Mass Effect Show Writer Denies It’s Being Rewritten For ‘Non-Gamers’

Earlier this month, a report came out stating that Amazon’s upcoming Mass Effect TV show was undergoing rewrites to appeal to, as The Ankler put it, “non-gamers.” There wasn’t much context given in the story, but fans took this to mean that Amazon’s adaptation of BioWare’s science fiction epic might deviate from the source material in ways that might not feel true to the RPGs. But now, the co-showrunner on the series has disputed that this demand has come from on high.

In a Bluesky post, writer and executive producer Daniel Casey said that while he couldn’t talk specifics about what he was working on because he’d signed an NDA, he had been  caught off-guard by the “non-gamers” quote when the Ankler story went out, as that has “at no point” been said to him.

So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you. I don’t know where that “non-gaming audiences” quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.

At this point, we still know very little about the Mass Effect show beyond the fact that it will apparently take place after the original trilogy, and won’t follow the game’s protagonist, Commander Shepard. This is probably the right call, because no one wants to see a flattened version of Shepard’s story that crystallizes the games’ choice-driven narrative, which can go down many different paths, into one specific thread. However, if it is going to take place after the original trilogy, it will have to contend with Mass Effect 3’s divergent endings, and I don’t envy the writers that task. 

A fifth Mass Effect game is in the works at BioWare following a restructuring that led to a massive downsizing at the company. We know it will take place sometime after Mass Effect: Andromeda, and will involve both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies in some way.