I have spent so much time these past three days writing about the closure of BioWare that I feel like I’ve not really gotten to stop and take a moment for myself. Yeah, I vented about how avoidable this whole thing was, but that’s anger, not grief. I braced myself for years, anticipating the moment when EA would finally bring down the hammer on the Mass Effect studio, so you’d think I would have already given some serious thought to what I’d want to say when the day finally arrived. In all honesty, however, I haven’t been able to figure it out.

The night it happened, I reinstalled my copy of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the 2021 remaster of the original trilogy. I hadn’t accessed my save file on there in years, but that playthrough had been completionist one. That last time I played through the games, I devoured them. My encyclopedic knowledge came in handy; I didn’t have to use a guide to make sure I saw everything, completed every quest, and soaked in every drop of my favorite video games on a modern console.

So when I booted this save file up, I was caught off guard by the deafening silence of the Normandy SR-2’s CIC. My Shepard, an idealized version of myself from over a decade ago (hence why he has hair, unlike most of the RPG protagonists I make nowadays), stood in the glow of the ship’s galaxy map, and there was nothing left for me to actually do.

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