I was suddenly reminded of the numerous Bioware marketing campaigns over the past years, and while I do consider myself a loyal fan follower who despite of his whining always ends up buying new Bioware games day one anyway, I have consistenly felt alienated by your marketing.
I feel there are several repeat mistakes every time a new BIoware game has been announced in their time under EA. A huge part of marketing your sequel is to make newcomers aware and gain new fans, but I feel like BIoware largely does this at the expense of their previous fans... with a few examples.
You consistenly restate the conventions of the franchise as if it's a new idea when you show off the sequel:
In both Mass Effect 2 and 3 and Dragon Age 2 and 3, it's bugged me how Bioware takes the basic gameplay into their marketing and talks about conventions of that gameplay as if it's a new thing you came up with for the sequel. As an example, For Mass Effect a feature is the ability to assign the movements of squadmates and use their powers strategically during combat. This was a feature in Mass Effect 1, but guess what, when ME2 and ME3 was announced you made trailers in which your developers directly say "now you can do this!" which shows off greatly for newcomers how awesome your game is, but for anyone who's played the first ones, we feel discarded as you're simply explaining the same gameplay to us again but acting as if it's new and fresh.
You did this too, for DA:I in which I clearly remember Mike Laidlaw showing it off in 2013 and talking it up like he's about to reveal an awesome new dynamic to the gameplay and then he just says "In DA:I you can pause and assign the commands for each of your companions strategically". Oh cool, the newcomers gets it, but as a fan who's eagerly anticipating BIoware's new game, I suddenly realize "oh, Bioware isn't talking to ME right now. This is stuff me and the rest already did in DA:O and DA2".
At E3 2011 the now absent studio-heads of BIoware stepped up on the scene to talk about ME3. They showed off some interactive dialogue very briefly and then cut to combat saying "This isn't JUST about choosing dialogue!". As a fan I was very let down by this, because I felt like Bioware was saying "we know nobody cares about dialogue, tsk! The Call of Duty crowd wanna know how COOL Mass Effect is". Same with how Mike Gamble talks about how "don't worry. You'll get to shoot guys square in the face!" when teasing Mass Effect Andromeda.
My request is therefore this:
Find a way to show off your games that make the people you gathered to play your first game in a franchise, feel like its sequel is appealing to them, and not just the newcomer. Find a way to show off your base game for the guy who doesn't know what Mass Effect is about but then also include moments for the fans to go "oooh, I like where they're taking this!".
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