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.
The Mass Effect games are fascist as fuck though
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 3 has a godawful story and damages the entire trilogy, and I am not afraid to say it
Also true. ME1 had the best atmosphere.
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.
The main plot is extremely weak. Like we don’t explore the colonies at all. I don’t think we even have proper conversation with the very people we spend the entire game saving.
Imagine if we never spoke to the council/saren in ME1.
Shamus Young's retrospective puts it really well
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=29597
" gotta decide on giving a cure for a genocidal condition that causes the majority of pregnancies to miscarry based on who is leading. "
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
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
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.
The batarians are literally the only organic species to have a state controlled economy. In ME2 there is even a line that claims only „utopian“ technology can fix wealth inequality.