PRIDE 2021: Mass Effect Legendary Edition’s Lack of Queer Recompense Just Doesn’t Cut It

Fox News pressured BioWare into cutting queer stories, modders unearthed a slew of other LGBTQ+ romances that never saw the light of day, and the first Mass Effect has the player choose between a racist and a stale cream cracker. The Mass Effect RPGs are a staple of the industry, classics in their own right despite their relative recency, yet their politics and certain elements of their behind-the-scenes have aged like milk in the sun. The recent remaster had ample opportunity to remedy all this, but it didn’t. 

“Kaiden. Ashley. I’ve brought you both on the mission to tell you something very important. You both really suck… Like really bad… Like I kinda wish I could save neither of you…”

Remasters are an interesting concept. They can be very limited in what they can do - they aren’t a remake built from the ground-up, allowing for a classic to be reimagined and refined (see Demon’s Souls (2020)), they are built on top of an existing codebase that can make things like modern accessibility features much harder to implement if it’s even possible. However, cut content can be brought back into the fold or what was already there can be remixed - most famously done in the original Resident Evil’s remake. Although, the scope of this work would vary massively depending on when into development the content got cut.

In the case of Mass Effect, we know better and more in-depth queer relationships were planned, begging the question of whether it would have been possible without bringing back the old cast and massively upping production costs to a point where EA would pull the plug. But that reasoning doesn’t really hold up, BioWare used fan-made mods to help bolster the Legendary Edition when enhancing it graphically. That’s an important note to make because, just from one glance at the Mass Effect 2 Nexus page, you’ll notice, next to all the fanmade graphics mods cited by Bioware as the basis for its work on this update, you’ll find a mod titled “Same-Gender Romances for ME2.” 

Space is full of varied and diverse characters… But not like that kind of diverse ok.

This mod “allows Tali and Thane to be romanced by both male and female Shepard, utilizing unused dialogue in the game files.” There are similar mods for Miranda and Jack, opening the door to a much queerer Mass Effect 2. This stuff isn’t hard to find, they are some of the most popular mods on the game’s Nexus page. The very same page I’ve no doubt BioWare scoured to find fans’ work that would help to cut down production costs and development time when making the remaster. I’ve no doubt that Bioware was aware that these mods exist, hell it is the company that made most of that content in the first place - Bioware just didn’t add ‘em. 

How has Keighley not aged a day in 13 years?

Also the grammar of “SE”XBOX? is an absolute travesty the longer I think about it.

The pressure from Fox News in 2008 where they called Mass Effect a space sex simulator (using the terrible ticker title of “Se”Xbox?) was ridiculous and laughable at the time, let alone a decade later. What pressure and what backlash was BioWare afraid of with its remaster in 2021 - the angry vocal minority? The Last of Us Part 2 was headlined by a lesbian woman who, in the first hour, fell for another girl, kissing her twice and continued to be in a realistic gay relationship with throughout the rest of the game. It is in Metacritic’s top 100 best-reviewed games ever, it shattered sales records, and it was Sony’s poster child for 2020, hell, it’s being made into an HBO TV show. LGBTQ+ titles sell and they sell really well, so it’s bizarre that BioWare made no effort to remedy the mistakes of its past.

This symbol means a lot to a lot of people.

It is understandable then that there are fan groups cropping up dedicated to getting answers from BioWare, pushing to get these queer romances brought back into the fold. I understand it wholeheartedly. Hearing what could have been in one of the biggest sci-fi RPGs in the medium and comparing it to what we got is heartbreaking. Having such an LGBTQ+ friendly AAA title back in 2010 would’ve been beyond important and as someone who struggled to come to terms with liking guys growing up, seeing it normalised and accepted in my favourite space opera would’ve absolutely helped. Yet, the big bad wolf that is Fox News and the rest of right-wing media bellowed from its rickety wooden castle and managed to instil so much fear into BioWare that we never even got the chance to be properly seen. Repeating those same mistakes with the Legendary Edition amplifies the heteronormative approach so prevalent in games still - if BioWare wasn’t committed to addressing a problem so important and personal to many of its most ardent fans, it shouldn’t have bothered bringing the games back just to dredge up these old mistakes and re-open old wounds.

But, what’s done is done - the Legendary Edition is here. I played it, I had a blast, and I still love this trilogy. Yet, it’s akin to idea that The Last of Us TV show being made with years of hindsight might still continue its Bury Your Gays trope from the first game - y’know, queer stories ending in a tragedy like with Ellie’s girlfriend being killed before we even meet her? I still adore The Last of Us but it certainly isn’t without problematic elements. Yet, it didn’t become a product of its time when people were scared and hesitant to risk blatantly LGBTQ+ mass media stories. Granted, the fear that gay games couldn’t (and shouldn’t) find an audience was always a bullshit argument peddled by angry gatekeeping gamers and, as I’ve repeatedly stressed, bigoted right-wing news outlets. But not many triple-A studios were trying to make those leaps in the early 2010s, even if it meant falling prey to those pitfalls. Repeating decade-old mistakes through remasters or retellings is the problem and it’s something that needs to be talked about more when it comes to bringing back old games - do we leave them intact as an example of what they were or do we try to fix our mistakes? I lean toward the latter.

This one piece of DA4 concept art is gay-er than ALL of the first Mass Effect.

BioWare won’t fix this now. The game is out, it did well, and that’s that. It’s a damned shame and a missed opportunity that leaves console players completely in the lurch since the queer mods mentioned above are unavailable to them. But, BioWare is onto the next thing (two things to be exact). With both Dragon Age 4 and Mass Effect 4, BioWare has a huge opportunity to tell new queer stories with new characters, but it needs to tread carefully. Something that was so wonderful - even if cut - about the original trilogy was that romanceable characters were not playersexual. Your crewmates weren’t always attracted to the player no matter what, they had their own pre-determined genders, sexualities, and personalities. They weren’t just there to bend to the fantasies of the player. They were straight, gay, bi, pan, or whatever else. You are not allowed to sleep with any companion you increase some flirt-bar with enough BioWare never gave into this trope many open-ended RPGs do, one which only undermines representation. The answer to the problem of the first three games isn’t to make every character romanceable. That’s just giving into another troubling trope. The answer is to write more queer characters, more queer stories, more queer potential. The spice of life is what’s needed: you can still have hetero squadmates that won’t date you if you’re the same gender, but there needs to be a real variety and it needs to not be cut this time. 

Mass Effect 4 could well and truly make up for the past mistakes of BioWare’s history, the blood on its ledger, and I truly hope it does.