The greatest challenge of adapting BioWare’s beloved sci-fi RPG would be handling its player cipher. So… don’t?
After years of wondering when, not if, Mass Effect would ever make the leap from video games to film or TV, it would seem we’re at last on that precipice: Amazon has eyes on bringing BioWare’s sci-fi shooter/ Garrus Vakarian dating simulator to streaming. But the question should be less if the Mass Effect series should come to TV, but how— and the answer is without its “main” character. Commander Shepard is the star of the first three video games in the Mass Effect saga—in the fourth game, Andromeda, it’s Ryder, a character similarly largely defined by the player. Shepard is beloved, although not perhaps necessarily because they are a great character. Shepard is, in some ways, hard to define as having a personality when you scrape away the thing that makes Mass Effect still so loved, and the thing that makes an attempt to adapt Commander Shepard’s story to another medium such a dangerous prospect: so much of what we see in Shepard as players is what we ourselves put into them. Mass Effect is a game franchise defined by its incorporation of player choice, no matter how clear sometimes the limitations that influence can be made within its systems. Even if, on a macro scale across the games, players’ choices are relatively binary, or more about filling in the little flourishes here and there rather than the broadest strokes of its overarching tale, Commander Shepard remains a deeply personal character to people who play the Mass Effect games. We do more than just control Shepard from one plot point to the next, we guide what they say and what they believe in, we forge their friendships and their loves, we craft them as a person.
