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Longtime game designer Manveer Heir, who spent years at BioWare working on Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect: Andromeda, talks frankly about the problems he and his colleagues faced in getting the latter to ship. When the game debuted earlier this year it caught some criticism for glorifying colonialist fantasies, for example, and now Heir says there were people within the team who spoke up about the issue years in advance -- and in vain.
"I wasn't the only one. There were other people, there were other white people, white men, who spoke up. There's a lot of really good people inside of BioWare who spoke up on this stuff," he said. "This is what happens when, I think, you have a homogeneous leadership. The leadership of Mass Effect: Andromeda was all white men." He also ruminated on what it was like to be someone who works at a large, high-profile studio and also speaks publicly about topics like diversity, race, and representation in games. Heir describes being "talked to all the time about speaking up" and feeling like some people in the company wanted him to stop rocking the boat.
"I wasn't the only one. There were other people, there were other white people, white men, who spoke up. There's a lot of really good people inside of BioWare who spoke up on this stuff," he said. "This is what happens when, I think, you have a homogeneous leadership. The leadership of Mass Effect: Andromeda was all white men." He also ruminated on what it was like to be someone who works at a large, high-profile studio and also speaks publicly about topics like diversity, race, and representation in games. Heir describes being "talked to all the time about speaking up" and feeling like some people in the company wanted him to stop rocking the boat.