Mass Effect: Blasto - Eternity is Forever (One-Shot) (2012)

So I’ve been replaying the Mass Effect games before the remasters come out and I reread the Final Hours of Mass Effect 3. Working with the terrorist organization Cerberus always bothered me and I always wondered why they went in that direction. Here is what I can figure:

My impression while playing ME2 was that the new writing team actually wanted to have Shepard working for a teen/YA fiction-style “cool and edgy” organization (y’know: those underdogs who heroically Get Shit Done while the authorities are too busy being slow and petty). Cerberus was a ready-made, already-in-the-lore solution created by Mac Walters (who suddenly found himself in the head writer position after Drew Karpyshyn left to work on SWTOR when production on ME2 began), but had been inconveniently cast as a villain in the first game.

I think if Mac Walters had fully had his way, Cerberus would’ve been a 100% unambiguous cookie-cutter “chaotic good” organization in ME2, and the only reason they weren’t was because Walters was stuck with ME1 continuity he couldn’t just retcon away.

So he spent ME2 trying to do an awkward balancing act where he had to hard sell the “Cerebrus r edgy sekret heros!” thing to new players, while dropping the occasional tiny vague reference to their “old” villainy to (unsuccessfully) keep the returning players from being too weirded out.

I think this was probably the entire reason for both Shepard’s death/resurrection, and the Collectors as a new enemy. Shepard’s death was just a ham-fisted way to get him/her out of the Alliance and into Cerberus right at the start without having to write an actual character-based loyalty shift. The Collectors were an enemy that could be tied to the Reapers, but which could also be something covert and human-centric that the council could make a show of blowing off, setting up the “Cerberus has to Get Shit Done because the Alliance won’t” dynamic.

There’s some private enterprise vs. government political subtext to be had there, which was probably deliberate given the views that were common in the tech industry at the time. Unfortunately, Walter’s isn’t a clever enough writer to delve into those topics with any kind of detail.

I think it’s the lack of beard? Everything else looks the same, but no facial hair means he’s not as easily recognizable.

Anyway I hope it was nice meeting him :)