Mass Effect plays homage to a lot of things. The uniforms in ME1 are reminiscent of earlier sci fi(Ashley’s pink uniform and helmet is so seventies pulp sci fi). With the Asari very much a homage to Trek aliens.
ME2 feels a lot more cyberpunkish. As well s playing homage to eighties action movies. Whereas ME3 is just classic space opera with all the tropes that has.
What makes ME stand out-is it’s basically the only space opera IP that came out recently. Dune and SW exist but those are movie franchises and they are also decades old. Halo is a military sci fi shooter and thus isn’t the same genre as ME.
I think the greatest casualty by far is the sanding down of any and real conflict in the fictional setting used to set these games. Mass Effect died before its corpse could be raped, but you can see it in full force in Guntguard, where nu-Thedas is this hecking wholesome place where everyone gets along for some reason but there's still bad guys because its a fantasy game.
Safe edgy indeed.
Dragon Age ran into the problem its most enthusiastic fanbase are tumblr fan girls that are want wholesome coffee house fiction and a minimum of discomfort. There is plenty of savage brutality, gloom, and melancholy in DA*-but its main audience just wants to “smooch their elf girlfriends” and pet baby griffons. Because that’s what Origins was all about.
*I’ve seen YouTube videos from the late 2000s/early 2010s where there was at least a little overlap between DA fans and
40K fans.
If you pay attention to the setting it’s not actually hard to see why. A grim fantasy setting with plenty of racism, rape, evil monsters underground ravaging civilization, hell-even mages being at risk of possession necessitating harsh treatment and separation from the rest of society.
None of this goes away as much as it’s simply shoved under the proverbial carpet by Inquisition(which puts the really dark stuff in either codex entries, war table missions, or bits of dialogue referring to third hand accounts). And it’s basically the same in DAV-culminating in southern thedas being wiped out in a turbo blight. Yet the tone of the game doesn’t show this at all.
The setting of dragon age is very grim, miserable and hope is in short supply-but since Inquisition, the way it has been framed(both in the writing and art direction) is a generic noble high fantasy setting.
Which to me shows both the preferences of the fandom, and BioWare’s gradual subsuming into general wokeism.
You could easily re write DAI and even DA4 as Origins esque super violent games without changing their basic plot beats, it’s just how they are framed and presented.**
**DA2 is interesting. In that it doesn’t feel as dark as origins-hell it’s the only case where the “found family” trope actually works. The story is a tragedy, and the art does a decent job of demonstrating the sort of oppressive weight Hawke is under-but it has a sort of zesty enthusiasm in it that Origins lacks. It’s a grim and sad game, but not a dark game if that makes sense?
TLDR: DA’s problem is the writers wanted wholesome comfy vibes and the audience(mostly-the audience the writers cared to pander too) did as well. One can easily imagine an alternate universe where the DA franchise remains seen as a dark fantasy thing.
and 2 technically ran on the same engine, but for 2 it was so heavily tweaked that they renamed it. And Frostbite is notoriously hard to work with, and BioWare wasn't familiar with it, on top of that. Remember, they had trouble importing Shepards from ME2 to 3, and both of those games ran on the Unreal Engine.