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Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

donkeymong

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ME3 was fucking terrible. As soon as EA forced them to make the game Multi-player you knew all the area design would turn to complete shit (and it did).
Funny. Maps were bigger(atleast they felt this way) and cover was more "natural" then in the previous game."
Jacks prison was the worst offender regarding this.
 

eremita

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ME3 was fucking terrible. As soon as EA forced them to make the game Multi-player you knew all the area design would turn to complete shit (and it did).
Funny. Maps were bigger(atleast they felt this way) and cover was more "natural" then in the previous game."
Jacks prison was the worst offender regarding this.
Yeah, I don't get the hate for ME3 area design either. I mean it was basically the first time you had to be consistently aware of your surroundings (few of those areas were also in ME2 and stood out as the most fun and intense).
 

donkeymong

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Actually, nearly all enemies try to flank and force you out of cover. Unlike in 2,where you could basicly camp in cover,aside from Harbinger,robodogs and shotgunners, not one did this.
 

Spectacle

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I wonder if we'll get the story about what happened with the ME series from someone inside Bioware? What was the reason it went from good-for-what-it-is popamole space opera to nonsensical garbage?
 

Jick Magger

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bubbles In Memoria
I wonder if we'll get the story about what happened with the ME series from someone inside Bioware? What was the reason it went from good-for-what-it-is popamole space opera to nonsensical garbage?
84e9a4780a01b0c6aa0465ad8a90cf40_id1367488221_120812.jpg

dollar-bills-fan.png

112077ccc8dbdd4a34f91a628e16d698.jpg

badwriter.jpg


latest


In a nutshell.
 

Spectacle

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Money explains the gameplay changes, it can't explain why the plot stopped making sense.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The key to understanding Mass Effect is to realize that the entire trilogy came and went during that confused period between the releases of two seminal games - Call of Duty 4 and Skyrim. Until Skyrim, there was no proof that an RPG could sell tens of millions of copies. That left developers like Bioware flailing desperately for ideas as to how they could make a game capable of breaking beyond their traditional audience. They're still flailing.
 

Jick Magger

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Money explains the gameplay changes, it can't explain why the plot stopped making sense.
I wonder if we'll get the story about what happened with the ME series from someone inside Bioware? What was the reason it went from good-for-what-it-is popamole space opera to nonsensical garbage?
84e9a4780a01b0c6aa0465ad8a90cf40_id1367488221_120812.jpg


badwriter.jpg


latest


In a nutshell.

Any more questions?

The writing team swapped out between ME1 and 2, and more people left with ME3. The writers that were left were terrible, and all they could do is write an utter mess. EA didn't care because they just wanted monies, Bioware didn't care because they just wanted monies. Nobody cared.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Mass Effect Retrospective 43: Interesting Stupid
splash800_takebackearth.jpg

Shepard continues his tour of the galaxy, selling dubious hope in exchange for direct military support from people who are really going to need those military units in the near future. Today he’s giving his sales pitch to the Quarians.

Admiral Idiot


me3_rannoch1.jpg



The Quarians became space-nomads centuries ago when they built robots that eventually became “self-aware”. Worried of a robot uprising, they tried to destroy the robots. This led to a robot uprising, and they got their asses kicked off their own homeworld. Since then they’ve been flying around the galaxy in a huge fleet of ramshackle patchwork ships, dreaming of the day when they could retake their homeworld. It’s a good story that adds some interesting historical context to the universe, and has ramifications throughout the world of Mass Effect.

The Quarian fleet is broken into sections. Some ships are military, but most are simply homes and places to grow food for the Quarian people: The “live ships”[1]. A lot of their ships are old and in a perpetual state of being refurbished.

Admiral Han’Gerrel is our villain in this story. He’s stuck guns on the Live Ships and launched an attack on the Quarian homeworld. He was doing okay until the Geth teamed up with the Reapers. Now the Reapers are giving the Geth some sort of mental upgrade via a broadcasted signal[2] and it’s making them more dangerous opponents. The Geth have now pinned the Quarian fleets – basically 99% of every Quarian alive right now – and are going to overwhelm and destroy them if we don’t do something soon.

The problem is that now is a terrible time to have a homeworld. The Migrant Fleet might have some slim hope of scattering or running and hiding from the Reapers. We in the audience know that plan would eventually be doomed, but with their fleet the Quarians could be set up to outlast the rest of the galaxy. But if they give up their ships and settle on the homeworld, they would probably be the first of the races to go extinct. A population of just 17 million isn’t going to last very long.



me3_rannoch2.jpg



On my first trip through Mass Effect 3, I was annoyed with this story. During our Mass Effect 3 LP, I ranted against this section because Han’Gerrel is being an idiot, and I was just so tired of idiot plots by this point. Everyone is stupid, nobody can plan ahead, nothing makes sense, and nobody seems to notice.

But in real life you do sometimes end up with foolish or short-sighted leaders and they sometimes do enact destructive policies. It’s not even particularly rare. It’s actually a nice touch to have flawed, fallible, occasionally vain people running things. Perhaps we can refer to this as “interesting stupid”, in contrast to “regular stupid”.

The problem is that in a story where nearly everyone is “regular stupid”, the actions of the “interesting stupid” people get lost in the noise. Instead of seeing interesting conflict arising from a tragic character flaw, it looks like another dum-dum enslaved by the writer.

But on subsequent trips through the game I’ve warmed up to Han’Gerrel and his scheming. I think he’s a pretty good short-term villain, and I don’t think he deserves to be lumped in with lunkheads like Hackett, Udina, Anderson, and everyone who has ever worked for (or with) Cerberus.
  1. He has a goal. Unlike Cerberus, who are sometimes “pro human” and sometimes “take over the galaxy” and sometimes “KILL CIVILIANS LOLOL”, Han’Gerrel has a clear goal and a plan for making it happen. He wants to re-take the Quarian homeworld, which his people have been dreaming about for centuries.
  2. His mistakes are foolish, but understandable. His goals stem from his position, his culture, and the galactic history that has shaped the Quarian / Geth conflict.
  3. This isn’t a last-minute ass-pull from the writers. His potential for this sort of villainy was established and telegraphed in Mass Effect 2. Nearly everything in Mass Effect 2 has ended up retconned, forgotten about, or rendered moot. So it’s awesome to see some Mass Effect 2 ideas leading to some kind of coherent payoff.
  4. Everyone else in this mission story is basically normal, or flawed in interesting ways. This is a plot that requires a couple of leaders to be foolish about one thing, not a plot that requires everyone to be stupid about everything.
Space Battles IN SPACE!


me3_space_battle.jpg



So Han’Gerrel wants Shepard to slip onto the battlefield in his super-cool stealth ship, send a team of people over, and disable the dreadnought that’s broadcasting the magical Reaper buff signal[3]. Getting to the Geth dreadnought means flying though a big Star Wars style space battle where ships float lazily past one another like sailing ships and blast each other with pew-pew lasers.

This isn’t how the Mass Effect 1 codex says space battles work. According to Mass Effect 1, space battles are like space itself: Mostly empty, with a small number of things moving through the void at massively dangerous speeds, where any hit means death. Fights supposedly happen at extreme ranges, at high speed. But here we have naval combat without the water. (Although to be fair, Mass Effect 1 forgot about this idea by the time we got to the fight with Sovereign at the end.)

But you know what? I think the Mass Effect 1 writer made a bad call. I think this works better for the medium. While I’m always happy to see hard sci-fi ideas in my videogames, I think this change makes a lot of sense.

The problem is that while sniping in the void is probably pretty realistic – or at least, more realistic than Star Wars style dogfighting where lasers travel at hockey puck speeds – it’s an idea that works really well in print, and horribly in a visual medium like movies. (Which includes videogame cutscenes.)

How can you depict such a battle properly? There’s nothing to see. The camera can cut from one ship to the next, but it’s just a ship in a black void. The audience will have no sense of speed. No sense of where the combatants are relative to one another. No sense of who has the upper hand.

The only way to do this would be to have a couple of characters looking at a monitor, and one of them is explaining to the other what’s happening. It’s like listening to a baseball game on the radio. The audience would be left with a conflict that’s less exciting, less clear, and which needs tons of expensive dialog to explain how the battle works.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. You could probably have a go at handling it like typical submarine movies where the battle is conveyed through chatter, although that would require a large cast of characters flying the ship instead of just a pilot / co-pilot. In any case, doing it “right” would be very dry, expensive, and difficult.

Sometimes you need to stick to your science. Sometimes you really need to break from science and just go with what makes sense. Like hand-waving gravity, this is one of those things where a little compromise can go a long way to making something much easier to follow.

You CAN Stop the Signal, Baby!


me3_rannoch3.jpg



This is a really great section of the game. Okay, the blue interiors get old quickly, but it’s a nice change of pace, there are a few fun ideas thrown in[4], and you get to fight the Geth again. I never get tired of their beeping noises.

At the end Shepard finds Legion, the special Geth envoy / explorer that was potentially part of the Normandy crew in the previous game. The Geth are using him to… boost(?) the Reaper signal(?) somehow? He doesn’t even want to be doing it. They’ve just got him chained up like a prisoner in their evil Reaper machine.

While I really like this mission, I will say this setup is pretty schlocky. Why is Legion uniquely qualified to boost this signal? Does he have some ability that the Reapers don’t? If this power comes from some gizmo in his body, why don’t they just take the gizmo? Or build a duplicate? Or mind-wipe him so he’s loyal and not fighting to get free of this situation? The writer is anthropomorphizing the shit out of these guys.

But at least these problems stem from sloppy adherence to the science-magic of Mass Effect. That’s a tiny bit annoying, but basically par for this genre of fiction. Heck, the Starship Enterprise is powered by Dilithium Crystals and This Very Thing. I’ll take this over another brain-melting Cerberus scene any day.

Once Legion is free, the dreadnought is vulnerable. Rather than rescue the live ships as agreed, Han’Gerrel decides to push the attack and blow up the dreadnought. With Shepard on board.

Shepard escapes, and when he confronts Han’Gerrel you get a RENEGADE INTERRUPT prompt to punch his stupid dumb face, and it’s really hard to not click on it. This was a pretty big hint that this story was working. I was mad at Han’Gerrel, not the writer.



me3_rannoch4.jpg



But you need to cut a deal with this guy for his fleets, so it’s actually not ideal to click it. I love this. The renegade interrupts in this game often feel a little self-indulgent, so it’s nice to have an irresponsible one thrown into this situation where you need to restrain yourself for reasons of diplomacy.

Minor nitpick: I’m not crazy about how ambiguous these prompts can be. When the red marker pops up you don’t know what Shepard is going to do. Deck him? Say something racially insensitive? Shoot him? Sure, you can probably guess what the game is going to do if given enough time. (Racial slurs would be out-of-character, Shepard doesn’t have a gun, so this is probably a prompt for fisticuffs.) But if you pause to think it through, the moment will pass. I’d like it if the prompts gave you a little more information about just how drastic your actions are going to be. I’m always afraid I’m going to try and flip someone off and end up shooting them in the face.

Like Mass Effect 2, this game has a very modal quality. In Mass Effect 2 we had a drooling central plot and then enjoyable character missions. Here in Mass Effect 3 the main plot is both larger and dumber, but the “side” stuff is still wonderful. Like curing the Genophage, this Quarian vs. Geth conflict has lots of different viewpoints, is driven by characters, is responsive to past choices, and offers engaging new choices.



me3_rannoch5.jpg



A good example of an interesting choice: There’s a Quarian general who opposed the attack on the Geth and was vigorously against bring the live ships into the fight. But once the vote went against him, he sucked it up and did his job to the best of his ability. He’s been shot down and separated from his crew on the planet. He pleads with Shepard to save his crew, but from Shepard’s perspective it’s better to let the crew die and save this general, who might be able to convince the leadership to give up on this attack. And of course, you’re here to get his ships for retaking Earth, which means the fewer losses here on Rannoch the more ship’s you’ll have for retaking your own homeworld.

It’s a volatile mix of politics, people, and practicality. And the game is smart enough to notdirectly map your options strictly to paragon / renegade. The game allows for the fact that maybe you’re trying to help the general because it’s the “right thing to do”, but maybe you’re doing it because you want his ships[5].

The Matrix


me3_tron1.jpg



Legion invites Shepard to enter the Geth version of Tron and clean all the Reaper code out of their brains. The premise is pretty silly science, and that’s before we get to the hilarious idea of shooting computer viruses with virtual guns. But I give this section points because it gives us a fresh new perspective on the Quarian vs. Geth conflict.

The Quarians were really genre-savvy. They realized that their robot servants had achieved consciousness, and they figured they were about to face the robot uprising. So they tried to get rid of all the robots in the most brutal way possible. Which caused the robot uprising. (They were genre-savvy, but not “regular savvy”.)

As Shepard stumbles around inside the Geth mind, he sees some Geth memories. If these memories are to be believed (and they don’t conflict with anything the author has told us so far) then the Quarians were brutal, callous, merciless, and wrong. The Quarians don’t remember it, but there was a faction of Quarians who wanted to let the Geth live, and they were killed along with the Geth.

The Geth didn’t begin to fight back until they had been pushed to the brink, and they stopped fighting the moment the Quarians retreated. The Quarians were 100% the aggressors.

I love this inversion of the expected sci-fi tropes. It lets us have our robot conflict story without it being yet another riff on Skynet.

On the other hand, this massively, completely, aggressively contradicts the end of the game when King Reaper tells us that synthetics and organics will always be at war. Not only is war not inevitable, but it looks pretty damn easy to avoid. The Geth are intelligent, reasonable, compassionate, and merciful. When we switch back to the main plot, these ideas will be forgotten.

Again: The writing here is clearly modal. You can almost hear the clutch grind as we shift between disparate sections of the game.
 
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Bumvelcrow

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It is Thursday already? :) Reading these articles it looks like Shamus is getting increasingly pissed off as time passes. Hopefully the final entry will consist of him inviting out all the ME writers for some serious payback. Not even Bubbles went through such torture for his art.
 

Spectacle

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The problem is that while sniping in the void is probably pretty realistic – or at least, more realistic than Star Wars style dogfighting where lasers travel at hockey puck speeds – it’s an idea that works really well in print, and horribly in a visual medium like movies. (Which includes videogame cutscenes.)

How can you depict such a battle properly? There’s nothing to see. The camera can cut from one ship to the next, but it’s just a ship in a black void. The audience will have no sense of speed. No sense of where the combatants are relative to one another. No sense of who has the upper hand.

The only way to do this would be to have a couple of characters looking at a monitor, and one of them is explaining to the other what’s happening. It’s like listening to a baseball game on the radio. The audience would be left with a conflict that’s less exciting, less clear, and which needs tons of expensive dialog to explain how the battle works.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. You could probably have a go at handling it like typical submarine movies where the battle is conveyed through chatter, although that would require a large cast of characters flying the ship instead of just a pilot / co-pilot. In any case, doing it “right” would be very dry, expensive, and difficult.
Alternatively, you could take advantage of the medium you're working with and present the space battles as a minigame. No silly cutscenes of ships sailing slowly through space while firing broadsides, just an abstract map showing the relative positions of the fleets, a menu driven interface and lots of numbers giving you information about the situation. No need to explain to the player what is happening in the battle, let him experience it himself.
 
Unwanted

The Nameless Pun

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Most people seem to insist that the writer "painted himself into a corner" by making the Reapers some unstoppable Lovecraftian force of nature and that the big reveal would be a complete dud.

How so? There is no reason to have a big reveal at all, nothing prevented the writer from simply... not answering.

You don't need a reveal, especially if your entire premise is based on a great mystery, since nothing you can say will appear to resolve the mystery in a satisfactory way to the audience, and I say "appear to" deliberately, because straight answers are boring. Not answers and explanation, but delivering them.

Just because something is unknown doesn't mean it is mysterious. Do you know who built the chair you are sitting on, or who made the graffiti in the parking lot? Do you really believe you would be amazed if you somehow knew? The possibilities have very few variables.

In Halloween 2, Michael Myers is briefly unmasked and all you see is a perfectly normal middle-aged man. Not even the movie makes a big deal out of it: no camera effect, no violin sound, and then you feel dumb and say "of course, what did I expect?" The obsession that something just has to be a huge reveal if it is unknown gave us the stupid zombie faces so common with masked killers in later slashers.

The Reapers are killer robots who wipe out civilisation in particular but spare life in general, including sentient life like prehistoric humans, and they have been self-sustained long enough that their creators are not around anymore. Starting from there, the pool of hypotheses is extremely limited, it's not like any of them had the potential to be a shock.

Who creates self-replicating killer robots? Militaries who lost control? Eco-terrorists who didn't want civilisation to overgrow? Did they actually lose control, or were simply outlived?

You don't know, no one can know, the knowledge is lost. It doesn't mean that if you somehow had magical access to the answer (the ghost child essentially), the answer would be anything but completely, absolutely (but predictably) banal and boring. Same as Halloween 2: "what did I expect?"

It reminds me of horror films where supposedly the main villain is fearsome when unseen and executions are scarier when they happen off-camera. The villain was ominously walking towards the victim with a machete, the camera panned away as we heard screams of terror, and then the heroes found the decapitated body. Wow, a mistari. What happened? Someone tell me because I have no idea.

Sometimes the reveal is that there is no reveal, and in that case it's best not to give a final answer and let players figure things out for themselves. Remember how the Handmaiden is Kreia's daughter in KotOR 2? Now instead of that, give Obsidian a Director's Cut ending where Kreia says "by the way, take care of her, she's my daughter" before dying.

Spelling things out robs us, it is in our nature to unravel things. I'm sure most of us would have said "that's actually quite cool" if all we knew about the Reapers had been from gathering clues, infering from planet descriptions and Codex entries and analysing how they behave. Instead we have Dark City with the prologue that spells out what we should have been slowly discovering.
I regret not being able to brofist you, bro.
 

Atomkilla

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The problem is that while sniping in the void is probably pretty realistic – or at least, more realistic than Star Wars style dogfighting where lasers travel at hockey puck speeds – it’s an idea that works really well in print, and horribly in a visual medium like movies. (Which includes videogame cutscenes.)

How can you depict such a battle properly? There’s nothing to see. The camera can cut from one ship to the next, but it’s just a ship in a black void. The audience will have no sense of speed. No sense of where the combatants are relative to one another. No sense of who has the upper hand.

The only way to do this would be to have a couple of characters looking at a monitor, and one of them is explaining to the other what’s happening. It’s like listening to a baseball game on the radio. The audience would be left with a conflict that’s less exciting, less clear, and which needs tons of expensive dialog to explain how the battle works.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. You could probably have a go at handling it like typical submarine movies where the battle is conveyed through chatter, although that would require a large cast of characters flying the ship instead of just a pilot / co-pilot. In any case, doing it “right” would be very dry, expensive, and difficult.
Alternatively, you could take advantage of the medium you're working with and present the space battles as a minigame. No silly cutscenes of ships sailing slowly through space while firing broadsides, just an abstract map showing the relative positions of the fleets, a menu driven interface and lots of numbers giving you information about the situation. No need to explain to the player what is happening in the battle, let him experience it himself.




Judging by the level of minigames Bioware has presented us in ME (planet scanning, namely, though there were some minigames in ME1 IIRC), I think that such an idea, though nice in theory, would suck hard when given the Bioware treatment.
 

Kontra

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Yeah man thats Halloween 1 not 2. But youre right, they shouldnt have shown his face... At most they shouldve just shown Lauries reaction to seeing it or something.
 

donkeymong

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The problem is that while sniping in the void is probably pretty realistic – or at least, more realistic than Star Wars style dogfighting where lasers travel at hockey puck speeds – it’s an idea that works really well in print, and horribly in a visual medium like movies. (Which includes videogame cutscenes.)

How can you depict such a battle properly? There’s nothing to see. The camera can cut from one ship to the next, but it’s just a ship in a black void. The audience will have no sense of speed. No sense of where the combatants are relative to one another. No sense of who has the upper hand.

The only way to do this would be to have a couple of characters looking at a monitor, and one of them is explaining to the other what’s happening. It’s like listening to a baseball game on the radio. The audience would be left with a conflict that’s less exciting, less clear, and which needs tons of expensive dialog to explain how the battle works.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. You could probably have a go at handling it like typical submarine movies where the battle is conveyed through chatter, although that would require a large cast of characters flying the ship instead of just a pilot / co-pilot. In any case, doing it “right” would be very dry, expensive, and difficult.
Alternatively, you could take advantage of the medium you're working with and present the space battles as a minigame. No silly cutscenes of ships sailing slowly through space while firing broadsides, just an abstract map showing the relative positions of the fleets, a menu driven interface and lots of numbers giving you information about the situation. No need to explain to the player what is happening in the battle, let him experience it himself.




Judging by the level of minigames Bioware has presented us in ME (planet scanning, namely, though there were some minigames in ME1 IIRC), I think that such an idea, though nice in theory, would suck hard when given the Bioware treatment.

I actually like the quest of the salarien who developed a hacking device for the gambling machines in the citadel.
 

Ippolit

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RPG Wokedex Bubbles In Memoria Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Mass Effect Retrospective 44: Boss Fight
splash800_takebackearth.jpg

Here we are. The mysterious and legendary Quarian homeworld. We’ve been hearing about this place since we met Tali way back at the start of Mass Effect 1. I’ve always wondered about this place. I have to say it’s not quite what I was expecting.

Rannoch
me3_rannoch7.jpg

Quarians actually lived here? Maybe this isn`t the best time to bring this up, but maybe the Geth did you a favor when they threw you off the homeworld.

The Quarians only left a couple of centuries ago, and they were already a space-faring civilization at the time. So you’d expect to see some spectacular cities here. Or ruins of cities. Or Geth cities built from abandoned Quarian cities. Or, you know… houses. Something.

The planet description offers the excuse that a lot of the planet is kind of “Mojave Desert”-ish[1] and not worth inhabiting. I guess that’s where these missions take place?

In reality, I’m sure this was a simple budget problem. Cities are expensive to build, and this game is already heavy on expensive content. Still, I really wanted to see a Quarian city. Even if it had just been a darkened city on the horizon, baked into the skybox, it would have been wonderful.

It’s hard to share Tali’s excitement when her planet looks like such a depressing shithole. It’s like bringing your alien friend to see Earth, except you only show him some featureless scrublands, or a random spot in the middle of the Atlantic. Spoiler: He might not be super-impressed.


me3_rannoch6.jpg

Tali, are you sure you don`t want to build your house somewhere HABITABLE?

We’re here because the Geth are still getting some sort of Reaper signal from the planet, which is boosting their combat prowess.

Earlier, there was a brilliant conversation with Legion where he explained why the Geth allied with the Reapers again. The Quarians attacked, and the Geth felt like they were out of options.

“Imagine that for every one of your people lost on Earth, your own intelligence dimmed. The [Quarian] attack narrowed the Geth’s perspective. Self-preservation took precedence.”

This is a great perspective. It shows just how different and alien the Geth are in their thinking. It explains why they allied with the Reapers, even though you supposedly wrapped up that plot in Mass Effect 2. It also puts the blame for this whole mess right back on the Quarians.

Legion wants his kind to evolve independently, without Reaper interference. So the final task here on Rannoch is to shut down this Reaper signal.

Boss Fight
me3_rannoch8.jpg

Hey, I`m down here, asshole. What are you even shooting at? Birds?

There’s a bunch of fighting, but at the end of the mission it’s revealed that the source of the Reaper signal is… a Reaper. Which, yeah. Maybe someone should have seen that coming.

Shepard is equipped with a space-laser-pointer so he can paint targets and the Quarian fleet can bomb the spot from orbit. So you have to dodge the Reapers eye-laser and guide the fleet weapons to shoot it in the vulnerable spot. Which is a big red glowy bit. Which is exposed when the Reaper fires. And once the Reaper begins shooting, it fires in a straight line so you can dodge-roll out of the way.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear I dislike this sequence. It’s too transparently a videogame boss fight. It requires the Reaper to continue to chase around one little human instead of dealing with the fleet that’s actually kicking it’s ass[2]. The Reaper apparently forgets it can fly. The Reaper suddenly can’t aim its eye laser, even though we’ve seen them do it effortlessly in the past. The Reaper keeps using the red laser that makes it vulnerable, when it could just as easily walk over and sit on you at no risk to itself. This supposed hyper-intelligent machine god has to be dragged down to the mental level of a cat chasing a laser pointer for this to work. And I’m pretty sure even a cat would stop chasing a laser pointer if you physically attacked it.

Sigh. I guess this is the price of BioWare going mass market. I hate it, but I guess I don’t blame them. There really are a lot of people who get bored or frustrated if the game doesn’t give them big set-piece encounters like this. As silly as this is, I’d gladly put up with it if it meant we could get more AAA sci-fi in our gaming diet. At least we’re not fighting Cerberus.

This is clearly a part of the game you’re not supposed to think about too hard. But I’m feeling churlish so let’s perform a renegade interrupt and do exactly that.

Overthinking Orbital Bombardment
me3_rannoch9.jpg

Sure, you CAN excuse this by saying it`s shooting energy balls using mass effect fields or whatever. But it looks like a deck gun, moves like a deck gun, and recoils like a deck gun. So let`s pretend it`s a deck gun.

So Shepard is laser-painting the Reaper’s weak spot. Given the speed the Reaper is moving, painting the target would be pointless if it took more than a second for the space-bullets to reach the target. Any longer than that and they’d be hitting his turtle shell, which the dialog makes clear is invulnerable-ish.

Both the Quarians and Geth want to operate in the space directly over the signal[3]. So it’s reasonable to assume that the ships are in stationary orbit around the planet.

Geostationary orbit on Earth[4] is 35,786,000 meters above sea level. Let’s assume Rannoch is in the same ballpark, mass-wise. Light travels at a brisk 299,792,458 meters a second. So if these space-bullets cover the distance from orbit to ground in one second then they are coming down through the atmosphere at something like 12% the speed of light. We don’t know how big the projectiles are because we don’t have any reference objects when we view the ships. But these are warships and the cutscenes suggest the ones in the foreground are probably Normandy-sized. Hilariously, the guns recoil and make boom-boom sounds like gunpowder-based cannons from Earth. (I guess writing science fiction is hard sometimes.) Using that as a guide, the projectiles are somewhere “between bowling-ball sized” and “human sized”. Let’s assume the lower value, just to be nice.

me3_rannoch11.jpg

Normally I wouldn`t presume to tell a space-god his business, but maybe you should leave Shepard alone for a minute and worry about the fleet that`s pounding the crap out of you.

Accelerating a bowling ball to 0.12c is not a very safe thing to do. It basically doesn’t matter what you make the ball out of. It could be made of high explosives that detonate on impact[5] or they could be literal bowling balls. The difference in energy imparted to the target (and surrounding area) would be basically the same.

Assuming I didn’t screw up my Wolfram Alpha inputs: A 10lb (4.5 kilogram) object accelerated to 0.12c will deliver 4.106×10^17 joules of energy to the target. That’s something like 98 megatons of TNT. That 10lb bowling ball is going to hit more than 4,000 times harder than the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Shepard is less than half a kilometer from the point of impact. He’s basically got 4,000 atom bombs going off in his face[6].

Oh wait. That’s just one shell. The ships are actually firing a dozen or so of these “bowling balls” per salvo.

me3_rannoch10.jpg

You might want to shut your eyes, Shepard. And maybe back up a thousand kilometers or so.

And this fight requires you to hit the reaper with five salvos, with the Reaper getting closer each time. The last salvo slams into the Reaper only a dozen or so meters away from Shepard.

4,000 atom bombs per shell x 12 shells per salvo x 5 salvos = 240,000 fat man nukes.

“Can Shepard survive this?” is the wrong question. The question should be, “What kind of damage is this going to do to the planet?”

Welcome back to Rannoch, Tali. You might want to wait for the tectonic plates to settle into their new positions and the dust clouds to settle out of the atmosphere before you start building your house.

Yes, it’s goofy and pretty schlock-y, but I can actually forgive the game for lapses like this. I don’t expect writers to know how to calculate the energy of impacts at relativistic speeds[7]. And there’s always the hand-wave of “mass effect fields” to deflect this sort of analysis. But I do expect them to know how to construct a story and write their characters. And turning the Reapers into derpy punching bags who act like a cat chasing a laser pointer is a lot more damaging to the story than getting tripped up on the science.

Anyway…
When the Reaper dies, the Geth lose their upgrades and the space-battle going on overhead begins to turn against them. Han’Gerrel is still a dick, and has decided to wipe out the Geth while he has the advantage.

Legion shows up and announces he wants to upgrade the Geth collective. (It’s a long story.) You get some pretty big choices here. If you stop Legion from giving the upgrades, then Han’Gerrel will wipe them out. If you allow the upgrades, then idiot Han’Gerrel will still press the attack and get his people wiped out. You can side with the Quarians – which includes Tali. Or you can side with the Geth, which includes Legion.

When forced to chose, I’ve always sided with the Geth. The game just got done showing that the Quarians have always been the aggressors in this conflict that has spanned centuries. The only reason to side with the Quarians is because you really like Tali. I like Tali, but I’m not willing to genocide a species for her. Especially not when her species is and has been the aggressor for centuries. I suppose Han’Gerrel’s trechery and bloody single-mindedness doesn’t help the Quarians either.

You can try to broker peace, but it’s only possible if you have enough paragade juice and you haven’t pissed off either side too much. Brokering peace gets you both fleets and a big happy ending to this story[8], but does require quite a bit of effort. I’m pretty sure it’s only possible if you imported a Mass Effect 2 with the right decisions. The default Mass Effect 3 state can’t ever attain it.

For reasons of lazy pathos, Legion has to die in order to pass on these upgrades, even though he’s simply broadcasting data to the other Geth and copying data is kind of what computers DO.

The writer has basically given up on the whole “hard science” angle and gone for full-on action schlock. That’s annoying, but it doesn’t ruin the game because everything else here works. It concludes a story introduced in the first game. The characters ring true. We’re not constantly tripping over massive contrivances and retcons. There are characters driving the story, giving a sense of personal stakes. The dialog isn’t bristling with stupidity. Shepard doesn’t grief the player in cutscenes. Shepard isn’t railroaded into making infuriating choices or saying things that frustrate the player.

It’s action schlock, but it’s good action schlock. I miss my Mass Effect 1 style sci-fi, but at least this part works on its own terms. The next part? Much less so.
 

Spectacle

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You can try to broker peace, but it’s only possible if you have enough paragade juice and you haven’t pissed off either side too much. Brokering peace gets you both fleets and a big happy ending to this story[8], but does require quite a bit of effort. I’m pretty sure it’s only possible if you imported a Mass Effect 2 with the right decisions. The default Mass Effect 3 state can’t ever attain it.
If that's actually true then that's more C&C in this one quest than in the entire Dragon Age series.


So it's probably not true...
 

Lhynn

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Aug 28, 2013
Messages
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Yup, its true. i did it.

Yeah so did I. Didn't even know you could only do it if you had done stuff in ME2 though. Sort of incline there.
Plenty of other shit like that in the game. Which makes it all the more retarded that they shat the bed with the whole main quest, especially the ending.
It shows that they put a ton of work on the side shit, but all for naught. Truly bioware has a huge problem of incompetence, but its not without its talent.

The thing I'm skeptical about is the happy ending being locked away without an appropriate ME2 save, that sounds way too hardcore for Bioware.
As i said, plenty of stuff like that in the game actually. every choice you made in ME2 was actually tracked for 3, and adressed in one way or another, including locking out optimal results for a lot of the big quests.
 

Spectacle

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That's quite impressive, and further highlights how variable the quality is. The lead writers who wrote the main quest must have been too dumb to even notice that the sidequest writers were completely outclassing them when it comes to quality.
 

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