Hello and welcome to The Back Page, a Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Matthew, what have you been playing slash watching lately? I’ve been playing Resident Evil Village, which may be confusing because we talked about that last week. Yes, but there is a reason behind the kind of madness here, right? I mean, we are recording this episode before the Resident Evil episode. Essentially, we’ll probably have already explained this on the Resident Evil podcast, but basically we recorded that one really hot so we could get it up with some strong impressions of the game as it releases. And so this one, being specifically about the Mass Effect series, this podcast, tying with the fact that the Mass Effect Legendary Edition is releasing on current-gen consoles and PC, this episode focuses more specifically on that original Mass Effect trilogy. Therefore, me and Matthew have played it and we can talk about it. So that is a convoluted way of explaining the podcast that you’re listening to. But, yes. But currently, I am enjoying Resident Evil Village, but you will already know if that held to be true in the long run. Yeah, did Matthew’s opinion curdle? You will already know because it’s already happened to you. Yeah, oh my God, it’s like a time travel story. It’s a nightmare, this one. It’s like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, yeah, it’s exactly like that. Except hopefully you can hear both our voices clearly throughout. Yeah, although I will sometimes walk backwards like Kenneth Branagh does. So yes, Matthew, you’ve also been watching Nomadland on Disney+, how’s that treated you? Yeah, I really liked it. It’s one of those ones which, you know, I came to it after all the awards, then I watched it and was like, oh yeah, fair enough, you know, that’s that’s deserving, which isn’t always the case of these things. But yeah, I, you know, I love the tone of it. Beautifully shot. I must have put my hands up. It is the first Chloe Zhao film I’ve seen. I’ve not seen her earlier indie things. I’m fascinated to see what she’s done with her Marvel film. She’s doing one of the big Marvel films this year, right? Yeah, Eternals, which is basically a bunch of, I think, Jack Kirby, kind of like God-like cosmic characters who, to be honest, I don’t really give a shit about. But I’m sure Marvel will picked it because they’ve got some kind of interesting angle on it. And if nothing else, like a massive cast as well. Yeah, I mean, they’ve done this before. They’ve got a habit of kind of basically harvesting indie talent to make films. A lot of their films are made by people who probably hadn’t worked with budgets sort of beyond five million before. I don’t really know what the motivation is behind that. But did you see that absolutely hilarious Kevin Feige quote during the rounds where he was talking about Chloe Zhao? No. And he was like, oh, it’s amazing. Like, it’s absolutely amazing what she can do in camera. You know, she did some test footage and we were like, wow, look at the sea. And you’re like, yeah, that’s it’s called filmmaking, Kev. People have been doing it for hundreds of years. The thing I could never get out of my head about Kevin Feige, I worked with this guy years ago, who said that Kevin Feige looks like a dad at a Jumble sale. Like, sort of like he’s selling, you know, old sort of PC CD-ROM box games out of the back of his car boot. I can sort of see that. Maybe it’s the baseball cap, I don’t know. A guy who’s made billions at a Jumble sale. Yeah, exactly. So yes, Matthew, in this episode, then, we’re going to talk about Mass Effect as discussed. So it’s likely to be a slightly shorter episode. What we’ve decided we’re going to do is we’re going to fire through a bunch of our memories of Mass Effect, what we perceive to be the legacy of the series, what kind of happened to BioWare in the intervening years since the games came out, and a whole bunch of associated stuff linked with Mass Effect. So we’re keen not to just kind of like retrace over bits of the story. For one, me and Matthew have not had time to play through all of it. So the difference between this podcast and the Resident Evil one is that we haven’t like gone out of our way to get the Mass Effect Legendary Edition off of EA because A, I don’t really know anyone at EA anymore, but B, I also didn’t think it was as necessary to discuss these games because they are literally the games with a few tweaks. So yeah, I don’t think there was much need to replay them. But yes, I think that in this episode, people will probably appreciate the discussion about how the series fits into the RPG genre. And then in the last part of the episode, we’re going to go through our top 10 Mass Effect Companions, which would be quite an interesting sort of cross section of what me and Matthew were thinking in our sort of like early to mid 20s as we, you know, kind of courted the affections of some of these characters. So yeah, good stuff. So Matthew, why don’t you tell me a bit about your relationship with Mass Effect and how you feel about the series overall? Yeah, so I feel like I actually came to it a little later than most. For some reason, Mass Effect didn’t register with me at all before it came out. And I don’t know if this is because when they were ramping up previews of the game, I’d already started on NGamer and I just had such tunnel vision about getting that job done right and, you know, absorbing every bit of like Nintendo information I could. But, you know, I remember like when review, like even when review code came in for this and I heard like Xbox World talking about it next to us thinking, what the hell is Mass Effect? Does that matter? Does anyone care? Yeah, this may sound like a weird indication of importance, but I remember they freelanced it out, which sometimes is an indicator that like in-house, there’s not as much interest, you know, that that can be the dynamic. Sometimes it’s just because you don’t have staff available, but, you know, if it’s something really important, that tends to happen in-house. So that’s some kind of gauge of it. And, you know, I remember them talking about it and being like, yeah, it’s okay. So I think most of what I thought early on was kind of absorbed by a slight in-house Xbox world indifference to Mass Effect, where if I’d actually turned my swivel chair 180 degrees, I would have been looking at PC Gamer, and if I’d listened to them… Actually, no, I wouldn’t have listened to them, because it came out later on PC. That’s probably why. Because they were super into it, and actually I think it was listening to them talk about it, which is when I finally played it on 360, because Mass Effect came out later. Is that right? I think that’s right. Yes, that is right. It came out early 2008 on PC, I believe, and late 2007 on Xbox 360. Yeah, so that’s my weird relationship with the start of it. It kind of came in two waves. There was like a slight, eh, Mass Effect, I’m not going to spend money on that, and then this sort of, like, it came later that it was a, you know, a better thing. And even then it took me a while to click with it. It wasn’t really until Mass Effect 2 that I really got into it. And even then, I say I really got into it. These are games I’ve played each one once. I’ve never gone back to them. I have, like, a version of Mass Effect in my head. And maybe that kind of, like, not having that extreme sort of BioWare fervour that some people have, like, helped me enjoy the series a bit more, as we’ll talk about later, you know, Mass Effect 3 obviously triggers certain emotions in certain people. But, yeah, for my money, I, you know, I was kind of a dabbler who really rates Mass Effect 2. It’s probably the best summation of my relationship. I think that probably describes quite a lot of people’s relationship with Mass Effect. So it’s an interesting series in the sense that, like, this was… The first one was BioWare’s first, kind of, next generation RPG for the time. It being an Xbox exclusive was a big deal. This was a developer behind Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. They were well regarded for sure. Obviously before that, Baldur’s Gate. So been around for a while. And this definitely felt like a next-gen RPG for the time. This came up in my best game since 2007, the original Mass Effect. So my relationship with it was that I did like it, but I wasn’t sort of fanatical about it. It was interesting, actually. I read Eurogamer’s review of the original Mass Effect this morning, just before we started recording this. And it was by Kristen Reed. And he’s actually like slightly indifferent to a lot of the elements that define Mass Effect. So just how talky it is, how much time you spend in conversation. Mentions how like the first game, you waste way too much time just wandering around the Citadel talking to people. And I actually think that’s a fair criticism because I remember feeling like I was spending way too much time on the Citadel in boring conversations in the first one. And then the second one just seems to completely strip out any of the boring bits. I think it’s because they worked out what are the most interesting types of party members we can have traveling along with you. That’s part of why that’s so effective. Also at the same time in the first one, you were just an unambiguously good guy doing the good guy things to try and save the galaxy for the good guys. The second one, you literally work for the people you’re told are bad in the first one. It’s a real kind of shift in dynamic and your place in that galaxy feels a little more uncertain. The third one is just not quite as good as the second one. I think it feels not rushed but it doesn’t feel as complete as the second one does in terms of the… The second one just has such a perfect balance of types of characters and quests they put you on and a great overarching story that actually is not really attached to the wider lore of Mass Effect that much, like obviously the Reapers are the big overarching threat but the second one has its own self-contained story essentially. Yeah, it’s weird because I always think of second one as basically like companions the game. It’s a game about companions where the overarching story is entirely about getting enough companions on your side so you can go and do this big thing. And it’s kind of the perfect vehicle for like BioWare’s strong companion writing, which has always been one of their strengths and I’d argue it’s like probably of all the BioWare things I have played is the one where like companions feel like front and centre and you know they’re the most integral to not just the plot but how the game functions as a whole. Yeah, I think that’s so completely fair, especially in the second one which has these obviously loyalty missions which are basically extended side quests that are like TV episodes that give you the spotlight on your character, tell you all about their motivations and help you resolve something in their lives so you as a player feel like you get closer to them. And I think maybe the reviews for the Mass Effect 2 were incredibly positive at the time but I do wonder if in retrospect their ability to bring companions to life in that way was actually like a really rare event. Maybe we were watching maybe the best version of this in the kind of modern age and maybe didn’t realise how good we had it and I don’t feel like I’ve played a party RPG since then that’s done that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we’ll probably talk a little bit about Andromeda later but, you know, that’s the huge flaw for me there is just like the companions are so weak, it’s so noticeable, they really sort of struggle to do anything interesting with a lot of them. I’d also say, like, I think it factors into some of the disappointment with Mass Effect 3 in that the way it uses companions is quite odd in that a lot of people who were previous companions come back as almost like cameo roles and they have like a little moment to shine in the main story and if you were particularly connected to certain characters, you know, as I was, you could maybe understand being disappointed. I mean, like, I am definitely less keen on Mass Effect 3, but it’s mainly because it did a lot of stuff I didn’t like with specific things, you know, like, it didn’t treat Thane right. I didn’t think, you know, what happened with Thane in 3 isn’t, you know, the kind of grand continuation of that friendship. Basically, it felt like it was concluding a lot of relationships which had only just started in 2. The benefit of 2 is it introduces loads of cool people and it continues some key relationships from 1 where 3 is just endings, endings, endings and, you know, it’s quite hard to take. Yeah, I would say that some of those endings are very powerful. I remember how the Liara story ends very, very well in Mass Effect 3 and I thought that was a very powerful, very good bit of writing and acting. But I see what you mean. It’s tough because obviously, like you say, if some members are in your, some of the members from previous games are in your party, others aren’t. The ones who are in your party tend to get a better shake than the ones who aren’t. Sometimes, I would say that like the way it lets you resolve some of your romances in 3 is quite satisfying, but I can see what you mean. And I think that, maybe I’m getting into the weeds a bit here, but one of the reasons they did that Mass Effect Citadel DLC was so that you could have more time with these characters who you really, you really enjoy spending time with, all in the same place, all doing like almost slightly fan-service-y hanging out stuff to remind you of why you enjoyed spending time with them so much. Honestly, when I think about Mass Effect, I get slightly, it’s slightly disappointing that it’s this kind of like magic went away, so Inquisition, I think, Dragon Age Inquisition does have a lot of the same DNA as Mass Effect in terms of the companions, the companions are extremely good in that game. They’re great in 2 and Origins, actually, that’s something that BioWare didn’t lose focus of in those games. But obviously, we’re now in this kind of weird era for BioWare where they’ve released Anthem, a game that had, you know, story and characters that were completely redundant, just entirely pointless. And then obviously Andromeda, like you say, where the party members didn’t resonate in the same way. So, Matthew, as Mass Effect Legendary Edition releases, where do you think BioWare is at? And what do you think this particular re-release represents for the studio as at this moment? I think they’re in a very similar place to where 343 are at with Halo. They are, I think, just as you said, that like what Mass Effect represents was kind of like BioWare stepping into the next generation as it was then and kind of doing something new. I think the generation after that threw them quite hard. I think there was a need to kind of like grow their formula in some way, and I don’t think they ever really settled on what it should be and what it needed to be. Inquisition, well, I say that, Inquisition is that next step and is great. I really love Inquisition. And you know, Inquisition is very much the template for what they then do with Mass Effect in Andromeda. It just doesn’t work for various reasons. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. They felt very sort of diminished after that. I would say in the same way that when 343 took over Halo, you know, Halo 4 actually is OK as a kind of tail end of that generation. But I think, you know, Halo 5 was very muddled. I think they didn’t really know what like a more powerful kind of bigger Halo needed to be. Like the philosophy of Halo got a bit kind of unbalanced. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. So with BioWare, it feels like you say that the increasing scope of games in the last generation, they were somewhat a victim of it. So in the kind of like alleged making of Mass Effect Andromeda, they were doing all this kind of randomly generated planet stuff, which sounded like a completely terrible idea on paper like never should have been something they wasted their time on. And it feels like just chasing that kind of open world template. I mean, to be honest, the open world stuff in Inquisition is not what’s good about it. Like the actual spectacle of walking around that world and seeing dragons fly around and stuff. That is very impressive. But as you’re kind of like looking for astrolabes and doing all these kind of like boring sort of side quests and fetch quests, it really doesn’t amount to much. All of the best stuff is still in like your party and you know how it kind of looks and feels and what the world is like. It’s not nothing to do with the actual kind of side quest design and stuff. So yeah, I’d say the key difference is one of genre as well. Maybe people disagree with this. But like for me, like fantasy sort of exploration kind of immersing myself in like a natural habitat that’s kind of beyond comprehension is like a big part of the appeal where with Mass Effect, with sci fi, I prefer that genre to kind of explore ideas a bit more closely, a bit more explicitly, you know, there is still the brave new world element of it. Like you’re going out and you’re discovering amazing things. But fundamentally, a lot of them are like just big barren old rocks. You know, it’s not as exciting a place as fantasy where anything can happen. You know, I think it’s telling that people love Mass Effect 2, even though it is more limited in scope. You know, if anything, it took away what open world aspirations Mass Effect 1 had with the Mako. It kind of, you know, reversed all that. Did anyone care? No, because it got you to the ideas faster. Like I think it’s actually OK for Mass Effect to be quite enclosed stories, which are just very, very dense with ideas, dilemmas, you know, the kind of the thought process you go through of tackling them. I don’t think it needs to tap into this sense of like, oh my God, I’m on this huge, vast, basically just empty ice field. There’s no benefit to that. Yeah, I think you can also have that spectacle without needing to have like a massive amount of sort of, you know, real estate for players to wander around. So I think the Mass Effect does this quite well with the way that it has you deal with the Krogan. Like the Krogan’s kind of like their planet, which I have not noted the name of here, which seems like poor research, doesn’t it? That I’m kind of like when you fight the big worm and stuff like that, you feel like you’re on that world, even though you’re not sort of like you say, doing loads of exploration and stuff. And I think that that’s kind of what they sort of need to get back to. In a way, I think that Mass Effect is a trilogy is the ultimate in like smoke and mirrors kind of game design. It’s there’s obviously kind of like loads and loads of sort of detail and how the permutations of the choices you make pan out, including entire characters who may or may not appear in the story. All that is really impressive. But I think that at the same time, it’s very much like you’re walking through movie sets a lot of the time. And but it doesn’t harm the game in any way, because it’s such an adrenaline rush just to kind of be there to be in these places as a kind of fictional location, fictional set of locations. The Mass Effect universe feels very complete. It’s sort of it’s just such a visually such a confident game, like it’s got such a great visual identity. And yeah, I think I agree with you. I don’t I don’t really know why they became so hung up on open world stuff. It’s just watching everyone else do it, I suppose. But what’s really interesting about these three games combined is that if you just run through the main stories in the three games, it’ll probably take you about 70 hours. It’s not actually like that long. It’s quite they’re quite short games. And there’s like like you say, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are ways to prolong that there are side quests, you can go scanning planets, all that stuff. There are ways to extend the game, but you’ll never extend the game to like the length that say Ghost Tsushima was you’ll never get it to like 60 hours plus, but you don’t need it to there’s just no need for it. And it’s that thing of like they they seem like the ultimate victims of conflating like ours played with value. Like they just don’t. And it’s just such a shame because I just feel like there’s so many wasted years of BioWare at this point. Now it’s 2014 was when Inquisition came out and in the intervening years had Anthem a proper like disaster of a game that they’ve just given up on now, which you know, I think they should give up on it and just focus on making like one thing good. That’s like what they should be doing. And then and a Mass Effect game that people didn’t like. And that’s such a poor showing for all those years. I feel bad for BioWare because they are they get such a heated response on Twitter. And so like I would never ever kind of level that individual developers. All kinds of stuff happened behind the scenes, no doubt, absolutely. But the end result to players is it just Mass Effect 3 came out nine years ago and it just feels like we’ve missed something. Something went away and we didn’t get it back. That’s how I feel about Mass Effect. No, I’m in complete agreement. Yeah, it’s a bummer. I wonder as well, it seems like the visual changes with this Legendary Edition might be contentious as well. So who knows what kind of reception it will get ultimately. I’m sure by the time people are listening to this, there’s more discourse about how the colour of the sky has changed on, you know. Yeah, I kind of, I always bounce off that discourse massively, because it’s one thing when you put two images next to each other to dunk on it on Twitter and go, oh, actually, I prefer the image on the right. But that’s not how you play games. Like, if you’d show me that legendary footage, I would have just said, oh yeah, kind of, that’s I think how it looks, didn’t it? Isn’t that how it looks? Like, my mind isn’t that good. My memory is so vague, I’d be like, oh yeah, that looks fine. That looks good. That’s Mass Effect, isn’t it? It’s this really like granular, dunk culture. It’s just not for me. Yeah, I’ve pre-ordered it. I’m well up for playing these again. Like, I don’t know how quickly I will play through them again, but what about you, Matthew? Do you think you’d go through the trilogy again? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so for starters, yeah, I’ve only ever played it through once. I just accumulated bad decisions. So like, you know, there’s like some characters didn’t even make it to my Mass Effect 3, so God knows what they actually get up to in the game. I’d be intrigued to see. Like rather shamefully, I’ve never played any of the Mass Effect DLC, which I know is quite substantial and a lot of people’s favourite stuff, you know, or some of their favourite stuff is contained within it. So I feel like there’s actually quite a chunk of this I haven’t seen, you know, I haven’t been able to kind of enjoy. And also the promise of, like we said, being able to play this quite substantial trilogy, but probably get through it, you know, in, you know, each one in 20 or so hours. That’s very appealing to me. Yeah, for sure. I’m well up for it as well. So when you say you haven’t played any of the DLC, did you get Zaid and Kasumi in the second one? So did you have to buy Kasumi DLC? It came with the game. It was like, I think Kasumi and Zaid came with the game. There was like a Cerberus. I got Zaid, who’s just a total bust. Like that character is just all I remember is I think he’s got a burn. I don’t know. Maybe. I think it’s like eyes. He’s lost sight of one eye or something. I agree that Zaid is one of the worst companions for sure. But I thought he was just like a pre-order freebie and I was like, well, it’s the freebie character who like never ever gets mentioned. Like, whenever you see him on the ship, he’s just so noticeably got nothing to contribute to the game. The Kasumi. I swear I didn’t get Kasumi because I like I was, you know, reading into a bit her loyalty mission or the kind of the sort of sort of going to this sort of swanky party. I have no recollection of that at all. You would remember it as well because it’s yeah, it sounds like my kind of deal. So yeah, I don’t know what happened there. Yeah, so I’m understanding is that both came as part of the same thing. This is back when publishers were doing those really naff attempts to fight pre-owned games where it’s like, oh, if you buy Arkham Knight, sorry, Arkham City pre-owned, then you have to like pay for Catwoman missions and the Catwoman missions were all like the worst bits of that game. So yeah, so there was a bit of that going on. So that might be how you missed out on it. What’s weird is though, I think when I reviewed Mass Effect 2, I don’t recall having access to Kasumi and Zayid, so they must have been added like either at launch or after launch. Zayid came later, definitely. It was like, hey, here’s that drop you’ve been waiting for. It’s a guy with a weird eye and you’re like, hmm. Yeah, new companion just dropped, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Like you say, I think you would really appreciate the DLC. So the Mass Effect 1 DLC, I don’t really recall that well. But the second one, I do remember them very well. Lair of the Shadow Broker, the Iliara one, that’s a really, really strong extra chapter, like a really kind of top-end side quest basically, it lasts for a few hours. And another one that’s pretty good called Overlord, which is really like a TV episode. You’ll play, I remember playing it at the time, Overlord. And it has a kind of like sort of Star Trek-esque kind of twist at the end and a conundrum and all this stuff. And I was just there thinking, I would play the shit out of a Mass Effect game that basically dropped a new quest like this every month for a year and I would pay for every single one of them, you know. That’s how to do it, game of service, proper Star Trek style. Yeah, it’s like a whole season of extra stuff basically on top of the game that you’ve paid for already being substantial. That would be good and it will never happen because instead it will be like bullshit kind of season passes and unlocking emotes and all that kind of bollocks. But yeah. Do you want to see a Krogan dab? Yeah, so I was curious Matthew, what do you think the influence of Mass Effect is and the legacy of the series? When I was thinking about it, I thought I watched my partner play a bit of Horizon Zero Dawn and all of the kind of talky conversation bits in that first of all seemed quite boring to me, but secondly looked exactly like Mass Effect to me in terms of your choosing dialogue from like a wheel thing and like even the way that the discussions are framed was very Mass Effect-y and it made me think that is the influence of Mass Effect to make games more cinematic rather than more than anything else? Is it more about how RPGs turned into action games over like the last 10 years? Is that the influence the series had? What do you reckon? Yeah, I mean probably, you know, it definitely has a big cinematic influence on how things are presented. Maybe what people expect from these. I mean, you’re right. I mean, it just, that becomes the model. It’s the camera shot of the other character, the camera shot of you, maybe a bit of your shoulder. I mean, it’s in everything from like Batman chatting to people in the Arkham games to, yeah, like you say, Horizon Zero Dawn. I mean, the really interesting one is Borders Gate 3, which obviously, you know, Mass Effect is what BioWare decide RPGs are going to be after Borders Gate that they’ve made. And now we have Larian basically making Borders Gate 3 in the vein of a BioWare game. I mean, the big change they’ve made is that it’s a lot more cinematic. When you talk to people, it is a BioWare camera. I mean, the way you talk with kind of companions and you have the kind of loyalty quests there. I mean, obviously that harks back to Borders Gate 1 and 2, but it’s Mass Effect all over in how it feels. I mean, right down to any game now that has a kind of hub area where you talk to people between missions, everyone will always say Normandy. Like that’s the go to comparison point. So like you have a campfire in Borders Gate 3 where you can talk to everyone at night and it’s straight up Normandy. Everyone’s got their little bit, everyone stands in their little place. I mean, yeah, so I think you’re right. I think its influence is maybe more like style than necessarily like substance. Yeah, I think that’s about it. It’s interesting because when Mass Effect 2 came out, it launched at the same time as Dragon Age Origins, which felt like the last connection back to that original Baldur’s Gate and like Neverwinter Nights, you know, classic RPG style. So yeah, I think that is an interesting influence. It’s really interesting to me the idea of a developer making something that resembles a BioWare game deliberately from about 10 years ago, because that doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen. Like it’s really interesting, but I do definitely get that vibe when I look at Baldur’s Gate 3 in action. It’s yeah. I mean, the other one that jumps out recently was, did you play anything of Greedfall? No, no, that’s I’ve got it on PS Plus. Is that that is straight up the closest thing I’ve seen to the song going, well, if BioWare aren’t going to BioWare, I will BioWare. And it’s just Mass Effect, it is just a Mass Effect game, but in a kind of a sort of Victorian steam-punky kind of fantasy world. I didn’t think it was amazing, but like the positive reviews I did read of it, or the affection that some people seem to have towards it is purely because they’re like, well, finally someone’s doing, you know, what BioWare wouldn’t. So that’s that’s kind of that’s kind of interesting. I think that appetite is there and again, it goes back to like just BioWare really misjudging what people wanted or expected from this generation. They could have made another Mass Effect trilogy that was mechanically and like, you know, visually structurally exactly the same as the last Mass Effect trilogy. I think that would have been one of the most like critically loved series of this generation if they’d done that. Yeah, I think that what’s really a bummer as well is that there’s nothing about Andromeda that doesn’t sort of fit in terms of the shooting is really, really good in Andromeda. Like that. That’s where there’s like a nice generational leap between the two, the two series, the two sub-series of Mass Effect games. And yeah, I think just a better shooter and just looking really fucking nice. Like maybe with some larger sort of hub areas to explore, like maybe the Citadel becomes like, you know, a bit more kind of open-worldy or has more going on and, you know, and that’s a compromise as opposed to doing like say vast planets of nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Just a shame to think about what might have been. It’s interesting as well, because when you look back on the discourse around Mass Effect 2, obviously between Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, they ditch this kind of like cool-down based RPG numbers flying off of enemy’s combat system and make it a straight up third-person shooter. So to some people, I think this marked like a point of no return of classic RPGs sort of becoming mainstream games and losing what made them classic RPGs. Now though, I think that people have the same affection for this era of BioWare games now that about seven or so years ago when like Pillars of Eternity was taking off on Kickstarter, like that affection existed for those older classic RPGs. I think people have just as much affection for these games. It’s just that like it’s deferred a little bit now and I feel like yeah, like you say, maybe the kind of Larryan’s approach to Baldur’s Gate 3 is like our first taste of maybe a wave of developers trying to make stuff that’s a bit like the old kind of Mass Effect style of games. I don’t know. Well, I hope so. Yeah. So I was curious Matthew, in terms of like when you were kind of covering the Wii U. So we talked about this in the very first episode of this podcast, actually, when you talked about the Wii U launch and we joked about the fact that Mass Effect 3 launched on Wii U out of nowhere. The first one and second one didn’t come over. But nonetheless, they seem to put some effort into porting it. Do you have any memories of covering this at the time? Yeah, I think it was Mass Effect 3 Baffling Edition was its name, because here was a game which basically, the importance of Mass Effect 3 is that it finishes and it concludes and it reacts to everything you’ve done before, to varying degrees of success. If you haven’t played any of that, I actually think Mass Effect 3 as a standalone game is completely baffling. It does an okay job within itself of explaining in the given moment why you’re doing something, but you wouldn’t understand the importance of any of it. It’s quite a big gamble in that way. It really is a kind of a, we’re just going to trust that you have played the other two for all this to make sense. By itself, I have no idea why you’d play Mass Effect 3. I had no idea why they bought it to wait. I mean, really very odd, because I know that Mass Effect 1 was never on PlayStation, right? They, I believe they did port it later on to the PS3 via like a trilogy edition that had all the games. Oh, because when they did Mass Effect 2, they, on PlayStation, they were in the same boat, right? They didn’t have Mass Effect 1 at that point. And didn’t they do that kind of interactive comic thing? Oh yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To kind of fill in the gaps. So like, I could understand you’re like, okay, maybe that works. Like you can jump in at this point, but buy three, absolutely no way. But this is just, this was so true of just Nintendo at the time, like the desperation to get stuff on there and like random instalments. So like they had the, it was similar with Batman. They had the big Arkham City and okay, you don’t necessarily need to play Arkham Asylum to understand it. But the idea that you’d be satisfied, you know, with this quite weird sort of chunk of a bigger thing, it’s never sat easily with me. I mean, it’s just sort of, I don’t know, I think it is a nice port. I think EA, you know, by all accounts did a nice job of it. It’s just absolutely needless. You spend the whole time going, who the fuck is that? You know, you just wouldn’t know what’s going on. Yeah, the whole trilogy, the maybe the user, the kind of Wii U controller and to manage your inventory or select choices or whatever it might be. I don’t know exactly how they did it. That might work quite well. But yeah, very odd. I remember seeing it thinking that’s really strange that they did that. And yeah, did you have much envy of covering Mass Effect at the time Matthew, while you were working on Wii, this quite sexy cinematic game? Like, I see you over time, like you said, that obviously Xbox World, a bit of apathetic towards it at first, but then I assume that like our office in Bournemouth, imagine your office in Bath at future became a bit obsessed with these games over time? Oh, yeah, like fully on board by Mass Effect 2. I mean, yeah, I mean, at this point, like we knew what the Wii could and couldn’t do. So there was, you know, there were some things you were like, maybe, but that was always a there is no chance in hell. There wasn’t a huge amount of point in being jealous of that. Because, you know, if you’re jealous of that, you’re jealous of like, you know, 20 other games too. And, you know, jealousy didn’t seem like the best place to be kind of building a magazine from. It would have been quite a weird read if just NGamer the whole time was just moaning that it wasn’t playing Mass Effect. Though actually, like, I remember on the team, Kitsy was, we used to write, there was a spread in the mag called Meanwhile, which was basically, like what was going on on other platforms, which was, you know, something Kitsy wrote every month. There’s Martin Kits, who’s the deputy of NGamer. And he was, yeah, because he was, like, a big next-gen game. Like, he was definitely, at that point, I think, felt maybe a bit more into the kind of, the other, the other gen consoles than the Wii itself. So, yeah, Mass Effect did probably appear in the pages of NGamer very enthusiastically in the Meanwhile section. But yeah, for me, no, it was, it was fine. I mean, I just sort of ogled, ogled it being playing. Yeah, it’s weird actually, like, that what happened between Mass Effect 1 and 2. Like, I don’t know if you remember in your offices, was there a lot of buzz for Mass Effect 1? So I remember it being like moderate buzz. It was nothing like Bioshock was or Halo 3, which happened in the same year. Like, I think everyone sort of played Mass Effect and probably came to the same conclusion that that was good, but maybe there was like a missing extra something that would have made it great. But I can’t explain why when Mass Effect 2 came around, people were so fucking up for it. Maybe just affection for it grew over time or maybe that BioWare just talked a good talk with the follow up. But I don’t know. What happened there? I can’t really remember, but it’s just… Yeah, I think like definitely like Mass Effect 1, for a lot of people, totally rebrands BioWare. I think for a lot of console people, there probably is this slight feeling of, you know, Mass Effect 1 is coming out. It’s made by BioWare. And you’re like, the kind of borders gate guys. I mean, it’s not really our affair. Yeah, Cotor and Xbox as well. Oh, yeah. I’ll take it back. Yeah, sorry. That’s yeah. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. What about even that? That’s Star Wars. It’s quite nerdy. Yeah. And it was only on the original Xbox as well. So we’re not talking about like a wide console. Listen, it’s shakier, but I think it kind of holds. Yeah, I could go along with that. I think that a lot of people, this was their first taste of BioWare. And then actually, when Dragon Age Origins comes out and people jump on that, they probably find it quite odd to go, you know, this downgrade in visuals and very different style of game. So, yeah, I think you’re right there. But Matthew, I was curious if you think that the BioWare will ever get the thread back of what these games achieved. Like, do you think it’s on the cards? And what do you personally want from the future of the series? Yeah, like we’ve already said, I’d be happy for them to kind of go back to the kind of the more linear route. I think that’s the best place to explore their ideas. I think they can. I think they could easily do it. You know, the challenge with a lot of this stuff is like, would EA let them? You get the feeling that like some of what happened with Inquisition and Andromeda is also like, you know, there are certain things EA want in the game, there are certain criteria they’re probably trying to hit in terms of how long people can play, are their systems in place for kind of loots, like, you know, loot boxes and all this kind of jazz, which Mass Effect Andromeda had in its horde mode. So, you know, it kind of depends whether like EA can get into a place where they’re happy for those kind of games to happen. I would argue that they they’re probably more open to it now in like the wake of what happened with Jedi Fallen Order, for example, which I think was probably a bit of a wake up call in terms of single player games can actually still deliver. I mean, it did deliver for them. So, you know, obviously what Mass Effect is is different to a single player action adventure game like that. But I’d hope that someone was open to the idea of of a more traditional Mass Effect again. You know, it’s where BioWare’s strengths lie. I mean, saying that, though, it still doesn’t really account for how bad the companions were in Andromeda, because structural problems aside, even if that was a linear game, those companions would suck. Yeah, if that feels like it’s a kind of change over in writers and people just not nailing it. Of a lot of the RPGs I’ve played recently, I haven’t been bowled over by a lot of companions. Like, when I was playing The Outer Worlds, like the companions in that were also pretty bad, I thought. I don’t know if what’s going on there, if just the old guard have moved on and like the new generation is still finding their feet. You know, I wouldn’t want to say, but there’s definitely a change in tone. I tell you what, Mass Effect Andromeda, it feels like a crew where like everyone is like a Jacob from Mass Effect 2. It’s like that. It’s kind of just off. Yeah, I thought Jacob was fine in isolation in Mass Effect 2. That’s one of the companions I have like no real problem with. He’s not in our best companions list, but I thought his sort of story was quite interesting. I always thought there was a bit of a curse of the male human companion in the Mass Effect games. Is that you taking it? Kaden, Jacob and is it James in the last one? James Vega, yeah. I mean, just I mean, when we were doing our list, I just couldn’t remember. I was like, what did any of these guys do apart from maybe get blown up on a planet? Yeah, let me posit a theory about what’s happened with companion design. So these these companions in Mass Effect 2 in particular, the companions were so, so good as a kind of group. They were like, I remember them being like a pleasure to talk to. You got excited when there was like new dialogue to talk to, you know, like Miranda or, you know, Samara or Mordin. It was all thing. It was exciting to go and talk to these characters. And I feel like the environment they were creating those games in kind of predates people’s like overt fascination with different supporting characters in games and like kind of like the culture that kind of emerges around different types of games and like shipping characters and things like that. I think that that has accelerated so much that now it’s hard for creators to build characters without being conscious of how they might be received in those circles. So I think that’s why like a lot of the Outer Worlds characters end up feeling annoying. They feel like they’re designed to be like either kind of like mean or like crushed, you know, people having crushes on them or whatever. And it feels quite self aware in terms of the design. They don’t feel like organically good characters. They feel like they’ve been created to try and generate a response from you. And I think that with the BioWare games, it starts with like a very good character and like a distinctive set of like quirks and a personality and all these things that make them incredibly endearing. And now I think it’s hard to create a game in the kind of environment where people are sort of like actively looking to be passionate about different characters. That’s my sort of wild theory on this. Yeah, I’ve never really read anything about like companion theory in terms of like, not a lot has been said or that I have found about people talking about their design process. Like I’d love someone to do a big like deep dive with Larian about like the art of basically making a companion in Baldur’s Gate 3 and the kind of thought process that goes into each individual one. Because thinking them as a collective whole, thinking them as of individuals, it’s a difficult task. And you’re right, I think, you know, as well as that kind of fan culture, which I think you’re you’re bang on about, like when you are also working in the shadow of great characters like Mass Effect 2, that’s probably difficult because you’re like, I kind of want to do this, but then, you know, I want to do a character with quirky speech patterns, but I don’t want it just to be another rip off of like Morden. I imagine there’s a lot like baggage or things that you feel like you can’t necessarily do without stepping on the toes of like party characters. Yeah, I think that that is like a big problem that Andromeda faced as well. So my understanding is they trimmed at least one companion because they were worried they were too similar to original Mass Effect companions. So they obviously wrestled that a little bit and didn’t quite figure out how to do it. And it’s interesting. My understanding is that BioWare’s process is that different writers own different characters. So I think like that’s how it works at Larian too. Yeah. So my understanding is that Patrick Weeks is very much the writer of Mordin. Like Mordin Solis is a Patrick Weeks kind of creation. And that character is is shaped around their sensibilities. And that’s like, you know, that’s quite a good way of doing it in terms of isolating down a personality, having one person own the character and therefore there’s a consistency there. So, yeah, I agree with you, though. I’d love to hear more about that sort of that sort of process. But yeah, certainly there’s just a just a kind of a rare magic here. And I think it was the exact right environment to create these kind of characters. Yeah. Now it’s just it seems difficult. But how does Larian do it? Are the characters are good in Baldur’s Gate 3? Yeah, obviously, we’ve only got the early access version. So you’ve only got like the first chunk of their arcs. Also, you know, it’s not the full selection. It’s like four or five of them. But yeah, they’re written by they’re written by individual people. I think they’re pretty good. I think some people have had a problem with Baldur’s Gate 3 in that the current characters kind of like lean a bit evil or everyone’s maybe a little quick to anger or disagree. So it’s quite hard to kind of like with the particular combination they’ve given you. It’s quite hard to kind of keep everyone on board. But there’s a few very, there’s two quite sour characters and like their general kind of sourness maybe overshadows what’s interesting about them. But in terms of like, you know, tapping into like interesting character stories, interesting character quirks, the vocal performances, the way they look, they’re pretty distinctive. And you know, I’m already like into the ones they have. I’m really fascinated to see, you know, the other ones they, you know, they come up with and kind of what happens to them as they go on. Yeah, I think they’re pretty strong. They’re like, could be the big companion renaissance. What about the companions in our old favourite Yakuza like a dragon, Matthew? Isn’t there like a crab in that? What are they like? Well, that’s like one of the poundmates that you ring up. It’s like a crab, is it like a lobster or a crawfish or something? I don’t know, you phone up and the lobster turns up and fights. The companions, I’d say they’re closer to like JRPG companion members in terms of like, you’d have the party there, you know, they all kind of appear in cutscenes. Regardless, there’s a little bit of the normandy effect where there’s like a pub that you can go to and they all hang out there and you can talk to everyone. They’ve sort of got loyalty missions which unlock like new powers. So it’s got a bit of that kind of like Western RPG kind of character thinking. Yeah, another interesting one actually on the companion front very quickly is The Witcher 3, which has great companions, even though none of them are ever in your party. There is still, I still get the same sense, like I know like Dandelion, for example. You know, he’s never with me, but he’s in the games. You have this relationship with him. It’s another approach, I think, where someone can just be like prevalent in your life, but not necessarily like mechanically present. And that can still work. Yeah, I think that it’s not an RPG, but Ghost of Tsushima does that quite well as well. Like, I think you’re kind of like sort of the guy who is played by that dude who was the Hanzo-Dama guy in Lost. Like, he’s like a really memorable… You kind of get the sort of RPG feeling of going on journeys with him and hearing his story and all that stuff. But, yeah, without the kind of like… without so many of the meaningful choices or that sort of thing. So, yeah, I like it when it bleeds over, for sure. I mean, there could be… Talking again, just to go back to the what could they do to kind of reinvigorate the series, you know, there could be a bit more of that, like… Like, organic approach to character development, that you sort of get in the cinematic action games, like your Uncharted or whatever, where you have the kind of banter that plays out, and there’s quite sophisticated stuff going on behind the scenes in terms of, like, how that banter is, like, doled out as you’re doing the adventure to make sure it’s not, like, overkill. So get out of the traditional trope of, like, character development only happens in a locked down conversation. Like, you know, Mass Effect 3 is definitely, like, more cinematic in some of its set pieces, but you could stick to that linear route and bring in a bit of that kind of slightly more slick, cinematic third-person kind of action and maybe find a kind of an interesting middle ground, an idea. Yeah, that’s interesting, yeah. I think that Inquisition is actually really good at that in terms of the party dialogue that happens while you’re exploring. The way they interact is really, really fun and an underrated part of that game. It also encourages you to switch out party members and switch in characters you don’t use as often just to hear how they kind of interact with other party members. On a kind of similar note as well actually, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that Persona does this very well too. It’s not necessarily like a western style. Again, there aren’t massively meaningful choices, but you do have to choose to spend time with them. The amount of character detail you get for your individual party members is way more than you would get in a typical Japanese RPG I would say. It’s just everyone but BioWare doing this basically, and that’s the big frustration. Matthew, before we get to our top ten companions, we’ve got a few more stuff I wanted to rattle through here. I wonder if you had any particularly good memories of missions or events or quests in each Mass Effect game. Is there anything that springs to mind when we put this plan together? Yeah, definitely Mass Effect 1. I think the point where that game becomes a lot better and ramps up for me is Vermeer, which is the planet where you kind of fight. You basically encounter Saren properly and you have the big kind of Caden Ashley choice. And also another big choice with your Krogan pal Rex. Rex, not Rax, is it Rex? Yeah, there’s that tense moment where you can basically turn on each other and he’ll leave your party and he’ll be dead, right? That’s what happens. Yeah, basically. That planet had a lot of big stuff that can happen. And as you go on and play the rest of the games, you think, man, if I’d lost these characters, this would have actually been pretty huge. That was the first big sign of its intent that this was going to be a game that made big decisions. It’s also where, for me, that game, the lore becomes a lot more interesting. The Reaper threat steps up. Yeah, because I remember thinking it was all fine, but that was when I was like, oh, OK, actually, there’s a bit more to this world. Because I think Mass Effect 1 does have the unfortunate problem of being the first in a game with entirely new lore and an entirely new setting. And at times, it does feel like it’s teaching you a bit too much. I mean, the fact that there was that sort of hilarious glossary. It had like an inbuilt Wikipedia with that good dude with the cool voice basically reading out all the entries. It felt like you had to just get your head around. Every conversation, you then have to go into the glossary and work out just what the fuck you’ve been told. And, you know, that’s obviously Mass Effect 2 can hit the ground running. It doesn’t have that. But in terms of like dramatic stakes, that mission with the whole kind of bomb decision and everything, it just, I don’t know, that’s where the game kind of snapped together. And I was like, oh, yeah, I’m in now. Yeah, it’s a real good kind of like statement of intent of what the rest of the series will entail. I remember, you know, Saren as a villain, I thought he was a very, very good like opening villain. And then the fact that he’s kind of like being basically like controlled by the Reapers was was really interesting. And the finale in the Citadel was, you know, quite visually spectacular, but ultimately definitely feels like a first act. But yeah, that really sets like that sets a kind of like good, a good kind of template for the rest of the games to follow in terms of the potential weight of your choices. And this really comes to a head in the second one with the suicide mission, which I noted as one of my my sort of highlights is when I played this review, I lost three party members and it was fucking devastating because I don’t know what I was doing in this in this like this this bit. Also, when I reviewed the game, I completely missed Legion as a party member. Like I never went down and activated him. So he never joined my party. And it meant it meant that when you send someone into the pipes in the finale of Mass Effect 2, I sent in Mordin and then like it was a series of poor decisions. Basically, I lost Mordin, Jack and Fane. They all died. And like, oh, wow, that would have been. Yeah. I mean, like Mordin aside, you aren’t losing much in Mass Effect 3, I’d say, with those character deaths. The Mordin, the kind of conclusion of the kind of Mordin storyline in Mass Effect 3, I think is a highlight. I think the strongest thing about Mass Effect 3 is the way that it closes stories, which started in Mass Effect 1. I think they did a really good job of introducing certain ideas and certain sort of like galaxy wide dilemmas, which then mutated in interesting ways across all three games and had some quite spectacular endings in 3. If anything, weirdly for all the talk about the ending of 3, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it in a second, I think the quest up to the ending does do a pretty good job of wrapping up a lot of stuff in a satisfying way. Yeah, I think so. I think that’s why. I mean, yeah, we’ll come to it. But I think that’s why my own impression of Mass Effect 3 wasn’t as down as some of the other ones, because to me the ending of Mass Effect was the ending with these characters. It was finding out how these three game relationships basically close out. And I think that the game really pays off a lot of those very, very well and gives you a real good opportunity to say goodbye in loads of different ways. And sometimes those are in quite devastating ways. Like there’s quite a number of characters can basically die in Mass Effect 3. It’s just down to the decisions you make. So it can go quite catastrophically wrong at times. But yeah, I think, yeah. It also does that hilarious thing though of because that suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, which is brilliant, I agree with you. It’s like probably my series highlight in terms of the concept and the execution of the thing. But like any of the characters can die. And that has huge repercussions in 3 where a lot of these characters play key roles. But the only downside to that is like if they do die, they’re kind of replaced with people who are quite like them, who you have like no relationship with. So it will be like just another sort of Turian or another Krogan will sort of turn up. And it’s like the worst one is where there are alien races where they can kind of like, like with Legion, who’s the kind of Geth robot, you know, it’s just like, oh, it’s just another robot. It’s like we made another robot. Oh, well, maybe it’s because I just I never lost those party because when I when I am went to play the game with my own save file, I looked up how you avoid everyone dying basically Mass Effect 2 because I didn’t want them to die. And then basically just like forged a scenario where they all survive. It’s fine. But it’s like the way they do it isn’t so much kind of like this story won’t happen. It’s like the stories will still happen in Mass Effect 3. It’s just that they find like all these weird proxies. So I imagine there is like a version of Mass Effect 3 where if you killed off enough people, where it would just be totally abstract and there’d be all these randos you’ve never ever met who have quite big dramatic moments and you’re like, all right, you know, very unearned. Yeah. It’s like I’ll sacrifice myself. It’s like, sure, I met you two minutes ago. Oh, that’s really funny. I guess I’m not really aware of this because it just didn’t happen in my playthrough. Like, that’s funny, though, because, yeah, like you say, you can end it. So I’ve seen the end cut scene where it’s just you who escapes the suicide mission. And then like Joker just looks really fucking devastated as you fly away. And the idea of trying to complete your Mass Effect journey after that with all those characters gone is just, yeah, very odd. That’s, yeah, very bizarre. But yeah, do you have any other highlights, Matthew, from the series you want to share? I mean, like, you know, it’s very easy just to list a lot of the loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2, because they’re generally quite strong and they explore like the characters or interesting kind of cultural elements of the species. I really, really like Sins of the Father, which is Thane’s loyalty quest, which is about basically he’s sort of this sort of lizardy assassin and he’s trying to stop his son from being a lizardy assassin. It’s kind of interesting because it’s not an actiony mission. A lot of these missions are go to a place, kill loads of people and then have a difficult conversation. But this one’s more of like a detective mission. You go around the Citadel talking to people. You do like a police interrogation. You get to do a good cop, bad cop thing. And it’s just a lot of conversational stuff. I think it puts the writing to the forefront. One of the sort of the other reasons I really like Mass Effect 2’s companions is while some of them factor into these grand arcs that are defining the universe, like Mordin’s role with the genophage and everything is really important, I do like the characters who have quite self-contained personal issues. Not everything feels like the end of the world, which is arguably does and is in Mass Effect 3. But yeah, the stuff with Thane and Samara in 2 I think is really nice. Just like solving family issues, but they can still end horribly. It’s quite a good format for a quest. Did you ever get Samara’s daughter instead of her as a party member? No, I didn’t know. That seemed like a really interesting wrinkle in the second one too. Is that Morinth? Yeah, that’s right. And it never happened for me, but I understand that that can result in some quite interesting outcomes too. So yeah, it’s quite the thing. But yeah, I agree with you. The second one, definitely the loyalty missions come to mind. Like I say, I think the third one’s got some very good goodbyes. I was watching the cutscene this morning of Garrus and Shepard on the Presidium doing target practice, which is a moment I remember really well from the third one, because it is just like a gentle kind of character moment. And you can choose whether to sort of like make a shot during target practice and get different responses from Garrus. And it’s just a really good distillation of your relationship with that character. There’s a few moments like that. I won’t spoil all of them because they’ll come up. I’m sure they’ll come up in our companion chat very shortly. But yeah, I think that the Kasumi DLC is something I will spotlight there. I think that it’s a shame you didn’t play this because like I say, you’re basically, Shepard is in a suit. He’s going to like a mansion for a party and like you’re casing the joint. So Kasumi, your companion, can basically steal something I believe and get revenge for her lover being killed. So it’s a really, really good, again, like a TV episode, but like so memorable as a premise. I love party. One of my favorite bits in Inquisition is when you go to that foreign court and you have to kind of do the sort of, you know, follow all the weird protocols there of like high society. I love any mission where you get to get rid of your armor and wear some silly suit for 20 minutes is good. Yeah, I think that this is why you should definitely, if you haven’t played the DLC, Matthew, the Citadel DLC, is almost like a kind of like epilogue for the Mass Effect series. It’s like it is like a true goodbye to all these characters you’ve known very well. So if you do go through this trilogy again, I think you’ll find that a really satisfying way to kind of cap off your relationship with those characters. Yeah, I think I’ve watched some of it in like cut scenes and things. I just don’t know why I didn’t, because yeah, Mass Effect 3, like I played it when it came out. I didn’t even play, I haven’t played the extended ending or anything like that. I’ve just played it as it was on day one. Let’s do the ending chat then Matthew. So Mass Effect 3, the ending of that game, obviously very contentious. When it happened, when the game released, it immediately got a heated response from players who didn’t feel that the ending paid off enough of their choices. It resulted in a lot of crybabying on social media and BioWare eventually basically changing the ending to have an extended version, including recording new music and showing different outcomes for your party members and stuff like that. So, I mean, I feel like this point has been made before, but this does feel like a very significant moment in the kind of history of bad online discourse in terms of basically like complete dickheads getting like what they want. And it’s that thing where I don’t think the ending to Mass Effect 3 is perfect. Maybe it’s because I’m just not I’m not that plot minded a person. And so it didn’t like I’m more character minded as a person. I like seeing, like I said, character resolutions meant more to me than a resolution to this big overarching story. I think Mass Effect 3 is a finale to the series worked because you do feel the stakes of the Reaper attack. And it does feel like these these choices are like life changing. It’s just maybe like that last decision is quite binary. There’s like, you know, basically two buttons to press and then two outcomes that happen. But I can’t say I found it particularly unsatisfying. And I think there are like lines to be drawn between what happens at this point when this launches and like what happens with The Last Jedi? What happens with arguably Gamergate a few years later? And what happens with kind of people’s general in gaming, it kind of normalizing really toxic discourse like all the time as a kind of like constant thing in like our lives. Like just this week, there’s lots of bad, bad chatter around Returnal from lots of accounts I have muted or like, you know, you know what I mean? Just it just feels like it’s normalized just this bad discussion around games and we’re kind of stuck with it permanently. What do you think of all that? Yeah, I kind of agree with you on all those points like now, because it’s not something I particularly like want to relive and go back to. So I have quite hazy memory of like the specifics of the complaint at the time. But, you know, I remember feeling that, you know, what people are looking for is just so unlikely, you know, that these games which are going to be like in this particular case, a game which is going to be incredibly reactive to like everything you’ve ever done. The game, you know, of all the series I’ve played, I mean, it’s arguably one of the strongest in terms of delivering on consequences and a game which has so many choices that, you know, with every choice, with every branching path, it becomes more and more complicated, it becomes more and more unsteady. You have this sort of like, sort of consequence uncanny valley, I think, where the more you offer kind of reactive material, the more people want and the kind of the more grievous it feels when it doesn’t behave in a reactive way. So I think this is a game that like 90% delivers on kind of what it wants to, but maybe it doesn’t right at the end. But I would also say, show me the game which does. I mean, there’s very few games based on consequences and choices. That stick the landing. You know, in terms of the button A or button B, I remember feeling similar way about the when they rebooted Deus Ex. I always get them confused which one came first. Human Revolution. That was the same. Like that gets the end. It’s just like, which of these three things are you going to be? And you’re like, all right. You know, it’s underwhelming, but then endings are underwhelming. Maybe the bigger point is maybe you just don’t like endings. You know, because most things end poorly. But I think that might just be because they end and you don’t like it. You know, I can maybe name like two or three TV shows, which like absolutely delivered after like 10 years. Which of those? It’s so rare. It’s impossible to do. It’s just a hard thing to do. You know, to deliver emotionally satisfying conclusions to a hundred hour stories, there’s not many books that do it. You know, it’s just it’s difficult. But you’re right. You know, I’d say that that’s true of a lot of art forms. Unfortunately, it happened in a particular art form, which has got a teenage audience, which isn’t kind of particularly prepared mentally for those kind of challenges. Yeah, which is where the discourse comes from. Yeah, the stink. No, please go on. No, I was just saying it stinks. You know, everyone gets upset about the ending. You go, oh, well, you move on. I mean, the flip side is if you absolutely do deliver, it is like the best thing ever. I mean, some of my favorite pop culture experiences are the ones which see it through to the ending. But there are so few of them. I know it’s hard. Like, you know, I’ve just come to it and not expect it. Yeah, so I think that in many ways, actually, this ending is a victim of the fact that players have never found themselves this invested in a story before in a game. And again, like I say, I think that Mass Effect is a trilogy that’s about smoke and mirrors in a lot of ways. It’s about making those choices feel meaningful. What’s really interesting about Mass Effect 2 as an ending is because, you know, as we’ve discussed, it’s kind of like an open ending. It can let all your characters die. In some ways, that’s like the most satisfying ending for an RPG because it allows all these different permutations and the consequences are kind of like felt in real time. It’s a bit harder to do when you’re trying to resolve this one big story that basically links all three of these games. And yeah, I can see sort of, I don’t, yeah, I can just see how it ends up panning out this way. And it reminds me too, actually, Matthew, I mean, this was right around the time as well, that a few years after Battle Star Galactica had ended and Lost had ended. So those are both TV shows with terrible endings, like, or at least like poorly received endings. Like not everyone hates those endings, and fair enough. Battle Star Galactica had a completely baffling ending. I don’t really get it at all. But it hasn’t really soured my kind of like impression of it overall. And also I don’t think like the fan response was that bad, but maybe that’s because, like you say, a little bit older, a little bit more trained into potentially being disappointed when a really kind of big weighty sci-fi story doesn’t entirely pay off. Yeah, that’s the thing. I just feel if you’ve got a wider, more balanced diet, this wouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s hard to do these things. I just think it speaks to a lot of gamers who have gaming as like the cornerstone of their personality. I mean, it’s just bound to happen. What is the most satisfying ending for you in pop culture? I know it’s a bit of a tough question just to launch into. Well, actually, I will give that a tiny bit of thought, but why don’t you tell me what you think the two or so TV shows are that have perfect endings are? I’m really curious. So for me, perfect ending TV is The Shield. Oh, I know about that ending. That is a grim ending, right? Yeah, which it won’t spoil, but absolutely. The character arc, what he goes through, what he gets at the end of it is 100% what should happen to that character. Still a little open-ended, but everything’s wrapped up and like, I don’t know, it feels that sort of some kind of big moral justice has been served. It’s very, The Shield, I think, is a spectacularly good show, start to finish. And that is a show which is about choices and consequences. It’s a big snowball of bad decisions adding up. Yeah, it totally sticks to the ending for me. The other one, I’d say, I know not everyone’s on board with this. I think Mad Men, I love the ending of Mad Men. I think the last season is a little odd, but I think the final notes of it are brilliantly done. Yeah, I’d say for my money and recent memory, shows that really did it. Yeah, I think there are sort of quite a few shows that are amazing that have bad endings, like you say. So I was thinking about The Wire, for example, which I know you just started watching. I think that the final season is generally considered like the weakest. It has like probably the most outlandish premise of the whole show. And so I think it does end in a… it just sort of like ends. It’s quite a sort of like… it just sort of goes away a little bit. I don’t think it has like a really satisfying conclusion. In a way, though, I think it doesn’t matter because each season of that show is so self-contained that it’s got characters, numerous characters throughout the show have very satisfying endings, I would say. I agree with you on Mad Men. I think that The American Office has a really good ending. I don’t think… I mean, it’s shit for about three seasons before that, but the actual two-part episode where they… You’re not a fan of Robert California. Is he a favourite of yours? No, it’s alright. We just rewatched all of The Office over the last few months. And I actually think the last seasons weren’t as terrible as I remember. They’re definitely not as good. There’s a few, like, killer episodes. The last season’s actually pretty good. The premise of that ending is actually, like, would have even worked perfectly a couple of seasons before if it had ended earlier. Even though it does make the most of the fact that they’ve got this big cast of characters at that point, I do think that, yeah, it’s a really good two-parter to just sort of cap it off with a bunch of key character moments. It’s so good, in fact, that I feel like Greg Daniels probably came up with it years before they ended the show and was like, right, this is how it will end and this is how it will be emotionally satisfying. Yeah, I don’t know. I think this is a really weird one, but the original ending to Scrubs is quite good. Oh, I don’t think I ever saw it through. Well, neither did I. I didn’t see all of it. But I saw the last episode where the main character walks down a corridor and sees loads of old patients. He basically treated as he prepares to leave the hospital forever. So all these people like that he had life experiences with just sort of emerge in this kind of grand flashback. And then there’s like this quite sort of, I guess, like emotionally manipulative footage of what happens to JD, the main character after that. It kind of flashes forward and it’s considered pretty good. I don’t think Scrubs is a great show. Let me make that very clear. But that’s quite satisfying. Again, as much as I dunk on it, I did think the last Avengers film was a pretty good tie up for everything. I know they’re making more Marvel things, but whatever it was. Was it Endgame? Is that the last one? Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, like in terms of the end, it was quite crowd pleasing. The pair of those films feel like they give a lot of people their little shot. I mean, it kind of is the end of a thing. It feels like the end of a particular era. That was a big crowd pleasing version of that. Yeah, for sure. And the only other one that I would draw attention to is the ending to the Buffy spinoff Angel, which I quite liked. It’s a really grim ending where basically all of the main characters are doomed. They are fighting like an unstoppable force. It’s kind of like the Butch Cassidy sort of ending. It’s very similar. Very similar sort of vibe. Definitely broke my brain at the time because you literally never find out what happens to the characters, whether they survived or not. But it’s a good finale. I don’t know, when it comes to these, to draw it back to Mass Effect, when it comes to big, weighty sci-fi stuff, I can’t really think of anything. I wasn’t like a big Star Trek guy, so I don’t know. Maybe, like, I know that TNG has an ending, and I think it’s quite well regarded, for example. But that’s not really the same genre of sci-fi. I think a lot of sci-fi can just sort of go a bit galaxy brain at the end, and then it’s kind of like, well, there you go. But isn’t that the nature of the universe? And you’re like, yep. Or it all ends up, you know, there’s someone getting their mind zonked out in a light tunnel. And you’re like, yeah, sure. Yeah, I’m not really into endings that are like, we’ve kind of merged, we’ve become gods or any of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve turned into pure light. It’s hard to find like a human relatable ending in a universe built on like ideas beyond human comprehension. Yeah. But what can you do? All right then, Matthew. So I’ve got one last question about Mass Effect before we move on to our companions, which is Mass Effect Andromeda is something we’ve talked about before. We talked about it a bit on this podcast. Do you have any further thoughts on that game? And do you think there’s anything that’s kind of like worth salvaging from it? Or is it worth kind of like picking up again for people who might bounce off it the first time? I mean, the general concept of the thing of like, you know, going out and meeting faces of the threats unknown and, you know, that’s like more of a sort of Star Trek fantasy than the other Mass Effect. So the other thing that, you know, the previous trilogy, everything’s quite well established when it starts. And I think the promise of Andromeda and what it doesn’t deliver on, but the promise is still a good one, is like, you know, it’s all these elements, you know, kind of interacting with something kind of new. You know, what do truly new alien worlds and, you know, new alien species look like? And unfortunately the answers they came up with were just really boring. It was just like two tribes of people with like dog faces. And you’re like, great, it’s like a dog men. What a waste of time. We came all this way. Yeah, it leaves me so quickly, Andromeda, by having that moment where you meet the one of the alien species on that planet at the start. And then like you’re opening fire on each other straight away. I was like, oh, this is bad. This is like I feel like the original Mass Effect Trilogy wouldn’t have done this. It would have had. Yeah, there would have been further context. But the whole concept of like everyone’s come together, you know, the downside to it is it’s like the society you bring with you is presumably pretty stable. So there’s not a lot of like interesting stuff to explore within that society. So it’s entirely about like what you find. All the side quests are basically about establishing better living conditions in this new world, in this new solar system. And that’s, you know, you need history for like interesting kind of quests to kind of emerge from. That’s what’s great about Mass Effect 2 is you’re basically stepping into the end of lots of stories, which have been playing out for a long time and basically need some resolution. And that’s what Shepard is. His whole job is to go in and basically put an end to people’s sort of epic kind of conflicts. But there’s no time for those conflicts to actually develop in Andromeda. No one has them because their conflict is, oh, fuck, where the fuck are we? Like, how do I, you know, breathe air on this planet? That is an interesting problem from a kind of like dilemma point of view. What might be more interesting is if they did something like a similar premise to Andromeda where all these basically these desperation kind of moves to create, to move kind of like the different alien species and humanity elsewhere in the universe kind of goes wrong. And then it becomes a bit more sort of like Firefly or Mad Maxy where it’s kind of like everyone’s, it’s a few hundred years have passed and people are really struggling just to survive in this, in this galaxy. And so all the kind of different tensions between the species are much hotter than they are in the first Mass Effect. Something like that, just very different, you know. Yeah, I think there are hints and there are elements of like, you know, certain ships got there earlier. And it’s the idea of like, what difference does like time make to this sort of society that we already know? You know, if some people turn up and basically anoint themselves kings, you know, what does that happen? You know, what happens to everyone else? That could have been great. But sadly, no, giant empty barren ice planet instead. That’s what we get. There’s one good bit on that big ice planet actually, is that if you look under the ice, there are these like giant fish swimming under the ice, which is quite cool visually. But I mean, I wouldn’t spend 60 quid just to see a giant fish. Well, you’ll never have to spend 60 quid to play Mass Effect Andromeda these days. You’d be lucky if you have to spend more than eight quid. I don’t know if I’d spend eight quid to see a giant fish. Maybe just look up on YouTube and see the giant fish. That sounds cool. Yeah, I was meant to play it. But yeah, I just couldn’t I couldn’t get past that first like bit where you go to your ship and you’re having loads of boring conversations and it’s quite clear early on like you say that the companions are just really weak. I’m like, oh, I hate all of you and I have to spend like 40 hours with you. That’s not good. So yeah, I would kind of like them to roll that maybe roll the dice again on this premise and see what happens when you know Mass Effect starts somewhere else again, but you have a bit more of a hook to it. My fear is they’ll end up doing another Shepard story somehow. And like no one needs that. That is if another Mass Effect game even gets made in our lifetimes, which who knows it. We haven’t even got a new Dragon Age yet, so it could be a while. In which case, Matthew, then I feel like we’ve talked about the series pretty comprehensively there. Let’s take a short break and then we’ll come back and do our Top 10 Mass Effect Companions. Matthew, welcome back. People have listened to some really nice Mass Effect music, I’m sure, at this point, that I’ve ripped off of YouTube, and they’re back to hear us talk about the top 10 Mass Effect companions. So, our process here, Matthew, is a little bit similar to our Hitman Levels episode, right? We basically had a spreadsheet, and we put down one to 10 of our favorites, added them together, and here we are. Before we get a jump into the order, then, I wondered if you had any thoughts on how I voted, and anything you found particularly objectionable. No, not really, like, I feel we’re actually, I felt like we were coming from a similar place. I could see a lot of myself in your decisions. Yeah, I don’t really have a grasp of, you know, is there consensus? I don’t know. Like, you know, I was looking at a few lists online, and there seemed to be, you know, quite some different choices in there, which I guess speaks to the strength of the characters. One thing I would say is that I think people’s perception of these companions can be dramatically altered by just like what happens to them or how far they get in the trilogy. Like, some characters become weaker as they go on. Others get stronger. They might just die. And in your head, they’re just that terrible character from Mass Effect 1. So that’s another interesting wrinkle. Like, just even our versions of the characters may be a bit different. I’ve never met anyone who’s kept Kaiden and Elenko alive, for example. And I would love to know, probably because I mostly know men. That’s the real reason. I know like nerdy straight men. Those are the people I know mostly. But yeah, I’d love to know what, does the Kaiden stuff pay off in Mass Effect 3? Is Kaiden like, oh my God, Kaiden. He’s like the best, the most, the richest, most well-developed character ever. And instead I was just like, well, I’m having nothing to do with him. He made just a complete non-event of a man to me. But yeah, I think there’s a bit of a consensus on like a couple of these. Like our number one is quite a safe one, I would say. But okay. And our number three, I think is slightly embarrassing, but we’ll get to that. No, I’m passionate about this choice. Okay. All right. Let’s kick off with number 10 then. So we’ve got Tally at number 10, Matthew, who appears in all three Mass Effect games, which is actually quite rare for a companion in this series. So yeah, Tally is kind of like whole thing is that she’s sort of like a member of her kind of like alien sect, right? And she’s just quite nice, Tally. I don’t really have like really strong feelings on her. I just thought, yeah. This was the only one of yours where I’m like, I don’t really care for Tally. Like I didn’t put any votes into Tally. Of all the reoccurring characters, she’s my least favorite by quite a distance. Mainly because I find there’s something about… She’s a good, she’s like quite a pure good character. There’s not a lot of conflict in her. And because I also play a Paragon Shepherd, you know, as pure a Paragon as you can possibly be, basically, there’s nothing really interesting between them. There’s no spark. A lot of these characters become a bit more interesting if they disagree with you. And unfortunately, she’s also like probably the closest thing to a purely good person, which is to a disadvantage. Also, like there’s just something unknowable about her because she wears that sort of visor. I’m not particularly into her kind of like that kind of… Is she a Quarian? Yeah, that’s right. A Quarian, yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Like of all the overarching stories, the Quarian kind of geth stuff is not my favourite stuff. And I think she met quite a bad ending, if I remember correctly, in my Mass Effect 3, which I was like, yeah, fine. I’m fairly referred to it. She looks… She reminds me a bit of a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Surely those little kind of obese alien men are more like Dyson vacuum cleaners than the Quarians are. They’re more like Henrys. Do you think Mass Effect secretly based everyone on a different brand of Hoover? What I find funnier is that you managed to find a way to bring up Dyson vacuum cleaners in every episode of this podcast now. That’s like a common thing. It’s a major trauma for me. Yeah, I suppose actually, like, maybe I’ve shown myself up here by not having loads to say about Tali. But I think that I like the Quarian geth thing more than you. And that, what happens with her, can happen with her and Legion in the third game is quite interesting. Is that what you’re referring to when you say about her? Yeah, it got pretty bleak. Were you just, like, willing Tali to die, basically? No, not really. I don’t think I was that malicious. I just didn’t really care for her. I will say, though, outside of this top ten, there’s a general kind of sort of mass of slightly unimpressive human companions who didn’t make the cut. Humans definitely have the short end of the stick in this one, in this series. They just don’t have a lot going for them. Yeah, it’s very true. Oh, God, now that we’re doing this, I don’t have anything more to say about Tali. Maybe I just think she’s quite nice. I like the idea that you can romance her and it’s not necessarily based on physical romance. It’s more like a sort of human kind of connection and sort of like finding emotional middle ground or whatever. But do I truly find that interesting? Not when I was making horny choices in my early 20s, Matthew. Yeah, I like the bad girls of Mass Effect. Is that a calendar that you own? Yeah, I wish. OK, so number nine. This is a Sammy Roberts choice because Matthew has never met this character. This is Kasumi, the Mass Effect DLC character. So I liked her as a thoughtful addition to Mass Effect 2’s roster. I think that even though Zaid is kind of like a bit… I think his quest is perfectly fine and he’s good to have along. It’s nice to have another option of a character you can add to your party. I think Kasumi was a legit inclusion. Like, her backstory is really, really sad. And the game does a really good job of like throwing Shepard into her life to help her resolve this thing. Basically, her mission is like a loyalty mission. And yeah, she can turn invisible as well, which makes her quite cool in battle. She’s got quite a specific sort of moveset I always like to have her in my party. So yeah, I’d recommend actually adding her to your party when you play again, Matthew. And I understand that she can also turn up again in Mass Effect 3, but for whatever reason, I could never find her again in Mass Effect 3. I will say one of the downsides with this game putting some characters in DLC is that because of that, they also then don’t really have much to do beyond their specific DLC content from what I’ve read anyway. I mean, it’s definitely true of Zaid, he just like turns up and then he’s just like lurking around. He hasn’t got much interesting to say on the story. Yes, that is probably fair to say. I think they do like weigh in on the cutscenes and stuff, though. They can play a part when they’re added to the story. They do just feature in the cutscenes. He’s just always moaning about his eye the whole time. And they’re like, right, it’s a suicide mission. He’s like, my poor eye. And everyone’s like, oh, now’s not the time. So we’ll stay home then, Zaid. Jesus, or you’re going in the tunnels, mate. Yeah, so I like Kasumi. I think that’s probably fair. I think there is a level of interaction you can have with your companions in Mass Effect 2 that Zaid and Kasumi don’t have. They just have one line of dialogue when you talk to them on the Normandy, basically. My eye! My eye! Number 8, then, Matthew, is one of your votes, Samara. Yeah, so she is a… I want to say she’s a just a car. I think that’s right. I get a little… Sometimes I worry these are terminologies from Dragon Age. I’m getting things confused. She’s basically been sort of hunting her daughter for… I think it’s like thousands of years. They live for ages. So she’s got this sort of mad, sort of like Shakespearean loyalty quest of of sort of hunting down this Moranth character, who, yeah, as we’ve said, based on the decision you make, can then basically replace Samara in the game. I just… A lot of these characters just had great loyalty quests and they really lodged in my head. They didn’t really do much or contribute much to the wider story beyond that, but they kind of turn up… They basically represent an interesting wrinkle in their species’ history or culture. In this case, her religious duties to track down her daughter. Yeah, I just remember thinking, oh, yeah, that’s kind of cool. I like the idea of being vengeful for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. That’s an interesting place to come from. Yeah, that is thoughtful. There’s a lot of, with these characters, there’s a lot of either parents dealing with their troubled children or children dealing with their troubled parents. That’s a recurring theme, particularly in Mass Effect 2, I would say. Yeah. Now I’m looking at this list, I’m like, that’s 100% what the game’s about. Why didn’t I see that? That’s weird. Yeah. So yeah, that’s a good choice. I can’t say I remember loads about Samara, other than just thinking she was a cool presence and enjoying how that storyline with the daughter plays out. Because her daughter does seem like a real fucking nasty piece of work when you catch up with her. So yeah, and like I say, the fact that you can switch her for her daughter is also quite nasty. So yeah, interesting stuff. Number seven then Matthew, let’s get into it. So Ashley Williams is number seven. Now you on a previous podcast did diss me for romancing the space racist. And yet you have also voted for the space racist in this poll. So what was he thinking there? A lot of my thinking with Ashley Williams isn’t particularly lived. She did survive in my game. I didn’t have like vast amounts to do with her. The weird, but Ashley and Kaiden, both of them are in Mass Effect 2, like super weird, like how they react and kind of interact with you. Given that you’re like basically back from the dead, you know, they’re quite dismissive of you, if I remember correctly, when you meet them. Yeah, Ashley Williams, like, I don’t know, she has a bit, I think the problem with Ashley Williams is she makes a really stinking first impression. And if you do bump her off in Mass Effect 1, that’s all she’ll ever be. Is that stinking impression? But there’s a bit more depth to her. There’s a bit more warmth to her. When I was working on OXM, we got Chris Thurston to write us a very good piece in defense of Ashley Williams for our back section of the mag. And he was talking about how she was one of the few characters who was a bit more self-sufficient and doesn’t particularly rely on Shepard, doesn’t particularly need Shepard. She doesn’t need saving in any major way apart from a massive bomb. So yeah, I think that’s fair. Of the non-event human characters, she’s actually one of the better ones in the long term. Yeah, I think that what they do in Mass Effect 2 with her is actually really good. Well, I think that basically, obviously she can’t be a party member. So you meet her in a side quest. And then my memory of this is that she was quite upset that you’re working for Cerberus. And then you kind of fall out. And then that’s kind of the end of that interaction. I just remember him basically being like, no, I won’t join your group and being quite miffed about it. But I don’t remember why. That does make sense. Yeah, I think it was Cerberus that she’s basically upset with that element, just because Cerberus, even within humanity, are quite a controversial organization. So I believe that’s the reason that there’s tension there. And so, yeah, I remember that being quite good. I also really like the way that characters who were in your party in the first one would then turn up in the second one and are kind of like, oh, well, what’s going on with you now kind of thing. That’s something that you can only do in a trilogy like this where you know you’re going to have a next instalment to and you have a plan for where the different characters are going to pop up again. That’s a cool feature of Mass Effect, for sure. And the fact that it has this two-year time jump, I mean, that’s a trope. I love it when TV shows do a big time jump and then everything’s changed. And you get that bedding in period where you’re working out who everyone is now, a few years later. That’s always really satisfying. It’s done really well in Mass Effect 2. Yeah, I liked her again in Mass Effect 3, but she wasn’t my ultimate romance choice. We’ll get to that. But I did romance her in the first one. But yeah, that’s interesting. Is that Chris Sirsten piece online anywhere? Is that on GamesRadar or anything? I think it’s on GamesRadar actually, yeah. Oh, nice. People might want to check that out then. I did think about asking Chris on this podcast, but he’s got his own podcast. I thought he might be busy. That’s my excuse. Cool. So next up then, Matthew, our number six is Erdnot Rex. There’s also like Grunt who you get in Mass Effect 2, another character I like, who’s kind of like a sort of made in a lab, Krogan. But Rex is quite a good kind of well-rounded character, like someone who you kind of seems aggressive, but then you find sort of common ground with. I don’t have like loads more to say about him, but he’s a bit like in that sort of Garrus genre of party member, where it’s like, oh, he’s like an alien buddy, basically. And I think the game does a good job again of like bringing him into the story in two before making him a party member again in three. I thought it was just quite elegantly done and he had a good arc. Yeah. Yeah. I basically agree. The kind of like, I’m not massively into kind of sort of like aggressive warrior, tropey characters. Like I very, I very rarely play with like sort of like berserker types or kind of rage warriors or whatever. But yeah, he’s actually like, you know, surprise, surprise. He’s quite thoughtful underneath it all. That’s why I think that kind of choice in Mass Effect 1 to, you know, where you basically can, like get rid of him from the game. Like, you know, about halfway through, I would say that would be like quite a, quite a major character to remove from the trilogy. He’s one of the ones who in Mass Effect 3 gets replaced with just like a real duffer, just like another Krogan prince. And it just carries so much more weight if he’s still in the mix. So yeah, keep him in play if you’re playing it for the first time. Rex is good. I would say by contrast to the Vermeer choice, which I think is very good. I actually think that the Rex choice in Mass Effect 1 feels a bit more forced. It’s a bit more like, I mean, it’s a kind of tense moment because there is that thing of like, I think you kind of know as a player that if you choose this option, then that’s basically it for you and Rex. So it definitely registers in terms of being a powerful moment. But I think their conflict, I remember the conflict feeling slightly contrived as a way to try and get you to basically pull the trigger on like, what happens if you and this party member like completely break away? I think the more likely negative outcome is that Ashley does the killing. Oh, jeez. She’s like well up for it. She’s a nasty piece of work. Oh my God. I actually didn’t know that. Yeah, I think she shoots him in the back to sort of like defend you. And you wouldn’t actually have done it. I think that’s one of the outcomes anyway, because that’s Ashley’s secret. That’s the whole space racists thing. She’s a little keen when it comes to shooting non-humans. Maybe we should publish a follow-up pop-head saying, no, actually Ashley Williams is a big space racist. Maybe you’re misremembering that, but I think that’s the case. Yeah. So next up, we’ve got Mordin Solas, an unbelievably good character, so basically someone who is partly responsible for a sort of genocide of an alien species, trying to make amends and fundamentally an extremely nice and likeable character. It’s just a really rich creation, I think. What about you? Yeah, there’s some bits of this character where like alarm bells ring that this is going to be something I’m not going to get on with. He’s kind of the super intellectual, kind of funny intellectual character, which a lot of geeks like to imagine themselves to be. You know, he drops all these references and he’s very kind of cutting and funny and he like quotes Gilbert and Sullivan. I kind of know people in real life who are a bit like this in terms of it’s that sort of the really arch, they know how clever they are. And it’s very like it’s like a it’s like the cool nerd trope. This character could have been horrible. But actually, yeah, like his weird speech patterns, the vocal performance is brilliant. The dilemma at the heart of his character is great. He’s kind of what I like about him is he is like maybe a bit evil, like it’s a little murky, but he’s really likable. I had him in my party loads in Mass Effect 2, probably like my like number one buddy. I remember him having lots of like fiery attacks. He was like a fiery dude. I think I think that’s right. And the conclusion to his story in Mass Effect 3 is really, really well done. Yeah, it’s a great, a great, a really great character, really strong. I should have maybe vote this even higher. Yeah, same, actually. I wonder if this should have been higher than the number four we got here. But yeah, he’s just definitely one of my favorites. I think that loyalty mission really cracks his like story open as well. In the second one, like that’s how you find out the true nature of how he’s involved in the Genophage. And, you know, the kind of like the prospect of can he reverse it? And how does he feel about it inside? And obviously people also remember the Gilbert and Sullivan moment with him in Mass Effect 2, which I never saw, to be honest. That didn’t come up in my interactions. But I agree it’s a really nice bit of characterization. And yeah, that’s got to be like when I was looking at the best Mass Effect moments for this podcast, his ending is, you know, one of the top five in like basically every list. So that’s a pretty amazing thing to kind of pull off with a character who’s basically just like a companion who, you know, like I say, might die in Mass Effect 2. And I assume be replaced by a NAFA version of Mass Effect 3. Dave. Dave Solas, yes. Dave, who also sings Gilbert and Sullivan. But worse. And you’re like, too soon, Dave, too soon. But in a cockney accent. OK, so number four, Matthew, is Liara. So Liara I put down here, I voted for Liara because I am very, very fond of how this portrays, if you play the male shepherd, your friendship with Liara is really well done. Like, if you don’t romance her, the fact that she pops up again in the Shadow Broker DLC in Mass Effect 2. I just felt like a real kind of warmth and I feel like a friendship between a male and ostensibly female character. Just rarely done this well. And then the fact that I don’t know if you unlocked this, I assume you probably, I assume that all players can see it. But the mind meld thing she does in Mass Effect 3 right before the end of the game is like a beautiful moment. Like a really great bit of storytelling. Do you have much kind of memory of her? Yeah, I mean, I felt very similar. I think she’s got a really good like individual arc through the three games. I haven’t done the Shadow Broker DLC, but you know, the two years change has been quite, you know, the two years, you know, changed her a fair amount. Yeah, I think like in a way she gets right what Tali doesn’t for me in that she just sort of changes and evolves is a bit more kind of going on. But she also she’s just a face that you bring through the whole thing. So by the end, you’re like super attached to her, you know, those those original crew members, they just have that natural advantage over everyone else because of the history. But yeah, just a super nice presence. Yeah, also a voice very well by Ali Hillis, who played lightning in the Final Fantasy 13 games. So once you once you hear that, you can’t unhear how some of those voices are right. But yeah, very well developed relationship there. OK, number three is Miranda Lawson. So Miranda getting this high is what happens when two boys who are watching Chuck in like 2007 or eight and were probably slightly too horny get to vote for their favorite Mass Effect character. Would you say that’s fair, Matthew? Well, I’d say there’s a hint of that. I think I’d say it’s unfortunate that like she is a really great, interesting character. She’s got a really interesting backstory. The fact that she’s a Cerberus person puts her in a really murky, interesting place in Mass Effect 2 with regards to the shepherd. But on top of that, she is this stunningly beautiful character and the game really ogles her and gives her the most ludicrous, shiny outfit that just sort of accentuates. One of the things that’s happened in Legendary is they’ve apparently dialed down some of the endless camera focusing on her butt in cutscenes, which caused a minor upset of like, hmm, censorship. But I think they’ve just raised the camera a bit because there’s bits where she’s telling you about her tragic backstory and the camera is like arse, which is just super inappropriate. I think there’s way more to this character than just this really gorgeous love interest on the ship, so I don’t feel too embarrassed. No, I think that she’s a good character too. She was very firmly my main romance option. I think that when you first meet her, like you say, she’s working for Cerberus, so you’re not entirely sure she’s a hero or villain. And then over time, you unpick this relationship that she has with her sister and her father, this strange, tense relationship that is built on very, very well in Mass Effect 3. I would say that how her story can pan out in Mass Effect 3 is really, really good, even though she’s not a companion. Her mission definitely feels meaningful, I would say. And yeah, I think that it does have that slightly NAF kind of justification of, I’ve got physical augmentations that mean my butt is so big or whatever. I think that element’s the character, right? That she’s like, I’ve been sort of augmented. Yeah, like this sort of, basically perfect person, which is quite a compliment that they based her on. She’s clearly modeled after the actress, right? Yeah, Yvonne Stachowski, who, like I say, was in Chuck and is now seen in The Handmaid’s Tale and is very good in that, actually. Very different if you’re a fan of Chuck. Yeah, very, very. A very, very different energy. It’s almost like punishment if you watch Chuck, I would say. I would say, call your jets if you come into this for Chuck. Yeah, OK. It’s punishment. I might have to cut that because it sounds so bad. I think I do have to cut that because it makes me sound so awful. I think horny young men must eventually be punished, though, in a kind of like Old Testament sort of way. And the Half-Made Tale brings you that, I think. OK, good. So yeah, the story with her sister and her dad. Very well done. We voted for her because of her parental strife. That’s enough about that. That’s our story. So, number two is Fane Krios, Matthew. So, like you say, a dying assassin who has a fraught relationship with his son. And you didn’t seem that keen on how his story pans out in Mass Effect 3, but I thought it was really well done, personally. I’m just very sad when he dies. But how did you feel about Fane’s journey in these games? Yeah, I think the thing was I just wanted him to be like a proper companion again. Like, I really liked him. I had him in my party quite a lot. I like the assassin. I like that he’s kind of… His story is sort of outside of all the main drama. You know, he’s a species that doesn’t really appear anywhere else in the game. You know, he’s quite an isolated presence because of that. His backstory doesn’t tie in to, like, the fate of his entire, you know, of an entire species or anything. It’s very just him dealing with some stuff. You know, that obviously makes perfect sense in Mass Effect 2, where the game is built around a lot of self-contained stories. Maybe, you know, it is harder to kind of give him a starring role in 3 because, you know, we’re talking about, like, threats at a much larger scale. Yeah, I was just sad that I didn’t get to spend more time with him, that he spent most of it in a sort of wheezing in a hospital bed dying of whatever his weird disease was. Yeah, but that’s pure, like, as a fan, I wanted more. But then that puts me in the same camp as all the whiny babies. So, you know, I was the only one petitioning. They were like, change the ending. And then there’s me going, and Thane, at the end of the protest. Yeah, I think that Thane just speaks to the real strengths of them, just how much BioWare nailed it with that Mass Effect 2 set of companions. Because the way he kind of like flashes back and remembers stuff is is quite, it’s just a very effective device in Mass Effect 2 as well. Just like how he kind of processes information and how they get that across to you as a player. Side note, when I was watching the cut scenes, generally, to refresh my memory on these games this morning, it’s amazing how much like the camera does a lot of the heavy lifting to make up for the fact that the the characters don’t look like that human when they’re, you know, how they’re sort of facially animated. They do look a bit kind of like puppets a lot of the time. And like, you know, there are bound to be limitations from the fact that these are all games and stuff like that. But the, I guess cinematography, as it were, does so much heavy lifting in making these games like feel more kind of alive and more cinematic. Just like an amazing, underrated sort of element of why these games have such good storytelling, I think. But yeah, but I just remember those camera angles of when you talk to Thane on the Normandy and Mass Effect 2 and how they just serve to make him sort of quite distinctive and sort of like in how thoughtful he is. A great character. Amazing character model as well. Like the design of him and the look of him. I always remember thinking like some of the humans now look pretty, pretty dated, but some of the weirder looking aliens are still like kind of up there in terms of kind of, you know, emotive or interesting faces. I think at least until like The Witcher 3 comes along, which is like the next level of that stuff, Mass Effect is like a pretty high standard. Yeah, they kind of built alien species who would work on the Xbox 360, who would like look good when animated on that console. Yeah, lots of like hard, like shining shells, not soft tech, they’re very like hard, crunchy bits. Yeah, it’s great. And the occasional Dyson vacuum cleaner. Imagine the ray tracing on her Dyson visor now. Oh, good stuff. So number one, Matthew, a very predictable choice, what we’ve gone with Garrus, everyone’s favorite space body, Garrus. And so I have one thing I just really, really loved about Mass Effect 2. And there are there’s so many different things. But the way that Garrus is introduced into the story, that there is this kind of like warrior on Omega, I believe is called like Archangel, I think he’s called. Yeah. And then you’re like, Oh, who’s this? He’s like a legendary sniper and this kind of like figure of the underworld and stuff. And you meet him and it’s like, it’s only fucking Garrus. That was the kind of vibe of it. And I just remember that being like really, really cool as a way to bring that character back into the story. Absolutely. I mean, that’s that’s like easily the best year of the kind of the best use of the time jump in terms of like to have a dramatic reveal of like, Oh shit, it’s Garrus. He’s this other dude. He’s sniping all these guys. This is rad. What a crowd pleaser moment. A great a great guy. I mean, probably the most memed character in Mass Effect maybe triggers the kind of the meme culture you were talking about earlier, which is now kind of doomed all companions in that he just seems to be this perfect combination of sort of funny quirks, habits, likes and dislikes that really stick with people. Everyone remembers, you know, the weird kind of catchphrases and things he gets up to. I think it sort of helps as well, but he’s not like hugely tied personally to like any major, major dilemma, at least not in my head anyway. You know, he’s he’s he’s quite a he’s free to be quite a kind of chill dude in Mass Effect. So I was watching the that sequence I mentioned earlier, where you’re doing target practice with him on the Citadel. And like, there’s one of the things you can say to him there is, you know, I’m glad that you’re you’re here with me, basically. Like, and he said something about how like, at this time, a lot of a lot of people are just like turning tail and running because the Reapers are coming. But you know who your friends are, because they’re, you know, they’ve got your back during this time where the ultimate threat is coming down the pipe, essentially. Obviously, it’s more articulate than that, because I’m just trying to remember it. And coming down the pipe doesn’t sound as good coming out of Shepherd, I don’t think. But nonetheless, it’s, it’s a really kind of profound bit of like, I guess this is if you pick the male Shepherd. But it’s a really good bit of like male friendship in a game. And I think that I’m sort of like big into seeing like good, wholesome male friendships in games and in media generally, because I don’t think you see that many of them, because so much kind of like male friendship in pop culture is like based on sort of competition or, or like being like, uber masculine and never talking about your feelings and stuff. And I think that Garrus lets you have a bit of a bit of that without it getting a bit too kind of like Final Fantasy 15, where it’s, you know, maybe a bit more sort of like melodramatic. So yeah, as a really as a good kind of male friendship character, I think he’s a top creation. I think a lot of the people who complained about the ending of Mass Effect 3 need a little Garrus in their lives. Yeah, exactly. I suppose if I was if I was playing, if you were playing the female shepherd, Matthew, would you romance Garrus? Because I think I probably would to see how it pan out. But I wonder what that says about me. Probably not. You couldn’t romance. You couldn’t. There wasn’t like crushed species romance in the first one, was there? You couldn’t. It was Liara if you were. I think Liara if you’re a male and female shepherd. Right. But I don’t think you could romance Garrus until Mass Effect 2. Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. Like we’re mates. I wouldn’t want to kind of complicate things. Oh, I see. I see how it is. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Yeah, so that’s it. Those are our companions, Matthew. I think that’s a pretty solid list. With the exception of Tali, who I couldn’t remember much about and probably should have just left out of the list. So we decided that for BioWare to bring Mass Effect back to its glory days, they got to go super linear. It’s got to have absolutely incredible graphics, but you don’t have to be able to walk there. You can just look at it in the distance and your party is made up of just Miranda, Thane and Garrus. Yeah, that’s sort of good models for it. And let their 100% or meta-critic roll. So Matthew, we’ve done Mass Effect, very comprehensive there. The podcast is slightly longer than I thought it would be, but that just seems to be the way with us. We’ve got a few eliciter questions here too. Do you want to read out the first one? Hi, question about magazine writing. In general, which is, slash was, your preference between writing reviews for a personal favourite game, e.g. Mario Galaxy, with an expectation from the reader, or writing a piece that’s much more throwaway with less expectation from the readers. Loving the podcast, which has quickly become my favourite listen of the week. Thank you very much, Aaron Stewart. So, I personally, I think that it would be, a mix of the two is kind of ideal as a reviewer. I think it’s good to be challenging out of your comfort zone a little bit. I think you need a sort of particular, sort of specialty. Sometimes, or at least like some kind of affinity with the genre to review it. For example, I think I could review an arena shooter. I don’t think I’m the best person to do it, but I could do it. And I could probably do it in a way where I’m like detached enough from the genre to be quite objective about it. At the same time, it’s fun to review a game that you’re super passionate about sometimes. As long as the parameters in which you’re reviewing aren’t too like over the top. Trying to review Breath of the World 2 in two days wouldn’t be very fun, for example. But I’d love to have like having two weeks of Breath of the World 2. That would be a fun review experience, for sure. So yeah, I think it’s a mix, I guess. I don’t know if that’s a useful answer. What do you think? Yeah, it’s difficult. The ones with expectation, you have expectations as well, and you have expectations from your own review. I’ve talked about before, like I get quite bogged down when something’s genuinely amazing and important, whatever that means. I get quite stressed out about the review, about doing it justice, about wanting to do a game justice and trying to capture it. That’s not necessarily a very enjoyable writing experience, but those reviews can end up brilliantly sometimes. I’m not going to say I get it right all the time. Where I feel a lot less pressure with things that I’m not personally invested in, and from that lack of pressure some better reviews can flow, I think. So, yeah, it’s a tricky one. What I want is a game with no expectations that comes out of nowhere and absolutely wows me. Those are kind of my favourite reviews to write. I like the, oh wow, this is surprisingly amazing. Those reviews I’m quite comfortable with. Yeah, I can think of a time that happened for me actually. By the way, I cannot believe we’re still talking about the process of reviewing games. We’ve done two whole podcasts on it, well three arguably, and we’re still doing it. That’s alright, I like talking about it. No, it’s fine. So one of those for me would be Red Faction Gorilla, which is a game that I had no real opinion on when it rolled around in 2009. It was quite a brown looking game. It’s obviously out of Mars. It’s only so colourful you can make it, I guess. I couldn’t work out what was interesting about it, like a NAF 6 out of 10 third person shooter. I didn’t realise it was entirely built on these destruction physics, which are incredibly fun. That comes along and takes my breath away. I’m suddenly much more into it than I thought it was going to be. That was a good example of that. I gave it an 8 out of 10. I just thought, oh wow, what a satisfying experience that was as a reviewer. How about you? Yeah, I had that with Castlevania Lords of Shadow, which I’ve talked about a few times where I didn’t have any particular interest in it. I thought that was a phenomenally good game. The process of writing the review was more excitement of being able to introduce people to it. I felt like, oh man, you’re going to love this. That was the flavour of the review. That’s what was in my head. I cannot wait to tell you about how good this is. And that’s a really great place to be writing from, I think. Yeah, for sure. So next up, Matthew, there’s a question from Simon Crowe. Hi lads. What was the first games mags you remember reading? Did you ally yourselves with any in particular? I was big into Total, a Nintendo mag seemingly written by just two people. I remember it being pretty anarchic for a ten-year-old anyway. I also remember reading one issue of, I think, Games Master that included fan art of Sonic urinating on Mario. Like being a child, I decided this was too childish and never read Games Master again. Well, you know, that sounds like a very sort of of its time piece of fan art. I loved the idea in 2021 publishing a piece of fan art of Sonic urinating on Mario. But yeah, I’m sure that’s a kink for someone. But anyway, yeah, so first… Definitely Sonic fans, they’re weird. I feel like we covered this before when we’ve talked about… I can’t remember which episodes it was, but like the various magazine covers ones I think we discussed. But the first games mag I remember picking up was PC Gamer. However, there is a slight exception in the fact that I used to read Sonic the Comic as a kid. This is one of the only comic books you could buy on the shelves. It was like next to the Beano and stuff. Came out every two weeks. Had these quite lofty sci-fi storylines featuring Sonic. Some of the books were written by Mark Miller, the creator of Kick Ass. So yeah. Did Sonic piss on anyone in those stories? Just pisses on Dr. Robotnik at the end of every story. Everyone’s like, this is weird. Weirdly, I do remember a storyline. The storyline I got mega invested in was Sonic vs. Super Sonic. And what happened is Sonic has to basically trap Super Sonic inside this screen. This kind of living screen called the Omni Viewer. And he basically gets Super Sonic to fly into there. And then the Omni Viewer kind of frees the Super Sonic. They take the Omni Viewer to the center of this asteroid and then blow it up to kill Super Sonic. I remember thinking that was quite big sci-fi storytelling for basically a kids’ comic with these silly Sega platforming characters. The reason I picked that out is because it actually used to have little bits of previews of Sega Saturn games and Mega Drive games and stuff. I guess that technically counts as my first one. How about you Matthew? Yeah, definitely N64. I wasn’t really buying Mags when Super Play was around. I came to Mags a little later. And a little bit of Amiga power because I had an Amiga as well. I had a friend who used to get a lot of Amiga more regularly. He had quite a big collection and he used to read those at his house. But definitely N64. I really like Games Master. I think Games Master has got this bit of this reputation. Because early on it had a lot of that Mario vs. Sonic kind of era of slightly more playground banter. I mean, generally console Mags were a little bit more like that back then. But I think from the late 90s, maybe 2000 onwards, Games Master is decent, it’s a good Mag. I’ve got a lot of respect for Games Master. I think if I was writing for any… When I was at Future Writing for NGamer, if I was going to have written for any other Mag, it would have been Games Master. It had great writers, really funny writing. It was just all games, games, games. There was no bullshit about the industry. No fucking posturing. Just really pure, exactly what I wanted when I was growing up. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of respect for Games Master. But I know that it started and it was a slightly different mag. Yeah, so I think that when I look back on most of the mags I read, so when I got aggressively back into games in about 2001, pretty much all the mags I was reading were from future, minus play, which was published by the hybrid or Paragon at the time. I could never remember which one. It was very confusing. But yeah, the future mags I was reading a lot of were like Edge and Games Master. I did read CVG as well. And I read official PlayStation 2 magazine. I read official Xbox magazine. I basically read everything. Like I just couldn’t get enough of it. I sort of envy these people who have like big piles of like N64 magazine and stuff. But I just never have the real estate to kind of keep magazines. That’s like the cost of being a millennial. If you’re in your 40s, you might have bought a house for like 20 grand like 20 years ago. But like our generation has obviously been screwed by an older generation on house prices. So there’s only so much you can really do with the space you’ve got, you know. And that is the real tragedy of the modern house market is that we can’t store old CVG. I realize now that does sound preposterous. So let’s let’s move on. So got quite a long one here. But, you know, I’m going to I’m going to. Oh, actually, why don’t you read this one out, Matthew? People can hear a nice warm voice. Thanks for a warm, well thought out and entertaining podcast. It’s really brought some joy to some pretty gloomy commutes recently. No worries. That’s me saying no worries. That’s not in the letter. Once upon a time, I wrote really rubbish fortnightly blogs on O&M’s website. That lasted a couple years and it bled a little into Matthew’s time, but was mostly before, I think. I was writing those blogs at an interesting time for print when the internet was becoming more important to everyone and mags were trying to keep up with the changes. At O&M, it looked like there was a drive to flesh out the websites with blogs, lists, etc. and produce regular YouTube videos like the absolutely timeless Expert Super Guide. How do you guys feel about how the industry reacted to the change to being more online? It seems like a lot of people were having to learn skills really different to ones they needed when they started. Do you think there was that much of a generational divide with that? I should also mention that the blog somehow didn’t kickstart a lucrative career in video games journalism. I became a doctor instead. So if you’re doing health mechanics in games slash a Trauma Center episode, feel free to page me for a medical consult. All the best, John Vekinis. Oh, I remember, John. O&M had a team of reader bloggers. And they wrote regular columns. It was a little bit before my time. I think there was some crossover. But the O&M website, that was Tommy’s Domain. I really had very little to do with it. But thank you for your service, John. Much appreciated. Thank you for your service, like you went to Vietnam or something. Well, thank you for your service of contributing blogs. And also as a doctor. Oh, yeah, that is true, actually. As a doctor, yes. I was talking about the blogs. I wasn’t thinking about the doctor, but I thought I could salvage it after your burn. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Yeah, I think that maybe you can take advantage of John’s skills generally. So I keep getting told by the NHS website that the reason I’m snoring a lot is because I’m overweight. But I’d like to hear a different answer on that. You want to hear a doctor who tells you it’s because you’re not eating enough cake? Yes, exactly. I need a second opinion. That’s more in line with like… I want a second opinion that allows me to be more disgusting. Yeah, I want a second opinion that makes me feel better. I don’t want to hear it’s because I weigh 20 stone. I want to hear it’s because I am, you know, like, I don’t know, some other answer basically. You need to drink more Pepsi, my friend. Nice. Thanks, doctor. That’s just what I wanted to hear. Exactly. That’s the kind of second opinion I’m looking for. So the question itself is about skills, right? And a generational divide. Yeah, between like being on print, seeing online, taking off. You’re probably more better equipped to talk about this, having actually bridged that divide. Yeah, I think that in retrospect it’s like the best decision I made was to try and learn how online works and stuff like that. I sort of see careers all about learning skills. That’s ultimately what you’re doing. Obviously the money thing is one thing. But the more you can learn to do, the more rewarding it is as a professional. And working media is very much part of that. That’s why I’ve enjoyed working on stuff like events. Like I say, working online, doing social media, and even doing stuff like working on different sort of video bits for both editorial and in other contexts. And yeah, all kinds of different stuff. It’s interesting. I think that what’s quite different is now, I think that the people who kind of come into the orbit of UK games industry are more interested in streaming and getting started in that side of things than they are in writing. There’s still lots of people who want to make it as a writer. But I think that in terms of seeing where it gets lucrative or where I guess maybe you don’t need the same type of skills to succeed in streaming that you do in writing, that might be part of it. So yeah, Matthew, what do you think about this in terms of reacting to the change of being more online? Yeah, I feel like I am the worst person to ask about this because I didn’t react to the change to online at all. I’ve never worked on a game website directly. I worked for Rock Paper Shotgun, but I was on the video team. I’m not part of the daily website routine, churn, whatever you want to call it. I actually have the skill set to do that. I’m best used these days just as a writer and those words happen to live online, but I’m not doing a lot of online thinking. I can’t do news coverage for a site. I just don’t really have that skill set or mindset, which sounds weird having done this for so long, but I was print to the bitter end and then jumped into video. Yeah, but generally I never felt… One thing I will say is that when I was working on Mags towards the end and obviously online was just where everyone wanted to be, I didn’t feel the need for the Mags to play catch up in any way. I think that is a mistake people make, is where they try and employ online thinking to magazines. It doesn’t make any sense because time is never on your side. If anything, in those last few years, whenever we were redesigning or rethinking things, we were trying to differentiate the Mag from online. We were trying to push it away, get more retrospective about things, try and tap more into the mindset of someone who might still be buying Mags in the internet age. What do they value? What do they like? I think they are slightly different things. I don’t think the internet naturally does serve everything that Mags used to do. I think there is a need for speed and obvious relevance that drives a lot of decisions, which didn’t necessarily have to do in magazines. Yes, without having done the online thing, I can’t really speak to it myself, but I definitely saw print as quite a separate art form. You could definitely learn how to do that stuff, no problem. I think that a lot of this stuff like SEO and things like that are very easy to learn. It’s like anything else really. As soon as you get started, it’s fine. Likewise, writing news. I know how to write news online, but I was never a news editor online or anything. You just do it. You’ve got to get into the mentality of doing it, and it’s fine. I think you underestimate yourself, Matthew. I’m quite a slow writer as well. That’s the other thing. I wouldn’t employ me on a site because I wouldn’t get much out of me and I’d get really cross. What an advert for yourself to any employer. I hope no one is listening to this. If I ever apply for jobs, dismissal that and just focus on the earlier hilarious bants because that’s what you’re employing. I think Matthew would be a great online editor, but that’s just me sticking out for him. Generational divide for sure and definitely a change in priorities as well. Taste change too. The types of games that people are into now who are breaking into working media, very different to what they would have been when we were breaking in. It’s quite telling now actually that I have quite a few peers who work for sites, but if you were to come to them completely blind you might think they were actually streamers because they’re so into that as well. There’s a lot more side hustle nowadays which didn’t really feel like they used to be, mainly in print. The idea of trying to have a side hustle on top of making a fucking magazine, no chance. It just wouldn’t have worked. My side hustle was occasionally being able to sleep. I’ve thought about streaming and stuff but I’ve just settled on the fact that it’s not quite an art form. A, as I mentioned to the Doctor earlier, I weigh too much to be on streams at the moment. As soon as I’ve eaten more cake I’m sure I’ll have found a resolution to that. But also I think that I would kind of approach doing streaming like we do our podcasts where someone else would have to be there. And the bants would have to be the crux of it. Some people ask us if we stream some bad PS2 platformers, Matthew. I just can’t do it by myself. That’s the thing. When I’m playing games my head is actually empty most of the time. If I was saying what I’m thinking, it’s actually just like, bing, and then occasionally I react. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. But, hey, you know, something to think about there. I wish I’d become a doctor, like John. Yeah, make all the money. But hey, I’m sure it’s been a very… Make all the money. Thank you. People clap at you. They think you’re a hero. God, it’s a good life. Free Renies. Do you get free Renies if you’re a doctor? I’m sure John can give you a prescription for all the Renies you need, Matthew. The really hard stuff, the really concentrated calcium carbonate. Oh yeah, the Renie Jewel actions. There we go, Matthew. We’ve reached the end of another podcast. Thank you very much for sending in your letters there. If you’d like to have a letter read out on the podcast, you can tweet us at BackpagePod on Twitter. You can email us at backpagegames.gmail.com if you want to send us something slightly longer. We will read them out. Usually we let a few of them build up and then read them out in one go. We always like hearing from listeners. Thank you so much for your support. If you’d like to review us on iTunes, or it’s never called iTunes anymore, it’s Apple Podcast, but just giving us a star rating is really good for our visibility. Thank you to the 50 plus people who have already done that for us in the UK store. We appreciate it. What else? I’m on Twitter. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. Where are you on Twitter, Matthew? MrBattle UnderscorePesto. And our next episode is about something or other. I’ve forgotten which one, but it will be out next Friday, whatever it is, so look forward to that. Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now!