio whose work pretty much put me where I am today. Now, that day has come, and even though I’d braced for it, I’m still gutted and angry, because things didn’t have to be this way.
On a professional level, I run a semi-popular podcast about BioWare games, and cut my teeth writing about how games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age allowed for levels of player expression you wouldn’t find in most AAA games. In a way, my entire ethos about what roleplaying in video games is was born out of playing and thinking about these games.
Personally, however, I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without playing Mass Effect 19 years ago. Inhabiting Commander Shepard was a journey of self-discovery that I wasn’t about to get anywhere else in the podunk boonies of north Georgia. I have left time capsules of who I was in every game that followed. My angriest version of myself exists in Shepard and my Inquisitor from Dragon Age: Inquisition .
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