We may never see a trilogy of games like Mass Effect again. I don't love Mass Effect because of the combat. I love seeing Garrus calibrating, Tali spying on Engineering, Mordin humming while synthesizing, and Joker being sarcastic to the AI. Few games have ever made companions feel so much like people you genuinely knew, and even fewer have delivered the character growth, relationships and consequences that Mass Effect could build across three entire games. Choices made years earlier could come back to reward you, haunt you, or completely change the fate of someone you'd grown attached to. And that's the part I'm worried we may never quite get again. Because when developers talk about making games like Mass Effect today, one thing comes up repeatedly - planning an interconnected trilogy from the beginning is insanity. Maybe they're right. But that insanity is also part of what made Mass Effect special.