Uh, I just got a really awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Why?

Karpyshyn hasn’t been involved with Mass Effect 3 due to his work on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

That’s from a Eurogamer article about fan outrage over the canonical errors in the most recent Mass Effect book, ironically entitled Deceived.

Now, I have the book but haven’t started it yet because I’m finishing up some other reading first, so I can’t say whether or not the book is really as bad as the Internet is claiming. I imagine and hope that it’s not and that thing’s have been a bit over blown, as is often the case. But the sinking feeling I’ve gotten isn’t because of the book, it’s because the same guy who wrote the first three books and two games, didn’t write the third game. The story has been the major driving force for me in the game, and between Karpyshyn’s absense and the change late last year to delay and include multiplayer, I’m really wondering if we’ll get a strong finish to the trilogy.

I hope so, but I’m going to start planning for disappointment. I’ll be extremely happy if I’m wrong.

Foreboding
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6 thoughts on “Foreboding

  • February 8, 2012 at 9:01 pm
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    Why do you have to tell me that? I’m worried enough as it it!

    • February 8, 2012 at 10:41 pm
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      Misery loves company.

  • February 9, 2012 at 2:42 am
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    I found that google document you were talking about. I do think the drama’s a bit blown out of proportion. Yes, there were a handful of GLARING mistakes, but much of items of the list are also sort of minor — looks like fans went through the book with a fine-toothed comb to pick out *everything* down to the teeniest tiniest error. From what I gather, it’s probably still readable, as long as you don’t let that disappointment burden you right from the start.

    I wouldn’t worry too much about the actual game yet though. Dietz is just the writer they picked up for the book, and it’s clear he didn’t do much research into the ME universe before he wrote it. I doubt Bioware would have let the writers actually working on the game story and dialogue to get away with that.

    Oh btw, when you said you were going to focus on “Deceived” yesterday in twitter, it confused me because I thought you were talking about the SWTOR book! The ME book is actually “Deception”, and from what Bioware says about fixing mistakes in future editions, the original might even become a collector’s item! 😉

    • February 9, 2012 at 11:38 am
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      Wow, so they actually plan to fix it based a google doc compiled by lore grongnards. I have to say that’s actually kind of cool.

      • February 9, 2012 at 8:38 pm
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        Except for all of the people who have the original copy. Again this is second hand information, but apparently there are some large character deviations from previous books that would require major plot changes to fix, so I wonder how much a second edition will really fix.

        Again, please keep in mind that I haven’t read Deceived yet.

    • February 9, 2012 at 8:41 pm
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      My worry is if BioWare didn’t maintain their previous standards for the book, there’s a better chance that they did the same for the story and dialog in the game. If they think there was nerd rage over the book, imagine the reaction to the game having similar problems.

      Anyway, my hope is that I’ll read the book and not really notice any mistakes. Some of the non-spoilery errata I looked at had to do with characters being the wrong age by a few years and similar trivial discrepancies. I can definitely live with errors like that.

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