Amazon TV head allegedly orders Mass Effect show rewrite to make it 'more appealing to non-gamers'
I should go.
https://www.pcgamer.com/movies-tv/amazon-tv-head-allegedly-orders-mass-effect-show-rewrite-to-make-it-more-appealing-to-non-gamers/Open linkView original on piefed.world114
Comments39
Ah, the good old exec interference. Did they not observe how Fallout was a success for reasons of not INTERFERING?!
Do you want Halo? Because that's how you get Halo
I was so hopeful for that show to figure it out. No issue with the alternate timeline, that makes total sense to give some creative freedom.
I don't even have an issue with Master Cheeks. Not a choice I would make... But it doesn't actually affect anything.
Changing the entire way AIs are made and how that functions within the UNSC, was stupid as fuck. And the changes to Halsey were unforgivable. And that doesn't even get to the Spartans themselves, the magical shit, and the creation of Makee's character. No way the Covenant leadership would have worked with a Human in any form, that was a core reason for the damned war and why the Arbiter became a heretic when he say reality.
The Mass Effect universe is interesting enough on its own. Changing it will only ruin it.
I'd be curious on actual data that measures the outcome of executive interference of movie and TV show adaptations of literature and/or games.
My expectations are low, but would be interesting to see if there are any that succeed.
I just want to know if the graph of budget to bad ratings is linear or not.
That worked out so well for Halo.
😭 what could have been
Ah, because forcing a videogame-based series to have "broader appeal to non-gamers" worked out so well for Halo...
Newsflash, the core audience for a videogame show is SciFi nerds and gamers that like the franchise!
Trying to please everyone will please nobody, and just alienate your core audience.
How fucking stupid of them, they wrote fallout for gamers and turned out everyone loved it.
Oh god. They're gonna fuck this up, aren't they?
I'm sorry, were you operating on a different conclusion before this?
I was naively hoping they'll leave the ME IP be where it is and move on.
Because clearly, making a show less appealing to gamers and more appealing to non-gamers is going to improve the income generated by a show based on a game. Everyone knows that sci-fi viewers hate video games. /s
It would seem that the Venn diagram between Mass Effect players and sci-fi fans... Is almost a circle.
It was never gonna be about your Shepard/Ryder or your crew, it was gonna be about what they can sell to the board and an audience who are doom scrolling TikTok. Just play the trilogy again or Dragon Age or something. They’re not going to make us happy and they’re definitely not going to bring us more joy than the games have.
the fallout show made me happy :(
if the show were just high res cg recreations of all the variations possible I'd watch a few eps. femshep decides to go X... etc
I feel like that exists on YouTube, with the Legendary Edition on PC with mods. Like "ME3 final space battle full force 4K 60FPS" but due to YouTube compression, it kinda sucks. Yet all these 4K/"8K" Cyberpunk videos look crisp and clean...
good point
“…fuck.”
Hey, maybe the writers did do too much game experience, maybe:
The first episode is just the protagonist trying all sorts of hairstyles, some multiple times before heading out.
In a fight, the protagonist gets the upper hand when they make some weird movements near a wall and clip through it
The protagonist strings every possible love interest along equally until the sex scene episode, where he keeps doing one thing for each one, having the sex, and then time restarts for the protagonist to do each one.
A lot af airtime is taken up by the protagonist talking to every single charactery they see until the character says the same thing over and over to let the protagonist know they are done with everything they know.
They have a tournament arc where a lot of the people sound like 12 year olds as they insult each other's moms and teabag a fallen opponent
How about the elevator episode followed by the epic Mako experience of landing on every planet you can and try to climb all the hills (and kill wildlife) ?
I have no problem with them rewriting things; I think the press tends to give it too much importance. The problem is THAT reason.
In what universe would adapting a video game that's less appealing to gamers ever be a good idea? Who hires these people?
This is just going to be another halo tv series. Shepard is probably gonna fuck one of Sarens underlings while Liara watches.
They're changing saren's name to sean.
Glad to see someone found my fanfics.
Aannndd with that, I'm not going to get my hopes up. I'm just going to assume it's trash and just play the games if I want to reexperience Mass Effect. Good luck to your rewrite, Jeff
If only they knew it's already a series that appeals to non-gamers.
Seriously during covid I had several family members talking and asking what to do. I told each of them, non gamers, play mass effect. Quite a few did actually. On the easiest modes, no difficulty at all, but by the end they loved it. Non gamers already like mass effect, that's not the problem, but to suits with MBAs it's all the same
All the MBAs know how to do is make things more exploitative. "Broad appeal" is exploitative because it cynically tries to get as many people as possible to pay to see it. They don't even think about the next movie or show, or even whether anyone will ever want to see it again, because literally the only thing that matters to them is how much return they get today.
TV execs ruining a show cause they don't respect the IP. Name a more iconic duo.
And chuds will blame wokeness for its badness...
You. Big. Stupid. Network Exec!
At first this was I thought this was a case of Amazon executives being a bit more "let eat cake" than Bethesda. But I was curious and the Amazon executive in question seems to be Peter Friedlander who recently joined Amazon.
In addition to being responsible for scripted series at Netflix for ~5 years, Friedlander was also a junior producer for Road to Perdition (2002), Mission to Mars (2000) and Reindeer Games (2000) back in the day.
Bloody hell, there goes that.
You'd have more success asking for a Star Trek episode or movie that "is more appealing to non-trekkies"
ME has a galaxy of potential stories without following Shepard, unironically just copy the best Star Wars did that wasn't an episode movie.
Yeah, sounds pretty bad for the show.
I like this article though, it goes above the grade and offers which games Bioware devs have been working on
EA/Bioware aren't good to release anything good, that's for sure.