14 DAY TRIAL // The Mass Effect series has been criticized for its approach to sexual relationships between characters and to the gay and lesbian choices that are offered. But the development team behind the third title in the series says that political opinions are never a factor when deciding what content to create.
Speaking to Kotaku, Greg Zeschuk, who is one of the co-founders of BioWare and one of the leaders of the role-playing division at Electronic Arts, stated, “It’s surprising that people think it’s that big a deal. If you’re creating this kind of content, it’s very natural to provide all the options. It’s a choice based on preferences.
“If there’s a political bent to it, it’s very Libertarian. It’s like… yeah, we make the choices available. You decide what you want to do. We’re not pushing any particular direction with most of our stuff.”
The video game developer made it clear that BioWare has no actual agenda and only plans to allow gamers to play the game every way they want it.
Ray Muzyka, the other leader of BioWare, added, “We got feedback from players that they wanted more choice. We respond to that feedback and try to make our games better based on what our players are asking for.
“A few years ago there was a debate among the team members that, yeah there’s more of an expectation to enable more content so, essentially, our games have to be bigger to enable these choices to occur. You have to have different paths. You have to have different playthroughs.”
The Mass Effect community has always supported as much choice for the player character as possible, but outside sources, like television reports, have sensationalized the issues and sought to portray video games as a sort of political outlet that promotes liberal views.
Mass Effect 3 will be launched on March 6 in the United States on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and three days later in Europe.