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[RaggieRags]

So, let's ignore the "are games art?" argument for a while. I want to talk about what I see personally odd and problematic about Ray's open letter and mainly the part about "artistic integrity". I think the discussion about this letter has derailed a bit (and I have the feeling this was the exactly the point of it) and some actual issues have been lost among talk about irrelevant details. More relevant questions than the definition of the word "art" are these:

1. Has Bioware ever been above making changes to creative decisions due to financial reasons?

Ray writes: " I also believe in and support the artistic choices made by the development team."

I find this an odd statement. I've read several interviews where Bioware writers talk about how time and money constraints (and really, they both boil down to just money) have resulted in script edits which they have disagreed with.

This makes me wonder about:

2. Was the final ending really what the development team had in mind, or were changes made due to financial reasons?

I think we all know about the many things the devs were talking about pre-release, and how different things ended up being. The devs have talked about how your choices matter and how there are many different varied endings. They've talked about it over and over again throughout the development cycle of the entire series. This is not what happened. Did they lie about the number of endings they planned, or did Bioware in fact pass their original plan because they were in a hurry to get the game out of the door?

Which brings me to:

3. Whose artistic vision are we supposed to be protecting anyway?

The Mass Effect franchise has been created by, if not exactly by a committee, by a very large group of people. If we only count the writers (minus the novel/comics writers), the series has had 12 writers so far according to IMDB. Most people who worked on ME1 have not worked on ME3. How much does the series have artistic integrity to begin with? Probably not that much.


I don't claim to have the answers to these questions and I'm also not putting them up here as an accusation. I just think there's more this than "fans versus The Art".