Please Don’t Make a Mass Effect Prequel

Forbes’ contributor Paul Tassi has penned an editorial-like plea to BioWare to convince the developers not to pursue the Mass Effect prequel ideas they’ve mentioned in a recent interview. Here’s a sampling to give you an idea of his argument:

This is what at least a few of these ideas suggest to me. They take characters that are interesting enough from when we’ve seen them already across three games, and aims to dive into their past to ensure they become far less interesting the more we know about them. We love Garrus, but do we care how he got all gruff during his time at C-Sec and why he’s always wearing that eye.thing? The Illusive Man is a mysterious villain, but do we care about his teenage years when he fell in love with a young Krogan maid who broke his heart and turned him into an ice cold bad guy?

Going backwards is cheating. It’s the easy way out when you don’t want to innovate and move your story forward in any meaningful way. You already have the ending written, and have probably established some of the pieces along the way. Making a prequel, you simply have to fill in the blanks, and people fail to realize that sometimes it’s a lot more interesting to leave blanks blank. Just ask Boba Fett.