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Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

Lhynn

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IT doesn't make any sense. The whole game would be pointless if it was true.
Nope, actually would make the narrative much better. You'd have an overarching theme for the game, that would directly tie it to the first game. Youd suddenly make the second game have a point (because as it stands it has absolutely 0 reason to exist). And its cleverly introduced, with tons of clues and red herrings across the entire game. Like you cant deny most of that shit is intentional.

Nobody however explains that endings differ slightly depending on the level of assets you had throughout the game. How would the Crucible Child count and change the endings in Shepard's head?
The assets were gamey shit that had no real reason to be there other than anti piracy measure. Also works as biowarean C&C usually does. Arbitrary shit changing reality when it shouldnt have to. Like loyalty missions.
 

Xor

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Everything in ME3 points toward the indoctrination theory, except for all the stuff that doesn't which was put in by evil corporate overlords at EA or can be explained away by making shit up.
 

Mozg

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The thing about the IT stuff is that they obviously should have done it. They have two different quasi-sympathetic villains at the end of ME1 and ME3 where you have a "Don't you see you're being manipulated you foolish fool!" conversation with them. It's obviously something that they could have turned around on the PC and it would have been a great wrinkle to throw in at the ending. There are like ten different Star Trek episodes where the hero of the episode realizes he's in a manipulative sci-fi dream. I don't think they ever intended to do it in the slightest. Bioware just tunnel visioned past it. They're really that shitty.
 
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I don't think they ever intended to do it in the slightest.
No, it was actually planned during the concept stage at one point but they scrapped it. Source. It's a shame, they could have gotten some nice George Lucas style poetry in there. I think it's rather obvious why they didn't use that idea, considering how the series kept trying to jerk off the player harder and harder with each game.
 

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The penultimate chapter...

Mass Effect Retrospective 49: Star Child
splash800_takebackearth.jpg


Shepard rides an elevator up to the Crucible. I have no idea why a control panel has an elevator that lifts you up to the exterior of the Citadel. I don’t know how you survive there with no helmet. I suspect that the answer both questions is that the writer simply wanted you to be someplace fantastical when you meet…

The Star Child


me3_end1.jpg



So the personification of the Reapers is a ghost hologram of a ten year old boy. This is the best idea in this entire scene. Which is a shame, because it’s still a terrible idea.

Star Child introduces himself and explains that he controls the Reapers. He explains that his job is to command this fleet of machine gods to kill all spacefaring organics every 50,000 years. He does this because advanced organic species inevitably build robots, and those robots will inevitably wipe out the organics. So that’s why this kid has his robots kill everyone. To prevent this.

This is the explanation behind the Reapers. For real.

The rumor is that this idea was devised very late in development by two people, and that the concept didn’t go through the normal peer-review process. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I want to believe it. I want to believe talented people were backed into a corner, made a few bad calls under pressure, and wound up making a huge mistake. I want to believe this because the alternative is that somebody out there really thought this would make for a good story.



me3_end2.jpg



It’s easy to believe this idea came together at the last minute, because the rest of the game – if not the series as a whole – contradicts it. Just a few hours ago we saw the end to the Geth vs. Quarian conflict. The backstory showed that the Quarians were always the aggressors in that fight, and that the Geth were always willing – perhaps even eager – to make peace. The Geth are possibly the least warmongering race in the galaxy. They left everyone else alone for hundreds for years, and it wasn’t until the Reapers themselves showed up that they turned hostile.

Let me say that again: The Reapers are here to kill us because they’re afraid synthetics will kill us, but the Geth were peaceful until they fell under the influence of the Reapers. Not only are the Reapers not the solution to the problem, they are actually the only apparent cause of it. Sure, you can argue that the Geth were an exception and that sooner or later you’ll get machine genocide. But then you just have an ending premise that’s telling you to ignore what you’ve been shown. The end of a story is supposed to be the payoff for the stuff that came before, not an abrupt re-write.

On a more personal level, EDI can build some sort of awkward romance with Joker. She was basically an AI slave made from Reaper Tech and developed by Cerberus, the worst people ever. And yet when her AI shackles were lifted she fell into trope-y computer love with her human friend and repeatedly risked her life to save her friends and defeat the Reapers. Her parts were bad, her creators were bad, but she is virtuous. Again, the only AI that seems to be a threat to organics are the ones designed to save organics from AI.

It’s Too Late to Change Premise


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Sure, the Geth were occasionally antagonists. But they have also been allies. Sure, their conflict with the Quarians is an important part of this universe, but so is the Genophage, the Rachni, the Krogan rebellions, and all of the other historical events that shaped this galaxy. And in terms on impact and reach, the Geth have actually been pretty minor compared to the others. Now suddenly this B plot is being lifted above all the other B plots and made the center of the story.

So the big reveal at the end is a premise that comes completely out of nowhere, wasn’t part of the themes of the game, and isn’t just unsupported but repeatedly contradicted by the events of the story.

Even if we want to hand-wave these problems, you can’t just drop a new premise into the last minutes of a story and expect it to work. The audience has been anticipating the resolution to the Reaper conflict, and now that’s being superseded by a new premise that hasn’t been established. It’s like Frodo reaching the slopes of Mt. Doom and suddenly some completely new character emerges and says that The One Ring doesn’t really matter, because the really important conflict is deciding what to do about wizards in this world. It’s like Luke getting to Palpatine’s throne room and learning this whole Death Star thing is a distraction from the real problem, which is that we need to decide what to do about droids. It’s like Kirk reaching V’Ger and the space god says they need to hammer out what they’re going to do about Klingons.

This new concept has no momentum in the hearts of the audience. The audience has invested nothing in it and they’re not curious about it. People complain that the Star Child makes no sense – and it’s true, he really doesn’t – but no matter how much exposition you add, you can’t make this ending work as a proper conclusion to what came before. Because even if it made sense, we still wouldn’t care.

You can argue with the Star Child, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. You have to accept this broken premise or turn the game off. There are a lot of things wrong with this ending, but I feel like most of them are obvious and have been covered in such exhaustive detail that it wouldn’t really add anything if I tried to recount them all here. The point is that the story is fundamentally broken at this point. It’s not just that the ending isn’t good, it’s that this is no longer an ending for a science fiction story.

Twilight, by Shamus Young


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So the first two Twilight books are out and the series is a pretty big hit. Stephenie Meyer can’t write the sequels, so she’s outsourced the job to me. I’m given the job of writing two more books that will complete the story. I don’t know why she hired me. She just did.

I don’t know anything about writing teen romance. I don’t like it, I don’t read it, and it actually kind of gets on my nerves. But now I have to write one.

So… plot twist! It turns out that leading man Edward is also a retired Witch Hunter. They weren’t mentioned in any of the previous books, but there’s this nasty coven of super-powerful witches who are a threat to all vampires. No… the Earth! So Edward has to get his sword out of mothballs (he never told Bella about his old job because he didn’t want her to worry) and hunt down all these witches.

What follows are hundreds of pages of Ed killing witches in brutal, high-energy fight scenes. Ed gets a costume with a black cape and maybe a gun-sword or a shuriken-crossbow or somesuch. The books are all about fighting these witches and how dangerous they are to the world.

Every few hundred pages I have to stop and give some lip service to this whole “teen romance” thing. But I don’t know how to write teen romance. So the Bella / Edward romance never progresses beyond the point where Meyer handed it over to me. Their conversations repeat the same themes every time and they have the same arguments. They fight and make up, always talking about how everything will be okay once this witch-hunting thing is over.

Then, at the end of the last book, I finally have Ed kill the witch-queen and save the world. Great, now I just need to wrap up this romance bullshit and we can call it done.



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I still don’t know how to build a proper teen romance, but I’m familiar with the tropes of the form. I’ve seen some romantic comedies and I think I basically get the idea. Let’s see…

Bella and Edward seem doomed to break up. He meets her at a train station in the rain. (Fans: WTF is this writer doing? This town doesn’t have a train station!) They talk and stop fighting and profess their love for each other (What about Jacob, did you forget about him???) and agree to move in together. (What about Edward insisting on getting married!?!) The sun comes out (Aren’t they in a public place? He sparkles in direct sunlight! Did you even READ the original, you asshole!?!) and they decide to move to New York (Edward would never!) and he can help her start her career as a painter. (WHAT the SHIT?!?)

If you didn’t know or care about Twilight, you probably wouldn’t see anything wrong with this scene. I mean, isn’t this how they’re supposed to end? A relationship solidifies, our leads kiss, we get some symbolic happy scenery, and they discuss how they’ll spend their Happily Ever After. It’s sappy love story horseshit. Isn’t that what the fans want? You’re probably happy to read a story that was 80% badass witch-hunting and only 20% of this stuff.

But while I’ve copied the superficial trappings of a romance story, I’ve totally failed to make one myself. This is not a proper ending to the Twilight saga. It’s not even a proper ending to my witch-hunting books. It’s just a fake ending devised by a someone who didn’t understand the form he was trying to mimic and didn’t respect the source material he was working with.

This is what happened to Mass Effect.

I See What You’re TRYING to do, But…


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You can see it in the way the the Reaper plot didn’t move forward in the second game. At the end of the first game, Shepard was going to “find a way” to beat the Reapers. At the end of the second game, he was still stuck at that point. And in the third game, other people handed him a way to beat the Reapers with no build-up. From the closing credits of Mass Effect 1 to the moment Shepard met the Star Child, his quest for knowledge never actually went anywhere. This writer didn’t want to write about Reapers any more than I want to write about sparkly vampires, so they had you recruiting friends, fighting bugmen, and fighting a war against Cerberus.

The Cerberus storyline did not fit with anything the first game set out to do. The focus on Cerberus was wrong. The focus on Shepard being a hero was ill-fitting. The focus on Earth and humanity was disappointing and lacking in vision. Making all the aliens into inert spectators was frustrating. Solving the Reaper problem with a machine we don’t understand was wrong. Making the Reapers into trash-talking space monsters was shockingly wrong. Kai Leng was wrong, and then some.

The ending to Mass Effect 3 sort of superficially resembles a classic sci-fi story: You’re in a fantastical place, with a space battle in the background. You’re talking to a mysterious alien made of pure light, who is talking about a mystery that spans millions of years. If you squint, maybe you can see fragments of sci-fi classics floating around in this soup of nonsense. It’s got a space battle like Return of the Jedi. It has a glowing super-being shaped after a deceased character as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There’s some bizarre mystery and obtuse messages like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it doesn’t actually come together to say anything. Making an incomprehensible ending does not make you Stanley Kubrick. Having exposition delivered by an immortal machine does not make you Gene Roddenberry.



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This author[1] was wrong for this material. They either didn’t understand or didn’t care about this universe or this style of story. Like turning Twilight into a series about killing witches, they turned Mass Effect’s space mystery about how to defeat the machine gods into space marine action schlock where you fight Cerberus. Like copying random romance tropes to wrap up my story, the writer resolved the Reaper plot mostly off-screen with a magic Reaper-killing device and then gave us a final dialog of random tropes that sound vaguely profound but don’t have anything to do with what came before.

Mass Effect 1 was not designed to tell the story the Mass Effect 3 writer wanted to tell, and they basically broke the universe trying to make it fit. It’s entirely possible that if the Mass Effect 3 writer had been in control from the start, we could have enjoyed a single coherent story about a badass space marine who saves the galaxy from space-Hydra. You could tell a good story about Cerberus, but you can’t do it properly using Mass Effect 1 as a starting point.

This is also why the Mass Effect series is so contentious. Edward Cullen, Witch Hunter would probably be a more popular story than Twilight. To be totally honest, I’d rather read that than the real Twilight books. And so there would always be this rift in the fanbase: The people who wanted their love story, and the people who showed up later when the series “got good”. The story changed audiences. But not in an honest, deliberate, structured way, but in a way that hijacks the story to serve the new audience[2] while paying insincere – almostcondescending – lip service to the old.



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After I was done ruining the Twilight books, fans of the series could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they have lots of other options. While it’s always frustrating to have a series you enjoy take a bad turn, teen romance novels are plentiful. But big idea, story-driven, character-rich science-fiction videogames? We don’t get many. Even four years later, the community is still sore about this, because there’s nowhere else to go. There’s no alternative series to play Pepsi to Mass Effect’s Coke. There’s just lingering disappointment and the sad hope that maybe the Classic BioWare writing staff will magically reconstitute and grant us another science fiction game.

It’s been a long series (novel-sized, actually) but we’re finally going to conclude it next week. I’ve already written a big part of the next one. It’s a surprise. For now I just want to gently remind people that I’ve got a Patreon if you’d like to support my efforts to create more of this kind of content.
 
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What I really enjoy about ME3's ending is when you tell fans that 'preventing killing people problem by killing people' kind of logic is stupid, they immediately start arguing that 'Reapers don't really kill anyone, they harvest' :lol: I am a little bit surprised that Shamus didn't address this idiocy.
 

Bumvelcrow

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In the final episode Shamus either films himself exploding violently and scattering blood and entrails across the camera or reveals he was indeed the writer for ME1 and this is all Cleve/Smart-level butthurt and vendetta. I'd prefer the latter as it'll set things up perfectly for his kickstarter, 'Gravity Consequences', with added vampires.

Actually, if the last episode was just 'Fuck Bioware' in the middle of the page I'd still feel I'd got my money's worth.
 

oldmanpaco

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The best analogy for the writing he could come up with involved Twilight? I wonder if that's more about ME3 or Shamus?


For now I just want to gently remind people

You know who says "gently remind"? SJWs and spectacular faggots. Jesus man, I've been triggered.
 
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InD_ImaginE

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Shamus is really good at this thing though. I would really want him to actually start making retrospective about another RPG/RPG series.
 

Infinitron

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Bumvelcrow Lhynn oldmanpaco



Mass Effect Retrospective 50: The Final Affrontier
splash800_takebackearth.jpg


Now that the Star Child has explained his nonsensical purpose of solving a problem by perpetrating the same problem on an even grander scale, he asks Shepard to pick a new solution from three available choices. I don’t know why. Even if we accept the idea that mass cyclic genocide is an appropriate solution to the allegedly inevitable conflict between synthetics and organics, Shepard has done nothing to suggest he’s worthy or knowledgeable enough to participate in this decision. To the Star Child, he’s just a wounded meatbag soldier that crawled in here.

Also: All of the three solutions result in Shepard’s death.

If the Star Child really believes that his solution is no longer working and that he needs a new one, and if he really believes that Shepard is the guy to make this decision, then why do the Reapers continue to press the attack? Why not stop the assault while Shepard mulls it over? Why doesn’t Shepard ask for more time, or if he can use one of his lifelines to call a friend? Arrogantly making unilateral life-and-death decisions on behalf of the galaxy is what the Reapers stand for, not Shepard.

The Star Child has no good reason to be killing organics. But if we pretend he does, then he has no reason to think that Shepard showing up should change that reasoning. But even if he did, there’s no reason to think that Shepard should be the one to decide on a new solution. But if he was, then shouldn’t he come up with a solution on his own, instead of picking from A, B, or C? But even if it makes sense for the Star Child to provide the choices, there’s no given reason to constrain the choices to these particular three things[1]. But even if that made sense, there’s no reason Shepard needs to kill himself to make these choices happen. And even if that were true, there’s no reason for Shepard to believe that any of these things are true.

Sure, you can come up with your own justifications for a few of these. You can extrapolate if you want. Maybe if you glue on enough fan-fiction you can get through this scene. But this is the big reveal at the end. The writer tied the whole universe in knots to to make this moment happen, and the big reveal at the end is actually a fill-in-the-blanks homework project. The whole thing is just so nakedly arbitrary.



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If you’re still playing and haven’t shut the game off in confusion or frustration, then the Star Child presents Shepard with three choices:

  1. Destroy all synthetic life. This includes the Reapers, the Geth, EDI, and Shepard himself, since he’s part machine. (And then I guess everyone needs to make a pinky promise to never build any more? How is this enforced?) If Shepard chooses this, he does so by walking up to a RED thingy and shooting it over and over until it explodes in his face, even though it’s not clear why he thinks that shooting this small device would kill all robots, and it’s really not clear why Shepard needed to stand beside it while it was blowing up.
  2. Control the Reapers. Shepard can dissolve himself into the machine. He’ll die, but his mind will live on, guiding the Reapers. (TIM was right all along! LOLOL!) Shepard has to grab onto a BLUE thingy that does the dissolving.
  3. Merge all organic and synthetic life. (Somehow. I guess robots will just randomly sprout some meat?) Shepard jumps into a GREEN beam that evidently disintegrates him.
Note that the Star Child still has all the power here. There’s no reason the Reapers couldn’t fly over here and blow up the Crucible. Star Child is letting Shepard win. And not because of anything Shepard has done. (Aside from show up.)

After Shepard makes this choice, the Citadel explodes in an energy cloud of the chosen color. This cloud touches the nearby mass relay, which also explodes, and sets off a chain reaction that eventually detonates all mass relays. These expanding energy waves magically accomplish whatever Shepard chose: Either all robots are obliterated from the galaxy, all robots are placed under the direct control of the now-disembodied intelligence of Commander Shepard, or all robots and organics are somehow blended or merged or whatever.

The Death of Agency


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Outside of the Genophage and Rannoch missions, Shepard has no power to make decisions. The game is linear and Shepard is simply dragged from one mission to the next, and the only power he has is to shoot people and choose teammates.

Like I said way back in part 35: Shepard had nothing to do with the Crucible. He didn’t find the ruins, uncover the plans, decipher them, or decide to use them. He didn’t build the Crucible. He didn’t know what it was for or what it would do. The entire plot turns on this thing, and it’s completely out of his hands aside from pushing the “On” button. He didn’t uncover the big mystery that made this possible. He didn’t get the answers and then confront the villain empowered by that knowledge. He just showed up and it was given to him by the only character with agency: The villain. Here at the end, all of his choices are described and constrained by a malevolent enemy whom he has no reason to trust.

And since all of the choices kill him, he really should be skeptical that the Star Child is going to be true to his word after Shepard obligingly kills himself.

This is why the ending feels so patronizing: The writer is pretending to let Shepard have ALL THE POWER, but in reality Shepard has all the agency of a coin being flipped by someone trying to make a decision. The audience doesn’t feel powerful, they don’t feel informed, and nothing in the conversation feels like they have actually defeated the Star Child in any meaningful way.

In a tabletop setting, there’s a stigma to people who run games where victory is only possible via a superweapon that the players must collect. The GM can’t bear the thought of his awesome villain being defeated by those lame dirty players, so instead the story is about their awesome MacGuffin vs. their awesome villain. One of their creations defeats the other, and the players get to participate by fetching the weapon and escorting it to victory, which has the added benefit of putting the players in just the right location to act as an audience.

It’s an idea so selfish and shallow that I made it part of the story in my webcomic Chainmail Bikini, which was a tale of reluctant players being dragged through a cringe-worthy D&D campaign. And yet, despite the fact that I deliberately engineered that campaign to be horrible for the purposes of comedy, I actually think it’s less self-indulgent on the part of the game master than the story of Mass Effect 3. If the Chainmail Bikini players had ever bothered to gather up the super-weapons, at least they would have personally used them and understood how they worked.



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Shepard wins the game by activating a machine he didn’t discover or build, with no understanding of how it works or what it will do. He doesn’t even know a proper history of the device. And once he turns it on, the bad guy lets him win. Shepard is then offered a choice, but the bad guy controls the parameters of the choice. This is a literal Deus Ex Machina. A god shows up and solves your problem for you. The fact that the god in question is also the source of the problem makes this a story in which Shepard is nothing more than a spectator. The best Shepard can do is plead for information, which is all hackneyed nonsense.

Shepard never had control of this situation, never understood what was going on, and was only being allowed to make any decisions at all because of the unexplained magnanimity of the villain, who he must implicitly trust for any of this to work.

Even if the writer had untangled all the continuity errors, lore failures, character misfires, and dialog shenanigans, this would still be an unsatisfying way to conclude this particular story. The player was given an unearned victory, a dumb explanation for the Reapers, an illogical choice, an unsatisfying and meaningless death for their avatar, and a confusing after-death cutscene[2].

Having said that…

The End is Not the Problem



I love Mr. Btongue, the YouTube personality behind Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage, which is probably the best summary of the problems with the original ending. I love his work and I’m always hoping to see him start producing again. Even though he hasn’t made a video in a powerful long time, I wish he had a Patreon so I could throw some support his way for the awesome work he’s done in the past. I think his video on BioWare is some of the smartest stuff that’s been said about any of the companies that EA has gobbled up, and I’d be lying if I said his thoughts haven’t influenced my own ruminations on the business of making videogames over the years.

But I didn’t write this ponderous, self-important, overly verbose and barely proofread series on Mass Effect just to repeat what others have said. And if there’s one thing I’d disagree with in his videos it’s the idea that Mass Effect was great right up until the end.

The ending isn’t where the Mass Effect 3 writer faltered. The ending is where all of their ongoing, widespread, long-running failures finally came to a head. Failure to establish a theme. Failure to build up a proper villain. Failure to give the various factions ideas. Failure to characterize. Failure to construct a natural sequence of cause and effect. Failure to establish and adhere to the rules of the world.

The writer constantly wrote IOUs to the audience: This will all be explained later. It’ll make sense in retrospect. This is building up to a larger payoff. This is a setup for a later reveal.The writer never explicitly promised those things, mind you. We just sort of assumed those promises were being made. When the writer kills and resurrects the main character, re-writes major details of the world, radically changes the focus of the story, and imposes decisions of the player character that seem unreasonable or poorly justified, it’s natural to assume that it’s all in pursuit of some larger goal. Surely all these compromises now are in service of some satisfying payoff later, right? The writer wouldn’t bring us all this way for nothing, would they?



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Once Shepard steps into that beam, all those implied or inferred IOUs came due, and the writer had nothing for us. It’s natural then to say the ending failed us. But I think the story was doomed long before we meet the Star Child. When Mass Effect 2 wasted the second act on a side-plot, it kicked all the duties of a second act into the third. When The Arrival introduced huge ideas that couldn’t feed directly into the main plot because they were DLC, the writer tied their own hands with regards to what they could and couldn’t do in the third game. They couldn’t contradict The Arrival, but neither could they build on it. When the writer made Cerberus such a central element of Mass Effect 3, they created a foe that would devour screen time and clutter up an already-busy story. When the writer built the emotional core of the story around a child we neither knew or cared about, they tied their final confrontation to a character that was fundamentally uninteresting and thematically wrong. When they dropped a contrived and unexplained deus ex machina into the story to solve the Reaper problem, they made it so that Shepard would never be anything more than a witness to the ending, not an active participant in it.

By the time Shepard reaches the Citadel, the writer has painted themselves into a corner so small, no amount of writing skill or sci-fi savvy could have saved it. Sure, you could come up with a better reason for the Reapers or a less arbitrary final choice, but the story was already hopelessly broken beyond repair. The ending was doomed to come up short, because the rest of the story had destroyed the framework that would have made a satisfying conclusion possible.

Nothing Could Have Been Good Enough


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A common retort during the “Mass Effect 3 Ending Controversy / Temper-Tantrum of Doom” was that “after so much hype, nothing could have pleased fans”. As if to say: “The ending is fine, you just expected too much.” It’s an attempt to blame the audience for the failures of the writer.

If this series has done anything, I hope it’s destroyed this notion. Even if you loved Mass Effect 3, I hope you can at least see the game through the eyes of the fans who didn’t, and understand that for people who signed up for details-first, character-driven sci-fi drama, this ending was a failure on all counts.

Lord of the Rings concluded to everyone’s satisfaction. Return of the Jedi came amid a vortex of hype, and fans managed to love it anyway. Harry Potter captured the imagination of a culture for a decade, and there wasn’t a widespread backlash when the last book hit the stands. Properly concluding a series is not an impossible task. Other writers have done it. Fictional works have come and gone without enraging or alienating their fans.

You Just Wanted a Happy Ending


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This argument is tricky, because it’s technically true in some cases and it’s more a matter of degrees than anything else. But this goes back to my points about what people want from their fiction.

Generally speaking, an audience is probably looking for three key things at the end of a story:

Affirmation – Love conquers all, hope endures, freedom is worth fighting for, the truth will set you free, justice can’t be denied, etc. You save the little kid, the evil overlord is defeated, somebody gets married, everyone celebrates the hero, cupcakes and ice cream. Ex: Frodo drops the ring into Mt. Doom and Saruon is defeated forever.

Explanation – All questions answered. Making sure it all makes sense also falls under this category. Ex: How did Gandalf come back from the dead? What made the Witch King undefeatable? What happens to the Three Rings if the One is destroyed?

Closure – How did things turn out? Did the characters have a happy ending? Ex: Sam married Rose. Frodo and Bilbo went to the Havens. Aragorn was crowned king.

Yes, there’s quite a bit of overlap here. But you get the idea. Good guys win, questions answered, and character stories are fulfilled. Lord of the Rings does all three. Of course, you don’t have to do all three. In fact, in a gritty sci fi universe like Mass Effect, a mega-happy ending can feel forced or out of place. It’s perfectly valid to write a story where the good guys lose. (Empire Strikes Back, Se7en, Usual Suspects.) You can leave questions hanging. (What was in the unopened package in Cast Away? What was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction / Ronin?) You can drop characters without resolving their stories. (What happened to Sean Bean in Silent Hill?)



me3_end14.jpg



Mass Effect 3 didn’t deliver on Explanation, because the end was goofy vague science magic nonsense.

Mass Effect 3 missed on Closure, because the story ended with the Mass Effect relays being destroyed, the combined might of the galactic fleets in orbit around the now-ruined earth, and Shepard’s companions flying off, crashing somewhere, then taking off again. What happened? Was the earth saved? Did Shepard’s friends make it? Was the Citadel usable after this? What happened to the folks on the Normandy? Did they make it home okay? What happened to the Geth? Is the Star Child still around? Did anyone ever figure out what Shepard did, and do they understand it was Shepard’s decision? What happened to the galactic government without the relay network and Citadel to support it? Etc, etc, etc.

Some people just want happy endings, but other people are willing to go with a sad ending as long as it has something profound or clever to say. But if you are going to refuse the audience Explanation and Closure, then you’d better have some Affirmation for them. But Shepard is dead, the Earth is ruined, and the Star Child – king of the Reapers – seemed content with how things turned out. The bad guys weren’t defeated through cunning or strength. At best they let you win and at worst they won and got your hero to kill himself.

Which is to say, if the big reveal at the end had made some kind of sense, the sadness of the ending would have been less of a problem. If all that bullshit with Cerberus had led to some payoff or reveal, or if the Star Child had delivered a properly telegraphed mind-screw of a twist, or if the story had said something profound about the nature of life in the galaxy, then people would have been more accepting of having Shepard die.

The argument isn’t so much, “I want a happy ending” but “If you can’t give me anything else,at least you could give me a happy ending”. It’s much harder for the audience to zero in on complicated stuff like thematic failures or Schrödinger-style branching continuity holes, but everyone can latch onto the fact that it doesn’t feel like they won. Their avatar is dead, Earth is ruined, the mass relay system is ruined[3], and as far as we can tell the rest of the galaxy never even got the few meager answers that Shepard did.

The irony is that the original Mass Effect – the nerdy, talky, details-first game that began with the premise of space Cthulhu coming to devour all civilization – was a pretty good setup for a sad ending. Cthulhu stories don’t tend to end in sunshine and rainbows. They’re dark and grim and usually the protagonist simply forestalls evil at great cost to themselves.

But the later games embraced an action-movie vibe of visceral audience empowerment and cheap gratification. If you’re not going to offer anything more nourishing than sensory stimulation, then you’d better not mess with audience expectations. The later games promised us cheap thrills and then tried to be dark and profound and mysterious at the last minute, and the result comes off as insufferably pretentious.

Unsolicited Advice


bioware.jpg



I’d be very surprised if anyone at BioWare had the patience to sit through my long-winded complaining. While I have nothing personally against anyone involved in making these games, I don’t blame them if they don’t care to read this thing. I imagine it would be excruciating to spend years of your life building something only to have nearly every aspect of it criticized in exhaustive detail. If someone were to do the same to one of my large projects, I’d probably skip it just to avoid feeling depressed and angry.

But I feel like this series is incomplete without some sort of constructive advice. So I’ll offer some for whoever managed to make it this far.

We can’t see inside of BioWare or EA, and we don’t know what sort of decisions shaped the development of this franchise. But we can see the high writer turnover as people left the company or jumped to other projects within BioWare. Every single installment of Mass Effect had different lead writers. That might be acceptable if this was a series of games like Uncharted or Fallout, where each installment is supposedly a stand-alone story. But the Mass Effect Trilogy supposedly exists to tell a single overarching story, and that story is completely incoherent because the parts don’t fit together.

So if there’s one thing I wish I could impress on the suits at EA / BioWare it’s this:

Writers are not interchangeable.

Everyone realizes that voice actors aren’t interchangeable. In the same way, writers also have distinctive voices and treating them like generic script-writing machines can only lead to disaster. Pick a lead writer and stick with them. Even if your writers are are all literal geniuses, don’t shuffle them around in the middle of telling what is supposedly a single story. Pratchett and Tolkien were both masterful and inventive storytellers, but that doesn’t mean either one would have been a good fit for taking over a Vernor Vinge novel in progress.

I realize this advice is probably lost on EA, who have built an entire company culture around the wrongheaded idea that you can turn all videogames into assembly line products. The thinking seems to be that if it works for Madden, why can’t it work for all games?

Wrapping Up


me1_fineprint.jpg



So that’s everything I have to say about Mass Effect[4]. I’m glad the first game exists, I wish the latter ones had turned out differently, and I hope someone takes another stab at making some details-rich space opera Real Soon Now. I’m not going to comment on Mass Effect: Andromeda yet[5]. My hope is that this retrospective acts as a sort of denouement of the entire ending controversy and enables us to put the whole thing behind us. The complaints have been made, the mistakes have been cataloged, and the advice has been offered. There’s nothing to do now but try to remember the good, forget the bad, and hope for something better next year.

Thanks for reading.

– Shamus Young
 
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Bumvelcrow

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Strap Yourselves In
There’s nothing to do now but try to remember the good, forget the bad, and hope for something better next year.
Fool me twice, shame on me. Would I buy ME:A after this? Probably not, even if it wasn't from EA. But I would like my details-rich space opera REAL SOON NOW. :mad:
 

Ippolit

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RPG Wokedex Bubbles In Memoria Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
caption on Shamus' site said:
I AM A VAST INTELLIGENCE BASED ON THE KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE EXPERIENCE OF COMMANDER SHEPARD. I HAVE DETERMINED THAT ALL GALACTIC PROBLEMS CAN BE SOLVED BY SHOOTING THINGS FROM BEHIND COVER.

:lol:

So long, and thanks for all the Hanar.

:salute: ...... :oops:

Thanks for promoting this series, Codex, learned a lot.



"pulling an Avellone" :D
 

oldmanpaco

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I've long held the opinion that ME2 was worse than ME3. It might be because I went through that game twice (BIOWARE DARK SIDE!) just to prove to myself that it was shit. When I demoed ME3 (DA2 is the last bio game I bought) I think I went through it with such low expectations that all the stupidness just kind of bounced off. I guess the drop-off from ME1 to ME2 was so significant that whatever happened in ME3 it didn't really matter. But my god seeing all the plot laid out before me makes me realize the difference. ME2 was a pointless piece of shit which signified BW giving up on RPGs but ME3 is just gut-wrenchingly stupid.

Also I do remember being so bored with the ending that I only killed the reapers and didn't even bother to reload to see what would happen if I choose differently. I just had to finish it.

When ME:A is released it will have been 10 years since BW made a good game (I don't buy into the DA:O revisionist theory saying its OK - game is shit). What this series has done is kill any unwarranted excitement for any Mass Effect game.
 

Malpercio

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I still think ME2 is worse. ME3 is stupid, but at least stuff happens. Heck, there are even a few nice moments in some of the side-contents (Ereba and Charr, the resolution to the Quarian vs Geth conflict)

ME2 commits the worst sin for a story: It's boring. ME3 Reaper plot is nonsensical, but it's so stupid that it's almost fun to pick apart in all its glaring inconsistencies.
 

donkeymong

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There’s nothing to do now but try to remember the good, forget the bad, and hope for something better next year.
Fool me twice, shame on me. Would I buy ME:A after this? Probably not, even if it wasn't from EA. But I would like my details-rich space opera REAL SOON NOW. :mad:

The multiplayer horde mode was quite well done. I leked and spent a lot of ours playing. So hopefully Andromeda has this too.
 

donkeymong

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I still think ME2 is worse. ME3 is stupid, but at least stuff happens. Heck, there are even a few nice moments in some of the side-contents (Ereba and Charr, the resolution to the Quarian vs Geth conflict)

ME2 commits the worst sin for a story: It's boring. ME3 Reaper plot is nonsensical, but it's so stupid that it's almost fun to pick apart in all its glaring inconsistencies.

It was just as stupid as 3. The collector ship that destroyed the first Normandy got defeated by a bunch of ordinary cannons from the Alliance. A
example of many.
 

Malpercio

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Oh, it was stupid, I agree. But the problem is that ME2 essentially had no plot, most stuff happens at the beginning and at the end, the whole middle part of the game is a snozefest.
 

Tom Selleck

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I got excited when I saw this thread had been updated but then suicidal when I remembered it ended last week. I hope he does another thing soon.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I got excited when I saw this thread had been updated but then suicidal when I remembered it ended last week. I hope he does another thing soon.

He's already started. See the "Random JRPG News" thread.
 

GarfunkeL

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...No, everything that Shamus' gone over still convinces me that the writers were just that incompetent. It's still a neat fan theory, and proof that a gang of fanboys can write this shit better in their free time than Bioware's team of paid professional writers ever could.


Pretty much this.

I very much admire the indoctrination theory and I would really, really like it to be truth, but this retrospective basically proves that isn't the case. No writer responsible for writing Kai Leng would be able to come up with something as complex and meta as IT.
It's a silly fan-theory that has no basis in reality. People are just desperate to believe in something instead of admitting that Bioware is shit and has been shit for years. ME1 was traditionally trite Bioware but at least it was on the same level as Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights (not OC but the expansion campaigns). ME2 is like it was made by a different company and Samus does point out that BW was growing far too rapidly at this point. Then ME3 had to return to the plot points of ME1 except ME2 had already taken a massive dump all over it, so the writers just went "fuck this" and threw everything and the kitchen sink into it, hoping that the Michael Bay school of storytelling would work. And it did.
 

Lhynn

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But sold sufficiently. ME3 outsold its both predecessors and the hype train for Andromeda is alive and well, unless I'm sorely mistaken.
But dragon age inquisition didnt sell all that well, and andromeda is not all that hyped. I havent taken an interest in it and i barely know its coming, for really hyped games i know almost everything there is to know about them by proxy, dont even need to actively look for info about them.
 

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