Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 5

Feros is the most “Classic BioWare” of the planets. It’s packed with story beats, themes, and plot elements ripped from earlier games. You’ve got the bog-standard optional “help these villagers gather resources they need to live” type questing, you’ve got some charmingly lame puzzles, and you’ve got a little bit of local politics and personal drama for flavor. This would be my favorite location in the game if it wasn’t all the same unendurable shade of beige.

A lot of games from this time period made the mistake of making a world of tan and grey, but this particular example really bothers me. I can tolerate it if the people developing the Military Manshoots of 2007 thought that concrete dust and rubble was just the “most realistic” and therefore “best”, according to the artless simplistic tastes of the day. But here? On a strange and distant world meant to evoke a sense of wonder and alienation? I can’t help but feel like the people who designed this place should have known better[1].

You could go either way. You could make the old parts of the planet – the ruins and underground caves – look vibrant and full of color, and make the prefab human housing look drab and boring. This would make the human stuff look ordinary and pedestrian in contrast to this alien backdrop. Or you could go the other way and have the human structures be bold and garish against the understated backdrop of the ruins and nature. Perhaps human stuff would be painted, or made of colored plastic. This would make the human structures stand out as new and out-of-place, like building a McDonalds in the Greek Parthenon. Either way, there should be stark contrast between new and old.

And no matter what, the Thorian should have some kind of green or yellow motif, even if it doesn’t photosynthesize with chlorophyll like Earth plants. It’s mind boggling that the exact same color palette is used for the human colony, the Prothean ruins, the ExoGeni Offices, and the Thorian caverns. What a wasted opportunity.

Zhu’s Hope

The outpost of Zhu’s Hope feels a lot like a remix of the Mother quest from Jade Empire. (Which itself borrowed a little from the Rakghoul plot in KOTOR.) You enter a small community of odd people who are suspicious, unwelcoming, and secretive. Their dialog doesn’t make a lot of sense and it sort of feels like you’ve stumbled into a cult. Then after some screwing around you make it underground to find everyone was being controlled by a huge monster. Then you beat the monster and everyone is set free.

Some people fault BioWare for this very trope-y approach to stories, but I didn’t mind. Ok, maybe if they did this story a third time it would have been pushing their luck, but this is an interesting idea for a location. The cult-like atmosphere gives the monster a certain mystery and build-up, so that heading underground feels tense. You really have no idea what you’re going to find or how you’re going to deal with it. The reveal of the monster is creepy and the post-monster denouement is a great chance for character interaction and contrast.

It’s a solid hook for a story. And given that so few people played Jade Empire, I don’t mind that it was given another chance here in Mass Effect. Speaking of the monster, let’s talk about…

The Thorian

Yes, they’ve done the “underground monster enslaves a village” idea before, but this time around they really ran with the idea and explored it in greater detail. In Jade Empire, Mother was just an angry monster, but the Thorian is given some depth and complexity. When I talk about “big idea sci-fi”, this is exactly the kind of stuff I’m looking for.

The Thorian is a plant the size of a building, hidden deep underground. It has lived for tens of thousands of years. Its roots (or tendrils, or whatever they are) reach for at least a few kilometers, and nobody really knows where they end. It sends out spores that are inhaled by mammals[2] and work their way into the nervous system. The Thorian is then able to control the victim by prompting the creature to take action and inflicting pain if it resists.

For the most part it leaves its thralls to live their lives, breed, and do whatever it is that they do, but it can direct them to action if it needs to defend itself. The Thorian doesn’t really think or measure time the way we do, and it’s not even sure of its own age. It spends most of its time dormant, but will rouse itself once every few millennia when it needs to take some action.

That’s a pretty radical idea for a life-form. That’s a long way from the usual human-sized biped that carries a gun and hides behind cover. The Thorian is strange and unsettling and more “alien” than anything else in the game.

In the case of Zhu’s Hope, the ExoGeni Corporation has deliberately placed some of their personnel in living spaces directly over the Thorian to see what the effect would be. Embarrassingly, one of the computer VIs in the ExoGeni offices refer to these people as the “Control Group”. Uh… no, silly computer man. If there was another group of colonists NOT living next to a mind-controlling Elder Plant and you were comparing the two, then the non-enthralled people would be the control group. These people are just unwitting test subjects. If this blunder was made by one of the employees I might assume this was to show that ExoGeni were not very good at science. But since this was stated by the VI, I have to assume whoever wrote the dialog didn’t understand what a control group was. Oops.

But the Thorian isn’t just a sideshow freak for nerdy fans of space opera. It’s nature and its lifespan are directly relevant to the plot.

Back on Eden Prime, Shepard interfaced with a Prothean beacon, but all he saw was a scrambled flash of images of circuit boards and meat[3] with no other context. The beacon was a device that enabled Protheans to communicate with each other mind-to-mind, over vast galactic distances. But since Shepard doesn’t think like a Prothean, the message is all garbled.

The Thorian has been alive for so long that it actually had Protheans as thralls at one point. The Reapers purged the Protheans, but the Thorian lived on, its mind preserving Prothean language and culture long after they were gone. Here, fifty thousand years later, the Thorian picked up an Asari thrall, and through the Thorian she was able to learn about how the Prothean mind worked. Once Shepard deals with the Thorian, she is freed and able to share this knowledge with him. This knowledge lets him understand the vision more clearly and (as we learn later) grants him the ability to understand the Prothean language.

On the first world, Shepard saw a vision, a message from a long-dead civilization. On this world, Shepard has learned the language, culture, and mental patterns of that long-dead race. Shepard isn’t the “chosen one” according to some diety or space-prophesy. And Shepard isn’t special because of his ability to dispense space-bullets. Shepard is special because of the knowledge in his head. That knowledge wasn’t just bestowed in a single act, but was something the player earned over the course of an entire videogame.

And then Mass Effect 2 didn’t know what to do with that, so it decided he’s a “hero and bloody icon”.

ExoGeni Offices

As Much as I love the events on Feros, I will say this is some of the worst environment design in the game[4]. It’s even worse than Therum. The copy-paste hallways of the ExoGeni buildings are confusing, the visuals are a dreary monochrome, the lighting is flat, and the stairways make the map confusing to read without making the place interesting to navigate.

The scenery doesn’t even make sense. The offices are built in old Prothean ruins, and the place is falling apart. Did the company really move into this place of collapsing walls and floors and staircases and just set up their desks in the rubble? Do the office workers navigate this maze of barren rooms every morning and then stand ankle-deep in broken concrete and hope the ceiling doesn’t fall on them today? Or are we supposed to assume that the Geth did all this? Did they come in here and demolish all these staircases? I wouldn’t expect the game to waste resources showing us where the executives eat and sleep, but having a (decorative) locked door in a clean room with creature comforts would go a long way at selling the notion that human beings live nearby.

Zhu’s Hope looks like a place where people might live: Beds, shelter, desks, crates of supplies, lights, and walkways. By contrast the offices – where the white-collar types work – look like one of the subway tunnels in Fallout 3. There are no seats, no storage, no furniture, no supplies, and no signs that people used this place for anything besides storing computers and rubble.

 

[Fairfax]

I'm pretty sure Feros suffered from the BioWare's chronic problem translating concept art into actual environments in their games, although Noveria was worse.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=28025

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 6

Like Feros, Noveria is a two-location planet, with a Mako drive between them. Port Hanshan has the corporate offices, while the labs are up the snowy, hilariously steep mountain path. The people of Hanshan evidently know how reckless and sketchy their research work is, since they put all of their labs and experiments on the other side of a glacier.

Port Hanshan

Well it wouldn’t be a proper RPG if we didn’t run into a plot-driven door at some point.

This is a simple quest that feels long because of the elevators we have to ride. Administrator Anoleis is a corrupt jerkface[1] who won’t grant you a pass to access the garage, which you need in order to reach the Mako and drive up the mountain to Saren’s lab. You go from Administrator Anoleis, to Agent Parasini, to Lorik, where each of them tells you their particular agenda. Then you have a little scuffle at Lorik’s office, and you decide which of the previous three people you want to work with in exchange for a pass. If it wasn’t for all the walking and elevator-riding the whole thing would be over in less than five minutes. But that’s not a very good reason to have all the walking and elevator riding.

And yes, it makes no blazing sense in the universe that the Mako is already in the unreachable garage. I forgot to get a screenshot, but I’m pretty sure you can even see it on the map if you visit the garage entrance before you’re granted access. While I praise this game as a “Details First” story, this seems like a pretty big detail to overlook. Is the Mako in the garage supposed to be from the Normandy? If so, then how did it get there? If not, then is this just a… public Mako? Like, is this bouncy tank turret and machine gun just up for grabs for anyone who comes through. A courtesy tank?

I think I needed just one line of dialog in there somewhere acknowledging this. If Joker called and said, “Oh, by the way commander, so-and-so at the dock says we have access to the garage so I told them to transfer the Mako out there for you. Figured you didn’t want to walk. But, you know. It’s up to you. You’re welcome.” Even if it wasn’t clear howthe Mako was transferred from one side of the building to the other, it would at least smooth out this seemingly impossible situation. It would seem like an abstraction of “we didn’t want to depict the Mako moving around in a cutscene” instead of “we forgot that tanks aren’t naturally occurring”.

The other problem with the area is the need for excessive backtracking. We can forgive[2]the annoying loading-screen elevators as an unfortunate limitation of the engine, but did the designers really need to have us crossing this empty space and running around all these baffle walls so many times[3]?

Peak 15

Given the Trek-like tone of the rest of this universe, I find the heavy-handed “evil corporations” angle to be kind of odd. Not bad, mind you. Just unexpected. It feels almost cyberpunk. On Feros, ExoGeni perpetrated a horrific crime by deliberately placing colonists over the Thorian to see what it would do to them. Here on Noveria, the companies are all trying to spy on each other. Anoleis is basically a crime boss, the port security are all a bunch of bribed thugs, and it’s clear half the science here was crazy irresponsible weapons and biotech research before Saren showed up with his Rachni queen.

The Trek stuff is positive and hopeful and sees technological progress as a positive thing emerging from cooperation and creativity. Cyberpunk often views technology as sinister, risky, cutthroat, and the the resulting technologies often only serve to highlight our depravities. The game shows us all these wonderful technologies that don’t seem to have any glaring downsides. They don’t pollute, or create danger, or run on resources acquired from slave labor, or anything else we associate with stories about “bad” technology. But then we see where the technology comes from and it’s this circus of lawless plotting, theft, espionage, and carelessness. This mix of optimism and nihilism is jarring and I wonder how much of it was deliberate and how much was just the result of mixing together disparate tropes.

I’m not saying the “evil corporations” angle is wrong, per se. It’s just an odd combination. It makes me curious how other technology research works in this universe. Is this how everyone does it? Or is this a reflection on the relative hostility of the terminus systems? Or is this problem unique to private research, to be contrasted with the public-sector success of the Alliance / Turian collaboration in developing the Normandy? Or perhaps a commentary on how humans are kind of screwups compared to everyone else?

Or maybe I’m over-thinking this and the evil corporations thing is just there to justify a world where Shepard needs to go around shooting stuff instead of calling the cops.

At one point it’s revealed that basically everyone knows there’s some kind of containment-breach type emergency going on at Peak 15, and nobody has any plans to do anything about it. It’s apparently standing procedure that if Peak 15 doesn’t signal the all-clear,NDC will just vaporize the installation with a missile. Nobody cares, nobody has any empathy for each other, and nobody finds this chaos all that noteworthy. At any rate, it really says something that in the next game, when Cerberus shows up they make these clowns look like a bunch of humanitarian geniuses.

Anyway.

I really appreciated the time the game spent justifying Saren’s resources. We learn here that Saren has a share in some of these companies, which explains why he has this massive facility all to himself up on Peak 15. Elsewhere you have a conversation with Wrex that reveals that Saren has been hiring mercs to pirate supplies for him. His turn to evil was not recent, and he’s spent a long time – possibly decades – building up the facilities he’s using. The writers could have waved their magic wands and just said, “He’s the bad guy, so of course he has mooks!” but they took the time to hint at where his resources were coming from.

The game also makes it clear that Noveria is outside of Citadel space, which explains why nobody came and took all his toys away when he was stripped of his Spectre status.

I really have to wonder about the environment design here. The entire complex is a maze of elevators and long box hallways, with just four or five meaningful rooms between them. A few of the hallways are justified as arenas for combat, but the vast majority of them are just empty space. The Citadel made it clear that this engine is capable of doing large-ish areas, so I have no idea why Peak 15 is broken into all of these minuscule zones.

The elevators hurt the most. They’re long and boring. There’s no character chatter. No flavor dialog. You can’t even fidget by moving around. You’re locked in place with nothing to do until the ride stops. The elevators also turn the map into an unreadable mess by dividing the labs into a bunch of different little zones. This is irritating enough when you know where you’re going, but for a newbie it’s complete torture to wander around, trying to make sense of how these spaces connect.

Matriarch Benezia

It’s always great to see Marina Sirtis working. The Trek franchise is a strange place for actors to wind up. It can keep you gainfully employed for decades, but at the same time it leads to an odd sort of stagnation. Usually fame is a stepping stone to greater success, but with Trek you wind up with these people who are both instantly recognizable, yet somehow unemployable outside of Trek. For example, there’s no good reason in the world thatRobert Picardo didn’t get a career boost from Voyager the way Brian Cranston got a boost from Breaking Bad, other than the fact that Trek forms this strange, insular acting ghetto that few performers can escape[4]. His portrayal of the Holodoc was brilliant, and since then I don’t think he’s been given anything worthy of his talents[5].

I really like Sirtis. Everyone remembers Counselor Deanna Troi as a joke who would use her powers as a space-psychic to tell us that she could sense “hostility” in the aliens currently torpedoing the Enterprise. But like Kate Mulgrew years later, I think Sirtis was given disastrously bad dialog and did her best to make it work.

This performance as Benezia is actually really tough to pull off. You have to introduce this character, establish her allegiance, do a quick heel-face turn, deliver some exposition, and then have a melodramatic death scene. Oh, and you have to do with with just your voice, because your body will be animated (not mocapped) by someone else, and your in-game face will barely emote. That’s asking for a lot from a voice performer in a very short time, and the fact that this doesn’t dissolve into an accidental comedy is a miracle. The fact that Sirtis can actually make this work and inject some pathos into a videogame boss fight is a testament to her talent.

Vader Built C3P0

The decision to have Matriarch Benezia be Liara’s mother is a little uncharacteristic of the tone of Mass Effect. It just so happens that Saren is looking for Prothean ruins, and his right hand is an Asari Matriarch, but one of the best Prothean researchers in the galaxy just happens to be the Matriarch’s daughter? That’s quite a coincidence, and it makes the galaxy feel a little small. The dialog sometimes makes it sound like you recruit Liara because of her mother, but of course the far better reason to get her is that she knows Prothean ruins. This is a very Drama First setup.

It’s a contrivance, but it’s a mild contrivance that is economical in terms of screen time and it heightens the emotional payload of one of the most pivotal scenes in the story. I only point this out to show that yes, I recognize Mass Effect 1 isn’t some flawless unassailable classic. Nor is it a structure of pure logic. It has little lapses and minor dramatic cheats in the margins. (Or in this case, brazenly in the middle of the story.) It’s not perfect, but it cheats a little in the service of doing something really difficult (big-idea space opera) while the later games cheat a lot to accomplish something easy (spectacle-focused action schlock) and pointing out the flaws of Mass Effect 1 doesn’t get Mass Effect 2 off the hook. As always, story collapse is less of a binary thing and more a matter of degrees.

It’s not like it’s a plot hole. It certainly doesn’t break the story. If Saren was the uncle of Garrus and it turned out that Kirrahe[6] was good buddies with Shepard’s mom, then I think things might unravel. There’s room to fudge things for the sake of drama as long as you don’t push it.

At any rate, this setup does give Benezia a better buildup[7]. Without Liara explaining her Mother’s wise and gentle nature, Benezia would probably be reduced to a boring mind-controlled bad guy. Liara’s viewpoint allows us to see her downfall as tragic and shows that even noble, intelligent, strong-willed people can be indoctrinated.

We’ll talk more about the other events on Noveria in the next entry.

 

[Inspectah]

Or maybe I’m over-thinking this and the evil corporations thing is just there to justify a world where Shepard needs to go around shooting stuff instead of calling the cops.

Well, no shit

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=28052

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 7

One of the sad things about the big reveal of the bug-like Rachni in Peak 15 is that for a lot of players it probably didn’t feel like a big reveal. The Rachni War is probably the single most important event to happen in the galaxy since the last time the Reapers went on tour, but the game never goes out of its way to let you know that beforehand.

A Brief History of the Rachni

Two thousand years before Commander Shepard was given his license to fly around the galaxy and Shoot Shit in The Name of Peace, some enterprising Salarian popped open a mass relay, took a look around the system on the other side, and was promptly captured by the Rachni that lived there. The Rachni reverse-engineered the ship, built some of their own, and started kicking the galaxy’s ass. They were kicking so much ass that the council races were basically screwed.

So the Salarians – masters at implementing terrible ideas in clever ways – uplifted the Krogan. The Krogan weren’t much for doing things like inventing spaceships or zap guns or space suits, but once the Salarians gave them these things the Krogan were able – delighted even! – to solve the Rachni problem as violently as possible. They eradicated the bugs from space, then eradicated them on their homeworlds, them bombed the surface just to make sure.

The Krogan then turned around and began fighting everyone else, because that’s kind of what they do. This led the Salarians to come up with a sterility plague[1], and the Turians to release it, which cut down on the Krogan numbers and created a lot of hard feelings all around. Also, the council races stopped opening new mass relays, which stopped their expansion, which had even more consequences down the road as species began squabbling over the now-limited supply of planets.

And then when the Humans showed up on the galactic scene, they tried opening a mass relay because they didn’t know any better. The Turians found them doing it and tried to stop them without saying “please” first, and yet another war happened.

Basically, the Rachni war was at the root of every lousy thing that’s happened in the last two thousand years.

I love this bit of galactic history because of the causality chain it creates: D because C as a result of B because of A. This is so much more interesting than so many invented histories which are simply: A then B then C then D. When you look at the history, you see how sickeningly inevitable it all was. You can also see the personalities of the various species involved. They don’t all behave like humans with funny-shaped heads. They all have their own approach to solving problems and making decisions.

For example: The Salarians are brilliant but extremely hasty, averse to direct confrontation, and short-lived. Short-term solutions like the Krogan uplift perfectly reflect their mindset. (The genophage probably wasn’t the product of long-term thinking, either.)

Sadly, I’m willing to bet most players had no idea about any of this when they ran into the Rachni Queen. You could only learn about the Rachni through the codex, and even then it’s not like the game went out of its way to draw attention to this particular entry. Wrex is the only one who brings it up in conversation, and only if you talk to him about his people often, and even then the Rachni are barely a footnote in his story about the genophage.

Basically, this could have been a major mind-blowing reveal, but instead ends up feeling like a little bit of trivia: “By the way, did you know this bug-thing was believed to be extinct?”

Ideally, it would have been nice if someone in your crew had been telling this story the way Wrex told the story of the genophage. Then when the player was offered the choice to let the Rachni queen live or die, they would have had a fuller grasp of the magnitude of their decision. Speaking of which…

The Rachni Queen

This is a pretty interesting alien. She not quite the freak that the Thorian is, but the whole thing with her using a mostly-dead Asari commando as a puppet so she can speak is pretty out there, and all her blather about colors and words makes it clear that their way of communication is pretty different from ours.

This also marks one of the major player-controlled story branches in the game: Do you release or destroy the Rachni Queen? Either empty her cage into the vat of acid, or open the cage and let her scurry off.

The choice is a little unfair, of course. When the Rachni War ended, the Roman Empire was still a thing back on Earth. The war was a long time ago according to how humans measure it, and not so long ago according to (say) the Asari. Even if the player has been diligent about the codex-reading and even if Shepard paid attention in history class, neither one has the proper context or authority to make a decision of this magnitude.

The most obvious course of action would be to leave the Rachni queen in her cage for the moment. You could delay the choice until after you arrange a conference call with (say) the council. Maybe she should be handed over to the Salarian STG? Maybe you should give the complex time to evacuate before you you let this particular genie out of her bottle? Maybe the Citadel could send some other force to take custody of the queen and leave the decision to them?

But Shamus, Noveria is outside of Council space! The council couldn’t just send in a team to deal with this.

I’m not really objecting to the fact that Shepard can’t just summon help out here. It just feels odd that our only options are “kill” and “release”. It shouldn’t have been that hard to fix. Just give Shepard a third option to leave her in the cage, and when he talks to the council they mention they’re sending somebody to secure the queen. This middle road would have offered no paragon or renegade points, and the writers could have simply treated this choice as exterminating her for the purposes of the sequels. (Since it’s reasonable to assume the council would have killed her themselves if given the chance.)

And speaking of making choices…

Choice and Consequence

But fine. It’s a videogame and it can’t possibly take into account every possible course of action. A complex dilemma is boiled down to a simple binary decision. That’s a bit of a bummer, but you can’t have everything.

But this just makes it all the more frustrating when Mass Effect 3 muddles the whole choice. There are four total outcomes for the Rachni:

1. If you spare the Rachni queen here on Noveria, then you find her a prisoner of the Reapers on Utukku.
   1. You can rescue the queen, which turns her into war assets.
   2. You can leave her to her fate, which… whatever. Nothing happens.
2. If you KILL the Queen here on Noveria, then the Reapers construct a Queen Thrall, because they want to control Rachni soldiers and no we don’t have time to explore that idea in detail. Let’s just go with it.
   1. You can rescue the thrall queen, which turns her into negative war assets[2] when she betrays you off-screen at some later time.
   2. You can leave her to her fate, and she will attack you.

They went to all this trouble to give us this branching outcome, when I think that what people really wanted was for that initial decision to stand. If I kill the queen she should stay dead, not be replaced with a color-swapped doppleganger. It’s this strange mindset that players must value content more than choice, that we’d rather see our decisions negated than miss out on one mission. Heck, if you don’t want to cut a mission then just fill the cave on Utukku with… I dunno… other mooks. Whatever. Just don’t un-do the earlier decision, and then turn around and offer the player the same decision again.

This is something that harmed Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Negating a major player decision doesn’t just harm that particular moment of the game, it harms every subsequent decision. You’re asking the player to ponder this uncomfortable decision with complex ethical implications and unknowable outcomes, but now in the back of their mind they have this nagging doubt, “Bah. It probably doesn’t matter what I choose anyway because nothing I choose makes any difference. I’ll just do whatever gives me paragon points.” It’s destructive to one of the core promises of the game, which is that the player will get to “make choices that matter”. Players are hungry for even a little authorship over the world. I think we value that far more than one more stupid gunfight.

Agent Parasini in Mass Effect 2


I can’t make sense of BioWare’s priorities when it comes to choice. You can bump into Agent Parasini again in Mass Effect 2, and according to the wiki there are several different ways that conversation can go. She might not be there at all, if she died in Mass Effect 1. If she is there and if you helped her, then she has some extra dialog acknowledging that. Parasini is a minor character and I doubt anyone would have been upset if she hadn’t shown up in later games. In fact, randomly bumping into her on another world makes the universe feel kind of small.

Why was the trivial decision about how nice I was to Parasini given a nice little fan-service spotlight, but the gut-wrenching decision to genocide or unleash the Rachni was hand-waved away? This was both the most expensive and least satisfying way of handling things.

 

[pippin]

The Rachni Queen was a nice touch, yeah. I had forgotten about that. It's just that those decisions only affect things that happen off screen or this horrid score points system in ME3. So much potential wasted.

 

[Drax]

Yeah.
An insect-like mind-controlling race? Meh, just put moar blue bisexual babes in.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=28116

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 8

Virmire is gorgeous. After the bland monotony of Therum and the frustrating monotony of Feros, it kind of feels like this game just isn’t interested in engaging you visually. But then you reach Virmire and you have vibrant greens contrasting with crashing ocean waves against a spectacular backdrop of lightning. You even get some scuttling indigenous life and some birds to give the place a little flair of verisimilitude.

There’s a lot going on here. The Wrex confrontation, the Salarian commandos, the indoctrination research, the meeting with Saren, and the Kaiden / Ashley choice. So we’re probably going to need to spend a few entries on this.

We arrive at Saren’s compound and find that he’s cured the genophage and is pumping out an army of Krogan. He’s also researching indoctrination. This guy has all kinds of hobbies.

Wrex finds out about the cure, and doesn’t like the idea of us blowing it up in the process of stopping Saren. So we have to talk him down. Now is a good time to talk about…


Ashley Williams

There’s something that’s always bothered me. Among fans, Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams is often referred to as the “space racist” of the team[1]. Supposedly, she hates aliens. This reputation comes mostly from a few situations that everyone misunderstands.

The first comment is when, in a moment of wonder at visiting the Citadel for the first time, Ashley says, “I can’t tell the animals from the aliens!” I can understand that if she said this about humans: “I can’t tell Polish people from animals” then it would come off as incredibly prejudiced. But aliens are not humans, and the problem she’s dealing with is that she has no frame of reference. Presented with the lifeforms of the Citadel, you don’t know if one is sapient or not until you try to talk to it[2].

This comment would probably come off as rude or crass to a non-human, but note that she wasn’t saying aliens were equal to animals. She’s owning up to her own ignorance and fallibility, not passing judgement on others.

The other comment from her happens while protesting that so many aliens have free run of the ship. Early in the game, Ash has this exchange with Shepard:

Ashley: With all due respect, should they have full access to the ship?

Shepard: They may not serve the alliance, Chief, but they're allies. At least as far as Saren goes.

Ash: This is the most advanced ship in the alliance navy. I don't think we should give them free reign to poke around the vital systems.

Shepard: You don't trust the alliance's allies?

Ash: I'm not sure I'd call the council races allies. We - humanity I mean - have to learn to rely on ourselves.

Note how she’s referring the the council races here. She could have lumped all aliens in together, but she’s making a clear distinction between the powerful council races (Asari, Salarian, Turian) and the others. And this is understandable. Those three races are powerful, technologically advanced, and have not been kind to humanity in the past.

This is a simply practical political expediency. People do it all the time, and it’s not racism. She’s presumably okay with the Hanar, Elcor, and Volus, or she would have just lumped them all together. She’s not prejudiced against other races, she’s prejudiced against beings that have power over us. If anything, I’d say it shows Williams to be a fairly average person.

The problem here is coding. When an author wants to do some quick shorthand for “this character is a racist”, they often reveal it with comments like this. It’s kind of like parents yelling at their kids. In real life, it’s an ordinary thing that happens all the time. In a movie, a parent yelling at their kid is universal screenwriter shorthand for “this person is a horrible parent”. We’re used to picking up on these cues and extrapolating. If a parent yells at their kid in the first five minutes of a movie, we assume we’re being shown the world in its default state. “This parent is ALWAYS yelling at their kids.” I think some people get caught on Ashley’s dialog the same way. “Oh, she’s ALWAYS ranting about aliens.”

But I don’t think that’s how this is intended. I think the writer is just trying to show some tension and unease is a natural part of our culture. We had a war, we don’t get a lot of respect from the council races, and Ashley just lots her entire unit in a Geth attack led by a Turian[3]. This isn’t racism, it’s realism.

Shepard: Standing up for ourselves doesn't mean standing alone.

Ash: I don't think we should turn down allies. I just think we shouldn't bet everything on them staying allies. As noble as the council members seem now, if their backs are against the wall, they'll abandon us.

Note that she’s in favor of being allies with aliens. Again, not a very hateful or xenophobic trait. She just thinks that aliens won’t always reciprocate. We should note that the story itself supports her view.

You got a pessimistic view of the universe, Williams.

Ash: A pessimist is what an optimist calls a realist. Look, if you're fighting a bear, and the only way to survive is to sic your dog on it and run, you'll do it. As much as you love your dog, it isn't human.

This is the line that gets her branded a space-racist. People think she’s saying the other species are like domesticated animals and that we should ditch them if trouble comes. But no, what she’s saying is that this is how they view us. She’s saying, “If something bad happened, the council races would look out for themselves first and foremost, and treat us like their dog.” And note that she’s not even mad at them. She’s just saying we need to be able to stand up for ourselves in case they do abandon us. And keep in mind they have already done so: The council scoffed at the idea of protecting Eden Prime after the Geth attack. That was fine, inasmuch as the humans put themselves in danger when they pushed so far out into the Attican Traverse, but the point is that the council did what was politically expedient instead of what what best for humanity, thus proving Ashley right.

Given that Williams has family members that were killed or disgraced in the war we fought with the Turians (a war they started) I’d say her worldview strikes me as being incredibly open-minded given those circumstances. Very few people can get through a war and remain this calm and practical regarding their views of the other side.

She doesn’t hate them, or wish them harm, or want to spy on them. She doesn’t want to take things from them. She isn’t even advocating overthrowing their power. She’s accepting of the idea that we’re ruled by non-humans, but doesn’t want us to become dependant on them. I can understand if you disagree with her worldview, but people act like she’s the KKK in space. Ashley Williams is not some hateful, xenophobic racist. She’s mildly and understandably distrustful.

I actually think her attitude grounds the setting and gives it a lot of authenticity. Movies like to sort everyone into “normal people” and “the KKK”, but it’s never that simple in real life. She reflects the attitudes of normal, honest people in the real world, who aren’t evil or dangerous, and who are guilty of nothing more monstrous than simple misunderstanding.

Ashley Kills Wrex

The final thing that earns her the reputation as an alien-hater is this encounter on Virmire. If you don’t have the charm or intimidate points to make Wrex back down on Virmire, then she seems to murder him.

It would be one thing if failing the Wrex dialog dropped you into combat mode where you were forced to defend yourself, but since the killing happens during dialog, the game is implicitly saying that Wrex wasn’t hostile yet when she shot him. I don’t know if that’s what the author intended the game to say, but that’s what it feels like given how other dialog-based stand-offs in this game work. For example, at port Hanshan when you’re dealing with the corrupt guards, the game simply exits dialog into combat, regardless of who “attacks” first according to dialog choices.

This happened to me on my first trip through the game, before I realized I needed to be min/maxing my paragade score instead of just picking whatever suited my current mood. I was pretty angry with Ash, and I would have court-martialed her (or at least kicked her off the team) if the game had given me the choice.

Don't worry, Ash. He won't be a problem. But murder him real fast if you get nervous, okay?


But on re-playing the game I noticed that she was following Shepard’s orders. Shepard actually tells her to be ready to kill Wrex if it looks like he won’t back down. He does this even if you stay in the “paragon” section of the dialog wheel. He’s the commander, and he’s the one who told her to have a weapon ready. It’s not possible to make Shepard say, “No, it’s fine Ash. Wrex won’t hurt me.” The distrust in this situation began with Shepard, not Ashley.

She’s got a massive crush on male Shepard, and Krogans are indeed the badasses of the galaxy. They nearly conquered it, after all. So even if she was out of line when she shot Wrex, I feel like:

• She did so after getting explicit orders…
  
• …to PROTECT her commanding officer…
• …from a non-Alliance threat…
• …a threat which is a stupendous badass…
• …and is brandishing a weapon…
• …and is extremely pissed off right now…
• …during a mission where Shepard is critical to saving the galaxy and Wrex isn’t.

If she messed up, she did so because every possible pressure was pushing her in that direction: Concern for the galaxy, justified fear of an enraged Krogan, her crush, her training that teaches her to defend her fellow ship-mates at all costs, and orders from her commanding officer.

It’s okay to be mad at Ash. Say she was wrong. Leave her to hug the nuke while you fly off with Kaiden if you want, but please stop acting like she’s space-Hitler. She’s nuanced, and games could do with more nuance.

 

[Inspectah]

Giving credit were it is due, the racism rant in the beginning was pretty good, and I agree with it.
Fucking black and white motherfuckers shit talking what they don't understand.
That said, never took her as companion, didn't even know she would shoot wrex

 

[Prime Junta]

Okay guise.

Inspired by this I decided to give ME1 another shot. And... damnit but I still don't see it. Yeah sure the world is "detail-first" and there's a lot of it, but all of that detail is mind-numbingly dull, and not a whole lot of it makes sense. Youv'e listed some of the plot holes and other inconsistencies in this retrospective even.

The whole game is one big downer. Everything looks and feels bland, repetitive, and uninteresting. Okay, so the voice acting and casting is pretty good, and the soundtrack isn't bad, but that doesn't even come close to making up for the unresponsive gameplay, samey environments, bad art direction, predictable and plodding plot, and general tedium of the thing.

At least ME2 and 3 aren't quite so soul-crushingly tedious to play. And there's the Tuchanka arc which is pretty decent actually. But I still can't help feeling that this whole trilogy is just one enormous missed opportunity: with better writing and livelier art direction it could've been a fine action-RPG-lite. As it is, I'd rather do the dishes.

 

[pippin]

Ashley in me1 was the best character for sure.

 

[Fairfax]

Totallly agree with the Ashley rant, although it's also BioWare's fault because the dog line was poorly written and used.

 

[yes plz]

BioWare's official ME2 site even basically described her as xenophobic.

At times her xenophobia can get the best of her and she can come across as insular and not willing to accept help when it is needed.

I dunno why people get pissy about it. It was the single interesting character trait she had.

 

[eremita]

Imo the best companion in ME1. And it was the first romance in a Bioware game that felt natural and not awkward. Kudos to the writer because I think it's actually really tricky to write an "Average Jane" right.

 

[eremita]

Okay guise.

Inspired by this I decided to give ME1 another shot. And... damnit but I still don't see it. Yeah sure the world is "detail-first" and there's a lot of it, but all of that detail is mind-numbingly dull, and not a whole lot of it makes sense. Youv'e listed some of the plot holes and other inconsistencies in this retrospective even.

The whole game is one big downer. Everything looks and feels bland, repetitive, and uninteresting. Okay, so the voice acting and casting is pretty good, and the soundtrack isn't bad, but that doesn't even come close to making up for the unresponsive gameplay, samey environments, bad art direction, predictable and plodding plot, and general tedium of the thing.

At least ME2 and 3 aren't quite so soul-crushingly tedious to play. And there's the Tuchanka arc which is pretty decent actually. But I still can't help feeling that this whole trilogy is just one enormous missed opportunity: with better writing and livelier art direction it could've been a fine action-RPG-lite. As it is, I'd rather do the dishes.

Care to write a more detailed comment about what exactly is mind-numbingly dull or not making sense?

 

[Prime Junta]

Care to write a more detailed comment about what exactly is mind-numbingly dull or not making sense?

Oof. I'll make this bullet points because otherwise it'd be a novel.

Things That Are Dull

• The visuals. Everything looks like a parking garage, mall, office, or warehouse, and it's all ugly. Okay, the only -- ONLY!!! -- exception is the exterior corridor of Virmire, and that only looks good by comparison with the endless concrete and boxes that preceded it. It ain't no Far Cry (and Far Cry is three years older, an eternity by vidya game standards of the mid-2000's).
• The quests. They're all one-two-three linear corridor shooters with occasional shortcuts available through conversations. There's not a single suprise twist anywhere, no room for off-the-wall solutions, no nothing. There's an objective, you slog through a bunch of trash mobs, there's a boss fight where you get to kill something the same way several times, and it ends.
• The sidequests. Oh, the sidequests!
• The large-scale worldbuilding. All late capitalism, all the time. You've even got stock market news played at you in the elevators.
• The alien races. They're utterly unoriginal and predictable. Once you've had one conversation with any of them, you know all there is to know about them. Except humans of course who have different cultures and shit.
• The elevators.
• The wheel-spinning minigame.
• The gameplay. It just stays the same from start to finish. Once you've figured out how to shoot things and how to apply a power, which you do on Eden Prime, there's no new twists to it at all, unless you count the lulzy win buttons the game hands you at some point.
• The overall story arc. It's set out for you in the beginning, and plods on exactly as presented, one thing after the other. It doesn't even manage to avoid the already-then-threadbare vidya game cliché of the First Confrontation With The Antagonist Forcibly Resolved By Cutscene. And of course ends with a It's Not Even My Final Form boss battle.
• The loot system. You know that when finding a Naginata V to replace your Naginata IV is a high point, something's wrong with it. Endless, endless same-y loot, the managing of which is a total chore.

Things That Don't Make Sense, in random order

• Crime lords, scientists, and colonies in boxes on planets with level 1 or 2 hazards and nothing particularly attractive
• Mummified Salarians with insignia turning up on random planets (same for Matriarch Benezia's writings, Turian insignia and other collect-them-all items)
• The Council sneeringly rejecting accusations of Saren based on eyewitness testimony (plus, presumably, physical evidence), but going THIS EVIDENCE IS IRREFUTABLE from a broken bit of audio
• The Council accepting Shepard as Spectre after he's just botched a mission and made massive mayhem on the station, plus flipped them off for good measure
• Every sentient race in the galaxy using the same font for everything
• Shepard having to jump through hoops to get the garage keys rather than just having the Normandy drop the Mako off near the cold lab once he discovers Benezia is there
• The physics of Mako
• The physics of guns ("overheating") - these two are bothersome because we "know" how projectile weapons and wheeled vehicles work; the "biotic" and "tech" magic less so because they're pure sci-fantasy
• The interior space of the Normandy. It's a military vessel. Way too much open and wasted space. Plus where does the crew bunk? (Addressed -- to a degree -- in ME2, as in, 'this isn't a military vessel.')
• What do people eat? I didn't see anything agricultural on any of the colonies. Nor hydroponics, nor evidence of any other food production. Okay, there was that one guy who needed a Spectre to help shoot a totally-not-wolf for meat, but that's hardly a survival strategy for an entire colony.
• Where do people shit?

I could go on but that's for starters. It's just so fucking dull, unoriginal, uninspiring, and generally tedious.

 

[Prime Junta]

Okay, here's another one.

The Conduit is just a mini mass effect relay between Ilos and the Citadel, correct?

So... why do Saren and Benezia need it in the first place? Or the Geth? Saren is a Spectre in good standing, and Benezia is a matriarch. Either of them could walk into the Citadel at any time and reprogram the Keepers to let the Reapers in. We know this because the evidence that gets the Council to dump Saren includes a mention of the damn thing. So why is he even bothering with the Geth, or breeding Krogan mercenaries, or what have you?

Put another way, the whole main plot makes no sense. This is no less stupid than ME3's RGB ending, or the derpy motive the Reapers had for the Cycle.

 

[Infinitron]

Okay, here's another one.

The Conduit is just a mini mass effect relay between Ilos and the Citadel, correct?

So... why do Saren and Benezia need it in the first place? Or the Geth? Saren is a Spectre in good standing, and Benezia is a matriarch. Either of them could walk into the Citadel at any time and reprogram the Keepers to let the Reapers in. We know this because the evidence that gets the Council to dump Saren includes a mention of the damn thing. So why is he even bothering with the Geth, or breeding Krogan mercenaries, or what have you?

Put another way, the whole main plot makes no sense. This is no less stupid than ME3's RGB ending, or the derpy motive the Reapers had for the Cycle.

Wait for Shamus to get to this part.

 

[Kem0sabe]

What i enjoyed a lot about the Mass Effect series was the the clean futuristic look of the equipment, architecture and ships, which reminded me a lot of JJ Abrams Star Trek and the "golden age of humanity" hope that infuses mankinds reach into space.

The characters and voice acting overall were quite good and the pop scifi space opera story was well done for the most part, ending notwithstanding.

Overall the series was one of my favorite action rpg's, and provided me with hours upon hours of entertainment with memorable characters, what more can i ask?

 

[Prime Junta]

I got so mad I segued on into ME2. (Again. I did already finish it once.)

It is much better.

The moment-to-moment popamole is almost fun, or at least it doesn't feel like you're trying to control someone who's drunk/stoned out of his skull, the environments are much more believable, and the characters are already much more interesting and engaging than in ME1. Probably because several of them are humans, and in the ME universe, humans are allowed to have nuance. And then there's Mordin who's great.

(Ofc the plot doesn't make any more sense than in ME1, but at least there's a modicum of fun to be had while ignoring it. And there's still the parking-garage-or-mall esthetic and the same font used for everything by every sentient race etc., but it's nowhere near the train wreck that ME1 is.)

 

[Prime Junta]

BTW about that "Ashly isn't a space racist thing" -- in ME2, when you meet her again, she straight-out says "I'm no fan of aliens."

Sorry, she is a space racist.

 

[Infinitron]

BTW about that "Ashly isn't a space racist thing" -- in ME2, when you meet her again, she straight-out says "I'm no fan of aliens."

Sorry, she is a space racist.

I think he was talking about her portrayal in ME1 only. Shamus isn't a fan of where the series went after that, tonality-wise.

 

[Lhynn]

Oof. I'll make this bullet points because otherwise it'd be a novel.

Things That Are Dull

• The visuals. Everything looks like a parking garage, mall, office, or warehouse, and it's all ugly. Okay, the only -- ONLY!!! -- exception is the exterior corridor of Virmire, and that only looks good by comparison with the endless concrete and boxes that preceded it. It ain't no Far Cry (and Far Cry is three years older, an eternity by vidya game standards of the mid-2000's).

The visuals are fine, but admitedly im not a graphixx whore.

• The quests. They're all one-two-three linear corridor shooters with occasional shortcuts available through conversations. There's not a single suprise twist anywhere, no room for off-the-wall solutions, no nothing. There's an objective, you slog through a bunch of trash mobs, there's a boss fight where you get to kill something the same way several times, and it ends.

Unfair assesment, combat ramps up at the end true, but there was plenty of dialogue during the game. And more than a few aligment checks.Also lets remember a lot of said "corridor shooting" is made on open areas with no cover.

• The sidequests. Oh, the sidequests!

Mixed bag, a lot of them were corridr shooters, but some of them had a bit of depth or didnt feature any combat at all. like tracking the AI in the citadel, or retrieving the corpse of a soldier for their family to bury, a lot of quests, especially at the citadel were about world building by showing instead of telling and were skifully done.

• The large-scale worldbuilding. All late capitalism, all the time. You've even got stock market news played at you in the elevators.

This is a valid complain?

• The alien races. They're utterly unoriginal and predictable. Once you've had one conversation with any of them, you know all there is to know about them. Except humans of course who have different cultures and shit.

Incorrect. All the council races are fairly well developed and have different characters that represent different sides of their culture.

• The elevators.

Didnt mind them, they were loading screens.

• The wheel-spinning minigame.

Wasnt a bad minigame, and you could actually get good at it, or bypass it altogether without much problem

• The gameplay. It just stays the same from start to finish. Once you've figured out how to shoot things and how to apply a power, which you do on Eden Prime, there's no new twists to it at all, unless you count the lulzy win buttons the game hands you at some point.

Except that you keep unlocking new powers all the way into new game+. also theres no such a thing as a win button. Also game is fairly challenging in the highest difficulties, and the enemy variety was big enough that there was no absolute winning tactic.

• The overall story arc. It's set out for you in the beginning, and plods on exactly as presented, one thing after the other. It doesn't even manage to avoid the already-then-threadbare vidya game cliché of the First Confrontation With The Antagonist Forcibly Resolved By Cutscene. And of course ends with a It's Not Even My Final Form boss battle.

Yeah mate, tropes are not bad on their own, dont know what kind of criticism you think you are making, but as long as execution is decent its ok.

• The loot system. You know that when finding a Naginata V to replace your Naginata IV is a high point, something's wrong with it. Endless, endless same-y loot, the managing of which is a total chore.

This is true, by far the worst part of it.

• Crime lords, scientists, and colonies in boxes on planets with level 1 or 2 hazards and nothing particularly attractive

I dont get the criticism, is it that the game doesnt inform us why they are there and its not obvious on its own? Sure i guess. Its not like they were putting lions there tho.

• Mummified Salarians with insignia turning up on random planets (same for Matriarch Benezia's writings, Turian insignia and other collect-them-all items)

True, it never bothered me tho. Always thought open maps were representative of the most interesting aspects of each of those places.

• The Council sneeringly rejecting accusations of Saren based on eyewitness testimony (plus, presumably, physical evidence), but going THIS EVIDENCE IS IRREFUTABLE from a broken bit of audio

Well, testimony is easy to fake, plus lets remember the less than favorable position humanity is in, they had no reason or desire to believe you. The evidence on the other hand im gonna half agree, as its never stablished in the dialogue why they believe it, perhaps because said evidence cannot be faked. Game should have at least adressed this.

• The Council accepting Shepard as Spectre after he's just botched a mission and made massive mayhem on the station, plus flipped them off for good measure

This is tied to your previous point. It is stablished that shepard definitely had the skill to be a SPECTRE, what needed to be tested was his character. It was fairly convenient for the council to throw a bone to humanity by accepting him there, and sending him to hunt down the councils own rogue spectre. Basically killing two birds with one stone. From a storytelling standpoint it did make sense. From a game standpoint i thought it was kind of lame, in the end it just made it easier for bioware to tell the story.

• Every sentient race in the galaxy using the same font for everything

nitpicky much?

• Shepard having to jump through hoops to get the garage keys rather than just having the Normandy drop the Mako off near the cold lab once he discovers Benezia is there

That is half true, the problem would have been that noveria security would have launched an attack on you.

• The physics of Mako

True.

• The physics of guns ("overheating") - these two are bothersome because we "know" how projectile weapons and wheeled vehicles work; the "biotic" and "tech" magic less so because they're pure sci-fantasy

In Mass Effect, to generate ammunition a weapon shaves a projectile the size of a sand grain from a dense block of metal contained within the weapon's body. The projectile is launched at supersonic velocities by decreasing its mass in a mass effect field. Thousands of these tiny rounds can be produced from a single ammunition block. Ammunition is never a concern because of this, but managing the weapon's internal heat is; if a weapon is fired too rapidly, heat will build up inside of the weapon and it will overheat, forcing the operator to stop firing long enough for the weapon to disperse that heat buildup.

Makes sense. even if it amounts to little more than "magic".

• The interior space of the Normandy. It's a military vessel. Way too much open and wasted space. Plus where does the crew bunk? (Addressed -- to a degree -- in ME2, as in, 'this isn't a military vessel.')

Yup

• What do people eat? I didn't see anything agricultural on any of the colonies. Nor hydroponics, nor evidence of any other food production. Okay, there was that one guy who needed a Spectre to help shoot a totally-not-wolf for meat, but that's hardly a survival strategy for an entire colony.

Thats something thats told and not shown. Ostensibly there are factories, hydroponics and other asorted sources. The game never really cares to show you that, as your travels never take you there but it does tell you on the codex.

• Where do people shit?

Same place people shit in PoE.

I could go on but that's for starters. It's just so fucking dull, unoriginal, uninspiring, and generally tedious.

Had to re-check the thread title, wasnt sure if this was a PoE one after reading that statement. All in all its not fampyrs levels of inspiration but its fairly entertaining, and its not meant to be original, It is a take on space opera of the 90s, that feel permeates from everything in the game. It does have tedious parts, but even great rpgs like new vegas feature those, it comes with the lenght.

Overall you seem to like telling lies and half truth to cover for your shitty uninformed opinion, thats one of the reasons i dont like you. You really should go back to the watch.

 

[Infinitron]

Weird, it looks like Shamus deleted this. Maybe there's something wrong with it:

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 9

While Virmire doesn’t feature the worst use of the in-game morality meter / conversation metagame / roleplaying tool, it does have the moment that – for me – perfectly crystallized how silly the system can be at times. So let’s talk about…

Paragade

It’s obvious that BioWare never totally nailed down the whole Paragon / Renegade system and what it was supposed to mean. Good vs. evil? Idealistic vs. practical? Merciful vs. Ruthless? Cunning vs. brutal? Doormat vs. leader? Sensible vs. sociopathic moron? You can find examples of all of these in the game.

I understand that BioWare felt like they needed to have this. It’s been a staple of the last few games and I guess fans have come to expect it. KOTOR had it because the game played around with the light and dark sides of the force. Then it was turned into the open palm / closed fist, which was an admirable idea that kind of turned into a philosophical mess in practice. So they tried again here in Mass Effect with paragon vs. renegade.

Mechanically, it’s a little more nuanced than the light / dark side slider we had in KOTOR[4]. The paragon meter fills independently of the renegade meter. Yes, when I save the puppy instead of eat the puppy I get paragon instead of renegade points, but at least it doesn’t subtract renegade points. This makes it a little less painful to cross lines once in a while. If you’re a paragon but right now you really want to shoot this annoying pain in the ass mook who’s trying to pick a fight, you can do so without feeling like you’re being punished. At worst, you’re just passing up the possible reward of more paragon points.

On one hand, the system is a great way to give the player some short-term choice. Every single decision can’t echo forwards, creating an ever-growing landscape of possibility. At the same time, it feels good to make decisions and have the game respond, even in small ways. So you can save the hostages or you can capture the bad guy. Each path gives a few paragade points and some varying dialog, but either way you never see the hostage or the bad guy ever again. I’m basically okay with that, as long as the game doesn’t jerk you around by creating “Sophie’s Choice: The Videogame” where you just plow through a constant stream of frustrating no-win situations.

On the other hand, we always end up having the same damn arguments over what each path “means”. And these arguments always end up in the same gutter, because they don’tactually mean anything. They’re just a low-cost way of telegraphing, rewarding, and acknowledging player choices. There’s no clear philosophy behind them other than “nice” and “meanie”, even though individual choices can be interesting thought experiments and make sense in isolation. This is probably because actually judging player behavior would require knowing why they’re doing the thing they’re doing.

One of my favorite illustrations of this problem is here on Virmire. The Salarians are going to attack Saren’s base head-on to create a diversion, while you sneak in the back. It’s basically a suicide mission for them. During your ingress, you run into several opportunities to make life easier or harder for the Salarians out front. You can destroy the Geth communications array. You can ground their air units. You can set off various alarms to make the enemy move into a different position. Each of these actions will allow you to fight more foes so your allies can fight less.

The paragon / renegade points are awarded under the assumption that taking more heat on yourself is altruistic and paragon-ish, and easing your way by dumping more foes on your allies is the renegade thing to do.

Let’s ignore that fact that some of these actions (like blowing up the communications array) can easily happen by accident in a firefight, without you even realizing you’d done something other than shoot some robots. What’s funny about this situation is when I tried playing through this section as a renegade. I wanted to fight as many Geth as possible, because they’re filled with lovely delicious XP that will level me up and let me kick more ass. The game assumed that I was killing these Geth because I wanted to help my allies, but in reality I was motivated by simple videogame bloodlust. Helping your allies is undeniably the optimal thing to do, so you kind of have to screw yourself here if you’re fishing for renegade points.

No matter how many choices you give the player or how much granularity you offer for their reasoning, I don’t think you can make a system like this work outside of Star Wars[5], but at the same time I’d hate to see them abandon it entirely. Like the Mako, the Paragade system isn’t perfect and sometimes it’s downright irritating, but the game would feel shallower if it wasn’t there.

Saren and Indoctrination

Here on Virmire Saren has captured some Salarians and stuck them in prison cells to expose them (somehow) to Sovereign’s indoctrination field. This is where the Reapers start to take on that “Elder Gods” vibe. Just being near them will inevitably warp your mind and bend you to their will. This isn’t a brute-force enslavement like the Thorian, where you’re tormented if you don’t do what the master says. This is subtle, quiet, and insidious. You might not even know its happening.

When we finally confront Saren, he reveals that there’s a trade-off at work here. Indoctrination can work fast and turn you into a gibbering psycho, or it can work slow and you keep your skill and mental acuity. Saren’s thinking is that he can give the galaxy – or himself – a more favorable outcome by being useful to Sovereign so that Sovereign will let him keep his mind. This also reveals that Saren has already fallen and he can’t even see it. You can tell he’s delusional. He’s blind to the truth that this cycle has repeated countless times. No doubt lots of people tried to do what Saren is doing, and in the end it didn’t make any difference. You can die standing still, you can die struggling, but either way you and your civilization are going to die.

This makes Sovereign a much more terrifying threat than simply showing that he’s got powerful space-lasers and Level 100 shields. Maybe we can invent better guns or get better armor, but how do we defend ourselves from undetectable mental manipulation? How do we protect against agents of the enemy when they themselves might not even know they’re serving the enemy? It drives home the point that even if we could somehow miraculously overcome our staggering technology disadvantage, we would still be hopelessly outmatched by the superior intelligence and experience of our enemy.

The research that Saren is doing is the biggest clue in the game that Saren is – or was – fighting against indoctrination. If he was truly loyal (either ideologically, or because he’s too far gone to have a will of his own) then he wouldn’t be spending his time studying this. But he knows that the indoctrination field exists, he knows he’s susceptible to it, and he probably suspects that once he’s fully indoctrinated, he won’t know it. So he’s looking for a way to work against Sovereign without losing himself. It’s a doomed plan, of course, but Saren would rather embrace a pipe dream like “outsmart a machine god” than give up and die. This is both why he chose to serve Sovereign, and why Sovereign chose him as his principal servant.

The game never spells any of this out for us, of course, but it is the simplest and most satisfying explanation for his behavior. There have been times in the game where Saren makes some poor decisions. He leaves the beacon behind on Eden Prime, which gives Shepard a chance to use it. You can nitpick lots of his moves like this, but “indoctrination” is a handy excuse that can plug almost any of his possible plot holes. If we accept that he’s mostly a thrall to to Sovereign but he’s sort of fighting back in small ways then we can excuse any of his mistakes.

This is another area where trust in the storyteller is crucial. If we trust the author, then we give them the benefit of the doubt. If the rest of the story is stupid action schlock, then we’re not going to go looking for subtlety and subtext when someone does something apparently dumb. We’ll just assume they’re an idiot like everyone else in the story.

Kaiden vs. Ashley

Everyone talks about this decision. “Kaiden vs. Ashley – WHO DID YOU SAVE?” I see polls now and again. Most of them seem to indicate the split is roughly even. I actually don’t feel strongly one way or the other. Being human, they’re both tied for last place in my list of favorite characters in Mass Effect 1. I don’t dislike them, but I also didn’t experience the gut-punch sense of loss that the writer clearly hoped I’d feel.

Ashley feels a little more “real” and vibrant – I’ve known a few Ashley-types in my life. Kaiden is a little more quiet and distant. He comes off as boring at first because he doesn’t seem to be very passionate about things the way Ashley is, and you’ve actually got to dig for a while before you get to the interesting parts of his backstory.

I do find it interesting that the split is so even when so many people played as Maleshep. I don’t have numbers for Mass Effect 1, but in Mass Effect 3 the breakdown is a landslide82% to 18% victory of Maleshep over Femshep. If we assume that the numbers are similar in Mass Effect 1[6] then it makes the Kaiden vs. Ashley outcome even more strange. You’d assume that a lot of people would go for the obvious early-game romance, which would stack the odds drastically against Kaiden. But it comes out about even?

Maybe Liara messes up the romance numbers, since she’s available as a partner to either gender? Maybe too many people interpreted Ashley as racist? Maybe a lot of people couldn’t prevent Wrex from dying and blamed Ashley? Maybe Ash’s personality just doesn’t resonate with the typical sci-fi fan the way quiet Kaiden’s does? I honestly don’t know.

In any case, it was an interesting and rewarding choice, even if I didn’t personally bear the emotional brunt of it. It’s a good character development moment for the team, it raises the stakes a bit by showing not everyone gets to go home, and it gives the player a huge degree of agency to choose who lives and who dies. And unlike some decisions in the series, this one stands. You don’t come back in Mass Effect 3 and find robo-Kaiden, or clone Ashley, or revived-by-Cerberus Kaiden, or VI-hologram Ashley, or whatever. Dead is dead.

 

[Prime Junta]

The visuals are fine, but admitedly im not a graphixx whore.

The graphics are fine. The visuals are shit. Compare to Jade Empire: poorer graphics but much better visuals, which means the game still looks good.

Unfair assesment, combat ramps up at the end true, but there was plenty of dialogue during the game. And more than a few aligment checks.Also lets remember a lot of said "corridor shooting" is made on open areas with no cover.

Plenty of dialog that made no difference whatsoever to the plot. The quests were still perfectly linear, and only involved shooting your way through a bunch of mobs and occasionally picking a lock.

Mixed bag, a lot of them were corridr shooters, but some of them had a bit of depth or didnt feature any combat at all. like tracking the AI in the citadel, or retrieving the corpse of a soldier for their family to bury, a lot of quests, especially at the citadel were about world building by showing instead of telling and were skifully done.

The fact that you cite a sidequest that consisted of three dialogs as an example of a good one says a lot about their overall quality.

This is a valid complain?

Yes.

Incorrect. All the council races are fairly well developed and have different characters that represent different sides of their culture.

Haha.

Didnt mind them, they were loading screens.

Good for you I guess.

Wasnt a bad minigame, and you could actually get good at it, or bypass it altogether without much problem

It was a shit minigame, and endlessly repetitive.

Except that you keep unlocking new powers all the way into new game+. also theres no such a thing as a win button. Also game is fairly challenging in the highest difficulties, and the enemy variety was big enough that there was no absolute winning tactic.

You get all of them in a single playthrough, just not on one character, and since you can command your party to use them as if they were yours, it makes no difference. Maxed-out Singularity is a Win button. Explosive Ammo on a sniper rifle is a Win button. There are others.

The combat is only challenging because character control is so unresponsive. There's ridiculous lag between clicking the fire button and actually firing, and sticking automatically to cover makes it highly frustrating to move when you're getting swamped. ME2 improved both of these aspects tremendously.

Yeah mate, tropes are not bad on their own, dont know what kind of criticism you think you are making, but as long as execution is decent its ok.

Indeed, if execution is decent.

This is true, by far the worst part of it.

Nah, it barely registers in the general mediocrity of the thing.

I dont get the criticism, is it that the game doesnt inform us why they are there and its not obvious on its own? Sure i guess. Its not like they were putting lions there tho.

It's just one of those things that don't make sense. Like, you know, no living space anywhere in those places, just a warehouse sitting bang in the middle of a hostile planet, full of fully-armed mercs expecting an invasion.

True, it never bothered me tho. Always thought open maps were representative of the most interesting aspects of each of those places.

Yes, you've made it clear that you're not bothered by a quite a number of things.

Well, testimony is easy to fake, plus lets remember the less than favorable position humanity is in, they had no reason or desire to believe you. The evidence on the other hand im gonna half agree, as its never stablished in the dialogue why they believe it, perhaps because said evidence cannot be faked. Game should have at least adressed this.

Haha.

This is tied to your previous point. It is stablished that shepard definitely had the skill to be a SPECTRE, what needed to be tested was his character. It was fairly convenient for the council to throw a bone to humanity by accepting him there, and sending him to hunt down the councils own rogue spectre. Basically killing two birds with one stone. From a storytelling standpoint it did make sense. From a game standpoint i thought it was kind of lame, in the end it just made it easier for bioware to tell the story.

The Spectres are supposed to be the Council's right hand, operating above and beyond the law. And the Council is just going to appoint a human who's made it clear he thinks the Council are a bunch of alien fuckwits out to keep humans down? Your standards of "make sense" are... interesting.

nitpicky much?

Apologist much?

That is half true, the problem would have been that noveria security would have launched an attack on you.

In the middle of a snowstorm when they can't even go out? (And no, it's clear that the snowstorm wouldn't have stopped the Normandy from dropping off the Mako. It does it with no problems on planets with worse environments.)

True.

In Mass Effect, to generate ammunition a weapon shaves a projectile the size of a sand grain from a dense block of metal contained within the weapon's body. The projectile is launched at supersonic velocities by decreasing its mass in a mass effect field. Thousands of these tiny rounds can be produced from a single ammunition block. Ammunition is never a concern because of this, but managing the weapon's internal heat is; if a weapon is fired too rapidly, heat will build up inside of the weapon and it will overheat, forcing the operator to stop firing long enough for the weapon to disperse that heat buildup.

Makes sense. even if it amounts to little more than "magic".

Inveting pseudoscientific babble to cover science magic is standard space opera. The problem is if you're presented with something that looks and feels familiar, like a projectile weapon that goes "Bang!" and behaves to all intents and purposes like a pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, or sniper rifle, but then behaves jarringly differently in one particular way. It was a bad idea, and another one they fixed in ME2 and 3.

Yup

Thats something thats told and not shown. Ostensibly there are factories, hydroponics and other asorted sources. The game never really cares to show you that, as your travels never take you there but it does tell you on the codex.

Which is a pretty fucking huge, whatsit, ludo-narrative dissonance right there.

Same place people shit in PoE.

That is a valid criticism of P:E. Good for you, you finally managed to make one.

Had to re-check the thread title, wasnt sure if this was a PoE one after reading that statement. All in all its not fampyrs levels of inspiration but its fairly entertaining, and its not meant to be original, It is a take on space opera of the 90s, that feel permeates from everything in the game. It does have tedious parts, but even great rpgs like new vegas feature those, it comes with the lenght.

Let me see if I can fix this:

"its fairly entertaining, and its not meant to be original, It is a take on isometric party-based fantasy RPG's of the 90s, that feel permeates from everything in the game. It does have tedious parts, but even great rpgs like new vegas feature those, it comes with the lenght" -- Pillars, of course. Good to see you're finally coming round!

Overall you seem to like telling lies and half truth to cover for your shitty uninformed opinion, thats one of the reasons i dont like you. You really should go back to the watch.

It's OK Lhynn I love you anyway.