Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

[Lhynn]

That is EXACTLY what the ME series is supposed to be, but for whatever reason took the ME series as OH MY FUCKING GOAWD THIS IS FUCKING SERIOUS BUIZNESS!!!! OMG!

Actually the tone of the first one was fairly serious, it wanted to be space opera in the first one. Another of the reasons the shift in tone is so jarring, it goes from wanting to be a take on star trek next gen or Babylon 5 to being a retarded nonsensical "cinematographic" experience that still wants to be taken seriously.

 

[yes plz]

I think ME2 kept the space opera vibe for the most part. It was ME3 with shit like Shepard having PTSD over a child's death that derailed the series into uber serious grimdark 'isn't this game deep!?' territory. I imagine that if the writing team of ME3 had complete control over ME2 we'd have a lot of Shepard crying about having died or maybe some existential bullshit about identity.

 

[Lhynn]

Bro, its a game that kills you to resurrect you, with quirky characters like mordin or legion, which almost felt like a parity of IA, and lets not start with EDI and joker. The emo assasin, the milf, the super thief, blue batman. That has an entire galaxy on denial over what happened in the last game just because they want shepard to feel like hes speshul and everyone that has any power is against him, mary suish as fuck.

It was a huge departure from the original in every way that mattered. And im not saying it was poorly done, some of those characters were well written, as were a lot of the situations you were put into, but none of that really belongs to the ME universe that ME1 was trying to set up.

 

[yes plz]

He was already p. mary sue-ish in the first one, with the whole spectre shit, prothean knowledge downloaded into his brain, with most characters fapping over how awesome Shepard is. As for the cast, the first one had it's share of oddballs too with Wrex the biggest, most baddest space merc evar, Tali the spunky teenage(ish) tech girl, and Liara the somewhat ditzy, awkward librarian type who can still kick ass and who is related to one of the main antagonists, and of course Joker the crippled pilot who always has something witty and funny to say no matter what.

For me Mass Effect 2 is a game of two halves: the good half being the side content and the recruitment and loyalty missions; the bad half being everything to do with Cerberus and the Collectors. Anytime I stand up for the game it's the former half that I'm talking about, the latter half is, indeed, shit and a departure from ME1's tone and style.

 

[Lhynn]

Hm, SPECTRE shit simply put him where the story needed him, made it easier to tell if he had access to the privileges that came with the status, allowed a lot of handwaving, wasnt there just for the sake of making the player feel awesome, proof of this is that you start the game as a candidate, and the only real reason the council grants you said title is because its convenient for them and they already know you can handle yourself. so did prothean artifact crap, it could have been anyone else, saren in fact used it before shepard, shepard only used it because he thought he was saving someone under his command. You are playing as an elite human operative, but neither the only one nor the best. Hes not a bloody icon like in ME2, hes just the dude for the job.
Wrex wasnt an oddball, just an smarter than average krogan that actually gave a shit, just another merc. Tali is just some girl that lands in the middle of this due to her pilgrimage, shes not spunky at all, shes kind of obsessed with the tech on your ship and how different is her life far from the flotilla. Liara is a socially awkward nerd whose life work puts her in line as a good asset for the mission, i doubt her being related to benezia was a mere coincidence as well, shes not especially talented as a biotic either, neither of your companions is actually the best or the baddest, shepard gains more skillpoints per level during the first 20 or 30 levels to signify this, hes one step above anyone there, i thought it was a nice touch.
As for joker, hes lead a p. shitty life, if he didnt laugh it off i doubt he would have been able to get anywhere, made sense.

ME2 isnt a bad game, its just a silly game that takes itself seriously. Characters were handled much better in mass effect 1, there was a lot more nuance to them, in ME2 they were mostly caricatures of themselves. Wrex the badass krogan to rule the krogan al conan like, liara the badass spy, tali the witty spunky teenager, garrus as batman, some spy as her ass, the token black dude as the token black dude. You are free to replay them both, youll be shocked of how most of what you think you know of ME doesnt actually happen till 2.

 

[lurker3000]

People who say ME2 wasn't a bad game are fooling themselves. This was the game where Bio took out all RPG elements and made it into a FPS because the console crowd couldn't handle shooting at a bad guy and missing. This was the game where nothing happened until the last act. This was the game where if you were evil the dark side showed through your scars. This was the game where they said you would go on a suicide mission that not everyone would return from. Well guess what everyone returns from the fucking mission because you did the side quests. This was the game you needed to feed your fish or they would die.

There was nothing redeeming about this game except the Solarian who sang showtoons.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 16: Re-entry

I’ve found that retrospectives like this one can be very therapeutic, both for the author and the audience. If we find ourselves annoyed and frustrated at the way the story has failed us, we can’t very well do anything to fix it besides compose ever-more convoluted headcannon to try and patch over the holes. But even though we can’t fix the story, there’s a certain satisfaction to be gained in enumerating and organizing the problems as a way to give them a sense of finality and closure.

The opening of Mass Effect 2 is doubly painful. Not only is it packed with retcons, but it’s also exposition-heavy and clumsy. This is painful because the first game had already paid off the expositional overhead. With the Mass Effect 1 setup, the second game would have been free to jump right into the action without the need for an extended series of setup scenes. By breaking from the existing status quo, the writer obliged themselves to twist the world in knots to make the new setup work, and then they executed the transition in the most desultory way possible.

Re-Entry

At the opening of Mass Effect 2, the Normandy is flying around the Terminus Systems looking for Geth. A strange ship (the Collector ship) pops in, spots the Normandy despite their stealth drive[1] and attacks. Shepard runs around, gets seemingly “everyone” to the escape pods, and is then blown out into space. We see Shepard flailing, his suit leaking atmosphere, vanishing into the distance. As we fade out, we see what appear to be “re-entry” particle effects around him as he drifts towards the planet below.

Somber music plays, and we transition to the “bringing Shepard back from the dead” opening credits montage.

Some people insist Shepard didn’t really enter the atmosphere, simply because that is too stupid to believe.

Case against: Shepard only floats a hundred meters or so. Was the Normandy really hugging the atmosphere of this planet? If Shepard really fell through the atmosphere, then he either turned into a wet crater on the surface, or (more likely) was totally incinerated. I mean, atmospheric deceleration is extreme enough that it routinely disintegrates rocks, which is why we don’t have to hide in underground bunkers during a meteor shower. In either case, if Shepard had fallen into the planet there shouldn’t be enough of him left to fill a shot glass. He’s not just dead, he’s stopped existing. This scenario is so preposterous that we simply can’t entertain it.

Case for: What else was the author trying to say here? The Normandy and Shepard were moving together, and the Normandy crashed on the planet. Therefore, Shepard falling into the atmosphere was an inevitability of physics. The “re-entry” lines get stronger as Shepard moves away from the camera and closer to the planet, which suggests that the author really was trying to imply that Shepard’s body did in fact pancake on the planet. No other outcome is possible. Yes, that’s ludicrous for any number of reasons, which is probably why people look at this scene and think, “No. That’s not actually what I’m seeing. It’s just… stylized. Or something.”

So right in the middle of upending the status quo, the writer throws in this sequence that’s either artistically inept or scientifically illiterate. Either way, it’s incredibly jarring. It’s yet one more thing to yank the viewer out of the story and encourage them to start questioning everything.

(There was a comic released to fill in the two-year gap between Shepard’s death and resurrection. The wiki has a plot synopsis, but it doesn’t seem to clear this issue up. Shepard’s body is recovered off-screen and put into a stasis pod, without explaining where the body was found.)

Shepard is then brought back to life in the opening credits and the tutorial mission involves him escaping the facility and teaming up with Jacob and Miranda. From there he’s taken to see The Illusive Man. There’s another short mission, and then it’s revealed that Cerberus has built a new Normandy and many surviving members of the old Normandy crew have left the Alliance and joined up with Cerberus. We’ll go over all of that in much more detail later in the series.

Drama vs. Details

This ineptitude with regards to establishing the new setup is a little easier to understand if we view this huge mess as the wreckage of shifting from “Details First” to “Drama First”. I’m not suggesting this change was deliberate. It’s just that this second game was (seemingly) written by a different writer who had different passions and sensibilities, and that writer either did not understand or did not value the contributions of the first.

There’s a lot of speculation on who wrote which parts of the series, given that the Mass Effect 1 writers appear in the Mass Effect 2 credits, along with some new names and the EA logo. There was a bunch of politics going on at BioWare while this series was being produced. The company was bought by EA during the development of the first game, and development resources were being poured into The Old Republic at the same time.


I often find myself examining individual parts of Mass Effect 2, looking at the tone and trying to figure out who wrote it. I have my own theories about Who Wrote What, but I don’t have anything to back them up and I think they would be a distraction from our efforts to examine the game as a whole. It’s all speculation and gossip and guess work, and I don’t think there’s anything useful to learn.

Naming authors would be an exercise in assigning blame, and that’s not why I began this series. I’m trying really hard to keep this focused on the art and not the artists. I’ll leave the “who ruined Mass Effect?” argument to others.

So I’m going to continue talking about the “Mass Effect 1 writer” and the “Mass Effect 2 writer” like they’re different individuals, even though both games were written by overlapping but slightly different teams. This is simply for convenience on my part and to avoid cluttering up this entire series with footnotes and speculation.

Anyway, getting back to “details vs. drama”…

Yes, the details say it makes the most sense for our hero to be at the center of the action because of his relationship with the beacons, the Protheans, Vigil, and Liara, but it’s more dramatic if he’s central to the story because he’s a famous badass superspy who came back from the dead to Save Us All.

Yes, the details say that we should be working for the council, but it’s more dramatic to have us working for a mystery man with glowing robot eyes and a hidden agenda who has a crazy space-throne room that would strike Palpatine as “perhaps overdoing it a bit”.

Yes, the details say that improvements to the Normandy should be part of an in-between game retrofit, and that Cerberus as presented in the first game is barely able to run a lemonade stand much less act as a galaxy-spanning superpower, but it’s more dramatic to have the ship blown up in the opening and replaced by this shadow organization.

Yes, the details state that saving the entire galaxy from the Reapers should be our priority, but it’s more dramatic to fight against bug-faced collectors who are threatening humans, and kidnapping your friends.

Yes, it’s ridiculous that Joker and Dr. Chakwas would leave their highly respected positions with the Alliance and sign on with an actual terrorist organization with the blood of hundreds on their hands, and who may be personally responsible for the worst thing that ever happened to Shepard, but the story is so much more dramatic if our friends come along!

Yes, the details (and common sense) dictate that people ought to stay dead, but it’s so expedient to establish our new villain by having them kill the main character.

(You can put sarcastic scare quotes over the word “dramatic” in the previous paragraphs if you need to. It’s okay. I understand.)

So much of the debate here centers around whether or not these events “made sense”[2].How did a generic terrorist organization – one with no narrative build-up in the first game – bring someone back from the dead? How did they build this ship? Why did your loyal Alliance crew abandon their lifelong careers to work for this terrorist organization that was blatantly behind some atrocities that Shepard dealt with in the first game?

But these questions are a dead end. You end up arguing over codex entries, which are maybe kinda supported by other codex entries, and this one thing that guy says if you pick the right question on the dialog wheel. And if you do an item-fetch sidequest then Chakwas gives you a new excuse that’s slightly less implausible than the excuse she initially offers. And then there’s a link to some forum where some guy has constructed twenty paragraphs of fan-cannon that “explains everything”.

We act like this would be an acceptable way to start act 2 of a story and the only problem is that the writers forgot to properly fill out the right codex paperwork. But this approach to establishing a new status quo is brutal hack job with no sense of pacing, build-up, pay-off, or structure.

In the first game, the codex was a reward, a place where lore-hounds could go to get a deeper understanding of the world. In the second game, it was where they stuffed all their retcons and excuses for whiners who didn’t like working for terrorists instead of trying to save the galaxy.

Switching Genres is Dangerous

This shift in genres (or at least, in tone) cuts both ways. Moving from a world of details to one of drama will destroy the rules that grounded the original, but going the other way is just as bad. In Star Wars, the Force is a nebulous thing controlled by feelings, relationships, and destiny. Darth Vader didn’t pull out some scanner to detect Obi Wan on the Death Star, he supernaturally sensed the presence of this powerful rival and former friend.

So it drove fans crazy when this drama-based element was reduced to technical details with “midichlorians”. Suddenly the Force wasn’t about sensing auras or seeing visions, or feeling strong emotions. It was about having a blood test and looking at the readout on the gizmo. Drama was reduced to details, and it was awful.

The death and abrupt resurrection of Shepard, the abrupt destruction and rebuilding of the Normandy, the sudden shift in the nature of Cerberus, and the removal of key characters from the first game – all of these changes eat up screen time, they’re incredibly jarring and off-putting to returning fans, and none of them are required to make this story work. Without an in-world or out-of-world explanation, they come off as sloppy. Perhaps even petulant.

When I criticize the plot failings of Mass Effect 2, people defend the game in terms of the gameplay and characters. And it’s true: The gameplay is better and the characters are fantastic. Yes, even Jacob, even though I make fun of him all the time. (I’ll talk about the characters later.)

But this creates a false dichotomy. It assumes we can’t have good game feel unless we upend the story. It assumes we can’t have Mordin Solus without working for Cerberus. It assumes we can’t have drama unless we get rid of all those icky boring details.

But whatever. The stage is set: Shepard is back from the dead and working for Cerberus. This setup either works for you or it doesn’t, but we’re done bellyaching about it for now. Much later in the series we’ll come back and look at this sequence in more detail, but for now we’re going to move on and talk about the gameplay.

 

[Prime Junta]

People who say ME2 wasn't a bad game are fooling themselves. This was the game where Bio took out all RPG elements and made it into a FPS because the console crowd couldn't handle shooting at a bad guy and missing. This was the game where nothing happened until the last act. This was the game where if you were evil the dark side showed through your scars. This was the game where they said you would go on a suicide mission that not everyone would return from. Well guess what everyone returns from the fucking mission because you did the side quests. This was the game you needed to feed your fish or they would die.

There was nothing redeeming about this game except the Solarian who sang showtoons.

 

[lurker3000]

The irony, right?

 

[Beastro]

Maybe. But I can't shake the impression that the author is a genuine ultra-autistic nerd who still (!) can't get over the fact that ME2 was great despite not being what he wanted it to be.

I’ve found that retrospectives like this one can be very therapeutic, both for the author and the audience.

there’s a certain satisfaction to be gained in enumerating and organizing the problems as a way to give them a sense of finality and closure.

I often find myself examining individual parts of Mass Effect 2, looking at the tone and trying to figure out who wrote it.

Makes you wonder what his average off day is.

*Wakes up, brushes teath, grabs a cup of coffee and sits down for a long, hard day of staring at the ME2 title screen*

 

[lurker3000]

People who think ME2 is a good game are partially retarded I believe. Just because the number of potential sex partners has tripled (or whatever) does not mean the game has value. As a FPS its a lame cover shooter, as an RPG its just lame.


But hot damn Miranda knew how to wear a skin tight jumpsuit.

edit: Best moment in ME2

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 17: Commander Shootmans

Last time I mentioned that Mass Effect jumped from “details first” to “drama first”, and that the resulting shift in focus hurt the series. This new setup either works for you or it doesn’t, but we’re done bellyaching about it for now. Instead let’s talk about…

Gameplay
I like the new combat. I’m not going to say it’s “fun”, but I will say it’s “fun for a cover shooter of this era”. It’s not like I was expecting them to turn the gameplay into Batman, Tomb Raider, or Chime. They’ve tightened things up so it’s clearly a cover-based shooter instead of a “You can use cover and it will help sometimes but your allies might not and they’ll wander into your line of fire during a fight anyway” kind of shooter.

Mass Effect 1 existed in this odd, unsatisfying spot on the gameplay spectrum. It wasn’t number-crunchy enough to let you enjoy radically divergent character builds and tactical gameplay, but it wasn’t punchy enough to be viscerally satisfying. It had a massive skill tree with all these tiny inconsequential bonuses, so you couldn’t ever “feel” the difference of spending skill points.

Mass Effect 2 fixes this by shortening the tree and cutting down on the number of abilities you have to juggle so you have three interesting ones instead of nine weak ones. Love it or hate it, I think it’s good that the game finally committed to a gameplay style. It’s not my favorite gameplay, but at least the series found an identity.

And to be fair, this isn’t just a bog-standard shooter. The biotic powers keep things interesting, the freedom to swap out squad mates keeps things varied, and the visuals have a flair and a punch that was lacking in the first game.

The horrible “trash loot avalanche” of the original has been replaced with something that’s more about making meaningful decisions and less of a “rummage sale” vibe where you scroll through huge lists of crap, trying to figure out what you want or need.

This is all good, since you’re going to be spending a lot more time shootin’ dudes. The Mako is gone. Overall there are fewer conversations in proportion to gameplay, and most of them are shorter than the ones in ME1. There’s less space to traverse between fights and the puzzles between you and your mission goals have been removed[1]. The loot-sorting is gone[2] and shopping for gear is less of a thing.

For good or for ill, the game is focusing on its central mechanics instead of trying to do a little of everything. But these changes come at a cost. Let’s talk about…

Thermal Clips

In Mass Effect 1, the idea is that your gun has a large block of mass inside. It shaves a tiny section off that block, the size of a grain of sand. That grain is then accelerated in a mass effect field, launching it at some ridiculous velocity so that the tiny fragment will still carry enough force to harm your foe. This generated some heat, so you had to let off the trigger every few seconds to allow the weapon to cool down.

Thus your weapon can’t ever run out of ammo. It has “practically infinite”[3] supply of shots stored inside its casing.

I liked this, because it nicely merged gunplay with science fiction. Yes, we want our combatants to run around shooting each other with space-weapons that make cool sounds, but the universe will feel lame if all these fantastical aliens are running around using firearms with gunpowder, rifled barrels, shell casings, and all the other things we associate with gunfights on Earth. It makes our universe seem like it lacks vision if all the fights look and sound like Call of Battlefield. The infinite ammo weapons were better than Earth-based firearms, they were new and alien enough to feel sort of sci-fi-ish, but they were close enough to conventional firearms that we could still use familiar shooter gameplay. (As opposed to something crazy and new, like a world where everyone has insta-kill guns that can shoot through walls, or sustained beam weapons that makes killing foes as easy as catching them in a flashlight beam. Those would be plausible alien weapons to put in a sci-fi universe, but they wouldn’t lend themselves to established gameplay conventions.)

But the original idea didn’t last. In Mass Effect 2 they added the idea of “thermal clips”, which work exactly like ammo. Yes, you still have infinite “bullets” but you need these packages of heat sinks to keep the weapon from overheating. If you don’t have a heat sink, you can’t fire. So they aren’t bullets, but they restrict your ability to fire in exactly the same way that bullets do.

This is framed as a technological advancement, but it’s pretty obvious that a gun that can run out of bullets is vastly inferior to one that can’t. This is particularly true when you apparently can’t carry very much of this new “not bullets” ammunition and find yourself changing weapons often when you run out.

Aside: “clip” is the wrong nomenclature. The “clips” we pick up are properly called “magazines”. I realize this is a sci-fi game with space magic, but if you’re going to get so macho serious about your firearms, then can you please stop making all your characters talk like a rube having their first day on the firing range?

To be fair, basically all games and movies get this wrong, to the point where it might be easier to change the definition than to get people to use it right. But it bugs me anyway.

But whatever. Thermal “clips” it is.

On one hand, I can appreciate what they were trying to do here. Traditional reload mechanics are a tried-and-true gameplay model. It encourages you to use a variety of weapons to manage your limited ammunition pools. There’s a tiny bit of strategy in deciding when you reload a weapon and when to keep shooting. It fits in with the rhythm of the fight and the way your enemies peek in and out of cover. It lets the main character interact with the weapon, making all those cool mechanical sounds and venting particle effects. It encourages moving around to acquire needed ammo during a fight[4], which can encourage the player to make risk / reward decisions about when to leave cover. These are all nominally good things to want in a shooter. In general, all of this moves the game towards mainstream mechanics.

Having said that, I’m not sure the execution here is the right way to go. Reader Naota[5]said this in the comments last week:

Thermal clips are a blight, even by normal game design standards. I think it’s pretty universally agreed that the idea behind ammo mechanics is to force players to aim more carefully and be economic with their shooting, by tying shooting to an expendable resource. This rewards pre-planning and smart play; if a player stocks up on ammunition and aims well, they won’t run out in a time of need.

…but thermal clips are not expendable, and can’t be planned around. The damnable things are scripted not to appear unless the player is already low on ammo, and magically poof into the surrounding environment. Thanks to the small capacity for spares, they’re needed constantly.

So… the only time you can find more bullets is after you’ve run out of them, and must flail around awkwardly in the midst of battle looking for environmental cues. You cannot go exploring to stock up ahead of time. But rationing your shots is pointless, because once you’re spent the clips will reappear infinitely. We wouldn’t want you to actually run out of bullets, after all – just to experience the same annoyance over and over with no way to mitigate it.

This is a system designed specifically to capture the biggest downside of ammo-based shooting mechanics (having to dumpster-dive for bullets halfway through a boss battle), while eliminating all of the upsides with precision that borders on the immaculate.

Game design is part of my job. I’ve built a competitive FPS. I could not make a more horrible mechanical framework if I tried my hardest. Thermal clips are a true marvel.​

To be fair, I had no idea the world worked this way. I always play as a Vanguard, and Vanguards are constantly leaving and running back into cover because of the charge ability. So these magical appearing clips got lost in the chaos. If I ran out, I usually assumed I had been bad at spotting ammo between fights.

But regardless of whether this works on a gameplay level or not, it’s pretty clear that it makes no damn sense within the established lore of the world. If I’m dumping heat, then why am I throwing away these clips? In Mass Effect 1 I had guns that could fire for fifteen sustained seconds, and cool off in just five. Why can’t I drop back to that firing mode if I run out of clips[6]?

The logic problems get worse when you find yourself fighting enemies that have been isolated for decades or centuries, yet they drop these same newfangled clips that were invented just two years ago.

More nonsense: The ammo pickups seem to work a bit like Team Fortress 2, where a single pickup will have just a few rounds for each of your weapons. So I go into a ruin that hasn’t been opened in centuries and inside I find a mook who shoots at me with an assault rifle. I kill him, and he drops this little cylinder-shaped “clip”. And when I pick it up I get 4 pistol bullets, 50 submachine gun bullets, and 3 shotgun shells. I don’t care what sort of excuses you stuff into the codex, that’s crazy bananas.

I really think it was a mistake to attempt to address this in-world. Maybe it would have been better for the game to simply present this change without comment.

I realize this sounds incredibly hypocritical after going on about “details matter!”, but here we’re dealing with a simple business decision and gameplay conceit. There is no way to explain this within the gameworld that will fit, so any attempt to justify it is just going to spread out into more frustrating unanswerable questions.

I think players are generally willing to meet the game designer halfway on stuff like this. In the first two Witcher games, Geralt’s equipment was ageless. The armor never broke, and his sword never got dull. But nobody ran up to Geralt at the start of Witcher 3 and said, “We’re using this awesome new alloy that makes swords more effective, but now you need to sharpen them!” The game didn’t try to explain why you suddenly needed to repair your stuff, and that was okay.

By presenting the change without comment, it allows the player to file the inconsistency into the mental folder where they keep all the other gameplay contrivances: You never have to eat or relieve yourself, you never need to sleep, you can reload the game when you die, you can see someone’s name over their head when you look directly at them, fat tomes never contain more than a paragraph of text, you can eat an unlimited amount of food in the middle of a swordfight, and so on.

I understand if people want to argue that they don’t like the new gameplay and just wanted the old system back. But if we accept the change as a simple design necessity then I think the best way to deal with the inconsistency would be to downplay it.

In fact, this is what they did with biotics, and I don’t see people complaining about that[7]. Biotic powers got a major overhaul in terms of mechanics, and they didn’t try to explain any of it in conversation. Its simply presented without comment. The change to biotics is nearly as radical as the idea of adding “bullets” to this bullet-free universe, but people didn’t mind as much because it was accepted as a simple gameplay change, without involving the setting.

On the other hand:

In a game where so much of the lore was re-written, twisted, abused, or ignored in the first hour, the people who care about details are already likely to be really annoyed. They won’t see this as a design decision, they’ll naturally assume the introduction of bullets is just one more sign that the Mass Effect 2 designers didn’t know about or care how the world of Mass Effect 1 worked.

This is just one more area where the bungled opening of the game comes back to hurt our immersion. The player doesn’t have any more room in their heart for hand-waving and letting little details slide, because that goodwill was burned up when the writer blew up the setting and replaced half the codex with little sticky notes proclaiming “PLOT TWIST!”

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 18: There’s No “You” in “Team”

The last game gave us a pretty good team and also gave us the goal of “go learn about the Reapers”. Then this second one replaced it with “Your team is gone. Build another one.” Once you get over the shift in goal[2] this is a good subject for a BioWare game, as it plays to their strengths in writing vibrant one-on-one conversations with interesting people. Okay, we’re gathering up a team of people even though we have no idea what we need them to do beyond “go through a relay”, but we’ll talk more about the main story later.


Team Building

The four Trek-like “episodes” of Mass Effect 1 have been replaced with shorter recruitment missions. Mordin, Jack, Garrus, Tali, Grunt, Legion, Thane, and Samara each get their own little recruitment story. And depending on what DLC you might own, you can also have Zaeed and Kasumi. You also get an optional loyalty mission where you can help these people out with their personal difficulties.

Note that this makes Mass Effect 2 a longer game. It also makes it more variable in length. You can do no loyalty missions and be done quickly, or you can do them all and have a very long game.

For each character on your team there’s a recruitment mission[3] where they become a member of the crew and select a spot to live on the Normandy. Then at some point later[4]they ask you for help. They have some personal problem that needs your attention, which involves accompanying them on a special mission. These loyalty missions are optional, although skipping it makes the final mission in the game harder. I’ll talk about the suicide mission later.

The dialog tends to shine in these character missions. Since the writer can be sure that Jacob will be on the team during Jacob’s loyalty mission, and since the mission is about him personally, they can give him lots of character development and dialog. This is in contrast to one of the late-game story missions where you might bring any two members of your twelve-person team, and so your companion dialog is rare and limited to shallow, single-line comments on the immediate surroundings or situation.

Since Mass Effect 2 puts the characters before the story, let’s discuss things in that order.

Mordin

Smart and amusing, Mordin nearly saved this franchise for me. Here was a throwback to those fun, quirky companions I remember from KOTOR. He’s colorful, funny, and gives us a much-needed look into Salarian culture and customs.

His recruitment mission also feels like Classic BioWare. “I have a cure for a major disease but I’m having distribution problems” is right out of KOTOR.

I suppose it helps that his life’s work is deeply bound to one of the most interesting conundrums in the galaxy: The genophage is an atrocity that saved the galaxy. I’m not going to go over it again, since I discussed this at length earlier in the series, but it’s still a fantastic plot. There is no easy answer, but there are a lot of interesting viewpoints.

Garrus

Yup, he’s back. Maybe they were laying the fanservice on a little thick when they had him become space-Batman in your absence, but… bah. It’s cool. At least it matches his character goals from the previous game.

One thing I really appreciated about Garrus was that the writer really tried to make the renegade choices more alluring during his loyalty mission.

While Shepard was dead, Garrus built a team of badasses to fight crime. That team was betrayed and murdered by a guy named Sidonus. If Shepard chooses to to help out[5] then you have to track Sidonus down and give Garrus his shot at revenge.

The game actually does a terrible job of making this clear, but the problem with Sidonus is that his crimes were perpetrated on Omega, and there’s no system to extradite him there. It’s like trying to have someone arrested in New York for a theft that took place in Antarctica. There’s really no way to do this “by the book” and have him thrown in jail, which would be the paragon choice.

So you can allow Garrus to assassinate a criminal, or you can let the criminal go. To do justice, you need to break the law. If you let Sidonus escape, then the game backs out at the end and the news reports that Sidonus turned himself in and the authorities are trying to decide what to do with him. This feels like a bit of a cop-out, but I guess the writers were afraid of offering the player a choice between “Do the satisfying thing and get renegade points” and “do something completely frustrating and unsatisfying for paragon points”. Although, the entire series is kind of notorious for screwing renegade players like this, so I’d argue it would only be fair.

Once again this reveals the cracks in the paragade system. The player must mix in-game and out-of-game concerns, “I can do the right thing here, but then I might not have enough Nice Guy Points to accomplish something really important later”.

Still, I like that the game presented a situation where renegade actions made sense, and were even tempting for a paragon.

Jack

Jack is a crazy biotic berzerker that we have to break out of prison. There’s nothing really wrong with her character design[6], but I’m usually really uncomfortable with Jack. It feels like I should be taking her to therapy, not on dangerous missions. She’s certainly not someone I’d choose for an important mission where people need to work together. And given that Cerberus tortured her as a child with their shitty science, she’s the last person in the world I’d choose for a Cerberus team.

Recruiting a powerful and psychotic Cerberus victim to work for Cerberus is beyond stupid. Is she really the only badass biotic in the galaxy[7]? Why would we go to so much trouble to recruit someone with such a massive grudge against our organization, when there are presumably less destructive options available?

There are two ways of looking at this:

1. This is deliberate on the part of the writer. Yes, recruiting Jack is a dumb idea. This is on purpose, to highlight the staggering incompetence and shortsightedness of Cerberus. This is followed up by her loyalty mission, which underscores that on top of their incompetence they are also manifestly evil. And not charming evil like Darth Vader choking a dude for overcooking his hot pocket. More like disturbing “Nazi war crimes” evil. Of course, this just shows how preposterous and inappropriate it is to force the player to work with them. Therefore, the writer is incompetent.
   
   
   
2. This is unintentional on the part of the writer. They couldn’t keep track of what Cerberus was from one scene to the next and didn’t realize that the idea of Jack being a Cerberus victim was totally at odds with her being on the recruitment list.Therefore, the writer is incompetent.

(I imagine the actual reason for this problem is “these two parts of the game were written by different people”. So it’s not really the work of one incompetent person, but the work of two different people who weren’t cooperating. Regardless of the cause, this is still a glaring problem with the story. Someone, somewhere along the line dropped the ball.)

But whatever. If all we’re trying to do is fill out the roster with colorful personalities and we don’t care if anything makes sense, then she gets the job done.

Her loyalty mission is what really sells the character for me. You take her back to the Cerberus lab where they killed and tortured children in their attempts to make a better biotic. They subjected young Jack to constant agonizing pain and narcotics in an attempt to supercharge her biotics. Then to test their work, they put her in fights with other children. Fights to the death.

It’s a ruin now, but for her it’s filled with the only kind of monsters capable of scaring her, which are the ones that come from inside her. It’s a dark, gut-wrenching process of watching her face her demons and struggle to find some closure in it all.

If the writer wanted to make Cerberus the least bit interesting they could have demonstrated that the scientists were actually onto something. If the audio logs showed a team gradually drawn down this dark road by the results of their study and against their better judgement, then this might make a sort of “ends justifying the means” thought experiment. This could then tie into TIM and Cerberus by asking the question, “How far would you go to save the entire human race?”

But no. The scientists are idiots and their research consists of coming up with new ways to torture children. They’re a bunch of amoral jackasses and in the end they’re killed by their own experiment. Given what we see in the game, they were wrong from the start and Jack would have been a powerful biotic no matter what kind of upbringing she had. In which case they took a powerful and gifted human being and wasted her talents by turning her into a monster.

It’s powerful and interesting, but it also drives home the point that Cerberus is a circus of stupidity and evil, and it makes no sense to be working for them. It’s one of the best moments of the game, and it makes the main plot look that much more idiotic in the process.

Jacob

It’s a running joke on this site that nobody likes Jacob, like he’s some kind of pathetic Charlie Brown figure. Nobody remembers he exists, nobody ever goes into the armory, he never goes on missions, etc.

But jokes at his expense aside, I think Jacob serves an important role in the story, which is to provide contrast to the others. He’s the Aquaman of this game: His only real sin is that he’s not as cool as everyone else. He’s replacing the shared role of Kaiden and Ashley, who roughly represented the viewpoints of rank-and-file humans in general and Alliance personnel in particular. At the risk of getting myself branded as an Ashley Williams style space-racist, hanging out with Jacob in Mass Effect 2 is like going to the zoo to see a labrador retriever. Those are cool dogs, but that’s not why you go to the zoo. In the same way, we’re here to meet crazy aliens, and it’s unavoidable that Jacob will look a little bland in contrast.

The other important thing he does for the story is to give us the face of the only sane man working for Cerberus. TIM is batshit crazy, Miranda is an arrogant elitist, Yeoman Kelly is a manic freak, and basically everyone else was killed by lab experiments run amok. Without Jacob, the writer wouldn’t even have the fig-leaf excuse of, “Maybe Cerberus isn’t as crazy as you’ve heard.”

His backstory of “I left the Alliance to work for Cerberus because the Alliance couldn’t get things done” is desperately in need of details. He throws that line out and we’re supposed to just accept it as a hand-wave of all the horrible things we’ve heard (and maybe personally witnessed) regarding Cerberus so far, and a single line of dialog just isn’t enough to sell this. Jacob could have been used to give us a sort of, “There are two sides to every story” vibe. Maybe he could talk about some Cerberus ops that accomplished good things? Talk about the people he’s helped? Talk about some horrible event that resulted from Alliance indifference[8]? But no.

In Mass Effect 1, Wrex has a personal story that builds up Saren as a powerful and scary guy, and another very personal story that explains how the genophage is destroying his people. Garrus has a story about a particularly nasty criminal that got away, and later we can help Garrus hunt him down. This allows us to experience his frustrations with C-sec instead of just taking his word for it that they’re sometimes ineffectual. Kaiden has a story of abuse at the hands of a Turian that fills in some details of our war with them. Liara has stories that show how much Saren had twisted her mother. Tali tells the story of the Geth and the Quarians.

The point is, these aren’t just personal stories; they also double as foundational elements of worldbuilding. They add detail to the world of Mass Effect 1. In contrast, Jacob’s story is just a story about Jacob, and it blows a vital opportunity to give us a viewpoint where it might seem reasonable to work for Cerberus. The writer passed on the perfect opportunity for some remedial worldbuilding to prop up a shaky premise and motivate a belligerent player.

This is not the last time they will make that mistake.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

What I think sums up ME's problems best was the claim during the development of the first game that they had the whole series planned out. "Oh yeah", they said in interviews, "there are documents with plot points of the next two games waiting in the wings." After ME3 3 was released one of the team members mentioned in a retrospective that at the time of the first game they had all of two paragraphs for ME 2, and a sentence and a half for the third title. No wonder the reasoning for the Reapers and the logistics of the fight against them are so bonkers. They wrote themselves into a corner in the first game.


Kinda reminds me of how the behind-the-scenes uber dill weeds The Four in the comic series Planetary were continuously built up. Then the writers had to scramble to explain how Elijah Snow and crew wouldn't get smeared across a windshield when they came into conflict.

 

[Beastro]

What I think sums up ME's problems best was the claim during the development of the first game that they had the whole series planned out. "Oh yeah", they said in interviews, "there are documents with plot points of the next two games waiting in the wings." After ME3 3 was released one of the team members mentioned in a retrospective that at the time of the first game they had all of two paragraphs for ME 2, and a sentence and a half for the third title. No wonder the reasoning for the Reapers and the logistics of the fight against them are so bonkers. They wrote themselves into a corner in the first game.

Lost Syndrome.

 

[Ebonsword]

Jack is a crazy biotic berzerker that we have to break out of prison. There’s nothing really wrong with her character design[6], but I’m usually really uncomfortable with Jack. It feels like I should be taking her to therapy, not on dangerous missions.

What always annoyed me about Jack is that, when you meet her, she takes out two of those huge robots by herself in about five seconds.

But good luck trying to replicate that feat once she's actually in your party.

 

[Lhynn]

What always annoyed me about Jack is that, when you meet her, she takes out two of those huge robots by herself in about five seconds.

But good luck trying to replicate that feat once she's actually in your party.

Jrpg storytelling at its finest.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 19: The Importance of Peasants

Before we resume talking about our new squad-mates, let’s back up and talk about the one that joined us at the start of the game:

Miranda

Miranda is a disaster of conflicting purposes. We’re supposed to believe that this lady is a brilliant medical researcher, and a badass merc, and a super-biotic, and the leader of the research project that CURED DEATH, and a natural team leader, and she barely looks thirty. Even Wesley Crusher wasn’t that big of a miracle child. And then on top of this she’s got this ongoing sob story about growing up fabulously rich and having high expectations placed on her. So on top of her amazing abilities and her insufferable smugness, she’s got this horrible case of daddy issues and first-world problems.

And then she has the nerve to be an asshole towards Jack, who was literally tortured as a child by Cerberus. The moment Jack gets on the ship, Miranda starts antagonizing her in the most childish, highschool-drama-bullshit kind of way. If Miranda is so smart, then why would she support the idea of recruiting an unstable psycho killer for a serious mission? And even if we buy that, how stupid and childish is it to deliberately provoke and taunt her like this? If Miranda is such an awesome leader, then why is she doing the thing most likely to make Jack freak out and cause problems? (And it does indeed cause problems later.)

This would be fine, in a “drama resulting from different viewpoints” kind of way, but you can’t call her out on her bullshit. Like Jacob, she trusts Cerberus and thinks they’re okay despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but she never discusses why. She doesn’t have to defend Cerberus because the writer doesn’t allow you to challenge her on Cerberus. Technically that’s the writer’s fault, not hers, but the problem arises when the player is talking to her and so she ends up taking the blame for Shepard’s neutered dialog wheel.

If I could have shoved Miranda out of the airlock, I would have done so. She was the PR rep for the entire premise of, “I’m not working for Cerberus but actually I am and they’re not evil except obviously they are.” On top of all her other problems, she was the embodiment of the most frustrating bit of railroading in the game.

I could accept her as a miracle child of super-talent, or I could accept her as a tragic story of someone who can never live up to their perceived potential, but these two angles are kind of at odds and the writer should have settled on one or the other. We can’t be in awe of her and pity her at the same time, and certainly not while she’s so unpleasant to everyone around her.

Okay, maybe I’m being unfair. I’m sure with enough depth and nuance you could explore both of these aspects of her character. But the whole thing is ridiculously undercut by the fact that the director stuffs the camera halfway up her ass when we try to talk to her.

Miranda keeps saying, “Take me seriously!” but I can’t hear her over the cinematographer screaming “WILL YOU LOOK AT THE HOT ASS ON THIS CHICK? 10/10. TOTALLY WOULD BANG.” Conversations with her are this quadruple-frustration between her own smug antagonism, the trickster dialog wheel that keeps making you say stupid shit, the constant cheerleading for Cerberus in the face of the overwhelming evidence that they’re incompetent and evil, and the pervert cameraman behaving like a 14 year old boy.

Maybe I’d like this character design if it was given a proper chance in another game. Maybe Miranda’s problem isn’t Miranda. Maybe her problem isn’t her father, her gifts, or her ludicrous provocation of Jack. Maybe her problem is that the author expected us to take her more seriously than he did.

Kasumi and Zaeed

I can’t comment on Kasumi, since I never had her on my team. I tried to buy her DLC when doing this write-up, but you can only get it through Origin[1] and you can’t get her for money. Like I said on Twitter:



The fact that EA is helmed by idiots who don’t understand twenty-first century commerce is not my fault. I’d rather include her in this commentary, but I have better things to do than jump through a bunch of hoops to waste my money on some lame tenth-generation copy of “Microsoft points”.

The same goes for Zaeed. He’s supposedly “free” with the digital version, but I’ve logged into “Cerberus Network”, the BioWare Store, Origin, AND the EA Store looking for answers, and their help pages all link to old answers for stuff that changed years ago. I should supposedly have him, but he never shows up and I don’t know which one of these half-dozen barely-connected systems is responsible for this lapse in DLC delivery. We could blow a few thousand words on how abominable Origin is compared to Steam and how it seems like EA still doesn’t grasp the fundamentals of “Digital sales are about convenience”, but that would drag us away from the game at hand.

Disclosure: About a month after writing this, I took another crack at buying DLC and managed to get The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3. It wasn’t as big a headache as it looks like it’s going to be when you start the process, and I didn’t end up with money tied up in useless BioWare Points. On the other hand it was still confusing, obtuse, and odd in several different ways. Also, they need to lower their prices. All DLC is still launch-day prices, which is absurd. In any case, EA really needs to look at what their larger, more powerful, more profitable, more market-dominating rival is up to.

Maybe Kasumi and Zaeed are just so gosh-darn wonderful that they redeem the whole game, but I doubt it. We’ll have to go on without them.

Grunt

I like the switchup the game does here. You’re sent to retrieve Dr. Okeer, a Krogan scientist. But then there’s a plot twist, Okeer dies, and instead you end up with Grunt, his vat-grown adolescent Krogan super-soldier science project.

Grunt is a fine character. His loyalty mission sends you to the Krogan homeworld and gives you a look at his culture. It also gives you a chance to catch up with Wrex, assuming you didn’t play Mass Effect 1 wrong. But Grunt is also a little thin on characterization. He’s sort of a newborn, so he doesn’t have any personal anecdotes or opinions on galactic culture, technology, or politics. He does pretty much what it says on the tin, and I don’t have a lot to say about him. In a game where the roster features 12 potential companions, he feels kind of superfluous. There’s nothing wrong with him, but anyone who isn’t in your list of top two companions is going to spend most of their time on the ship, and I’ve never seen Grunt make anyone’s list of favorites.

So rather than talking about Grunt, let’s talk about this shift in focus from “worldbuilding” to “character building”.

The Importance of Peasants

In Mass Effect 1, there were four main worlds to visit on your quest, plus the Citadel and Iilos. Aside from Therum, they all had a certain degree of universe-building going on. There were people to meet who weren’t directly related to your main goal. You’d run into regular people who would tell you stories that would help you understand how this world worked.

Something like:

John Q. Peasant:
At first the plague seemed like a lucky break. Before that, the only place that would hire Humans was the refueling station, and that's hazardous work. But then the plague hit and suddenly there were lots of jobs open and everyone wanted to hire me because I'm immune."

(Looks down, rubs hand on back of neck awkwardly.)

But now? Nobody's coming to the station these days, and my Turian buddies won't visit me anymore. They won't even talk to me. I dunno. This job won't do me much good if the whole colony dies out. I wish things could go back to the way they were.

And then maybe he’d ask you to grab [some bullshit item] from [place where you’re already going] for him. When the quest was done, he’d give you a picture of how life on the station has changed because of your actions, or what people think of it.

The point of the quest wasn’t to get you to fetch the quest item, the point was to give you a reason to talk to this peasant before and after your adventure. This would put your actions into a more local context. In just a few lines of dialog it gives you a sense of how the culture around here works, what daily life is like, and gives you a frame of reference for how Humans are doing compared to other races. Without these quests, you might assume everyone feels the same way about the council, or other races, or Spectres, or Shepard. These moments give us different viewpoints, which make the world seem larger and more complex. It puts a personal face on a tragedy and maybe even helps build a little emotional connection. The quest reward was just a little incentive to seek out other people to talk to.

But here in Mass Effect 2 they’ve sacrificed breadth for depth. The text blurb for the planet where you meet Okeer and Grunt sounds pretty interesting:

It’s supposedly this polluted, corrupt, crime-ridden landfill of a planet with 3.8 billion inhabitants. On top of all its other problems, it’s currently suffering from an internal power struggle.

If this had been Mass Effect 1, then we’d probably have started off this mission at some sort of civilian site, perhaps an outpost or village. We’d talk to the locals, and all the stuff from the text blurb above would be portrayed or hinted at. NPCs would also give their thoughts on the distant base that Okeer is running: What they thought of it, how its presence impacted their lives, how long it’s been running, and even hint at what we’ll find there. Perhaps they comment on how many mercs travel to the base, but very few return. Or perhaps someone will remark on how curious it is that the place is always receiving Krogan supplies, but they never see any Krogan going in. They might also remark on the planet in general and round things out with their thoughts on the Citadel or the Council races. Then we’d jump in the Mako, drive to the base, and then we’d have our shooty bits. Those early conversations would whet our curiosity, and then we’d get a nice payoff when we learn what’s really going on.

But none of that text blurb makes it into the game. None of it. Okeer’s base is a completely arbitrary maze of chest-high shootin’ walls with no indication that anyone lives there, works there, or does anything except shoot stuff. You do meet one Blue Suns Merc who gives enough exposition to explain that waves of Mercs are fighting waves of Krogan, but his exposition is a far cry from the stories you take part in at Zhu’s Hope.

He covers the basics, but there’s no worldbuilding, no culture, no flavor-text civilians, and nothing for you to learn or think about until you reach Okeer. From a worldbuilding standpoint, this mission is completely sterile.

I understand you don’t have infinite money, and if you increase the number of locations in the game then you have to cut something else. But while I can appreciate the financial realities that caused this, I can’t help but lament at the loss of depth and nuance. It’s one thing to hear about ExoGeni using humans as test subjects, but it’s another thing to see what this did to the lives of people at Zhu’s Hope. It’s one thing if the Codex tells you that the Rachni are scary space bugs, but it’s so much more potent to see how the Rachni ravage and terrify the research staff on Noveria.

In the struggle to show instead of tell, these flavor-text peasants are the key to making places memorable and building an emotional connection with the locations we visit. I’d go so far as to say they’re one of the key things that gives a game the “Classic BioWare” feel, and their absence is why so many old fans aren’t connecting with the newer titles.

There are a few “fetch quests” in Mass Effect 2, but the writer has apparently forgotten what they’re really for. If you run around Illium or the Citadel you can find a few people who need some object. Then you get the object and bring it to them for a reward. But they have no dialog wheel, no story, and nothing they say helps build up the world. It’s just a way to get credits and XP, which were never the point of these quests.

One exception is the Quarian accused of theft on the Citadel. That one quick exchange tells you how people feel about Quarians and how bureaucratic C-Sec can be. It’s this wonderful flash of conversation-based storytelling and worldbuilding, and this game needed a lot more of it.

The Mass Effect 1 style “villages” are a good place to sell the audience on an idea that’s hard to swallow. If you’re trying to convince the audience that anyone seriously believes that Cerberus is a “humans first” group and not a cabal of sadistic, moronic, mad-scientist terrorists, then this is the place to do it. Have a bunch of people that were abandoned by the Alliance because of some bureaucratic politicking, and Cerberus came to help them in some way. If you want to convince us that Shepard is “A hero, a bloody icon” after the events of Mass Effect 1, then have us bump into a fan on some backwater world who has heard of Shepard and wants an autograph. If you want to motivate us to go after the Collectors, then let us meet just one colony of people who are scared stupid, watching the skies furtively, and desperate for Shepard’s protection. Show their anger towards the Alliance, or their willingness to believe in anything – even Cerberus – if it will give them hope.

Yes, the world of Mass Effect 2 is larger than Mass Effect 1 in terms of raw square footage, but much of it feels so very empty, unfulfilling, and lacking in the kind of humanity that made the series special to begin with. And even when the spaces do engage in a little worldbuilding, they usually reaffirm what we already know from the last game[2], instead of attempting to sell us on the shaky premise of this one.

 

[Ninjerk]

It's amazing they actually made any money.

 

[pippin]

The Bioware Points have made me physically angry in the past. As it is shown, they've regulated the prices so you can't buy anything without spending more than 10 dollars.
Miranda's ass is worthy of admiration, though. Funny that Bioware has made some of the most objectifying models of modern rpgs. I've been checking the Art of Mass Effect book and most female models were very shapely and fit, and their clothes often help reveal their figures. Most of the descriptions for those designs are like "we tried to make her very sexy".

 

[Excidium II]

The Bioware Points have made me physically angry in the past. As it is shown, they've regulated the prices so you can't buy anything without spending more than 10 dollars.
Miranda's ass is worthy of admiration, though. Funny that Bioware has made some of the most objectifying models of modern rpgs. I've been checking the Art of Mass Effect book and most female models were very shapely and fit, and their clothes often help reveal their figures. Most of the descriptions for those designs are like "we tried to make her very sexy".

Except Bioware is an incloosive company so it can be justified as the sekshual liberashun of womyn.

 

[pippin]

Yeah, it was like those female artists who made lewd illustrations for League of Legends but it was ok because it's ok when women do it.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 20: Now Hiring for Unknown Position

We’re still playing Mass Effect 2. Still collecting team members. But let’s stop and talk about someone we’re not taking with us:

Liara

In Mass Effect 1, Liara was a shy, bookish, gentle, polite, socially awkward introvert who specialized in archaeology and geeked out over Prothean ruins. Then we bump into her here in Mass Effect 2 and she’s a tough-talking hard case with her own team of Asari commandos, and she runs some sort of cutthroat information business. That’s not “character growth”. That’s a complete re-write of her personality.

But even if we’re incredibly generous and pretend that this new Liara has simply been transformed by the events of the last two years, this character change feels completely unearned. In the last game she discovered a dire threat to the entire galaxy, killed her own mother, fought in several massive battles, and saved all of known space. It was a big deal and she had a little character growth in the process, but it was nothing compared to this jarring transformation that takes place entirely off-screen.

Worse, this change obliterated one of the most unique personalities in the game. The cast is packed with various flavors of badasses. We’ve got stoic, mercenary, philosophical, military, and berzerker badasses. Liara’s idealism and introversion made her unique. Her Prothean expertise and knowledge of history linked her to the overall plot of breaking a cycle that’s been repeating for longer than anyone knows. Now she’s just another swaggering biotic hardass with a gun.

And now we’re supposed to believe that not only does she have a completely new personality, but she’s changed to a completely unrelated career as an information broker? Somehow she’s even become “one of the best” information brokers on Illium, despite her ignoble background[1], lack of experience[2], lack of starting capital[3], limited time investment[4], and relative young age[5].

Sure, it’s “possible” for this change to have happened in some fan-imagined side-story, butthis is not how you handle characters in fiction. You don’t radically change their personality entirely off-screen, particularly not between works. Especially if it doesn’t even lead to some dramatic flashback, emotional payoff, or something else that serves the needs of the overall story. Especially not in a game that seems to be selling itself so hard on the characters.


Thane

Thane is a quiet, circumspect, philosophical assassin. He also highlights just how little sense it makes to run around the galaxy getting people to join a team to accomplish an unknown task. In reality, his recruitment conversation ought to go like this:

Thane: I would be honored to help you fight the collectors, Shepard. Who is my target?

Shepard: Pardon?

Thane: I’m assassin. I assume you need me to assassinate somebody?

Shepard: (Shrugs) Beats me. We have no idea what the collectors are like or how we’re going to stop them.

Thane: So why are you asking me to join you now?

Shepard: I dunno. The quest journal says to go get people to join. I figure it’ll all just work out somehow.

And Shepard is right. It does work out “somehow”. But unless your story is about having faith, or destiny, or fulfilling a prophesy, then this is not a good enough as a framework for player action.

You can have mystery elements in your story. The Consort on the Citadel has a soothsayer vibe about her. The Prothean visions in Mass Effect 1 were pretty fantastical. There was a terrified worker on Eden Prime that had a crazed hobo doomsayer thing going on. But those things weren’t our only source of guidance and motivation. They were things used to give our motivation emotional weight or give the dry technical stuff an air of mystery.

As people are always so eager to remind me, the writer can’t possibly explain and justify every possible action in the story. I agree. But when you have a plot element that intersects with player action, then you need to make sure it can survive them thinking about it. If the player stops to ask, “Why am I doing this and how does it advance my goal?” then there needs to be a good answer, and assuming you’re not doing something subversive and meta with player choice, that answer can’t be the author saying, “Trust me, it’ll make sense later.”

From Shepard’s perspective, it’s possible he might reach the Collector’s realm and find out what he really needs is a hundred engineers. Or a fleet. Or robots that can withstand extreme heat and radiation. Or a bunch of biotics. People even call the other end of the Omega-4 relay the “Collector Homeworld”. What would he have done if there was actually a planet of Collectors on the other end? Conquer it on foot with his 3-person squad? Shrug and apologize to the team and send everyone home?

“Oh geeze. What a waste of time gathering up all you people. Looks like I don’t need your help after all. Sorry! Let Joker know if we can drop you off somewhere.”

You spend a majority of the game rounding up people when you have no idea if their skills will be relevant or useful because you don’t know what the job entails. BioWare mostly got away with this because the characters we’re rounding up are so fun and interesting that we’re happy to have them on board, even if the in-universe explanation for this does not stand up to any level of scrutiny.

This is a game the writers have been playing throughout Mass Effect 2: Bullshit plots that don’t follow reason, but the audience goes along with it because we love the characters. It’s a trick that works right up until the end of the trilogy, when they take the characters away and all we’re left with is the last few threads of this quickly-unravelling world.

Samara

Samara is a fine concept for a character. Yes, “Fanatical Space Paladin” is extremely trope-ish, but this is BioWare we’re talking about. Tropes are in their DNA. Star Wars was assembled almost entirely from tropes, and it’s a beloved classic. Building atop tropes is not a sin[6].

Samara’s problem isn’t the character concept, it’s that nobody ever settled on a specific tone for her. Her character is pulled in several different directions as her super-serious demeanor is comically undermined by her towering heels and a neckline that goes down to her belly button.

Here’s a few of her concept sketches from the Mass Effect 2 art book. Click for the full view, it’s way to big to stick in the middle of an article:






I love the second row of drawings. (The ones showing her in profile.) I see those images and I think the artist behind Kurt’s Coil Suit must still be working at BioWare. And that makes me happy. Actually, all of the art books make me happy.

The limits of modern graphics mean that our game worlds are rarely as spectacular as the concept art. The Mass Effect art has much more of a “sci-fi novel cover” feel, which regrettably drifts towards mundane photorealism when realized in the game. This isn’t a Mass Effect problem. Look at the concept art for just about any AAA game and you’ll see the same thing. It’s just where the medium is at right now. I’m not complaining about the visuals of Mass Effect, I’m just saying the concept art is so amazing it makes me wish we could have graphics capable of looking like this.

Anyway, Samara is supposed to be ancient, serious, and matronly. Her delivery is sodeadpan serious. But her costume is pushing this character into a comical place that I don’t think the author intended. It’s like having the infamous Bat-nipples on the Christian Bale Batman. The writer and the costume designer weren’t on the same page. Or even in the same book. Or speaking the same language.

There are so many fantastic designs in the sketches above. I can’t believe they went with this one.

The Justicar code sounds like a terrible idea even before we get to the part where Samara might have to kill an honest cop in the name of “justice”. And then once they establish that she’s all about a rigid moral code, she agrees to join your crew not because of a moral or legal imperative, but because she’s so “honored” by your invitation to join the team, and without hearing much in the way of the details or goals of your cause. And she does this despite the fact that everyone else in the galaxy can somehow smell you’re with Cerberus, and Cerberus is infamously evil.

But Shamus, she swears to kill you if you do anything wrong. So it makes sense that she would join.

No, that gives her a contingency plan. It doesn’t even begin to explain why she would join you in the first place.

Maybe she’s joining to learn about Cerberus and planning to punish them!

Huh. That’s a really interesting dramatic twist. Too bad nobody thought to put it in the game. No matter how much head-canon we invent, it doesn’t change the fact that a paladin is joining a terrorist organization, and she doesn’t even bother to get a detailed explanation of what you’re going to be doing. (Which Shepard can’t give her, because he doesn’t know either.) Samara might indeed have a hidden reason for joining Cerberus. And if that reason was discussed, revealed, or hinted at in the game, then it would help form the series of motivations and actions that we could call a story.

These characters frequently do things that make no sense or don’t flow naturally from the events of the story. The fact that we can easily patch this hole with an off-the-cuff suggestion only highlights just how easy it would be to fix these problems.

Even setting all of that aside, it’s not really clear why TIM would choose her for the mission. Yes, she’s a badass. But I imagine there are a lot of phenomenal badasses in the galaxy. What additional benefit does a justicar bring to the table? Are we worried we might need someone to arrest the Collectors? Why would TIM expect her to join our team?

Samara is the quintessential Mass Effect 2 character: Someone we’re not sure how they could help with our ultimate goal, with a flimsy excuse for joining us, who probably has a silly costume[7] but who we like anyway because they’re interesting to talk to.



Morinth

Samara’s loyalty mission is amazing. Samara’s daughter is basically a psionic serial killer, luring her victims to her apartment with drugs and raw sex appeal so she can melt their brains. Morinth is powerful, crafty, and creepy as hell. Samara has been chasing her for ages, and asks Shepard to pose as bait in an attempt to trap her. It’s a suspense thriller where you track down the killer while nearly becoming their prey.

The quest takes place entirely in dialog with no combat whatsoever. It’s really easy for something like that to fall apart, particularly in an action-focused game like this. It’s one thing to ask your voice performers to deliver exposition explaining how the Cerberus lab burned down and killed all the kittens they were experimenting on, but it’s another thing to ask someone to go through a gut-wrenching two-minute character arc. You visit the mother of the latest victim and she has to go from desperate and lost, to angry, to grieving, to letting go in the hope of finding closure. The writer and actors were up for it, and the quest is able to stand on the strength of its writing and acting.

Morinth technically qualifies as a squad member, since you can betray Samara at the last minute and get Morinth as a replacement. I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing this. (And there really is no good in-character reason to chose Morinth.) But the option is there.

It’s tempting to sneer at the faults of Mass Effect 2 and complain that our smart, talky RPG was turned into a Big Dumb Shooter, but then something extraordinary like this pops up and shows that someone at BioWare still has their mojo.

Still, Samara’s character design is teetering on the brink of unintentional comedy. All you’d need to do is change her delivery a little to make her into a hilarious satire on the entire paladin archetype.

 

[Fairfax]

the quest is able to stand on the strength of its writing and acting.


It’s tempting to sneer at the faults of Mass Effect 2 and complain that our smart, talky RPG was turned into a Big Dumb Shooter, but then something extraordinary like this pops up and shows that someone at BioWare still has their mojo.

I'm surprised he finds Fallout 3 stupid. If Samara's quest is "amazing" and "extraordinary", Bethesda crap should be right up his alley.

 

[Lhynn]

Meh, it was forgettable, but its an interesting premise.