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Development runs mainly before vs after GFC + OWS being dismantled with identity politics... Is that pure coincidence?
Possible? It's difficult to date exactly when BioWare 'went woke', and it probably depends on how you define 'woke', but I'd say it's probably the early 2010s when they started to get aggressively preachy about it. KotOR and Jade Empire start to dip their toe into the idea of same-sex romance, but very little. DA:O and ME1 have some in the way of social commentary, with ME1 noticeably in favour of liberal humanitarian and cosmopolitan norms (the pretense that Renegade is not the evil path was never very convincing, even in 2007), but DA:O is surprisingly nuanced and fair.
I think DA2 and ME3 are probably where it gets bad, with DA2's ham-fisted approach to social strife, and ME3 was the one that, with Cortez, started directly preaching about marriage. (I note that ME2 and TOR were BioWare's last games to contain exclusively straight romances.) In general ME3 is noticeably more morally simplistic than its predecessors - where in ME2 the genophage was a complicated, ambivalent issue with Mordin making a persuasive defence of it, in ME3 Mordin has switched sides between games, so now all the good guys are on the one side and the pro-genophage camp is just evil. Likewise ME3 is just pro-geth in a way that strips out any kind of nuance from the issue. The writing has noticeably gotten worse. And then DA:I obviously has a couple of preaching scenes, and Veilguard is a dumpster fire.
I always thought the change in the genophage attitudes was strange. Here's a hyper expansionary, brutal race of beasts who previously wreaked havoc on all their neighboring planets. A solution was found. And suddenly the solution is evil just because they're killing each other instead of killing everyone else? And if they get a female leader they're supposed to become peaceful while multiplying like rabbits?
Sometime in the mid 2010s the cultural narrative trend went towards extensive 'these people did bad things because they were forced to and actually its the supposed good guys who are the evil ones that should be blamed for the bad actions of the bad guys.' Its a bit of a stretch, but not a very long one, to see that this was being forced into video games at the same time as all other media, particularly in order to capitalize on the 'current power order bad, bad things supposedly evil people do are just disagentic actions reacting autonomously against larger evil forces'. Put plainly, the analogy is that agency is reserved for the protaganists in-game race, and all enemies are actually victims that you are effectively mercy killing out of their tortured existence. Wait, thats slightly more fucked up the more I think about it.
Blizzard seems to be the only one that escaped most of that retardation, mainly because their writing was always trash to begin with. Look, there is ALWAYS a massively overwhelmingly evil external enemy that is responsible for everything, and its an eternally sliding scale so when this enemy gets some backstory and becomes sympathetic we immediately roll out the bigger BBEG to take the responsibility of all evil!
Outside of this, western game companies tended to have incredibly unimaginative narratives. This friendly white man turns out to be the actual evil bad guy all along! This orc is actually the poor oppressed woobie. Etc etc etc.
Also, evergreens like "The church is actually the bad guys!" and "The bad guys have no reedeming features whatsoever!".
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It frustrated me a great deal because ME1 goes to some effort to show us the disaster of the genophage for the krogan through Wrex's eyes - we see what the effects of this were through a sympathetic, beloved character. Then ME2 shows us the other side of the story - we see the case for the genophage through the eyes of another sympathetic, beloved character. Mordin is obviously very humane and cherishes life, and argues for the necessity of the genophage out of what seems like genuine concern for the krogan. Without the genophage, the krogan would either overrun everyone else, or provoke such a brutal reaction that they would be exterminated.
That seems like it's setting up a confrontation between the two of them in ME3, where the player, after having investigated the genophage deeply in the first two games, now has to make a final call on it - and no matter which call you make, a character you probably like, trust, and want to help is going to feel profoundly betrayed. That's excellent.
But BioWare cop out at the last minute, Mordin changes sides, and oops, his old position is now evil. It's lazy and undermines all their previous work.
Tali and Legion are the same issue - two brilliantly sympathetic, beloved characters, each serving as the face of one side of a genuinely challenging conflict, and once again BioWare swerve at the last minute. I find ME3's writing pretty cowardly.
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