Daily Briefing: Friday 26th November

Former BioWare writer isn't too thrilled by the idea of a Mass Effect television show

David Gaider, lead writer across all three games in the Dragon Age series, revealed on Twitter that he thinks the prospect of a Mass Effect television show makes him "cringe." This follows on for a renewed suite of rumours this week that Amazon Studios are nearing a deal with BioWare to finally put Commander Shepard (possibly played by Henry Cavill) on screen. Gaider writes that he's at least "relieved" that it's a television series and not a movie, but thinks that the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises' reliance on custom player characters will be difficult to translate into a television adaptation.

• Gaider writers, “for starters, Mass Effect and Dragon Age have a custom protagonist, meaning said TV show will need to pick whether said protagonist will be male or female. Boom, right off the bat you’ve just alienated a whole bunch of the built-in fan base who had their hopes up." David Gaider spent 17 years at BioWare before leaving in 2016 to become the creative director of Beamdog: a developer, publisher, and distributor founded in 2009 by BioWare co-founder Trent Oster and BioWare lead programmer Cameron Tofer. In 2019 he hopped across to the newly-established Summerfall Studios, as creative director on Chorus: An Adventure Musical.

Xbox are working on improving video capture quality

That's according to Xbox's director of program management Jason Ronald who, speaking in a recent episode of the Iron Lords podcast, revealed that improving the quality of video capture on the Xbox Series X|S is high on Xbox's list of priorities, alongside a review of how captures are shared. Ronald said that Game DVR is "one area that I wish we were able to make more progress on this year than we were able to. It's definitely a priority for us."

• Ronald elaborated that, while the Xbox team have been working to improve video capture quality across their consoles, they recognise that there is still work to be done and "definitely hear the feedback." Ronald closed by saying "you know, the best thing I can recommend is if you’re not in the [Xbox] Insider rings, get on the Insider rings, so that as we bring new capabilities and improvements, we want that feedback to know where we’re meeting the bar, and where we’re not meeting the bar."

Looks like the PC and PS5 versions of the Uncharted collection won't have multiplayer

That suggestion comes courtesy of the ESRB, who stated in their recent classification that Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves contains "no Interactive Elements." Legacy of Thieves is a compilation that includes a remastered version of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and spin-off Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Interactive Elements is the ESRB's catch-all term for online features that include players' ability to interact with each other. The ESRB's classifications for Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy both reference present online interactions, so this is pretty odd

• It's very unclear why Sony would decide to axe the multiplayer component from a high-profile re-release of one their biggest franchises. Developers Naughty Dog celebrated the fifth anniversary of Uncharted 4 back in May by dropping a whole load of stats which, among other things, revealed that the game had attracted 37m players, including 13.3m multiplayer users. The game coming to PS5 and PC would surely be reason enough to try and beef up those numbers again? It could always be an error on the ESRB's part, though.