Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

[pippin]

They really wanted to build an atmosphere of political tension but all they got was kindergarten-tier feuds.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 35: Mars Effect

So now that the Reapers are actually on Earth and have begun the reaping process, Shepard sort of accidentally steps into the quest hinted at in the closing moments of Mass Effect 1. He doesn’t know it when he arrives, but his job on Mars is to recover plans for a device to beat the Reapers. Better “Way, way, WAY Too Late” than never, I suppose.

Mars

Shepard arrives on Mars to discover that the plans for the MacGuffin are here in a research station, and that Cerberus is murdering everyone to secure those plans.

Like the main plot of Mass Effect 2, there aren’t any peasants to meet. There’s no dialog where you can talk to somebody about what this place was and how it worked. Liara shows up, but she’s just here to join the party and explain where we need to go and who to shoot. She’s not here to tell stories. Mars is just a big industrial base filled with mooks and dead civilians. Nobody around here is interested in filling in details or worldbuilding.

During the assault we discover that Cerberus has been partially husk-ifying their soldiers, turning them into half-machine slaves. We see that Cerberus is willing to slaughter a bunch of civilians to steal some intel for themselves. We see that they are needlessly cruel and the whole “pro humans” idea is just a fig leaf excuse for their atrocities.

So Cerberus mole Dr. Eva Coré infiltrated the outpost, betrayed the scientists, and let the Cerberus strike team in. They slaughtered the scientists, presumably twirling robo-mustaches beneath their power armor. Once they have the plans for the Crucible they start deleting them so that nobody else can have them.

There’s no reason given for killing everyone. Dr. Coré apparently had run of the place and access to the data. It’s not clear why she couldn’t just download the data and leave. Why kill everyone? Why erase the data? Those are both difficult, dangerous, risky, and costly tasks that don’t advance Cerberus goals. But it does advance the goals of the writer who is really fond of the idea of the player shooting dudes dressed like space marines. Again, the storyteller has gone from details-first to drama-first, and now from drama-first to gameplay-first.

This would be tolerable if Cerberus was just some minor side faction like the Blue Sun or Eclipse mercenaries. But Cerberus is right in the center of this story, and we can’t even tell what the storyteller is saying. Which is it? Is Cerberus a grey-hat pro human organization, or are they cartoon space Nazis? One or the other. Just pick something. Barring that, acknowledge this discrepancy in dialog by having your allies try to reconcile their different views on Cerberus.

We also pause to have an argument with Kashley about working for Cerberus. That’s a big topic and so we’ll come back to it next entry. Right now we have more important stuff to nitpick…

Dr. Coré is revealed to be fully-functioning AI in a robot body that can seamlessly disguise itself as human without raising suspicion, even when in the company of scientists for a week. That’s three different amazing reveals in a single package:

1. An ambulatory full AI, which even the Geth have only recently mastered!
   
2. A robot indistinguishable from a human in appearance.
3. An AI able to mimic human conversation and behavior.

And Eva was invented not by a government or by one of the more advanced species, but by a human terrorist organization. The story doesn’t pause to explore any of this. We’re here to shoot bad guys and bang hot aliens. Worldbuilding is for dorks.

Mass Contrivances

If this game was written in the style of Mass Effect 1, then the writer would have set aside some time for some exploratory dialog that shows why this invaluable piece of information survived the previous cycle, why it just happened to be on the planet right next door to Earth, why the plans would be there at all, and why we were only just now finding it at the last possible moment.

Recognize contrivances in your writing. Then have the characters recognize them. Then deal with them in dialog through additional lore or character discussion.

Mass Effect 1 had tons of this sort of due diligence in its storytelling, and this game has no patience for it.

For example, perhaps Shepard could have dialog with a random scientist that reveals:

It turns out we had the plans for the crucible all along! It was among the first artifacts we uncovered on Mars. The Prothens probably recognized that our species had potential and so put this stuff on Mars specifically so that we would find it. Maybe they seeded this stuff on lots of worlds, and we’re lucky that the Reaper cleanup crew missed this one.

But when we discovered the Mars tech, we got caught up in studying the more obviously useful stuff like FTL drives and zap guns, and we didn’t know what to make of the crucible, what it was for, or how it worked. And after the First Contact War, we shelved a lot of artifact research and focused on stuff with obvious and immediate military application.

But then Shepard’s discoveries on Ilos made us take another look, and we’ve spent the last two years studying these plans.

It’s not hard. That only took me a couple of minutes, and it covers a ton of sins. The problem isn’t that this writer can’t think of these kinds of things, it’s that it doesn’t even occur to them to do so. They’re happy to have the entire story turn on a single massive contrivance and they don’t even feel the need to lampshade it in dialog, much less justify it as I did above. The sensibilities of this writer are wrong for this genre of fiction and this style of story.

But even if they bothered to cover up this contrivance, the crucible is still wrong for this story because…

Victory Must be Earned
In a story, great deeds generally require great sacrifice. The heroes need to give something up in order to win. They need to work for it, to grow, to earn their victory. Okay, not all stories. But Mass Effect 3 isn’t some avant-garde deconstruction of the Hero’s Journey. It’s a broad action adventure. Or trying to be. The least it can do is aspire to be competent at that.

Luke spent a majority of Empire Strikes Back learning to use the force. He didn’t become a Jedi master during a training montage halfway through Return of the Jedi, and he didn’t become strong enough to win because some no-name handed him a super-powered lightsaber just before the final confrontation. Frodo spent most of the Lord of the Rings painstakingly making his way through mountains, swamps, forests, and rocky wastes. He endured hardship, capture, distrust, hunger, cold, poison, the undead, monsters, a giant spider, armies, betrayal, fatigue, and numerous wounds – both physical and mental. It was an arduous, daunting task that would have destroyed many great men, and in the end he just barely made it. But when The One Ring went into the fire, we had a sense that the victory had been earned. Frodo didn’t spend the first two books killing bandits on the borders of the shire and then had eagles carry him to the slopes of Mount Doom in the last chapter of the book.

This applies to previous BioWare games as well: In KOTOR, the player spends the entire game gathering the clues that lead to the Star Forge. In Mass Effect 1, Shepard spends the entire game working to find the conduit. The writer sets a goal, and then our heroes work towards that goal. That struggle changes them. The resulting events are our story.

But here in Mass Effect 3, we’re simply handed a solution with no buildup, no foreshadowing, and without needing to look for it. We spent Mass Effect 2 fighting an enemy that didn’t exist in part 1. That struggle didn’t give us anything to help us in part 3. Instead, a totally new element is handed to Shepard.

Shepard Has No Agency

Note how this artifact and this shift in story focus robs both Shepard and the player of agency:

• Shepard didn’t discover the location of these ruins during his adventures or investigations.
  
• He didn’t explore the ruins.
• He didn’t find the artifact.
• He didn’t discover what the artifact was or what it was for.
• He didn’t hear about this attack over the radio and decide for himself to intervene. He was ordered by Hackett.
• Shepard doesn’t decide to build the crucible.
• Shepard doesn’t participate in the building of the crucible except in the abstract sense of occasionally (and accidentally) acquiring resources for it in his adventures.
• And until the very end, Shepard doesn’t even know what it is or what it will do.

Instead of Shepard discovering these things and telling everyone else, other characters show up and explain these things to him. He has done nothing to earn or deserve his victory and he has no stake in it.

There’s a reason that military stories usually feature characters that are either isolated from the main force or buck orders and go rogue. It’s because in a broad adventure story, the main character should be an agent of change. Their ideas – not their combat prowess – should drive the plot. The combat is simply a viscerally pleasing means to that end.

Remember how in Mass Effect 1, the game did the best it could to pretend you were autonomous? People deferred to you, and you were the one who was getting the answers and figuring things out. The council always presented the game missions as intelligence and suggestions, and they demurred if Shepard acted like they were in charge. The game was selling the notion that Shepard was the person making all the important things happen and thus the main character. He was making decisions and forging his own path. Mass Effect 3 abandons this idea entirely and treats Shepard like a child. He’s told where to go and what to do, and often he’s not even told why. Everyone else does the thinking and planning, and Shepard does the shooting. Outside of the Mass Effect 1 stories (the Genophage and Rannoch storylines) Shepard makes almost no meaningful, informed decisions.

The story has stripped him of everything that made him special to this universe and turned him into a thug with a gun. But then the author turns around and pretends that Shepard is special anyway because he’s so famous and good at shooting people. At least when a deus ex machina shows up it’s typically somehow centered on the main character and their efforts. Typically, a “god” shows up and rewards the hero for an earlier good deed, or for having a good heart, or whatever. Sure, a “god” solves the problem, but at least they do so in response to something the hero did. Mass Effect 3 doesn’t even manage to do that. This feels like a deus ex machina solution for someone else’s protagonist.

On one hand the writer keeps clumsily stroking the player’s ego by talking about why a Big Damn Hero Shepard is, but on the other hand they’re treating Shepard like a child who can’t be trusted to make plot-relevant decisions. Once again, this is backwards.

We have a main character with almost no agency in the central story. He’s on a quest to gather military allies for a battle that the story has already clearly stated that can’t be won through military power. Unrelated to this, he’s also recovering some data that will miraculously solve this problem, somehow.

The advantage of a trilogy is that by the third act, the stage is set, the goals are clear, and the story just needs to follow through. But here’s the writer trying to establish two competing plots at the same time. Even at this early stage, the story is already broken or malformed in multiple ways.

And we’ve got a long way to go.

And it gets worse from here.

(Although to be fair, there are a couple of really good moments to look forward to as well.)

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Well, at this point:

Whilst I enjoy the sheer fury directed at Bioware for the nonsense story and the car crash fascination of how wrong it all is, at this point attempting to justify what is happening in terms of plot details revealed in MA1 is a waste of time. The writers by this point couldn't care less what happened in the first episode, even if they ever played it. The only way to tolerate this game is on its own terms.

 

[oldmanpaco]

We’re here to shoot bad guys and bang hot aliens.

If it was good enough for Kirk it sure as hell is good enough for Shepard.

 

[Spectacle]

While I can appreciate the thoroughness of this critique, it also feels like such a waste of effort. He's already put more thought into writing this than the writers at Bioware put into writing the games, and he still has most of ME3 left.

It's a bit like writing a detailed critique of some kid's high school essay.

 

[Fairfax]

This thing is still going? Part 1 was posted on July 15th. The guy is milking this shit like it's an actual EA game.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

It's a bit like writing a detailed critique of some kid's high school essay.

It may be an unfashionable thing to admit, but I really liked Mass Effect. But it had so much potential to be better than what we got, something really special and possibly unique: an intelligent sci-fi RPG. Reading about how it all went wrong is a kind of catharsis. I need closure.

 

[Magnificate]

It may be an unfashionable thing to admit, but I really liked Mass Effect. But it had so much potential to be better than what we got, something really special and possibly unique: an intelligent sci-fi RPG. Reading about how it all went wrong is a kind of catharsis. I need closure.

Indeed.

I wonder, are there going to be cliffnotes for some sort of Rewritten Mass Effect at the end of this analysis?

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 36: Argument Clinic

At the start of Mars, Kashley joins you and gives you a hard time about working for Cerberus. She or he pouts about not trusting you and traps you in dialogs where all of your answers come off as lame excuses. It’s largely a repeat of the frustrating conversation on Horizon, which is perplexing since lots of people said that was one of the most irritating parts of Mass Effect 2.

Arguments in Fiction



Fiction thrives on conflict. When an author wants a couple of their characters to disagree, they can do it through dialog that reveals their values as a character and allows their personalities to drive the scene, or the writer can just have them gainsay each other in an angry voice. This is very much the latter.

In a character-driven argument, disagreement arises from differing viewpoints. Each person has a different view of the world and they each try to convince the other that their view is correct. We get tension in the story because these viewpoints reveal or highlight the personalities of the participants. It’s drama, but also two-way character development. Good stuff.

But here at the ass-end of Mass Effect, people argue and say mean things because the author needs them to be at odds. One or both parties needs to be an obstinate butthead and ignore what the other is saying. The author effectively hands one of the characters the idiot ball so the argument can take place.

Dialog from my playthrough of the game, just as Ashley and Shepard are entering the Mars installation:

ASHLEY:
I need a straight answer, Shepard.

SHEPARD:
About what?

ASHLEY:
Do you know anything about this? What is Cerberus doing here?

SHEPARD:
What makes you think I know what they're up to?
(This question makes Shepard look dumb. YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL WHY SHE'S ASKING THIS. WHY NOT ACT LIKE THE MAIN CHARACTER INSTEAD OF PUSSYFOOTING AROUND?)

ASHLEY:
You've worked for them. How am I supposed to believe you've cut all ties?

SHEPARD: (Paragon)
We joined forces to take down the Collectors. That's it.
(Note how he doesn't say why. He doesn't mention that The Alliance refused to help him, or the death toll the Collectors inflicted, or anything else that might help Ashley understand his decision.)

ASHLEY:
They rebuilt you from scratch. They gave you a ship, resources…
(Let's just set aside the fact that it's not clear how she knows just how extensive Shepard's injuries were or what the revival process looked like. The important thing is that she doesn't articulate why she dislikes Cerberus.)

SHEPARD:
Let me be clear. I've had no contact with Cerberus since I destroyed the Collector base. And I have no idea why they're here or what they want.
(This is the first worthwhile line in the discussion. It does the important job of telling us what happened after Shepard blew up the Collector base.)

ASHLEY:
Sorry Shepard, I just…

SHEPARD: (Renegade)
You wanna hate Cerberus, fine. But I'm done explaining myself to you.
(Why is Shepard defending Cerberus here? Also, this is a dumb line because Shepard has yet to explain himself.)

This conversation is doubly frustrating for people who already hated the working-for-Cerberus plot of Mass Effect 2. Ashley is criticizing you for something you didn’t want to do, and which seemed like a stupid, poorly-justified action to begin with. And you’re forced to disagree with her. Not only that, but you’re forced to disagree with her in the most lame, cowardly, or ineffectual way. Mass Effect 2 gave you reasons why you had to join Cerberus. Sure they were dumb and mostly based on circular logic, but you can’t use those reasons here to convince Ashley. You can gainsay her or pull rank, but you’re not allowed to actually make the case for a position you’re being forced to advocate!

If you told me to create a frustrating and immersion-breaking conversation on purpose, I doubt I could do much better than this. The lengths the writer is willing to go to in an effort to do the wrong thing is almost heroic.

These two people aren’t really arguing. They’re just stating their differing opinions again and again. Here, let me write an example of a real argument:


DIALOG WRITTEN BY SHAMUS

SHEPARD:
The Collectors had taken thousands of lives, Ashley. Thousands. And the Alliance wouldn't lift a finger. You saw what the Collectors did on Horizon. Would you have stood back and let that happen if you had a way to stop it?

ASHLEY:
But Cerberus, Shepard? They've probably killed almost as many people as the Collectors. Working with them is treason.

SHEPARD:
You remember what the Geth did to Eden Prime. To your unit. Would you commit treason to stop that, or would you stay true to the Alliance and let it happen? Because those were my options.

If the writer wants Shepard to win, then Ashley could then lose the argument with a weak, “I don’t know”. If not, she could reaffirm her loyalty to the Alliance and point how Cerberus is now staging this attack, just proving how foolish it was to work with them. In either case, that’s how you make an argument about something. The player might agree or disagree with Ashley, but at least she would have a viewpoint they could appraise and think about.

This wishy-washy “I can’t trust you” argument in the game is like the Carth dialog in KOTOR, except without the dramatic irony, the personal tragedy, character relevance, angsty backstory, or final payoff. And I should point out that even with all of those things, people still found Carth really annoying.

Let’s Play a Cutscene!

Next we have an obnoxious chase scene. Dr. Coré steals the data and runs off. During the chase she’s invulnerable to your weapons and powers until the very end, when you can kill her with a pistol. Once again I have to remind game developers: Do not make me play through your static cutscenes where my input doesn’t matter and I have no control over the outcome.

From the Wiki:

“There will come a final moment when the only way to kill her is using weapon fire as she is immune to biotic attacks. If you are playing a biotic make sure you resist the urge to use biotic abilities during the slow motion cut scene and just use the pistol to shoot and finish her off.”

Keep in mind that before this point, she’s been immune to everything. And now she’s going to die to a pistol shot, because that’s how the writer has decided it will go. Poor writer. Those dirty players keep ruining your brilliant cutscenes with dumb bullshit like “gameplay” and “agency”.

Dr. Coré is defeated, but Kashley is critically wounded in the fight. So now you have a broken robot and an injured squad member. So it’s off to the Citadel to put Kashley in the hospital and ask the rest of the galaxy to come save Earth. What follows is over six minutes of cutscene and exposition with no meaningful dialog interactions. The dialog wheel pops up twice, but it’s just a nudge to remind you you’re playing a game. There aren’t any dialogs to explore and your responses don’t matter.

Say Something Nice

I’ve hammered on the failings of Mass Effect 3 for about five weeks now. So let’s stop and say something nice:

I really enjoy Mark Meer’s performance as Shepard this time around. The stiff reading of the first game is gone and male Shepard now feels like a character instead of someone reading me his script newscaster-style.

The Citadel is gorgeous. Really, it’s wonderful. There are green gardens. Animated car traffic. The cities on the arms are finally depicted in a cutscene, giving a really good sense of scale and splendor. The Keepers walk around, the crowds are denser, and in general it feels like a living place. This is the Citadel they obviously wanted to give us in Mass Effect 1, but couldn’t due to budget and technology.

Dr. Chakwas is here[1] and her dialog is pretty good. She’s busy with her own life, not orbiting Shepard’s. They even have an excuse / hand wave for why she isn’t in trouble for joining your crew in Mass Effect 2 and why she’s back with the Alliance again. Sure, you can nitpick it, but I’m grateful someone noticed this was a concern and took the time to acknowledge this in dialog.

I’m surprised the writer decided to take Kashley out of the story with a life-threatening injury. Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy these scenes. (Except for the bit where they repeat the go-nowhere Cerberus argument yet again.) This story has some nice character moments and it (finally!) resolves the conflict between Kashley and Shepard. It’s just an odd design choice. The Mass Effect 3 story is already bursting at the seams with too many plot threads in an attempt to make up for the lack of progress in Mass Effect 2. Everything is happening at once, everywhere. And now we’re going to have a side-plot where Kashley is in the hospital for a couple of chapters? I don’t know why they decided to put it in the game, but I’m not going to complain about the chance for some quiet moments, introspection, and character resolution.

It’s nice to have the plot finally cut the player loose. We’re probably a couple of hours into the game, and this is the first time you’re free to walk around somewhere that isn’t a linear battlefield. This is our first chance to soak in some environmental storytelling and get a feel for how the rest of the galaxy is doing. In particular, there’s an Asari in the hospital who has a harrowing story to tell[2]. Having said that, we’re a long way from the flexibility of Mass Effect 1. In the first game, you could walk up to someone and ask them tons of questions. You could ask them in any order, and you could bail whenever you’d had your fill. It wasn’t until this point at the two-hour mark that we finally encounter an optional conversation. The writer so far has very little to say, and when they do decide to engage in some storytelling it’s usually a brute-force linear exposition dump.

Asking the Council for Help

This scene is so silly it’s almost a farce. Shepard goes to the Galactic Council to ask for fleets to help liberate Earth. Everyone is being invaded by Reapers, and Shepard’s argument is that everyone should abandon their homeworlds and help Earth because Earth has it the worst? This is after we’ve already had a couple of conversations where Shepard himself admits that we can’t win this with conventional warfare. He’s asking for something which he has already stated can’t solve the problem, which is distracting him from the more important job of finding an actual solution to the problem, and which the other races have no reason to give him.

You could make the case that Shepard is thinking backwards and what we really need is some sort of planetary triage: Since Earth is bearing the brunt of the attack, Earth is clearly a lost cause. Therefore the Alliance should give up their unsalvageable homeworld and help defend one of the other, stronger worlds. Maybe the Alliance should go save Thessia, since it has more people, more advanced technology, and more infrastructure. While it’s still just as doomed as the rest of the galaxy, it’s slightly less closer to its doom that Earth and therefore a better place to spend our limited resources.

Or maybe Shepard could take up the position that we should help Earth because 98% of humanity lives there. The other species have spread out and could survive losing their homeworld, but the Human newcomers don’t have that luxury.

That would be an interesting debate, but the game isn’t interested in exploring those ideas, because – like I’ve said before – this writer has no idea how to make an argument about something. Again, people just mindlessly gainsay each other instead of having a proper debate. Shepard swaggers in, asks for something completely outrageous, and then says the council is “blind” because they refuse to help him. Shepard’s view of the Reapers seems to change from scene to scene and I’m not even sure if the writer themselves had any idea what he was thinking. Shepard, you know you can’t beat the Reapers with fleets. So why are you demanding people give you fleets that you KNOW they can’t spare?

Still, this does seem in keeping with the tropes of the Mass Effect universe where Shepard brazenly demands absurd things Council and then he (or Udina) insinuates the council is racist for refusing. It’s dumb, but at least it’s… consistently dumb?

It doesn’t matter anyway. Everyone in the room has forgotten, but the galaxy is screwed. Deciding where the fleets go is simply picking which planet will receive the wreckage of the fleets. There’s nothing to be gained. If any of these people were rational they would be discussing contingency plans, escape, or hiding. The Protheans managed to hide from the Reapers, so we know it’s a semi-viable strategy.

This scene might work better if it telegraphed that these leaders were overwhelmed, out of their depth, lost, or going through the stages of grief. If we got the sense that these politicians had no head for warfare and no understanding of the scale of the threat, then we could maybe hand-wave some of their foolishness[3] in this scene. Instead everyone seems level-headed and calm as they make terrible plans that can only hasten their doom. It’s like a group of people with no food arguing over which one of them gets the toaster. The player is forced to sit through a cutscene where they make no decisions and make no meaningful input, where their character is railroaded into being an obstinate jerk, and which doesn’t advance the player’s goals.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Well, it's getting a bit repetitive now. After all, how many times can you say the plot makes no sense and the characters share a single brain cell? I'm going to stick with it, though, as ME3, despite being the game I played last, is the game I remember least about. I expect that speaks volumes of the story.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

This seems like way too much work for Mass Effect.

 

[kwanzabot]

why do people even watch retrospectives, seems like an aspie passtime

 

[oldmanpaco]

why do people even watch retrospectives, seems like an aspie passtime

We are all just planning our next play-through.

 

[pippin]

Every time a "reviewer"feelss/he has to rewrite dialogue for a game, especially if it's ME3, it feels incredibly sad.

 

[Spectacle]

This whole text should be required reading at all colleges teaching "game development". A lot of bad writers could learn a lot from it.

 

[vdweller]

I read a lot of Shamus' stuff, but still can't get over the fact of how much he got teabagged by Fallout 4. Maybe he needs to do such shit for visibility or whatever.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Hey Infinitron, what day is it?

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective 37: The Needs of the Menae

After the Council meeting, Udina and Shepard find themselves ranting about those stupid racist Aliens who won’t abandon their dumb homeworlds to come help Humans who are obviously the most important people in the galaxy. Yes, it’s absurd, but we just came from a meeting with the Galactic Council so it’s not even in the top five most absurd things said in the last six minutes.

A Turian comes in and offers a deal: One of the Turian worlds[1] has been overrun by Reapers. One of the Turian Primarchs is stuck there. He’s an important military guy. If Shepard rescues him, they’ll agree to send some forces to Earth. It sounds kind of implausible. How can one general be worth more than the fleets he commands? Particularly when you’re in a war with a foe that you can’t meaningfully oppose and the only thing you can do is buy your populace time with the lives of your military.

But whatever. I actually have a hard time getting worked up about the little details at this point. Our overall quest is to round up fleets for Earth, which doesn’t make sense with what the game has told us about the Reapers. But the writer presents this as if Shepard’s plan makes sense. And Shepard’s plan does sort of work in the end. It’s just that he doesn’t have a good in-universe reason for believing in it. Which means we can’t really examine him or his motivations anymore. He’s just doing whatever is needed to move the plot forward. This plot hole is so big we crossed its event horizon in the first half hour of the game, and these half-assed motivations and quests can’t really do any more damage. It’s like punching fresh holes in the hull of a wreck at the bottom of the ocean.

Actually, it’s not fair to say that Shepard is just rounding up fleets for Earth. He’s sort of also looking for help building the Crucible. Or he will be, once that plot point is developed over the next chapter. But the story is really vague about it. Sometimes he’s talking about the Crucible project and sometimes he’s talking about Earth and it’s not until the end of the game when those two plans suddenly merge into a single plan. And even then, it’s only in response to the Reapers moving the Citadel to Earth. This means that Shepard’s current plans are nonsense until the Reapers do something unexpected much later.

As we leave the Citadel, we have the first of Shepard’s dream sequence / cutscene things, which features Shepard chasing Some Kid That Died through a spooky(?) forest. We get one of these at the end of each chapter. We’l talk more about them once we get closer to the end. For now let’s just get to…


Menae

Wait. Orbital PERIOD is known but orbital distance is CLASSIFIED? Is this an alternate universe where telescopes and math haven't been discovered? Also, the Turians have the ADVANTAGE on the moon?!? The writer really needs to figure out how powerful the Reapers are, or they need to stop talking about it so much.


Shepard goes to the Turian moon of Menae to save the Primarch. Let’s switch back to looking for nice things to say:

The battle and destruction looks spectacular. The artists really sold the scope of the devastation. You can see it on the Turian world in the sky. You can see it on the horizon of Menae. You can see it right in front of you.

Garrus joins the party. Yes, we randomly run into Garrus on the planet in the middle of a warzone. But unlike randomly running into Tali on Freedom’s Progress in Mass Effect 2, this event is much less improbable and much better justified. Garrus is here because this is the most important front in the Turian fight and he’s the closest thing they have to a Reaper expert. The importance of this battlefield has drawn both of these characters here. Garrus has been working for high-ranking military guys, and Shepard is here looking for high-ranking military guys.

This meeting works because the writer realized that a chance meeting of two friends in a galaxy of trillions is something that needs to be lampshaded or explained. It only took a couple lines of dialog to smooth this out.

This mission isn’t as straightforward as presented at first. The primarch he’s looking for is dead, so Shepard has to run around and figure out which one of these mid-level officers has just rocketed up the chain of command due to attrition.

And even after saving the guy and letting him know his new rank, the guy doesn’t immediately promise to send fleets to Earth. Instead he (quite reasonably) says he’d rather keep his forces here to defend his homeworld. But! He’ll offer help if you can get the Krogan to join the war.

While our overall goal (save Earth!) is still lazy unimaginative horseshit, I like this chain of events and how they resist simplicity while also keeping the plot moving and setting up your next goal.

The Reaper War

Before we go too much farther, I suppose I should mention how the Reaper ground war is portrayed. It’s not very hard sci-fi, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, and it doesn’t really work all that well, but in the end I don’t think this is a problem. But for the sake of completeness, let’s look at how the Reapers are executing this invasion:

Instead of using orbital bombardment, the Reapers are landing on planets and engaging ground forces directly. From their perspective, it would actually make the most sense to gather far beyond the reach of ground defenses and obliterate infrastructure with impunity. The only threat to the Reapers would be the fleets, which wouldn’t stand much of a chance if the Reapers engaged in groups.

The Reapers could just blow up all the power plants[2] and wait. No power means no factories. No factories means no weapons, ammunition, armor, supply lines, and vehicles. No advanced medicine. No refrigeration and no industrialized farming means no food[3]. Within a few months the existing food stores will be gone, or will be rotting in warehouses without the means to distribute them. Water delivery systems will fail and cattle[4] will die. Within two years, 90% of the population will be dead of disease and starvation. Then the Reapers can land and handle the mop-up work with little or no risk to themselves.

But instead the Reapers are attacking in this wildly impractical way. They’re flying face-first into the meatbag fortifications. They’re somehow capturing the living[5] and turning them into husk ground troops. They’re even building Frankenstein amalgamations of multiple species. That’s good as a “shock tactic”, but when you’re quasi-invincible, tireless, patient, and facing forces who are doomed to starve, why go to all that trouble? Do you really need the meatbags to piss themselves and cry before you murder them? As long as they’re dead, who cares?

Having said all this, I really don’t count this as a serious flaw in the game. This is stuff that most people wouldn’t ever notice. And even professional nitpickers like me would be eager to forgive the game for these lapses of military doctrine if the overall plot and themes had worked.

BioWare Has Left The Building

Despite all of this taking place in the Mass Effect universe with BioWare characters, this just doesn’t feel like a BioWare game in terms of plot, tone, structure, pacing, or a dozen other hallmarks that reveal the priorities and artistic sensibilities of the developers. Note thatdifferent doesn’t always mean worse. There are lots of areas where this game is strong. The combat has gone mainstream, the production values are top-notch, the cutscenes are less visually awkward and more “cinematic”. This feels like the product of a different developer with a different set of strengths and weaknesses. It’s like when the Amnesia sequel was given to The Chinese Room. You can like the old, or the new, or both, but they’re clearly cut from different cloth.

In Mass Effect 1, the opening scene was filled with long, exploratory dialogs. You could talk to Jenkins and Chakwas and see what they thought about several topics. Nilus was there to fill you in on the galactic politics, and then Anderson showed up to talk about the Protheans and ancient history. The game was filled with optional conversations, lore, and even philosophical debates between characters. You could talk to someone for a couple of minutes, or you could blow them off quickly. You initiated most conversations, you chose when they ended, and Shepard said very little without your direct input.

Here in Mass Effect 3, we’re a couple of hours in and:

1. We still haven’t had much in the way of “exploratory” conversations[6] where the left side of the dialog wheel had more than one option. The vast majority of dialog prompts are simply paragon / renegade tone-of-voice responses that continue the completely linear conversation. Most of Shepard’s lines are spontaneous, meaning a lot of his talking happens without player input.
   
2. Most conversations are triggered by the game, not the player. Characters, not the player, control when the dialog begins and ends. Dialog is very passive. It feels a lot more like your traditional linear AAA story game.
3. We have yet to choose our squad. The game keeps making these decisions for us: One person leaves and another joins, and the player never has any say.
4. There hasn’t been a single dialog-based decision.
5. You can’t holster your weapon in this game. The writer decides when you get your gun out and when you put it away. I can’t begin to describe how completely obnoxious and condescending this feels.
6. We have yet to pick a goal. The areas and mission progression are completely linear.

Worldbuilding is Flavor

“But Shamus! This is the third game! The last two games already set up the universe so we don’t need all that exposition and backstory!”

This sort of misses the point of those worldbuilding conversations. That’s like saying, “This meal has all the nutrients you need to sustain life. Adding spices won’t make it any more filling. Besides, you tasted those spices before. Why do you want them again?”

See, that exposition wasn’t a burdensome obligation that we had to endure, like a loading screen. It was content. It was a very unique kind of content that I can’t get in other games. The game didn’t “need” to let me talk to all those shocked lab workers on Noveria, because the designers could have just filled the place with corpses and we would have gotten the idea. They didn’t need to let me talk to the ExoGeni execs on Feros, because the plot-relevant info could have been on a computer terminal somewhere. The writer didn’t need the world-weary Turian security guard in Port Hanshan, because he was entirely flavor with no plot relevance.

It’s not like there’s a lack of stories to tell here. The galaxy is being destroyed. People could be having all sorts of existential thoughts that would hint at their philosophies, religion, and culture. Some people might embrace religion while others would have a crisis of faith. They could reflect on all that juicy galactic history hinted at in the codex and muse about what it means to have their culture end here, like this. We could learn about how the cultures cope with death, how their governments (used to) work, how their families were structured. The destruction of everything is the perfect time to reveal what all these various people value most.

The Mass Effect 3 writer isn’t interested in exploring those kinds of topics or doing that kind of writing. The exposition is much more immediate and utilitarian. Conversations are usually limited to your current goals or the characters directly related to them.

The energetic worldbuilding of Mass Effect 1 was what made the universe colorful, vibrant, deep, interesting, and unique. The stories hinted at additional levels of detail and layers of complexity hidden just off-stage. They were my favorite thing about the first game, and they’re gone. This new writer doesn’t care about worldbuilding and tone. The story has been reduced to simple facts and bits of fanservice. But the facts often contradict the ideas of the first game and the fanservice actually flattens some of the characters and reduces them to their most superficial traits and catchphrases.

Humans First

It’s not just the style of writing, it’s the author’s priorities as well. The first game gave us a universe where humans were newcomers, and our job was to explore this big crazy universe of aliens and get mixed up in their crazy alien shit[7]. The first act has Shepard removed from the normal chain of human command to work for aliens. Aliens join his crew. His rival is an alien (Saren) with an alien Lieutenant (Benezia) who has a fighting force of aliens (Geth and Krogan) and who works for the Most Alien Things Ever, the Reapers. The final confrontation takes place on the Citadel, a great big melting pot of aliens, in which Humans are actually a minority.

I’ve said before that the Rannoch and Genophage plots feel a bit different from the rest of the game[8]. We’ll talk about them soon, but for now let’s set them aside and look at the main plot of the game:

In the third game Shepard is working for humans (he’s back with the Alliance) to save humans (Earth!) by fighting human space marines (Cerberus) who are lead by a human (TIM). Your new squad mates are a human, and a robot designed by humans to look like a human. Shepard’s alleged “rival” (Kai Leng) is a human. The assault on the Citadel is the result of a Human (Udina) bringing in other humans (Cerberus / Kai Leng) to stage a coup, only to have the entire plan come down to a showdown between humans Shepard and Kashley. The final battle takes place in order to save the human homeworld by deploying a superweapon that was discovered by humans on a human world, and which was constructed by a team led by humans. The entire final sequence is a conflict between human characters: Shepard, Anderson, and TIM. And at the very end, the writer even decided to put a human face on the Reapers.

Mass Effect 2 felt like it was made by someone who disliked Mass Effect 1. Mass Effect 3 feels like it was made for people who disliked Mass Effect 1.

I don’t know what BioWare could have done. What do you do when your new writer has different sensibilities from the old? What if they don’t mesh well with the genre of story you’ve assigned to them? Yeah, “Hire a different writer” is one answer, but it’s not the kind of answer available to a company trying to simultaneously grow and work on three[9] different franchises at once while also cranking out the requisite biennial tentpole shooter.

It’s not the writer’s fault BioWare was pouring their resources into SWTOR, or that EA has a demanding schedule, or that some people left, or that others joined the team, or that fans wanted contradictory things from this story. But it’s not my fault either. This story doesn’t work on its own merits, and it works even less as a follow-up to the first game, regardless of how many “the dog ate my plot outline homework” excuses are offered.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Now brofists have gone I have no idea how to respond to this thread.

 

[Infinitron]

Now brofists have gone I have no idea how to respond to this thread.

Use the brofist emoticon. I think that carries over to the true brofist system once DU brings that back. Or at least it used to.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

But remember, 1 hitlerfist =2 brofists.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Mass Effect 2 felt like it was made by someone who disliked Mass Effect 1. Mass Effect 3 feels like it was made for people who disliked Mass Effect 1.

...

What do you do when your new writer has different sensibilities from the old? What if they don’t mesh well with the genre of story you’ve assigned to them?

He goes on and on about the writers. But writers will write what you tell them too. Its the responsibility of the producer or lead designer to build the world expectations so they can write coherent shit.

Also it occurs to me that I may have fonder memories of ME3 because I despised ME2 so much.

 

[Sceptic]

Complains that Mass Effect 3 has abandoned the hard sci-fi of the series.



The whole bit about "humans first" is also hilarious. The series was always human-centric, TNO wrote about it way back in his ME1 review, and that was before any of the other games had come out.

The problem with the retrospective is that it's way too nitpicky, and that the major flaws get lost somewhere in the noise.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

The whole bit about "humans first" is also hilarious. The series was always human-centric, TNO wrote about it way back in his ME1 review, and that was before any of the other games had come out.

Of course it is - it was written by humans. But at least ME1 felt like it was making some effort to portray a world where humans weren't the dominant species, just some overly aggressive upstarts who got lucky. By ME3 it's just so insular that it's painful to play. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

 

[Tom Selleck]

I like this quote: "Mass Effect 2 felt like it was made by someone who disliked Mass Effect 1. Mass Effect 3 feels like it was made for people who disliked Mass Effect 1" because it's something I thought but couldn't quite articulate.