Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect 2: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...s-young-now-on-me2.101333/page-5#post-4139755
Mass Effect 3: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...s-young-now-on-me3.101333/page-9#post-4351289
Mass Effect: Andromeda: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...e-by-shamus-young.101333/page-17#post-5839867

A new multi-part series from Shamus Young.

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 1

For the last few years I’ve half-jokingly suggested that there is no upper limit on how much people are willing to discuss the Mass Effect games. This series is going to put that idea to the test. This series is going to run for several weeks, and by the end it will be the length of a young adult novel.

Yes, I have discussed this series to death over the years. In Spoiler Warning our group covered all three games, in excruciating detail, over the course of 36 hours of running commentary. You’d think there would be nothing left to say at this point.

But we played and commented on those games in their time. Today I want to look back and examine the series as a whole, now that we’ve seen it through to the end. The white-hot nerdrage has cooled, the reflexively defensive fans have moved on, and we have a couple of years of perspective between our expectations, the results, and where we are now. Mass Effect: Andromeda has been announced, and so I want to take one last back over the whole trilogy with an analytical eye and (hopefully) without so much rancor.

Also be warned that since we’ll be discussing and contrasting all three games at once,there will be no spoiler tags for anything whatsoever. Use your head.

So much of the discussion of Mass Effect focuses on the ending of the trilogy. That seems to be where a majority of the audience checked out and stopped trusting the storyteller. But while the ending is the source of the controversy, I don’t think it’s the source of the problem, and it’s not where the interesting changes take place.


The Changing Face of BioWare





Mass Effect tells the story of Commander Shepard as he[1] tries to save the galaxy andmaybe fails at it? We don’t know, actually. It all depends on your definition of “saved”. But more interesting than the story of Shepard is the story of the company that created him. If we look at the tone and construction of the games it tells a story about a development house that was transformed in both personality and focus, over the span of just five years. Companies change all the time, but few games give us such a clear view of such a rapid transformation.

To those of us stuck on the outside of the company and who don’t follow the ongoing soap opera of equity firms and holding companies, the story of BioWare gets a little murky in 2005, when they teamed up with Pandemic studios. Then in 2006 they opened a new studio in Austin to produce the Star Wars MMO The Old Republic. Then in 2007 they sold themselves to Electronic Arts[2]. In 2009 they opened yet another studio, this time in Montreal.

The development of the Mass Effect series overlapped with all of this chaos. When work on Mass Effect 1 began, they were a single quasi-independent[3] studio. By the time the third game launched, they were a collection of three studios owned by the Borg Collective of games publishing, they were running one of the most expensive, high-profile, and ambitious MMO titles ever developed, and were developing Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles simultaneously.

I don’t care how informed your leadership is, how nice and talented your employees are, or how much money you have in the bank. You can’t go through that sort of radical growth and shift in focus over such a short timeframe and retain your company culture. It’s one thing if you make chocolate snack cakes. As long as you don’t mess with the equipment or the ingredients, your product can stay the same. But if you’re a creative company and your products come directly from the hearts and minds of your talent, then retaining your creative identity amid such a drastic influx of new blood is fiendishly difficult. That doesn’t mean your products will necessarily be worse, but they will be different.

To put it another way: Sir Terry Pratchett was an amazing talent. But if J. K. Rowling had hired him in 2002 to help her pump out Harry Potter books twice as fast, it would have fundamentally changed the tone of the series. Different creative people come up with different ideas, and this will give the new work a different texture[4]. And even if it’s an improvement – even if you want to argue that Pratchett-Potter books are better than Rowling-Potter books, the new books will still feel ill-fitting and alien to people who fell in love with the originals.

The Ages of BioWare

Mentally, I divide BioWare’s history into three broad periods:

1. Early BioWare: Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights They were a major studio by the standards of the late 90’s, but their sensibilities would come off as extremely “indie” today: Top-down, number-crunchy roleplaying games with lots of clear connections to their tabletop roots. The games were more tactical than visceral[5].
   
2. Classic BioWare: KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins.Here the company gradually moved away from their mechanically complex roots and tried to make games with more mass appeal: Third person camera, rich characters, voice acting, cutscenes, three-person squads. The automated dice-rolling mechanics gave way to the player pushing buttons to make attacks happen.
3. Nu BioWare: Mass Effect 2 and beyond. If we’re being churlish, I suppose we could call this “EA BioWare”. You can haggle about where to draw the line between “Classic BioWare” and “Nu BioWare”. Maybe you want to draw it with Dragon Age, since the “blood and sex and heavy metal” marketing campaign felt pretty un-BioWare, even if the gameplay held pretty close to their standard formula. Or maybe you want to draw the line at Dragon Age II, which felt so completely unlike Origins in pacing, gameplay, tone, scope, themes, and environments that it felt like the franchise had been handed off to a different studio.

No matter where you draw the line, it’s very clear that Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 3 are radically different games, and within the series we can see the change from “Classic BioWare” to “Nu BioWare”. At the start we have lavishly detailed worldbuilding, very trope-ish arch characters, stiff animations, and gameplay with generally lousy game feel. At the end the focus is on characters instead of worldbuilding, and the old RPG mechanics have been replaced by mainstream action shooter sensibilities.

This creates an unfortunate rift in the fanbase. Love it or hate it, those new shooter mechanics are a lot more popular than the RPG-focused combat of Mass Effect 1. A big chunk of the player base hasn’t even played the first game, and shooter fans who fell in love with Mass Effect 2 went back to see what they missed in the first game and found it completely unplayable. It’s a bit like the argument between fans of the different 3D Fallout games:

Alice: Fallout 3 was stupid. New Vegas was so much more coherent!

Bob: But New Vegas was boring and ugly and Fallout 3 was way more fun!

We start out trying to critique specific elements of a game, and end up dragged into a pointless argument over which game is “better”. This distracts us from the more important discussion of understanding the art we consume and understanding why we enjoy it[6].

So what we’re going to do here is step through all three games, examine their moving parts, and try to identify the magic that made us love them so much, as well as the failure points that lead to the ending controversy.

What is This For?

I’ve got three main points I want to make in this series:

1) The ending of Mass Effect 3 is where the problems culminated, not where they began.

The ending was deeply controversial, so that’s where everyone focused their attention. It didn’t hold together, it didn’t make sense, it was tonally wrong, etc. A lot of people lump me in with MrBtongue, because we’ve both had a lot to say about Mass Effect and our points had a lot of overlap.


Link (YouTube)

But even though I’m a pretty huge fan of MrBtongue (including that one really oddball episode on soccer) I’m going to diverge from his position that the first 99% of Mass Effect was great, and it all held together until the Star Child showed up. For me the major cracks in the story don’t come from the end of the third game, they come from the start of the second. Those cracks spiderweb outward, creating more problems down the road and eventually leading to the unraveling at the end of the series.

2) The failure of the Mass Effect story can’t be blamed on any single individual or decision.

Lots of people like to point out how Drew Karpyshyn was the lead writer of the first game, he shared writing credit with Mac Walters on Mass Effect 2, and then Karpyshyn departed the company, leaving Walters to handle the third installment on his own. This provides a tidy narrative: “Karpyshyn made it good, and then Walters came along and ruined everything!” I admit it’s tempting to jump this conclusion, simply because it offers a perceptible reason for the changes we see in the story.

But I don’t think it fits. There are sketchy bits in the first game and brilliant bits in the third, and the actual downfall of the story is a complex, multi-faceted problem

3) Themes are just as important as facts.

We often get so caught up in haggling over lore and continuity that people overlook the importance of deeper, more foundational elements like themes, ideas, philosophy, and tone. While it’s “easy”[7] to fact-check your story and make sure you keep the people and places straight, it’s much harder to nail a particular tone. Shifting the philosophical bent of a story can often be more damaging to our enjoyment of it than getting some of the facts wrong.

We’re going to look at the games, how they fit together, and talk about how disappointments over the games have lingered in a way that (say) the public disappointment with Duke Nukem Forever didn’t. I don’t know if you’ll find it cathartic, informative, illuminating, or annoying, but I do promise you’ll find this series to be exceptionally long.

Buckle up.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Guise, I traveled in time and brought you the conclusion of this retrospective to save you from reading all that sperging:

Bottom line is: Mass Effect games were shit.

So long, bitches.

You're welcome.

 

[pippin]

The new way of doing PR when you've announced a new title is talking shit about the older ones. Hmmm.

 

[Metro]

First was mediocre. Second I couldn't even finish since they dumbed down everything. I would play it without all the shitty action popamole segments, though. And that's all the games are, really. If you look at the 'gameplay' parts separate from the dialogue vignettes you realize how terrible they are even by modern standards. The level design is lazy beyond belief.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

haha 'length of a young adult novel'

which orifice did that come out/ooze from

 

[felipepepe]

Wow, mistook Shamus Young for Rowan Kaiser for a moment and recalled that it has been more than 2 years since he began writing that book on Mass Effect and asked monies for it...

Anyway, Shamus is not a fanboy, so this should be interesting.

 

[Lhynn]

Karpyshyn made it good, and then Walters came along and ruined everything

Great article, my thoughts exactly.

 

[Why.jpeg]

I think it's been pretty clear for while that internal changes at Bioware are the reason that the series got fucked up. I'm not sure this is going to bring anything new to the table.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 2

I really love the first Mass Effect game. I wouldn’t be writing the following 40,000 (and counting!) words on the series if it didn’t resonate with me on some fundamental level. I replayed it while writing this series, and was struck by just how well it holds up. It’s the lowest scoring of the three games on Metacritic, I’m sure it sold the least, and it seems to have left the smallest impression with fans in terms of memes and quotable moments. But for me it’s an experience I can’t get anywhere else: Large-scale, big-idea sci-fi space opera that’s grounded by technical detail and bolstered by careful, detailed worldbuilding.

Also, it has one of best best videogame soundtracks, ever.

A World by Worldbuilders

If you’re like me and you enjoy asking “What do they eat?” then this is probably the kind of game that will scratch your itch. No, the “food” question isn’t terribly important in a far-future spacefaring society like this one where food problems are basically solved[1]. But the designer did answer a lot of similar questions about how this world works: Where does energy come from? How does government work? What are the different cultures like and how are they shaped by the environments that nurtured them? Given how obnoxiously big space is, how do people get around?

These kinds of questions are why I love sci-fi. Yes, I enjoy a good laser battle or lightsaber duel as much as the next nerd, and I do have room in my heart for the science-fantasy worlds like Star Wars, where it’s all about the characters and not so much about the fussy details. But hard sci-fi stories like Mass Effect[2] really scratch my itch. The details of the setting make them uniquely suitable for asking hypotheticals about what society would really be like in a exotic world of life-changing technology. It gives the world a texture and authenticity that I can’t get anywhere else.

People like to contrast Star Trek and Star Wars as examples of “Science Fiction” versus “Science Fantasy”. But this can be confusing because both properties are fiction and you get into annoying arguments about how fantastical your fiction is. I mean, don’t “fiction” and “fantasy” mean kind of the same thing?

Details versus Drama

I prefer to think of these two genres as “Details First” versus “Drama First”. While “fiction” and “fantasy” are synonyms, Details and Drama are often opposed over the short term, because nothing sucks the drama out of a scene like having someone stop and explain to the audience why that gizmo that worked so well last time can’t help us this time. Conversely, nothing will torment a “Details First” nerd like hand-waving the established rules of the world because some character happens to be believing in themselves a little harder than usual[3]. Sooner or later a writer is going to run into a situation where they need to favor one over the other, which will make it clear which things are most important to this particular universe and its author.

An example of how the two differ:

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, C3P0 gets blasted into pieces by a group of stormtroopers. His friends find the pieces in the trash and put him back together. In doing so they learn about the stormtrooper ambush.






In Mass Effect, Tali kills a Geth and grabs some data from its memory banks. Her explanation establishes that:

1. Geth memory banks are wiped out upon death.
   
2. Tali is a Quarian, the race of people who originally invented the Geth. This gives her expertise that other people are unlikely to have, which is why she was able to recover this data despite rule #1.
3. Even with her expertise, she can only recover tiny fragments of memory, which explains why everyone else can’t just go around blasting Geth and then downloading their brains to see what they’re up to.

Presumably C3P0 has some sort of memory banks. He certainly talks about them often enough. But in Star Wars they didn’t fuss around trying to find an adapter that would let them download his brain and find out what happened to him. They didn’t plug him into R2D2 for a scan. They didn’t hook him up to some other computer. They just put him back together and they didn’t find out what he knew until he was able to physically tell them, because the business with directly accessing memory banks would have been wrong for Star Wars. It would have been too technical, and required explanations that would have burned screen time and would have required the writers to establish rules that would need to be followed later.

C3P0 isn’t a device, like a spaceship. He’s a character, like Chewbacca. He’s amusing when he’s exasperated and experiencing difficulty, so the best use of his character is to have him experience a lot of undignified personal hardship. Having him dragged around like a fussy, over-anxious dismembered corpse lets the writer leverage his best traits for comic relief.

The same “drama first” approach to writing wouldn’t play nearly as well in Mass Effect. Saying Tali got the info “because that’s just how Tali rolls” would have felt like a lame cheat, and nitpickers like me would immediately begin asking why we don’t put Tali to work dismantling all the Geth brains Shepard has been liberating from Geth skulls[4]. Sure, Tali’s dialog establishes her as quick-thinking, technically knowledgeable, and (at least in this case) a bit lucky, but it also establishes the ground rules for how the Geth computer memory works and why we can’t just read their brains after we kill them.

In both cases you have writers who conveniently provide exactly the information they want at exactly the moment it suits the purposes of the story. Both stories are fantastic, but these two universes[5] run on different rules and require a different approach to resolving difficulties.

This doesn’t mean that a details-first story can’t have any drama at all, of course. It’s details “first”, not details “only”. After all, without drama, what’s the point? This is supposed to be entertainment. It just means the writer has to make sure that the drama follows the established rules of the universe. The foundation of details rewards people who examine the story and suggest all those places hidden just off-stage. In their own way, details enhance drama by constraining the writer and limiting their ability to resolve seemingly intractable problems with a deus ex machina.

In a details-first world, if you say that “megashields are impervious to hand blasters”, then you can’t hand-wave that rule at the end of the story when the hero uses a hand-blaster to shoot through megashields by saying, “Well, he’s the hero and he’s just a really good shot.” In a drama-first world, you probably wouldn’t waste time explicitly saying something like “megashields are impervious to hand blasters” because that would be a waste of the audience’s time. A character might say something like, “I can’t shoot through that with THIS!”, but that leaves all kinds of room for interpretation. It’s a character defining what they can do, not setting a rule for the universe as a whole.

Worlds like the one in Mass Effect 1 are hard to do. It’s easy to lose track of the details and riddle the thing with annoying and distracting plot holes. And sometimes writers get carried away and simply bury the audience in exhausting technical details. Balancing the need for good pacing with the needs for a coherent technical background is immensely difficult, which is why I’m grateful that BioWare made the effort.

An Episodic Structure

Mass Effect 1 feels episodic, almost as if it’s a season of a television show. The pilot episode (Eden Prime) presents you with a several interconnected mysteries: Saren’s goal, the mystery ship (Sovereign), and the Prothean artifact. Each subsequent episode has you visit a new location and meet new people. You solve some local problem, and in doing so you get another piece of the puzzle to help you understand the overall mystery.

The other thing I find interesting about the location structure of Mass Effect is how similar it is to Knights of the Old Republic. You have a brief section aboard the (Endar Spire / Normandy) followed by the tutorial area. (Taris / Eden Prime.) Then you go to the area of MASSIVE WORLDBUILDING AND EXPOSITION DUMP (Dantooine / Citadel) where you become a (Jedi / Spectre). Then you’re finally free to move around in your own ship and choose to do three mandatory locations in any order. Once those are done, you have the stakes-raising chokepoint mission on (Leviathan / Virmire). Then you go to the hidden mystery world of (Rakata / Iilos) where the BIG SECRETS ARE REVEALED, which leads to the final battle on the (Star Forge / Citadel).

It’s not an exact matchup. Taris was massive compared to Eden Prime, and KOTOR has an extra location to visit between the chokepoint and the endgame, but the similarities are still really blatant. (Jade Empire also has a similar structure, but it doesn’t map quite as neatly as the other two.)

The process of landing on a new planet, meeting the locals, and then unraveling their local conundrum is a very “Star Trek” way of doing things. This is still an RPG and the story is still driven by side quests, but this “planet of the week” structure saves us from the nested nonsense of your typical RPG where you have to:

find a net…
to catch a chicken…
to impress the butcher’s wife…
so she will return the stolen cow to the dairy farmer…
so the dairy farmer will point you to a cave…
where you can defeat the bandit leader…
and rescue the King’s daughter…
so you can get access to the royal library…
where you can find the map…
so you can find the location of the artifact…
so the sage can use it to reveal the prophecy…
so you can learn the location of the Nega Sword…
so you can… etc

You’re never seven levels deep in some nested sub-sub-sub-sub quest where you’ve totally forgotten how your current task relates to the overall goal[6]. Feros doesn’t feel like pointless busywork that’s distracting you from the business of Reaper-fighting, because Feros is its own place with its own arc. The story on Feros would be satisfying even if it was removed from the overall story in a way that (say) chasing a chicken to to recover a cow to fight a bandit leader wouldn’t.

In the next entry we’re going to start working our way through these episodes and looking for what makes Mass Effect so special.

 

[Beastro]

Hahaha calling Mass Effect Hard Sci-Fi.

 

[Jools]

text text and moar text

Some alright observations in there, and quite some obvious-is-obvious...

What's puzzling is that someone is going to write 40k words on the series, whereas the whole series probably features less writing than that.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 3

Last time I said that Mass Effect 1 missions feel like television episodes. I’m not saying these adventures would work as television scripts as we find them in the game. Some would be far too short[1] and others would be far too long[2] but they still fit the overall pattern of American television where a cast of regular characters visit a new location, meet some locals, and have an adventure with one or more complete arcs. This is distinct from (say) something like Witcher 3, where the various arcs are all tangled together, nested, branching, meandering, and criss-crossing, and where the audience is dazzled with an ever-shifting cast of characters[3]. This is also different from something like Arkham City, where a half dozen (mostly unrelated, or barely related) plot threads are opened in the first hour or so, and then the player gradually closes them one at a time.

I really enjoy the Classic BioWare episodic style, and I’m not sure why it isn’t more popular. It seems like a good way to compartmentalize game development. It must be insane trying to coordinate something interconnected like Witcher 3, but in a game with lots of discrete locations you can probably hand each episode off to its own small team and let them work without worrying the teams will get in each other’s way. And as others have pointed out, it makes for a better safety net if you start to run out of time or budget. It’s easier to cut a location from the game and patch over the hole if the locations aren’t deeply interconnected.


Eden Prime

Right off the bat, Mass Effect 1 makes it clear that this is a Details First kind of story, to the point where the opening text crawl is spent not talking about the protagonist or current events, but talking about galactic history and the technology that makes this world possible – a technology so important that the whole series is named after it.

Our first episode gets all of the exposition out of the way. Nilus drives home the point that humans are a small species in a big universe, and we’re fighting to hold our place in it. We also learn that Nilus is here to observe Shepard as a possible candidate for the Spectres.

Fridge logic: How would things have gone if the Geth hadn’t attacked? Shepard would go down to the planet, shake hands with the locals, load the beacon onto the ship, and fly back to the Citadel. I can only imagine the report Nilus would have filed:


“I have no idea if the subject is qualified to be a SPECTRE, but if you need to move into a new apartment he’s definitely qualified to handle the transition. Could even be trusted to transport large appliances.”

To be fair, Nilus does say this is supposed to be the first of several missions. One imagines the subsequent missions would be jobs that couldn’t be subcontracted to a couple of burly guys and a dolly.

The flow of this episode isn’t complex, which is good because there’s a lot of exposition that needs to be done and the last thing we need is a complicated plot for the player to worry about. Shepard is sent down to recover the Prothean beacon. He lands on the planet and follows a liner path that tells the story of what’s been happening to the artifact. The path goes through the dig site where it was dug up. Then it passes by some of the colony housing so we can hear what the locals think. Then we reach the train station where the beacon was transported. The mission ends at the platform where the Geth are holding it.

Along the way we see Sovereign, we fight the Geth, we learn that Saren is leading the Geth, and we encounter the body horror of the husks. We get our gameplay tutorials out of the way and Jenkins, son of Trask, dies. We meet Ashley, talk to some of the locals, and get a little of the Geth backstory. Most importantly, the beacon gets blown up. Shepard sees the vision, and we’re left with no further clues. The only choice is to go back to the Citadel and attempt to have Saren brought to justice, so that we can learn what he’s up to. We know he wanted the beacon, but we don’t know why.

That’s a lot of pieces to put on the board at once, and the game manages to pull it off without clogging things up. The codex is a beautiful tool for making this work, and helps us enjoy our light fluffy Drama while giving the Details folks something to bite down on.

Husks

Someone at BioWare really enjoyed their stories about monsters that arise from bodily transformation. In KOTOR, there was the Rakghoul sub-plot, where a disease turned people into feral monsters. In Jade Empire, we had the Mother plot where cannibalism turned people into flesh-eating goblins. Here in Mass Effect we have two different flavors of space-zombies: The Geth turn people into husks, and the Thorian on Feros turns people into creepers.

I appreciate the gameplay need for Geth husks – a melee attacker keeps fights interesting, and it would be out of character for the Geth to just run up to you and start punching. Sending your own dead back at you as cannon fodder works great as both a tactical distraction and a shock tactic.

On the other hand, the actual transformation always struck me as a little odd. Okay, so the Geth completely encase the victim in electronic parts, and evidently destroy their mind in the process. The resulting husk looks kinda like a techno skeleton. But what I never understood was what they needed the bodies for. Like, if you just took all the machinery you use to cover the dead body, then it could presumably move and operate on its own, right? I assume you’re not actually using the brain and muscles of the corpse. What is it on the bodies that’s valuable? The skeleton? Nervous system? The muscle mass? Can’t you just make 100% synthetic “husk bots” so you don’t have to gather up bodies and wait for the incubation to complete?

Yes, I fully admit I’m over-thinking this one. If they actually answered any of my questions it would make husks a lot less interesting and scary. And they have the magic wand of “REAPER TECH” to wave at objections like this. But for whatever reason, I wonder about this every time I see a husk. (And not, strangely enough, when I see a Thorian creeper.)

Citadel

Yeah, this episode drags on. Overall, it’s pretty simple: We go to the Council and accuse Saren of attacking Eden Prime, without offering any evidence to support these accusations. We can’t even personally place him at the crime scene. The Council understandably refuses to act. We meet Garrus, Tali, and Wrex. Tali gives us the proof we need to show the Council that Saren was indeed behind the attack. The Council makes Shepard a Spectre and sends him off to stop Saren.

In concept it’s short and easy, but in practice it feels alternately plodding and rushed. We get bogged down in some organized crime stuff between Fist and the Shadow Broker, and while all of that was interesting, it felt a little too much like the “sub-sub-sub-subquest” problem I mentioned last time. I wouldn’t blame the player if they shot their way to the back room of the dance club to capture the local crime lord and found themselves thinking, “Wait. How is this related to the attack on Eden Prime?”

During this adventure, we learn that the Citadel is a massive place, and critical to how the galaxy is governed. It also drives home the point that even though our protagonist is human, humans are a small part of a big galaxy. Humans are new here, and they’re very much sitting at the kid’s table[4] from a political perspective. They’ve only participated in one war, which they lost. This is one of the things that draws me to the game: You just don’t see videogames frame humanity this way.

It loses me when we put Saren on trial with no evidence, and the player dialog indicates we’re supposed to be indignant that this doesn’t work. Then later we manage to convict Saren not just in absentina, but without letting him know he’s being accused or allowing him to defend himself at all. Worse, we do so using a tiny voice sample provided by a Quarian teenager, supposedly taken from a dead Geth. That has to be the sketchiest trail of evidence I’ve ever seen, and that’s ignoring the fact that faking a voice sample that short would be do-able even in today’s world[5], much less in a world with super-technology like this one.

On one hand, this investigation wasn’t particularly fun or interesting and anecdotally I get the impression most players were chafing to escape the Citadel and get on with the adventure already. So I’m not saying the story would have been improved if we spent another hour gathering up even more evidence. I know this is a sci-fi and not a procedural crime drama, but having the will of the entire galactic council turn against their most prized agent on this 10 second sound file feels embarrassingly weak. I think if nothing else, making it a video file would have helped.

The Citadel really shows that BioWare’s vision was a little too ambitious for the engine they were using. The shape and scale of the Citadel is spectacular, but also marred by loading-screen elevators, long empty box corridors, and (now brief) hard loading screen hotspots. This part of the game is just crying for an engine that can handle open-world content.

The “Statue” of the Mass Relay is supposed to be a setup for the finale. Plot Twist! It’s not a statue, it’s the receiver for a real relay! It’s the receiving end of the conduit everyone was looking for! That’s a fun twist, but for my first play-through it didn’t have a lot of payoff because the statue is a bit out-of-the-way and I never really noticed it[6]. It’s on the far end of the playable area, and there’s no reason for the player to approach it except for curiosity. The player has to deliberately eschew the fast travel system in favor crossing all that open space on foot. I’m sure a lot of people missed the relay, and thus the payoff at the end. Ideally I think it could have been moved a little closer to the center of the zone, or perhaps a quest-relevant NPC could have been placed beside it.

The Spectres

The Spectres are clearly a system designed to facilitate RPG style stories: You’re given an overall goal from the council, but they don’t control you directly. This is ideal for that open-world feel that keeps games free and exploratory. Shepard’s status as a Spectre gives the writers lots of wiggle room: Being a Spectre can bestow access to crime scenes, battlefields, and research areas where normal people aren’t allowed to go, but it’s not supreme power. The writers can give the player as much or as little power needed to justify the current quest, and it nicely sidesteps the, “If I’m working for the king then why do I have to put up with this pissant obstructionist guard?” problem that plagues so many quest-driven games.

Obviously the player can’t actually be autonomous in a story-driven game like this. You need to go to the given planets and do the scripted quests to get to the scripted ending. But the game tries to create an illusion of freedom. The Council doesn’t order you around; they offer “suggestions” and “intel”. If you reply, “I’ll get on it right now!” they even make a point of saying they’re just making you aware of your options. Anderson does the same thing. If you jump on one of his suggestions, he backpedals and insists it’s up to you. The game is constantly trying to bolster the notion that the player is in charge.

It helps that this is a quest for knowledge. In a story where you’re after (say) a super-weapon, the player loses a little bit of agency. It creates the feeling that you didn’t beat the bad guy, someone else beat the bad guy when they made the weapon, and you just acted as the delivery mechanism for the solution. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not nearly as satisfying as a situation where it feels like you’re forging your own victory. In a knowledge quest, both the player and the player character learn new things together, and it feels like you’re creating the road to victory instead of just following the in-game GPS to victory.

Once they’re free of the Citadel, the player is allowed to tackle the next three major locations in any order[7]. I prefer them in this order: Therum, Feros, then Noveria. I usually start with Therum so I can get Liara, and do Noveria last because some of the dialog checks are pretty high and I enjoy being able to hit them all. For my own convenience, I’m going to discuss them in this order.

 

[Inspectah]

How can you say a game where people can throw hadoukens around and use giant bullshit teleportation relays hard science fiction?

 

[yes plz]

Yeah, I never understood calling Mass Effect 'hard sci-fi'. As far as I always understood it, hard science fiction is based firmly on current and theoretical technology and theories, stuff that could one day be possible with the right advances, a sort of glimpse into our own future. Mass Effect, however, relies largely on a magical newly found super material (Element Zero) and magical super advanced alien technology (Reaper and Prothean tech). I guess all the made up techno gibberish the game throws at the player and the fact that you're not flying around with jet packs and fish bowls on your head that makes people think it's hard science fiction.

 

[Dreaad]

Wait what?! There were people who thought it was hard sci-fi???

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

It's a sci-fantasy, ffs. You have blue space elves, humpback space orks, fling space magic missiles, fight an occasional space dragon and space robot zombies since game 1 and wield a fucking space holo-sword in the 3rd. Let alone all the damsel-in-distress tropes you step into every 5 meters.
Only thing you lack is a fucking horse, and I'm sure the only reason you aren't riding one is EA not providing BW with enough Doritos to implement it.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, it's hard compared to Star Wars.

 

[Dreaad]

Not if you take into account midi-chlorians

 

[pippin]

There were *hard* parts during Mass Effect, if you catch my meaning.

 

[racofer]

Of course it's hard. There're AIs and super novas and gravity.

 

[Beastro]

Yeah something where a species can reproduce with any other species is very hard sci-fi

Yeah, I never understood calling Mass Effect 'hard sci-fi'. As far as I always understood it, hard science fiction is based firmly on current and theoretical technology and theories, stuff that could one day be possible with the right advances, a sort of glimpse into our own future. Mass Effect, however, relies largely on a magical newly found super material (Element Zero) and magical super advanced alien technology (Reaper and Prothean tech). I guess all the made up techno gibberish the game throws at the player and the fact that you're not flying around with jet packs and fish bowls on your head that makes people think it's hard science fiction.

Because Hard Sci-Fi has an aura of prestige and weight to it, in the same way RPG once did leading to everyone calling anything that to lend their game a degree of legitimacy.

Well, it's hard compared to Star Wars.

Everything is harder sci-fi than SW. SW whole point was playing around with shit while maintaining an thin veneer of Sci-Fi. They have no pretence of being anything more, and in that respect, SW is more respectable then Star Trek or Mass Effect because it not trying to bullshit you with technobabble.

In that respect Star Wars is original, in one of the few ways it is, not because it created sci-fantasy but because it went on to become the definitive sci-fantasy work in the war Tolkien's Legendarium dominates fantasy.

 

[Inspectah]

Star Wars was a classic medieval story told in a futuristic setting, and it is great for what it is.
It indeed was never meant to be hard sci-fi

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect Retrospective: Part 4

These first few entries might be a little dry. We’ll get to the good stuff eventually, but we have groundwork to lay before we can cover that.

Therum

Even though I do this planet first, it feels like a bad place to start exploring this particular universe. It’s short on expensive content like characters, dialog, cutscenes, and detailed environments. The combat can be kind of newbie-unfriendly at low levels, and the mission ends with a fight against a Krogan that can be ridiculously hard for some classes[1]. The brown rocky landscape is monotonous the moment you lay eyes on it, and it only gets worse as the mission drags on. This is the kind of stuff developers usually save for that late-game slog.

On the other hand, the interface shows the the player’s squad is still one member short, and it’s natural to expect they will be eager to come here and complete the team. On the gripping hand, I’m not sure the player has enough information to know or guess that Liara will be the final squatemate. Basically, I’m really curious what the designer’s intention was, and how people responded. I can’t remember my first play-through. Did people understand Liara was going to join the team, and did they make a beeline for Therum to get her?


Meet Liara

I love how Mass Effect uses the ‘Star Trek’ approach to civilian clothing. Everyone wears tight jumpsuits with random geometric color patterns. I bet this sort of stuff will look as hilarious to the people of 2040 as the miniskirts of original Trek look to us today.

As far as I can tell from squinting at my monitor, almost all Asari use the same base model, which is basically a Barbie doll: A nude figure with no surface features. (I assume this is for budget reasons.) So you can’t have cuffs, popped collars, capes, hats, tails, loose trouser legs, or anything else that changes the shape of the character. You have to accomplish all of your costume design with bump maps and textures. From one model they managed to give us night club dancers, commandos, scientists, and civilians. I admire when artists can do good work under difficult constraints.

It’s a really interesting choice to enable the player to choose when they get Liara. She’s really important to the story. Unlike Garrus, Tali, and Wrex, she’s directly tied to the overall goal of learning about the Protheans, and she has a lot of dialog dedicated to the subject.

There’s special dialog if you happen to bring her along to fight and kill her insane / mind-controlled mother on Noveria. The developers created extra work for themselves, and created a lot of content you might miss. If you visit places in the order of Noveria, Feros, and then Therum, then you’ll miss most of her dialog and her interactions with her mother. It really does feel like you should get Liara as early as possible, but the writers allow you to delay it.

On the other hand, the writers have really pushed their luck with regards to linearity so far. Forcing the player to Therum directly after the Citadel probably would have felt smothering. Really, at that point they might as well make the entire game linear.

Note the bold art style on the Geth dropship. Compare this to later games, when we actually visit a Geth base and it looks like box rooms. Not only do the later games focus more on human vs. human fights, but the art style gets gradually more conventional.


Therum stands out as an oddball in our three locations. The other two locations begin with an initial site of talking and roleplaying, then there’s a Mako section to take you to the secondary site where you have another talky bit mixed in with some heavier combat. In contrast, Therum has basically no roleplaying or worldbuilding at all. Aside from Liara, there aren’t any locals to meet. There’s no dramatic arc. It’s just a long, combat-heavy Mako ride, followed by some shooting, followed by the most shallow puzzle in the game[2], followed by a “everything suddenly explodes just as you fly away” finale.

The codex talks about Therum being an active human colony, but we don’t see a single worker. We see no living spaces. No mining equipment or vehicles. No place for supply ships to land and bring provisions to the colony, or carry away the minerals they’re supposedly digging up. At the very end we reach some mine entrances with some generic empty metal structures around, but that’s it. There’s not even an indication of where Liara was living. Presumably she wasn’t sleeping on the rock and digging with her hands, right?

When designers get lazy[3] they usually half-ass it with some audio logs from the former residents, explaining to themselves why they’re no longer around. But Therum is barren, story-wise.

Since driving is such a big part of this mission, let’s talk about…

The Mako

Some people loved driving the Mako. Some people hated it. It handled like an inflatable bounce castle on wheels, it was prone to getting caught on trivial bits of scenery, and your targets always seemed to be about five degrees higher than the turret could reach. Love it or hate it, the Mako bits were certainly unique among videogame vehicle sections. I wasn’t really a fan, but the later games made me realize that the Mako fulfilled an important purpose in defining the world.

Mass Effect 1 places a lot of importance on visual continuity. You can walk from C-Sec, ride up the elevator of Eternal Time-Wasting, and arrive at the bay where you can see your vessel docked. You can then seamlessly transition to the inside of the ship, fly away, cross the galaxy, and exit the ship on a foreign world. You can make that entire journey without any spatial cuts. The camera might cut away for the jumping-through-the-relay cutscene, but when you take control again Shepard is standing right where you left him. I really appreciate this sense of continuity of movement. Yes, the loading screens disguised as elevators and bio-scanners were flow-breaking frustrations. There was certainly room for improvement. But the lack of teleporting loading screens was something that made the game more immersive.

The Mako was part of this. Feros is comprised of two major sites: The colony and the ruins. I suppose you could have a cutscene to move between the two, but then they would have felt disconnected and unrelated. It would have deprived the player of a sense of scale and distance. They could also have allowed you to make the journey on foot, but then you need to move the sites very close together (which contradicts the events of the story) or you need to walk a long distance.

The best way to establish the distance between the two locations is to have the player jump in the Mako and make the drive themselves. In Mass Effect 2 and 3, there are parts of the game where you get in a vehicle and are taken to some other gameplay zone via a time cut. You’re deprived of a sense of distance, time, and scale. How long was the drive? How fast were we going? What did we see along the way? Paradoxically, removing the Mako made planets feel somehow smaller, even though the time-cuts could theoretically represent much larger distances.

Part of this might be an unfortunate side-effect of the conventions of cinema. In a movie, if the characters travel a long way the director will usually give us some sort of travel montage: The character driving. Long shot of the car driving into the distance. Shots of landmarks. A close-up of the driver’s face. Shot of the character stopping for food. Back on the road again. The sun goes down. The longer the montage, the longer the presumed journey in the minds of the audience.

The Mako gave the worlds a sense of scale. It wasn’t perfect and not everyone liked the driving mechanics, but removing it from the game deprived the designers of an important tool for making worlds seem large and diverse. Without the Mako, worlds are reduced to a single location.

The Hammerhead

If we could jump ahead to Mass Effect 2 for a bit, I want to talk about the Mako’s replacement, the Hammerhead.

While there are Mako fans out there, a non-trivial segment of the playerbase really hated the damn thing. So I understand why BioWare felt the need to “do something” about the Mako. Sadly, the Hammerhead feels a bit like curing the disease by killing the patient and then using a trebuchet to fling the corpse at the bereaved.

Someone at BioWare looked at the Mako and assumed it was in the game because this is a shooter and shooters need vehicle sections in the same way that Superman needs those little red underpants outside his costume. Which is to say: Not at all, but it’s always there anyway[4]. So the Hammerhead was designed to be a better vehicle section. However the more important function of providing a sense of scale and geographical continuity was completely lost. The Hammerhead is only used in locations designed specifically for it, and those locations feature no other gameplay. So while the vehicle itself might be more fun to drive[5] it was now completely disconnected from the rest of the game.

Case in point: The first time I played through the game, I didn’t download the Hammerhead DLC, and I didn’t miss it at all. I don’t mean I didn’t mind not having it, I mean I had no idea the DLC existed or that I was lacking anything.

 

[Frozen]

ME1 was KotOR in a new setting.
ME2 was perfect self-parody
You where commander Shep Durp, quarterback of a high school football team.
Your mission was to bang tentacle chicks while floating round the galaxy in your giant erected space penis and shooting robots into face.
There was so much corn in all of it.
What happened afterwards is a mystery to me.
Someone start believing he was writing war&peace in space and when that someone is a complete retard you get the story of ME3.
At least the combat was an improvement.
No wonder someone could think these games were deep SF when most people think Interstellar was something more than Mexican soap opera.

 

[Fairfax]

I loved the Mako. The exploration and even the way the vehicle was handled was one of the rare instances where I felt BioWare was actually bold and deserved due credit. Unfortunately, their "solution" to its problems were also extremely BioWare, which is a shame. It's been 8 years and no other game has tried anything similar.