Mass Effect Retrospective 25: Horizon
So the player is finally cut loose. They have their ship, their pilot, a new boss who is either boring or irritating, and list of people to round up for an ultimate goal that hasn’t been explained yet. The returning Mass Effect 1 player is naturally going to want to return to the Alliance and the Spectres to continue what they started in the first game. And so they go to…
The Citadel
Anderson says the Alliance can’t help you because you’re working with Cerberus, so you have to work with Cerberus because the Alliance won’t work with you. The writer placed Shepard into this thematically wrong situation and they can’t give us a better justification than circular reasoning.
The Council won’t meet with you for some hand-wavy political reasons, depending on whether you saved them or left them to die at the end of the first game. I’m okay with that, although it clashes with the “You’re a hero and a bloody icon” idea the game is attempting to sell. If Shepard is such a valuable beacon and leader that he’s worth bringing back from the dead, then why isn’t anyone willing to listen to him?
But whatever. The point is: While I can accept the the Council refuses to meet with you in person, it’s ridiculous that they wouldn’t be willing to send a representative to meet you in secret. You guys don’t want any Cerberus intel? You don’t want a tour of my new super-ship? You don’t care what I’m doing? Nothing?
Note that this isn’t a “plot hole” in the sense of being impossible. You can devise all sorts of excuses or theories for how the universe got into this shape. The problem is that betraying Cerberus – or simply working for the Alliance either overtly or covertly – is something many players will want to do. It’s something that it seems like it should be possible. The problem isn’t that we can’t do it, the problem is that we can’t explore it. If the writer wants to wall off some area of possibility space, then they need to spend some time answering reasonable, “But why can’t I do X?” type questions.
It’s like a game where your character really needs a cup of coffee, so you go to the diner and discover that none of the dialog options will allow you to order a coffee. “Maybe they’re out of coffee!” is the reflexive apologist excuse. And if that reality was reflected in the dialog I wouldn’t find this scenario so frustrating.
I can understand that you can’t allow for every single possible player desire. Shepard can’t become a space pirate with Jack. He can’t become an assassin with Thane. He can’t romance Barla Von and he can’t set up his own upscale curio shop selling erotic Asari soap carvings in the presidium. That’s fine. But this isn’t some exotic idea that only a few players would want. Working for the Alliance (or working as a Spectre) are a natural continuation of the ideas of the first game. It’s something that lots of returning players really wanted (and expected!) to do. The writer doesn’t have to let them do it, but they do need to deal with and explain this new state of affairs. They need to satisfy the player’s curiosity and objects with sound reasoning. But this writer wants to solve all their problems with a sledgehammer that has “BECAUSE I SAID SO!” embossed on the face.
Shepard does the first batch of recruitment missions and then TIM calls him up and forces the next story mission:
Horizon
TIM sends Shepard to the Human colony of Horizon, saying he believes there’s a collector attack in progress. At the start of the mission, Shepard comes to Mordin and asks if he has a way to avoid being paralyzed by the collectors. The camera cuts to an isolation box showing a collector bug, and Mordin says, “Yes!”
What? Mordin joined the team long after Freedom’s Progress. And you never go back there. How could he have possibly obtained this sample? Do the Collectors leave evidence behind or not?
In a details-based universe, this is simply not good enough. Heck, in any universe this isn’t good enough. “Oh no we have an insurmountable problem oh wait nevermind it’s over” is not storytelling. The writer couldn’t even be bothered to give us some lazy technobabble. The story has already established that the collectors leave no trace, which presented this obstacle where we knew they were capable of some kind of mass-paralysis, but we didn’t know how it worked or how to defend against it. The story then resolved this difficulty entirely off-screen, without comment, and without Mordin even leaving his lab. Mordin might as well have put on a wizard hat and cast “Mordenkainen’s Magical Bug Repellant” on the party.
There’s a cutscene where we see Kashley is here on Horizon. Apparently the Alliance finally sent some forces to help these colonists, which means they aren’t apathetic and impotent after all. Except, they sent exactly one soldier and some broken guns, which means they really, really are.
The earlier conversation with Anderson made it clear that, “Those people went out there to get away from the Alliance.” And now the Alliance is here.
Look, you can absolutely make a game about human colonists that have effectively seceded from the human government and then need their help. That’s a great concept for a plot. But the game refuses to explain what’s going on, why the colonists dislike the Alliance, what events caused this dispute, or how the two sides feel about each other now. This is one of the driving forces of the plot and the writer simply refuses to explain any of it. Which, fine. You want to make a popcorn game that hand-waves all that boring worldbuilding bullshit and focuses on style and action. Then just pick some excuse and stick with it. It shouldn’t be hard to keep your facts straight when you have so few.
But no. The Alliance can’t help the colonists except they are. Sort of. The Collectors never leave any evidence except they do. Somehow. Shepard is a hero and an icon except he’s not. This story manages to somehow be both vague and contradictory.
Note how stingy the game is with dialog here. In Samara’s optional loyalty mission, we get numerous long conversations with topics to explore, and several short conversations with side-characters. Here on Horizon[1] – one of the small number of core missions – we have exactly two conversations, and they’re both ridiculous and awful. If they wanted, the writer could have contrived any number of people for us to bump into. Perhaps someone was hiding inside a cargo container right where your team touches down. Maybe all the people in stasis are set free when the collectors blast off. Maybe you find a way to free someone from stasis as you move through the colony. This would have been an ideal time to allow us to feel some kind of emotional connection with these colonies. It could have been used to give some exposition, or to patch over some of the cracks in the story.
Meet Joe Colonist
Instead, we meet exactly one person from the colony. He’s a rude, unreasonable dim bulb who wanders in, complains at you, and you respond with a binary answer that doesn’t matter. This entire game is about saving colonists from Collectors, and this one guy is the only one we meet. In a story sense, he represents everything we’re fighting for. He blames your squad of three people for letting the colony be kidnapped by an army, and then he wanders off alone to pout when you point out he’s being a butthead. Also, he gets the last word in, thus maximizing how irritating he is.
Like I said before, the writer was so enamored of the idea of making this game all about saving Human colonies instead of the galaxy, but they couldn’t be bothered to characterize those humans. We’re supposed to care about humans that the writer doesn’t care about.
It this had been Mass Effect 1, then this mission would have been bookended by conversations with a half-dozen peasants designed to represent the colony as a whole. They would tell us their story, and through those stories we’d come to care about their plight and want to fight for them. It would also double as some world-building where the author could patch over their hasty retcons.
Some examples, in the BioWare style:
“They warned us that the Alliance was stretched thin and wouldn’t be able to help us. That sounded pretty good at the time. Don’t tell [Kaiden / Ashley], but I might have kinda left the service before my contract was over. (Looks down, rubs back of neck awkwardly.) But now? These aliens are crazy! I’ll take my chances with Alliance MPs any day.”
“I came out here because I wanted to escape the big cities and crowding back home. I thought country life would suit me. Never thought I’d see anything like this.”
“The only reason I came out here was to work off my debt to ExoGeni. Forget that. If they want their money they can hire a bounty hunter. I’m outta here on the next shuttle. Was never much of a farmer anyway.”
“I came to this colony with my husband Jon. He was so angry at the Alliance for compromising human interests all the time. He insisted we would be better off on our own. Now he’s… (sobs)”
That’s all we need. It’s not hard. I did that in five minutes, and I’m sure a real writer with a proper supply of time could do quite a bit better. Just put a face on the tragedy.
Earlier in the series I sort of forgave the game for not putting these kind of peasants into a lot of the side missions because there are so many missions, and you have to make compromises someplace. But here their omission is disgraceful. There’s supposedly half a colony worth of people left, but Shepard never sees – much less talks to – any of them. Kashley never expresses concern for them during his/her conversation with us.
Catharsis comes from Characters
Let’s back up and talk about Samara’s loyalty mission again.
Samara wants to capture Morinth, her psionic serial killer daughter, and she wants Shepard to act as bait. During the mission you visit the home of the most recent victim, Nef. You listen to some audiologs that show the arc of Nef’s relationship with Morinth. You see early excitement turn to infatuation, and you realize the strength of Morinth’s mental manipulation. We see what Nef wanted in life, what she valued, and how those perfectly normal desires became a weakness that her killer exploited.
But it’s kind of impersonal to see the victim this way, so the writer also has you meet Nef’s mother. Momma Nef is distraught and confused over what has happened to Nef. She doesn’t understand.
The audiologs telegraph Morinth’s power, and the chat with momma drives home the horrible, heartbreaking cost of her killing spree. Once you go through both of those, the game sends you to the club to meet her in person, and from there back to her apartment where she’s planning to flay your mind.
Now imagine that entire quest without without meeting momma and without hearing from Nef. You’d be tracking down a criminal you know nothing about (aside from her powers and her body count) to avenge the death of a victim you know nothing about.
Yes, the confrontation with Morinth is a powerful, tense, and exciting moment. And it’s cathartic and sad when it’s resolved. But this moment only works because the previous scenes made it possible.
Everything is Backwards
How is it that Nef – a deceased character we never personally meet, from a completely optional sidequest – is more thoroughly and carefully humanized and characterized than the supposedly thousands of colonists at the center of the conflict in this game?
I’d love to know why the quality in this game is so backwards. This main story represents the worst plot work BioWare had done up to that point[2], and yet the character missions still stand as some of the finest work in the history of the studio. The main story is vague, filled with glaring contrivances, and packed with plot holes. The dialog is atrocious and the player choices barely exist. Why is the main story so amateurish and so unlike previous BioWare stories in tone and style? This is like a movie where the principle director was Uwe Boll but the second unit footage came from Stanley Kubrick. It’s baffling.
This is why I keep referring to the Mass Effect 2 writer as a single person. It’s clear they aren’t, and it would be impossible to get through this series without it turning into a crime scene where we try to answer the question “Who killed Mass Effect?”
We’re not quite done on Horizon yet. Next time we’ll catch up with Kashley and talk a bit about our new Reaper.
Mass Effect Retrospective 26: THIS HURTS YOU
So we’re on Horizon and we’ve met Joe Colonist, the nameless dolt who is our stand-in for the human colonies. We still have two other characters to “meet”. First up…
ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL
Harbinger is the name of the Reaper who is controlling the Collectors. Occasionally he shouts “ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL” and jumps into the body of one of the Collectors so he can face you on the battlefield. He throws some cheeseball combat taunts out. Stuff like, “This hurts you, Shepard.” Then you kick his ass and go back to what you were doing. He only takes control of the low-level mooks. He doesn’t ever try to drive one of the larger foes that actually have a chance of killing you.
This is a truly stunning level of perfect wrongness. There are so many layers of faulty decisions here that it’s like peeling an onion made entirely of bad ideas…
If the protagonists aren’t even going to react to Harbinger, then why is he here in the first place? Harbinger comes off like some kind of overcompensating tryhard, and Shepard just smacks him down without a word. It’s as if this Reaper is just another unworthy mook beneath his notice. This is exactly backwards! This whole thing is so perfectly wrong: If you were to add anything, or take anything away, it would be an improvement.
- Space-Cthulhu should be above pedestrian concerns like direct combat with firarms.
- But if he needs to be somehow involved in a gunfight, he should have his own form and not just jump into the body of a lowly mook.
- But if he does jump into a fight, he shouldn’t get his ass handed to him repeatedly.
- But if he does get his ass kicked over and over, he shouldn’t keep saying the same four swaggering tough-guy combat taunts.
- But if he does, we should at least maintain the illusion that Shepard is an insect beneath his notice, and not somebody he knows by name.
- But if he does know Shepard by name, then the story should be selling the idea that Shepard and company find him the least bit intimidating. They should react to his presence in terror or dismay. Sure, it would be ludo-narrative dissonance to have the player character afraid of someone that isn’t actually a serious threat, combat-wise. But that ship has already sailed. We’re already having shooty time with a Reaper. I’m just trying to rescue our villain before this story turns him into a comical punching bag.
This humanizes the Reapers in the worst possible way. It makes them seem small-minded, petty, and weak. His one-liners aren’t even good:
“This hurts you!”
“My attacks will tear you apart!”
The idea that a Reaper that’s millions of years old would behave like a 14 year old kid getting schooled in Counter-Strike is so bad it’s almost hilarious. I can’t believe this idea came from BioWare.
“But Shamus! Harbinger is actually dangerous on higher skill levels!”
If you say so. Although, “Playing on max difficulty will partly fix one of the half-dozen things wrong with our villain” seems like a bad trade-off to me. I’ll point out that the Mass Effect 1 conversation with Sovereign works just fine regardless of what you do in the options menu.
A lot of his taunts don’t even sound like they’re trying to sound Reaper-ish. Several of them could be read by any loser Blue Suns merc and they wouldn’t sound out of place. This flaw should be glaringly obvious to everyone involved. Not just to the writers, but to anyone working on the team. And it’s something that would have been trivial to fix. Just… how did it get this bad?
On top of it all, Harbinger is a dumbass. His Collector plan is doomed to fail even without Shepard opposing him. Later he has the heroes cornered on the Collector ship and he can’t stop Shepard from walking out. He finally scores a win over Shepard late in the game, but only because Shepard suddenly comes down with a legendary case of cutscene stupidity. (We’ll talk more about these sections in detail when we get to them.) There’s nothing in Harbinger’s behavior that suggests any degree of cunning, forethought, patience, or competence.
Harbinger looks even worse when we try to view Mass Effect 2 in the context of the other two games:
Looking back to Mass Effect 1, Harbinger is evidently such a loser that Sovereign didn’t ask for his help when it attacked the Citadel at the end of Mass Effect 1.
Looking forward to Mass Effect 3, we know the Reaper invasion fleet will be here just a few months after the events of Mass Effect 2. (Sooner, if we take the premise of The Arrival DLC into account.) The supposedly ageless and patient Reaper launched this short-sighted attack against a single Human. That rash and needless attack provoked a response that blew up his Prothean ant farm. If Harbinger had just sat still for a few months it would have been effortless to round up all the humans they wanted.
Not only did this writer fail to create a compelling villain for their story, they took the imposing machine-god villains established by the previous game and turned them into pathetic and mildly comical losers.
And speaking of ruining things from the previous game…
The Virmire Survivor
You run into either Kaiden or Ashley here, depending on who survived Virmire. You’d think Ashley might remark on the fact that this is the second time you’ve shown up to save her life during an alien assault on a Human colony. It was a pretty big moment in her life and led to her friendship with Shepard. She ought to be experiencing some intense déjà vu, here. But no.
Kaiden and Ashley both have the same dialog for some reason, even though these two characters have very different personalities. They begin the conversation claiming you’re a “god”, then throw a teenage tantrum because you didn’t call them in the last two years while you were dead, and then act like you’re a supervillain for working for Cerberus. Then they storm off. It’s probably the most frustrating conversation in the game, because both sides are wrong. Kashley is incredibly unreasonable to the point of being irrational and childish, and your answers are dumb, bordering on idiotic. And to top it all off, the dialog wheel lies to you about what you’re going to say.
Here’s the dialog between Male Shepard and Ashley:
Shepard is trying to talk sense into Joe Colonist. One of Shepard’s companions calls Shepard by name.
Joe Colonist:
Shepard? I remember that name. You’re some kind of big Alliance Hero.
Ashley enters the scene from behind a crate(?) and looks in awe at Shepard. The somberVigil theme plays.
Ashley:
Commander Shepard, Captain of the Normandy. The first Human Spectre. (She looks at him warmly, smiling.) Savior of the Citadel. (To Joe Colonist.) You’re in the presence of a GOD, Delan. Back from the dead!
Joe Colonist:
(To Ashley. Disgusted.) All the people we lost and you get left behind. Figures. Screw this. I’m done with you Alliance types!
Ashley:
(Steps forward, offers Shepard a handshake.) I thought you were dead, Commander. We all did.
Shepard:
(Top of wheel, paragon-ish.) It’s been too long, Ash. How have you been?
Ashley:
(Suddenly offended.) That’s it? You show up after two years and act like nothing’s happened?
Every single spoken line above is wrong or jarring in some way, and I could probably spend an entire entry dissecting the whole scene a line at a time. But I don’t want to detract from the Main Wrong Thing by focusing on all the smaller blunders. The main problem is the incredible damage it does to the Kashley character. The rest of the game seems aware of how important the characters are to our connection to this universe. So why is this character handled so poorly? Like Liara, it feels like the author abruptly re-wrote the character for no reason. This isn’t even in service of the story.
This is conversation is such a disaster we can’t even turn to authorial intent for help. Even from outside the story, I can’t tell what the writer is trying to accomplish. Why does Ash go from “awe and admiration” to “offended and pissed off” when Shepard greets her? Is this slam-cut mood change intentional? Is the writer trying to say Ashley is irrational and emotionally unstable, or did they just skip the point in the conversation where her mood-change is depicted? What is the audience supposed to be feeling, here? Are we supposed to be angry at her? Hurt? Indignant?
The dialog wheel doesn’t tell you ahead of time, but Shepard’s responses inevitably mention Cerberus, which makes Ashley even more outraged. They argue for a few lines. Ashley seems to worry that Cerberus is mind-controlling you, even though she doesn’t actually know about the rebuilding process and so doesn’t have a really good reason to suspect that. (And literally nobody else in the story is worried about that, even the ones who do know about how extensive Shepard’s rebuilding was.)
No matter what you choose, she acts like Shepard is a monster and says, “You turned your back on everything we stood for.” (After you saved half the colony. Which you can’t actually point out.) She spends the whole exchange insinuating Shepard is either a liar or brainwashed. When she ends the conversation, she doesn’t say she’s going to check on the victims everyone here is supposed to care about, but instead she says she’s going to report to the Alliance, “To see if they believe you.”
Really, writer? “I’m gonna tell mom!” That’s how you’re going to end the conversation with one of the core characters from the last game?
Some players were willing to go with the premise of working for Cerberus, and some players hated the concept. But this conversation fails for both groups. The writer threw you some excuses at the start of the game to justify the Cerberus alliance, but you can’t offer those excuses back to the game when Kashley asks about it. But you also can’t agree with her, either. You’re obliged to debate her and then prevented from saying anything substantive or asking reasonable questions. Instead you select the dialog option[1] that says, “I’m not working for Cerberus”, and then Shepard says the opposite and fails to follow up with a good reason. And then Kashley acts like this is a horrifying betrayal.
The writer keeps telling us conflicting things about Cerberus:
1) Cerberus is so evil that working with them for any reason – even to save the lives of thousands of innocent civilians – is simply unacceptable. It’s a betrayal of basic values and decency.
2) Cerberus is so benign that Joker and Chakwas left their prestigious careers with the Alliance to join Cerberus, and it doesn’t seem like a big deal to either of them. They’re not deeply conflicted, or worried about what people might say, or expressing anything suggesting that this decision would be viewed as scandalous.
Having conflicting viewpoints can work, if you’re willing to spend the time on it. It’s a good way to make the world feel large and complex. “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter” is a real argument we have in the real world. Except, the author refuses to address any of this. None of it is reflected in dialog or even acknowledged by the characters.
Why is Kashley the only person to think that working with Cerberus is beyond the pale? What does she know that Joker doesn’t? We have this massive difference in opinion on the nature of Cerberus. Based on the Cerberus activity we see in the games, I actually agree with Kashley. But everyone else disagrees. You can’t tell Kashley about what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’ve been trapped in this course of action, and you can’t ask Joker what he thinks of all the horrible things Cerberus has done. Kashley doesn’t explain why her view of Cerberus is so radically different from that of Joker and Chakwas. You can’t confront Miranda or TIM about the evils of Cerberus. None of the pro-Cerberus people will name even a single thing that Cerberus has done that’s good.
The game’s entire presentation of Cerberus seems to change from scene to scene without anyone noticing or commenting. This is so wrong it’s disturbing. If feels like the writer is gaslighting us. “What? I never said Cerberus was evil. Maybe you imagined it?”
I think the author of this scene felt they needed a way to justify Kashly not re-join the crew, and so they contrived this juvenile argument. But no argument was needed. It would have been out of character for Kashley to abandon their post and fly off with you, leaving behind the colonists, equipment, and duties that had been entrusted to them[2].
All we needed to hear was, “I can’t abandon my post. These people need me here now more than ever, and going AWOL won’t help your cause or this colony. (Tearful hug.) Good luck out there, Shepard.” Boom. Done. Kashley stays behind. No stupid conversation, no railroading dialog, no breaking character. You could follow that comment up with Kashley saying something about checking up on their friends – meaning the remaining survivors you just saved. That would give Kashley a way to demonstrate concern for the colonists, it would give us at least some approximation of third-hand concern for them, and it would provide a graceful way to end the conversation without making it sound like Kashley is running off to pout.
And if all of that wasn’t wrong enough, the game plays the Vigil theme from Mass Effect 1 during this conversation. The writer is going to use the music of somber revelations from the first game as the soundtrack for an angry argument?! This is ludicrous and tone-deaf. We’re hearing the most distinctive track from Mass Effect 1 while talking with someone who is acting completely out of character. It actually amplifies the dissonance.
Based on how the theme was used last time, it might be appropriate to use this music…
Playing this music for Kashley is like playing the Star Wars Cantina music when we meet the Ewoks. Even if you think it matches the mood, a proper musical score is more than just a collection of tempos. Individual pieces of music come to mean things. They have their own context. It’s not a magic button the clumsy writer can push to cause emotions to happen.
- When investigating Prothean ruins.
- During a profound and revelatory conversation regarding the Reapers or the ancient past.
- In the “calm before the storm” moments leading into a finale.
Mass Effect Retrospective 27: Everyone Has Read the Script
The finale of Horizon has Shepard’s team repairing the colony’s anti-air guns while under assault from the Collectors. The guns were a gift from the Alliance, but they weren’t working. Once EDI completes a calibration / hotfix, they give the Collector ship a pounding until the Collectors retreat.
After each main story mission, we head back to holograph land to talk to The Illusive Man. These conversations have a lot in common with the Kashley conversation earlier: The other person talks nonsense, your dialog choices aren’t fair, and when you choose one Shepard says something different anyway.
A Talk with TIM
Last week I said the Kashley conversation was a disaster and you could find problems with almost every line of dialog. The same is true here. So let’s do that. Here is an except of the post-mission debrief with The Illusive Man:
TIM:
Shepard. Good work on Horizon. Hopefully the Collectors will think twice before attacking another colony.
A minor point: The only reason their plans failed today was because Shepard fixed the colony's guns. If the guns had been working to begin with, then (based on what the game has shown us) they wouldn't have been able to stage the attack at all. This leads to all sort of questions about why the guns were broken, what the Alliance is doing, how this event impacted the Alliance vs. Colonists dynamic.
But you can't ask about any of that. This isn't a plot hole. It's just that if the player is trying to think about the problem of "how do we stop the Collectors?" from an in-character perspective, it's probably going to frustrate them that the most important and effective element doesn't even come up in conversation.
Shepard:
It's not a victory. We interrupted the Collectors but they still abducted half the colony.
TIM:
That's better than an entire colony, and more than we've accomplished since the abductions began. The Collectors will be more careful now, but I think we can find another way to lure them in.
What is "another" way to lure them in all about? Presumably he's talking about some trick other than the one he used this time. But it never comes up again and Shepard isn't allowed to ask.
Shepard: (Exploratory dialog on the left side of dialog wheel.)
I wondered if you had something to do with that attack. [Kashley] said the Alliance got a tip about me and Cerberus.
Kashley said the Alliance got a tip Shepard was working for Cerberus, so Shepard concluded that Cerberus had something to do with the attack on Horizon? What? I mean, they DID, but this is a nonsense leap of logic.
TIM:
I released a few carefully disguised rumors that you might be alive, and working for Cerberus.
This line is so jarring it makes me wonder if the writer ever had a handle on who knew what in this story. Why would TIM need to release carefully disguised rumors? At the start of the game - right after the tutorial mission - you arrive on Omega. Shepard is met by a lowly guard who knows Shepard's name, identity, and Cerberus affiliation. Not only that, but he laughs at the notion that it was hard to figure out. Also Shepard is flying around in a copy of the Normandy with the Cerberus Logo on the side. And Shepard is constantly railroaded into blurting out his Cerberus affiliation. And Shepard met with Anderson ages ago and Anderson already knew about it.
TIM is saying he released a carefully disguised rumor of facts that are common knowledge, and that rumor changed the behavior of both the Alliance and the Collectors.
Shepard:
I see. What were you trying to prove?
This line is automatic. Which is just as well. No amount of deep-branching dialog wheel could ever untangle the mess the writer just made. It's probably better to hurry along and hope the next round of bullshit distracts the player from this bullshit.
TIM:
I suspected the Collectors were looking for you, or people connected to you. Now I know for certain. It was a risk, but I couldn't just wait for them to take another colony. You understand.
TIM knew that the Collectors were looking for Shepard. He knew that they would know that Kashley is one of Shepard's close friends, and furthermore he knew that they would know that Kashley has been stationed on Horizon. He also knew that the Collectors would want to abduct her, because he knew that they knew that Shepard would find out that she had been abducted, which would incite Shepard into going after them. (Even though he's already doing that?)
Not only does the Collector reasoning not make the slightest damn sense, but TIM was able to predict their moon logic and counter with crazy assumptions of his own.
He knew that if he released a "cleverly disguised" rumor to the Alliance that the Collectors would intercept it, and that they would believe it, and that they would alter their plans in response to it. And he was right: The Collectors did do all those things.
Also, if the Collectors were here to abduct Kashley then why didn't they, you know,abduct Kashley? They nabbed half the colony but they couldn't find the only person wearing pink Alliance armor? Was this part of TIM's plan, too?
Shepard:
We have to make sure they don't abduct anyone else.
TIM:
I want the Collectors stopped for that very reason.
TIM, if you know the Collectors were going to hit Horizon, then why didn't you tell Shepard ahead of time so he could get the jump on them? Or if your rumor incited the attack, then why didn't you wait until Mordin's bug protection was ready[1]? I mean, I get that you don't actually care about these colonies, but how does Shepard showing up late advance your goals?
It’s like Shepard and TIM are interspersing lines from two different scripts. The Collectors are looking for Shepard, or people connected to him? Why? How would that help their cause? What would make TIM think that? How would this attack prove it? Couldn’t this attack just be the result of the Collectors continuing to do what they’ve been doing? Is the game suggesting that TIM releasing a rumor that Shepard was alive somehow caused the Collectors to attack the colony where Kashley was stationed? If TIM hadn’t released those rumors, would the Collectors have left Horizon alone?
This conversation doesn’t flow, it doesn’t feel like these two people are talking to each other, and you can’t follow-up on strange ideas that are just thrown out there without comment. The only way to make this work is to ignore the characters and make a beeline for authorial intent. You can see what the author is trying to say, even if the characters aren’t making sense in-universe.
Not Plot Holes, Character Holes
I know I have to keep saying this, but I am not complaining about plot holes. I am complaining about fundamentally broken characters and dialog. When I pick apart plots like this, some people think I’m throwing down some sort of challenge: “If you can invent some fan-theory or find a codex entry to hand-wave this, then the complaints Shamus makes are invalid!” Some people take the position that everything is fine, as long as there’s some room for us to patch over it in our heads. But these problems can’t be solved with fanfiction[2]. If a scene forces you to invent new information to make it work, then the scene has already failed. The problem is that this entire sequence is just hopelessly muddled and everyone seems to be able to read the minds of everyone else. This dialog doesn’t work.
I am once again reminded of the Thieves Guild Quests from Skyrim, where author tries to do this complex “web of lies” plot and the whole thing falls apart because nobody’s behavior makes any sense in terms of their stated goals. In that story, the player acquires a book and then goes through a long process to confirm its authenticity. The player then presents that book to the guild as proof of some misdeeds. But the guild doesn’t trust the player and didn’t go through all those steps to authenticate the book. Yet they believe it anyway. The writer wasn’t thinking about these other characters and what information they might have. They were just chaining stock quests together.
The result is characters that don’t feel real. They don’t have worldviews and you can’t wonder about what they might be thinking at any given moment, because they don’t have working simulated minds as devised by a careful author. They just do whatever the story requires to drag us to the next scene.
When this happens in movies we usually talk about it in terms of characters “reading the script”. They seem to behave contrary to the information that ought to be available to them, and nobody else in the story seems to find this odd. While a lot of characters in this game seem to suffer from having “read the script”, TIM is by far the worst. TIM is barely even a character. I know he supposedly has this awesome spy network. But being a good spy doesn’t begin to explain these strange leaps of logic he’s making, and they certainly don’t explain Shepard’s understated reaction.
Obviously the game is trying to establish that TIM is extremely sketchy and willing to put human lives at risk to further his goals, but the game has already (and probably accidentally) done a pretty good job of selling the notion that it’s completely bonkers to be working for / with Cerberus, which is why most players don’t want to work for him in the first place. This entire conversation boils down to: “Surprise! This thing you thought was a stupid idea is actually a really stupid idea! BUT YOU HAVE TO KEEP DOING IT ANYWAY.” It’s why people get mad at the writer instead of the villain. TIM isn’t a character. He’s a plot device with a nice chair and a three-packs-a-day habit.
This conversation draws attention to the frustrating railroading and rubs the player’s nose in it, while not supporting or explaining the odd ideas it introduces.
The Collector “Trap”
So the Collectors park their ship someplace and power down to play possum. They send out a bogus message, making it sound like a Turian patrol disabled the Collector ship. TIM intercepts[3] this message, recognizes it as fake, but then reports it to Shepard as if it were real. He’s concerned that if Shepard knows that he’s walking into a trap, then he’ll somehow telegraph that he knows. And then the Collectors will know that he knows, which will make Shepard’s raid… less useful somehow?
This is a setup that requires everyone to have read the script ahead of time.
Dear Collectors,
Did you know that TIM had broken the Turian codes, that he would be listening in on their broadcasts, and that he would specifically dispatch Shepard as soon as he heard your fake report? Was that a guess?
What if someone else shows up that isn’t Shepard? Shepard doesn’t own the only spaceship in the galaxy. What if the Turians hear the fake message? What if they send a bunch of ships? What if Shepard decides not to board you, but instead just starts shooting while you’re powered-down and helpless?
What if Shepard has one of those drive-core nukes like the kind he used to destroy the Virmire facility, and he just dumps that in your cargo bay and flies off? Actually, how stupid would Shepard have to be to leave his spaceship and personally board yours? Why would you ever expect this to work?
And considering that Shepard walked into the trap ignorant, how completely incompetent are you? Are we supposed to take you seriously as a villain?
Love, Shamus
This plan requires the Collectors to correctly anticipate how the Turians, Cerberus, and Shepard will react.
Dear Shepard,
Actually, why don’t you shoot the Collector ship before you board it? Or destroy it outright? Or dump a bomb in their cargo bay?
Love, Shamus
I’m not saying Shepard should do these things. I’m saying it would be nice if we had a little conversation where Shepard discussed options, expectations, and contingencies. It would make him feel more like a leader and less like a mook who just does whatever TIM tells him.
Dear TIM,
What could Shepard possibly do that would telegraph that he knows he’s walking into a trap? He’s approaching the ship of his supposed nemesis. These guys already killed him and blew up his ship once. Which means you should expect him to be cautious to the point of paranoia this time. What additional caution could he take that would qualify as “too much caution” to the Collectors?
If this guy is such a superhuman that he’s worth bringing back from the dead, then isn’t it worth trusting him to be able to do his job?
Moreover, shouldn’t the survival of the Normandy 2, Shepard, and Shepard’s precious team take priority over a single mission? Why not simply blast the collector ship to cripple it for real, and then board it?
What if the Collectors just fly away with Shepard the moment he steps on board? Sure, he’s a “hero, a bloody icon”, but he’s not going to personally conquer the entire ship on foot.
You are puerile adolescent fiction,
Shamus
Everyone Read the Script. Nobody Agrees on What it Said.
Aside: Whats the deal with these light up window-things? They don't correspond to any windows we see from the interior. So what are they? Christmas lights? On a stealth ship?
So Cerberus sends Shepard into this known trap without telling him it’s a trap. I can’t even tell if the writer is trying to say this was a necessary risk or not. I mean, it doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t mean the writer understands that. So now we don’t know how to interpret this scene. Is TIM doing an “ends justify the means” by forcing Shepard into taking big risks for a big payoff? Or is the writer trying to show that TIM is a crazy idiot?
What story is the author trying to tell in this game?
At various points in the story, you could make the case for any of these. But the author won’t just commit to one. When TIM basically admits that he’s doing something nefarious and Shepard replies with “I see”, is that because he’s actually convinced Shepard that this was the right thing to do, or is that because Shepard is biding his time until the moment he can backstab TIM? Does TIM think he’s persuaded Shepard? Does he care?
- Cerberus has ruthless methods, but they really do want to help humanity. (Until they get indoctrinated in Mass Effect 3, anyway.)
- Cerberus is a bunch of evil stooges that are hated by all decent folk, but Shepard uses them to accomplish his goals.
- Cerberus is totally evil and dupes Shepard into helping them by pretending to care about colonies.
- Cerberus is a circus of idiocy and evil, and Shepard is a rube. They work at cross purposes and somehow manage to help human colonies anyway.
They put Cerberus at the center of this story, and then they failed to give Cerberus proper motivation, characterization, or framework within the world. What few things we do know about them are contradicted by the other things we know about them. It’s like a version of Star Wars where the story doesn’t make it clear if the Empire is evil, or if the rebellion is just trying to overthrow a legitimate and popular government.
The writer wants to take this details-heavy space opera of worldbuilding and structured rules and turn it into a broad action adventure. I get it. Fine. But broad action adventure requires clarity, and this story doesn’t even know what it wants to be about.
We’ll finish up this mission in the next entry.
Mass Effect Retrospective 28: Actually, Go Ahead and Fear the Reaper
Shepard has the Normandy sidle up the the “disabled” Collector vessel and his team takes the shuttle over. They’re here for “intel” on the “Omega 4 Realy”, but it’s kind of vague because that’s a really broad topic and we don’t know what they’re looking for specifically. We don’t know what part of the ship they’re in, or heading for. We don’t know how far we have to go, and it’s not even made clear why we need to board their vessel in the first place, since EDI seems to read their databanks from the Normandy. I guess the Collectors have a really shitty Wi-fi password? The author doesn’t seem interested in explaining how that works or what the limitations are, or what.
That’s usually fine in a drama-based story, although this is kind of muddled because the team seems to forget why they’re here. It would be nice if there was just one or two lines of dialog that framed their goals for this scene and explained how they planned to achieve them[1]. Shepard and friends just walk down a single linear corridor and act like tourists in a Collector-based theme park.
It’s actually important to keep the audience focused in a situation like this. We want the player to have some kind of perceptible goal. Since this is supposed to be an ambush, we want them to be thinking about the thing they’re supposedly about to get. Otherwise they go into passive mode and simply wait for the other shoe to drop.
And then we come across a weapon on the ground and we get a popup asking what weapon class we want to permanently unlock for Shepard. Just.. what? Here? In the middle of a mission? Shepard suddenly unlocks a new weapon? Shouldn’t this happen on one of the many upgrade menus in the Normandy? Why is this choice here?
It’s like the writer forgot they were supposed to be building tension for the upcoming ambush and so they left out some exposition and instead gave us some immersion-breaking decisions to make about our character build.
None of this is horrible (yet) but it does feel distracted and desultory.
The Collector Ship
EDI scans the Collector databanks and steals all their exposition. She reveals that the Collectors have a “quad strand genetic structure” identical to a structure “found in ancient ruins”, and that only the Protheans had this feature.
A writer who had even the most rudimentary grasp of story structure would have tucked that “quad strand genetic structure” idea into the story much sooner. Preferably at some point long before this reveal, so that this would be a payoff instead of an ass-pull. But this is the first we’ve heard of it. Instead of being an “ah-ha!” moment of revelation, it’s an immersion-breaking moment where we stop and question the storyteller. Really? The ONLY SPECIES in the ENTIRE GALACTIC HISTORY to have quad-strand DNA? That sounds so unlikely and amazing that it ought to be a topic of constant curiosity whenever they come up.
This revelation that the Collectors are the Protheans would feel a lot more satisfying if the writer had made some kind of effort to connect the two. In Mass Effect 1, the Protheans were lanky Slenderman-looking guys with tentacle beards. Now they’re dudes with insect heads. It just feels like a lame twist for the sake of a twist, not a satisfying development of an idea that was properly established.
Then we reach the main chamber and we see the millions of pods on the wall. One of your companions says something like, “They couldn’t fill these pods, even if they hit every colony in the Terminus Systems. They’re going after Earth!”
Now, you could assume that this one squad member is just jumping to wild conclusions. Maybe the Collectors don’t plan to fill all the pods, or maybe the other pods will be filled with members of other races, or maybe the millions of pods are already full of stuff they’ve been collecting for centuries, or maybe the extra pods are for the collectors themselves to sleep in, or this is how they care for their dead, and so on. There are a lot of conclusions we could jump to that are more plausible than “The Collectors are planning to attack Earth directly.”
But you get this conversation no matter who you bring with you, and I find it more plausible that the writer once again has simply given the characters a copy of the script. The writer is trying to build tension by suggesting that Earth is in danger. Once again, this the problem of assumed empathy. These lines are intended to be exposition.
Which means the Collector’s plan was doomed from the start. The Normandy can give the Collector ship a pretty good thrashing at the end of the game, which means the Collectors wouldn’t stand a chance against the Alliance fleets, which it would certainly have to face if they went anywhere near Sol.
EDI has already revealed at this point that this particular Collector ship is the same one that destroyed the original Normandy, and it’s also the one that attacked Horizon. And at the end of the game, we only face one vessel. Which means that – based on everything the game shows us – they only have one ship. The Collectors aren’t a threat to Earth. They’re losers. If we blew this thing up right now we would win the entire game without needing to go on a suicide mission through the Omega-4 relay.
I’m not saying the game should end here. I’m saying the writer should be able to put themselves into the shoes of the various participants and see the world from their point of view. The Collectors have a plan that is doomed to fail. Everyone knows they come out of the Omega-4 relay, so the Alliance could stop them by having a handful of ships camp the relay. Shepard’s ship is revealed to be strong enough to cripple the Collectors at the end, so he could do the same thing. These possibilities need to be dealt with in dialog to avoid the feeling that this is a galaxy inhabited entirely by morons.
The Collectors spring the trap and kidnap Shepard by flying away!
Just kidding. They just funnel him into a room with chest-high walls and then send waves and waves of mooks at him. Shepard fights his way back to the Normandy and flies away. There are actually some tough encounters along the way, but when the tiny Normandy ditches the massive Collector vessel, I can’t help but marvel at how every single mission in this game seems to diminish our antagonists. The story ought to be building them up for the big finale, but instead it’s eroding them. Their trap was dumb, and the only reason we walked into it was because TIM can’t remember which side he’s on. Their forces are ineffectual. Even with the home field advantage and the element of surprise, they couldn’t stop three people from leaving. Their scheme to assault Earth is a pipe dream.
The only reason they’re a threat so far is because they’ve been kidnapping isolated unarmed civilians that nobody cares about.
Aftermath
In the post-mission briefing, Shepard comes off as kind of dim-witted. I mean, aside from the initial stupidity of working for Cerberus in the first place, his dialog after the mission is a mess. When Shepard discovers that TIM “lied to him” (by not telling him about the ambush) he gets upset that he wasn’t told all the details. As former Alliance military he ought to be able to wrap his head around the idea that superiors don’t always share all the intelligence with you. The problem with TIM’s plan isn’t the lie of omission, it’s that it’s stupid and creates needless risk of irreplaceable mission resources. If he had a smart plan that required withholding information from Shepard, that would be fine. But Shepard and company aren’t just disposable mook scientists like Cerberus is used to throwing away, and putting all of them at additional risk for no articulated benefit is… so very Cerberus.
Shepard is mad about the wrong things and expresses his anger childishly instead of pragmatically. Again, instead of making TIM smart the writer made Shepard dumb. That’s nice in that it prevents the player from asking questions that would unmask the plot as a gigantic waste of time, but it does so by launching them out of the story through dialog-wheel shenanigans.
You can see what the writer is trying to do: They want Shepard to board the Collector ship and get the next batch of exposition, and they’re trying to build some sort of conflict between Shepard and TIM. But this exchange shows they have no head for proper character-driven motivation. All three parties have to behave irrationally to make this particular mission work.
The Dead Reaper
We’re nearing the end of the game at this point. So far the character-based missions (recruitment and loyalty missions) have ranged from serviceable to fantastic, while the story missions have ranged from dull to abysmal. But here we have an interesting situation where a story mission is also a recruitment mission.
TIM sends us to investigate a mostly-dead Reaper, which is smashed and orbiting a brown dwarf. Apparently it was felled by some long-dead civilization, and the carcass has been drifting there for 37 million years. There’s some technical talk explaining how this thing was found and a discussion on what the conditions are like around a brown dwarf. The dialog establishes that if the local mass effect field fails, the Reaper will fall into the brown dwarf and be destroyed. The thing has a strong “sleeping Cthulhu” vibe, with the last batch of visitors (Cerberus scientists) having gone insane. Even in death, the body of this Reaper is still dangerous to the minds of mortals.
Suddenly Reapers are spooky again. Suddenly science is a fun source of plot elements again. Suddenly the game remembers that Cerberus is stupid. Suddenly it feels like I’m playing a sequel to Mass Effect 1.
If this mission had been written in the same style as the rest of Mass Effect 2, then the writer would’ve had the Reaper orbiting a supernova, because a supernova sounds “cooler” and more people have heard of it. The idea of “Cut power, Destroy Reaper” would have been introduced as it happened as a last-minute ass-pull, instead of being properly telegraphed at the start for a later payoff. The people inside would have been killed by something that can hide behind chest-high walls instead of going insane.
Okay, I realize it’s completely unfair to condemn Mass Effect 2 for mistakes it didn’t make. But I’m just trying to illustrate how I see this shift in tone and focus. This mission feels different from the rest of the story missions. It feels like some of the recruitment missions, or perhaps a bit like Mass Effect 1.
I’m not suggesting this mission is perfect or anything. The description for how the Reaper was found is pretty iffy. As INH5 pointed out in the last entry:
I don’t have any justifications for the dead Reaper. There’s really no reason for it to exist, especially given that the stated method of finding it (tracing the path from a crater that an enormous mass driver left on a planet) wouldn’t work because planets move and rotate. As do stars. To do that, you would have to figure out the time of impact to the second, then figure out how the galaxy’s stars were arranged 37 million years ago. I’m pretty sure that both of impossible no matter what kind of advanced computers you have.
On top of this: Going by the “Reapers kill the galaxy every 50,000 years” number, 37 million years means that 740 different societies have come and gone since this Reaper was killed. 740 different species rose to galactic power, explored the stars, built governments that lasted thousands of years, waged wars, conquered their adversaries, colonized far-flung worlds, and were then wiped out by the Reapers. And yet none of those 740 masters of the galaxy ever found this Reaper?
It’s true that the science behind this isn’t very science-y. But Mass Effect 1 also had little compromises like this. It’s not ideal, but I find these sorts of missteps are far less irritating and immersion-breaking than the broken characters, nonsense dialog, lack of reasonable dialog options, tonal failures, and massive contrivances we see in the rest of the story. I know I’ve been pretty heartless to poor Mass Effect 2 in this series, but I’m not doing this because I enjoy complaining about things[2]. I really am willing to let little things slide when the author has the basic elements of storytelling working properly.
This mission is yet another case of a failed Cerberus experiment, and I don’t know if that’s a point in its favor or not. On one hand, this feels consistent with what we knew about both the Reapers and Cerberus in ME1. On the other hand, the main story missions probably shouldn’t be selling the idea that the main story is a dumb idea.
Cerberus found this dead Reaper and dropped off a bunch of scientists, who all went insane. Either Cerberus never bothered to check up on their people, or this whole thing was a deliberate test to see how long it would take them to lose their minds. It’s stupid and evil either way, but the first one is more stupid and the latter is more evil. (And wasteful either way. I have to assume there’s a finite supply of human scientists who are desperate enough to work for Cerberus. And leaving them all to die together isn’t a very good way to run an experiment. Did Cerberus even have means to gather the data? Did they ever back for the results?)
Earlier in the series I said that Mass Effect 2 feels like it was written by someone who hated Mass Effect 1. This mission feels like it was written by someone who maybe wasn’t totally on board with the overall direction of Mass Effect 2.
The meeting with Legion is understated[3] and mysterious. He has just a few lines of dialog to stimulate our curiosity and a single moment where he snipes a husk to demonstrate he’s not your foe, but the game doesn’t say anything further. He doesn’t quip, he doesn’t get a big moment of cutscene badassery, and he doesn’t invite himself onto the team. In fact, he gets the opposite of this. After intriguing us, Legion has a moment of cutscene failure where he’s swarmed by husks. The writer here understands that the best way to get the player to do something isn’t “DO IT BECAUSE I SAY SO!” The best way is to simply leave a breadcrumb trail of questions and then allow them to predictably follow it to the answer.
My only complaint here is that this entire mission is basically fetching a key to open a door. We get the IFF so we can go through the Omega-4 relay. That’s actually not the best use of a dead Reaper, story-wise. Really, an encounter like this is significant enough that it could have been the climax of the game. Obviously the mission we have is too short and simple for that, and wouldn’t work with the rest of Mass Effect 2, but in a thematic sense this would have been a good way to wrap up the middle chapter. If this was longer and isolated Shepard from the Normandy then we could have trapped the player in here. You could mess with the companion dialog and make them worry that they might be crazy. Having the player crawl around in this Reaper and uncover more secrets would have been a good way to follow up on the Sovereign conversation in the first game. It certainly would have been better than playing Whack-A-Reaper with Harbinger when he assumes Mook Form.
But instead the whole thing is relegated to a door-opening quest. And despite my griping, I think it’s still pretty solid. This does a good job of re-establishing the Reapers are a space-terror after the previous missions worked so hard to completely ruin that.
We’re getting close to the end of Mass Effect 2 here. We’ll wrap this up in two more entries.
After that? Guess.
Mass Effect Retrospective 29: Field Trip
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this story. I’ve looked at events from various angles, tried to see the world through the eyes of various characters, and tried to piece together what the author was trying to do. And I’ve found a lot of problems on a lot of different levels. But even after all this effort, it turns out I’ve still managed to miss some really perplexing ones. As reader Gruhunchously pointed out in the previous entry:
You know what my favorite thing about this sequence of events is? That when you get to the derelict Reaper, the IFF you need is conveniently just lying there on a table waiting for you to pick it up.
And that suggests that the team TIM sent to the Reaper extracted it before you got there, which suggests that they already knew what to look for. And since TIM sent them there, and lost contact with them before he sent Shepard to the Collector Ship, it suggests that he ordered them to extract the IFF at some point before then as well.
So TIM put Shepard in extreme peril by sending her into a trap that he knew about in order to confirm the importance of something that he had already had his science team identify and extract from a dead Reaper beforehand. And never told her anything about it until after the mission was over. What a dick.
It really is amazing just how fractally broken the story is. Every problem seems to be made up of a dozen smaller problems, which are made up of smaller problems, which are you get the idea.
Anyway.
Regardless of how Shepard got the IFF or how much sense TIM doesn’t make, it’s time to use this gizmo…
The IFF.
Shepard acquires the special IFF from the dead Reaper. This will, in theory, allow his team to maybe pass through the Omega-4 relay. This is just a theory, cooked up by TIM, the most untrustworthy person in the story. Nobody really knows what happens to ships that go through the relay. So Shepard decides to test TIM’s hypothesis by sending a probe through.
Just kidding. The plan is to just send the Normandy along with Shepard and his team of badasses through and hope it all works out on the first try. Because it’s more dramatic if we have our characters behave irresponsibly.
No really, it is. A probe would be boring. Drama is good. You can have your drama. Justlampshade this. Have a little conversation that explains why we’ve brought this guy back from the dead, built another billion-dollar super-ship, and recruited all these badasses, and now we’re going to risk their lives on complete roll of the dice with some untested Reaper tech, on the word of a crazy man, where any failure means death. Explain why the obvious alternatives (like a probe, or ambushing the Collectors when they exit the relay) won’t work.
They act like the risk isn’t going through the relay, but the fight we’ll face on the other side. It’s like they know they’ll make it through just fine. Once again, people seem to be reading the script.
The author could give us a conversation where Shepard expresses just how bad it is to be backed into a position where he has to take this massive risk. It will simultaneously highlight the risk – thus building tension – while also establishing that Shepard is a person who can think ahead. Instead we handle things backwards. The characters ignore the obvious (to us) risk, thereby deflating tension while also making them seem dumb.
One of the problems is that the IFF is basically some kind of Reaper… software? It’s not entirely clear. But EDI says it will take some time to integrate with the Normandy’s systems. This basically means that you should go off and do more loyalty missions and the IFF will come online at some unknown (to the player) point in the future.
This is what? We’re doing what?
At some point the player will click on the map to go someplace and it will trigger a cutscene. EDI says the IFF is ready for testing, and the ship needs to stay put while that happens. “No problem,” says Shepard, “I’ll just wait until the test is over and resume my mission.”
Just kidding. Shepard concludes he doesn’t need to be around while the crew test dangerous and unpredictable new technology created by cunning doom machines that want to extinguish all sapient life. So he decides to use the shuttle to get where he’s going. And rather than pick his 2 squadmates beforehand, he has every single member of the team – all 10 or 12 of them depending on DLC – suit up and pack themselves into the shuttle[1].
This is just baffling. The player didn’t actually pick a destination on the map. They just clicked on the map and triggered this cutscene. So the player has no idea where Shepard and crew are going or what they’re doing. This game has been really bad about maintaining the link between the player and the player character, but this simply obliterates it. Even if this was a movie where we weren’t expected to have control over the protagonist, it’s still madness to have the entire plot turn on an event where the actions of the protagonists are completely inexplicable to us.
Imagine watching the Death Star assault in Star Wars, except the writers left out the scene where they explained the exhaust-port weakness to the audience. So we’re all just sitting there thinking, “They’re going to shoot up a moon-sized base with fighters? What?” Instead of enjoying the drama we’d spend the entire sequence scratching our heads and trying to figure out what the heroes are thinking. And then when it blows up we’re like, “What? They found a magic hole that blew up the whole station? Did they know that would happen, or was it a lucky guess?”
In an action story, confusion kills drama.
Part of the confusion is that the map isn’t just how you select your next mission, it’s also your to-do list. Sure, you’ve got a journal, but the most convenient way to see what your tasks are is to open up the map and look for the little pins showing what systems have missions in them. So when the player clicks on the map, they aren’t deciding to do something, they’re trying to look at their to-do list. Hijacking the game at this point is bound to cause confusion, because the game is pretending to react to a decision you never made. If nothing else, the cutscene should have been triggered when you tried to go somewhere, not when you opened the map.
But even that change wouldn’t really fix the numerous immersion-shattering problems with this scene. In the play-through I did for this series, I was actually going to do a little mining because I was a few units short of the palladium needed for my next upgrade. Which means I guess that Shepard was loading up the shuttle with all his badasses to do the probing minigame?
The moment Shepard and the team leave, the Collectors show up to kidnap the entire crew.
So imagine we’ve got some players sitting around the table playing D&D. Their characters are at their secret campsite just a few miles outside of town and are planning their next move.
CHUCK:
How are we on supplies?
IVY:
Someone needs to go into town and get some potion ingredients.
Suddenly Casey, the DM, perks up…
CASEY:
You’re going into town? Well, while you’re there some bandits raid your camp and take the Nega Sword.
IVY:
What? We didn’t actually say we were going! We didn’t even say WHO was going! And why would we leave the sword behind?
CASEY:
Well, you did. And then bandits robbed you.
This isn’t just a designer’s foul, this is willful incompetence. It’s nakedly obvious what the storyteller is doing. It doesn’t flow naturally at all. It doesn’t feel fair, it doesn’t make sense, and worst of all it kills all the tension by burying it in incredulity and frustration. It’s the writer showing contempt for the very idea that the player needs to have reasons for the actions their character is taking, and it greatly harms what would otherwise be an interesting idea.
Just to be clear: “Casey” above is named after the game master in Chainmail Bikini. Andthat Casey was a callback to a DM of the Rings joke where the players call the game master Casey Jones, making fun of his tyrannical railroading.
I’m pointing this out because one of the head writers at BioWare is Casey Hudson, and I don’t want anyone to think this is some sort of cryptic dig at that guy.
This is actually just the right point in the story for a setback. And we’re long overdue for the bad guys to get their act together and score a win over the good guys. Conceptually, this event is fine. The problem is that the storytelling is so clumsy it kills the drama.
Don’t Shove. Entice.
Putting ourselves in the writer’s shoes: It’s our job to get all the pieces into place without shattering immersion. If we need to remove Shepard and all of the squad members from the Normandy, then we can’t just swoop in and begin shoving. The solution is to make the player think it was their idea. Think of a problem where the player would want to do this, and put that problem in front of them. Give the player the chance to realize this is a good idea, and then have the player character suggest it.
Something like:
EDI: The Normandy is disabled because of [technobabble]. We need [MacGuffin] to enact repairs. There should be one in the nearby [location].
Joker: Yeah. This has “OBVIOUS TRAP” written all over it, Commander.
And then the player is thinking, “Oh please don’t make me stupidly fall for another lame trap. If [location] is an OBVIOUS trap, why don’t we just bring a shitload of firepower?”
And then when the player sees they can take the whole team, they will understand what they’re doing, why the team is going, and they probably won’t notice how railroad-y the whole thing is. Then when we spring the trap it will feel like it happened fair and square. For the most part. Okay, it’s probably not possible to make something this arbitrary and contrived and have it work seamlessly, but you can certainly do better than this.
Also, there should have been a real mission on the other end of that shuttle ride. Shepard and friends should have gone through a brief shooting interlude to allow the player to settle into this new situation before the writer cut back to the Normandy to spring the trap.
It’s still really clumsy, but at least the player won’t be sitting there dumbfounded, asking why the entire cast was leaving the story for no reason.
Joker
Once the writer hand-waves the heroes out of the story, the Collectors board the ship and begin stealing everyone. EDI could mount some kind of defense, but there are security systems in place that prevent her from directly controlling the ship. Being an AI, people were worried that she’d go crazy and try to kill all the meatbags. It would figure that the one time Cerberus thinks to use some kind of safety protocol it turns out to be a mistake that gets people killed.
Joker is forced to leave the cockpit and run down to the AI core to take the safety protocols off of EDI so she can fight the Collectors. He does, she blows them out of the airlock, and the Normandy escapes.
Like I said, I like this sequence in concept. This gives us a chance to see the Collectors as most colonists see them: As horrifying, unstoppable abductors. After playing as Shepard for so many hours it’s easy to forget that all humans aren’t fearless armored biotic[2] badasses. It’s a break from shooting and a short dis-empowerment which can – in theory – enable them to more fully appreciate the empowerment of playing as Shepard. It gives us more of the Joker / EDI banter, which has been uniformly excellent. It finally gives us an emotional connection to what the collectors are doing by having them abduct known characters instead of hypothetical colonists.
But it’s hard to view this sequence without thinking about how we got here, and how we got here was through a brute-force contrivance that immediately launches the player out of the story. It’s okay to have the bad guys score a win over the heroes. In fact, it’s almost a required ingredient in a story like this. But this should be accomplished by having the antagonist do something smart, not by forcing the hero to do something stupid, and definitely not by doing something that’s initially baffling, and then later only stupid once you’ve gone over it again.
And just to put a couple more whip marks on this dead horse:
Did the Collectors somehow know that Shepard was going to abandon his ship with his badass buddies? Because this assault wouldn’t have turned out the same way if he hadn’t been so nonsensically stupid. Last time they ran into the Normandy the were trying to blow it up, but now they’re abducting people. Did they even know Shepard was gone before they boarded?
Also: I find it really odd that the Normandy continues to function after the entire crew has been kidnapped. It sort of makes me wonder why we dragged them around with us. I guess you could say that taking the shackles off of EDI enabled her to run the whole ship autonomously? If there was a hand-wave of this in dialog, I missed it.
But these are minor points, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed them all if the previous section hadn’t been so outrageously baffling, practically begging the player to look closer to figure out what everyone was doing.
Mass Effect Retrospective 30: Suicide Mission
I’ve spent most of this series complaining about aspects of Mass Effect 2 that a majority of fans don’t see is a problem. So let me briefly be a contrarian in the other direction and defend something everyone complains about: I think the Suicide Mission was a really interesting idea. I think it was a thematically appropriate way to wrap up a game that focused so much on preparation and team-building. It was the first time the series really did anything with the concept of Shepard being a military commander aside from him always leading 3-person teams into gunfights. It justified the large team size and it gave you an in-game reward for doing all those loyalty missions.
Sure, there are problems with how the suicide mission plays out. But unlike the problems with the plot, premise, and dialog, these aren’t baffling failures at basic tasks. The suicide mission was a new idea not just to BioWare but to AAA RPGs in general. It was challenging, it was different, and so its shortcomings are a lot more understandable in a game design sense.
The Suicide Mission
The Normandy goes through the Omega-4 relay to the collector base. There’s a little space battle that reacts to the decisions you’ve made regarding your ship. If you’ve been doing the research, talking to allies, gathering resources, and paying for the upgrades, then the characters will respond. “Gosh! Good thing we upgraded the anti-decombobulator!” If you haven’t, then the bad guys blow holes in the Normandy and maybe some squad members might die.
After that the Normandy lands on the Collector base and you get to divide your people into teams and tasks. If a job calls for someone with technical skills, then you can select anyone with any technical knowledge. This, combined with whether or not you did their loyalty mission, determines if they survive performing the task.
I think the major cause of complaints here is that the cutscenes don’t connect the cause and effect. At one point Garrus gets shot in the chest. If he’s loyal, he just staggers for a second and recovers. If he isn’t, he drops dead. You can try to justify this by saying, “Well, Garrus was distracted, and so during the previous off-screen fights he took more hits, which depleted his shields. Which means that shot to the chest went all the way through.”
That works as an after-the-fact excuse, but it doesn’t really make the moment work in a dramatic sense. When Garrus drops dead it feels random, and not a consequence of his unresolved grudge against Sidonus or your failure to properly lead him. From within the story, you can’t see the cause and effect. If you put in the work and your team survives, then it feels like the game is rewarding you. But if you skip some of the sidequests, then the failures don’t really feel like proper thematic consequences, and they usually don’t work as a story. It feels like a major character died the death of a Star Trek redshirt.
Like I said above, this isn’t some horrible failure. It’s just something that understandably bugged a lot of people. I think the suicide mission was a solid concept, and it would be worth iterating on it to see how these problems could be solved or mitigated. I think it would be worth trying it again and looking for different ways to make the failures and deaths more understandable and acceptable to the audience. I suppose the holy grail of this idea would be for a mission where each character realizes the conclusion of their character arc, either through survival or death. That would be a really ambitious blend of gameplay and story, and I’m not suggesting Mass Effect 2 needed to do that. But it’s a fun idea to play with, and something worth considering for future RPG’s with teams of companions.
Having said all that: It’s a shame the suicide mission idea was used here, because it’s actually better suited for the end of the third game than the end of the second.
Mating Call of Cthulhu
Shepard and company blast their way to the heart of the Collector base. EDI scans their databanks. We see the Collectors turning kidnapped colonists into grey goo, which is then fed through pipes, building a giant robotic humanoid with three(?) glowing red eyes and a mouth-laser. Shepard comes to the horrible conclusion that they’re building… “A human Reaper!” EDI agrees, and suggests that this is how Reapers reproduce.
As I’ve said before, there’s a certain tension in the story of Mass Effect. On the Cthulhu side we want the Reapers to remain mysterious and terrifying. On the sci-fi side we want the Reapers to have some interesting explanation that represents an answer to a problem or idea posed in the story itself. If the writer wants to favor the Cthulhu idea, then they shouldn’t explain anything. If the writer wants to favor the sci-fi idea, then the Reaper mystery needs to be resolved in a final reveal. Sooner or later, the writer was going to have to choose which of these two masters they were going to serve.
But the Mass Effect 2 ending manages to fail both. When faced with the choice of preserving or resolving the mystery, their solution was to introduce a new mystery that’s too on-the-nose to work for Cthulhu and too action schlock to work for sci-fi, and which contradicts ideas presented in the first game. You could argue that it’s replacing the Cthulhu idea with more of an H. R. Giger style story of bio-mechanical body horror, but that’s completely ruined by the unintentional comedy of a MOUTH LASER. The sense of mystery is gone, but we’re also denied having a satisfying explanation for their actions because the story doesn’t really give you a proper sci-fi styled explanation.
So now the writer has painted themselves into an even smaller corner. Not only does Mass Effect 3 need to explain why Reapers kill everyone every 50k years, but now they also need to explain why the Reapers would do… this. So the writer has killed both the Cthulhu and sci-fi aspects of the story, while simultaneously burning all the bridges to Mass Effect 3 so that no future installment could ever make sense of this. The Reapers can’t be a mystery, but they also can’t build to some final reveal where everything falls into place.
Why would you need grey organic goo to build a metal robot? Why would the resulting robot have three eyes? Is that a mistake? What caused it to have a mouth-laser? What could possibly connect this Reaper to the others we’ve seen? And how could building this thing right now possibly advance their cause of conquering the galaxy? Even if this new Reaper was mature, how would it help them? Fine, they’ll have a Reaper. That would take us back to the start of Mass Effect 1, where there was a lone Reaper and a galaxy of people that didn’t believe in it.
It’s not that you can’t come up with answers to these questions, it’s that the story seems to create these questions without realizing it. This is supposed to be the moment of big revelation, and it just introduces a bunch of head-scratching nonsense. Worse, our main characters don’t seem to notice how goofy this is. In fact, they seem to think this is a brilliant twist that makes sense.
Shepard: A human Reaper!
EDI: Precisely.
They also don’t seem to notice that this doesn’t mesh with existing lore. Vigil never mentioned this. We see at the end of the game that all the other Reapers look like Robo-Cthulhu, so there’s no explanation for why this particular one would look like a person. It doesn’t fit with what Sovereign said in Mass Effect 1, and it doesn’t flow from the visions. “Sovereign could have been lying” is the handy excuse, although that effectively negates one of the big reveals and central questions of Mass Effect 1. It’s bad enough the writer capped off Mass Effect 2 with a Big Dumb Reveal, but they’re ruining some of the best scenes of Mass Effect 1 to do it.
There’s not even a line of lampshading dialog from Shepard like, “Everything we thought we knew about Reaper behavior was wrong. So why did Sovereign feel the need to lie to us?” Instead the Sovereign and Vigil conversations are basically dismissed as a side-effect of this new reveal, and the writer didn’t even seem to notice.
The writer’s job had three parts:
I understand that doing all three of those is tough, and I might be more forgiving if they had sacrificed one to benefit the other two. Sure, retcon the Sovereign conversation so it’s all a bunch of dumb lies from a neurotic space monster. As long as the resulting story is satisfying, then people will tend to go along with it. Or if Mass Effect 2 suffered because the writer spent lots of time laying groundwork to build a bridge between Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 3, that might be understandable.
- Build naturally and seamlessly on what came before.
- Come up with an interesting story for now.
- Set up the groundwork for later.
But the writer failed at all three. They took the small number of established facts about the Reapers and swept them away. Then they used the resulting freedom to tell a dumb story that went nowhere. Then they burned any possible bridges that might be useful in Mass Effect 3.
And for what? A boss fight?
Guessing Game
Note that all of this is revealed in a dialog with EDI. This is the closest thing we get to the talk with Vigil at the end of Mass Effect 1. This is supposed to be where the questions are answered and mysteries are solved. Only instead of answers from an authoritative source, we have EDI scanning the Collectors with space magic and extrapolating. Even if this wasn’t drivel, it wouldn’t be satisfying because it’s all guesswork. I’m sure she’s right and what she’s saying really is how the author has decided it works, but it still feels lame and directionless. Imagine if the Vigil VI had been removed from Mass Effect 1 and instead Garrus and Liara had just sat down at a Prothean computer and took turns guessing at what they were seeing. That lacks a certain revelatory punch.
It’s crap. It’s stupid, infantile, lazy, sophomoric crap. This is exactly how we got the ending of Mass Effect 3: The writer explained something that didn’t need to be explained, and their explanation was so mind-numbingly stupid that it launched people back into the Primary World and slammed the door behind them. It’s not like the writer failed to make this hold together; they didn’t even try. The writer couldn’t see any further than their immediate goal of “Make a boss fight” and didn’t think it needed to mesh with existing information or leave a path open for the future.
There wasn’t an uproar over the end of Mass Effect 2, so there was never any reason for the writer to question their desultory approach to storytelling. If the peasants will praise you for serving them shit, why bake them a soufflé?
Next week: The conclusion to Mass Effect 2!
Mass Effect Retrospective 31: Choices Matter
So you shoot the baby Reaper in the face until it falls down and goes boom. Once it’s gone, you can access the Collector power core or whatever, and you can either set it to explode, or set it to irradiate all life and leave the technology intact. The Illusive Man wants you to leave the installation so his scientists can study it. But Paragon Shepard objects because…
This place is an abomination?
Ending Choice
This is some messed-up superstitious thinking. He seems to be suggesting that learning about our enemy is inherently evil. Your companions also take this position, too. Even #1 Cerberus apologist Miranda suddenly does an abrupt heel-face turn saying, “I’m not so sure. Seeing it first hand… Using anything from this base seems like a betrayal.” And not because of indoctrination, but because of some completely un-articulated principles.
The last game ended with us beginning a quest for knowledge. That idea was wiped away to fight the Collectors. And now at the very end of the game we finally return to the question of “How do we stop the Reapers from killing us all?” except the narrative frames the acquisition of knowledge as an inherently evil and irresponsible thing. As a fan of sci-fi, I find this idea to be repugnant. The first game gave us a quest for knowledge and the second one is going to follow up with caveman science fiction?
Shepard says, “It liquefied people. Turned them into something horrible. We have to destroy the base.”
Even if you don’t want to look at the device that liquefies people to turn them into a giant robot, it’s entirely possible there are other things around the base that are of use. New zap guns[1]? Better armor? I’ll bet those Reapers have some pretty sweet shield technology. It’s already been established that EDI can magically read their databanks. Is there intelligence worth having? Do we have any ongoing security leaks? Any indoctrinated people in high-ranking positions we should know about? Any other hidden bases out there? Is there a map of what’s behind all those closed relays we’ve been afraid to open? No? We’re going to just blow the whole thing up because knowledge is icky?
Remember that EDI herself is Reaper tech, and she’s invaluable. But for some reason the Reaper tech in this particular location shouldn’t be studied.
Cerberus Sucks
Now, you can argue that Cerberus will just come in here and get themselves stupidly killed by doing science the Cerberus Way. And I would agree. But that’s not how the game frames this discussion. If you could make Shepard say, “I’m blowing up this base because I don’t want Cerberus getting their hands on it!” then that might line up with how some players see the issue. (Which means they see Cerberus as a more immediate threat than the Reapers, which just shows how badly this game bungled its premise of obliging you to work with Cerberus to stop the Reapers.) But the reasoning given in dialog has nothing to do with this. Instead you’re blowing it up because atrocities occurred here and it would be somehow wrong to look around and learn from that.
The common defense of this line of thinking is that it’s wrong to use research obtained through unethical means. This usually leads into a side-argument about the ethics of using (say) Nazi medial research. While I understand this attempt to bring an interesting philosophical discussion to this videogame, I want to point out that this comparison doesn’t work and isn’t appropriate here. Shepard doesn’t actually articulate a moral or philosophical stand. Moreover, if he wanted to take that stand then he should have done so at the start of the game by refusing to work with Cerberus, who basically have “Unethical Research” in their mission statement.
Furthermore, this is a completely different situation. This base isn’t the work of humans, and they weren’t doing research. These are amoral aliens who vastly outclass us in terms of technological power, and who are planning on killing everyone. If you’re going to argue that it’s immoral to study this place because of the atrocities perpetrated here, then then that leads to the conclusion that any attempt to study the Reapers is inherently immoral, because the Reapers are one giant atrocity. Mass, repeated genocide is what they do. All of their technology is dedicated to this singular evil cause.
“We can’t study the Mass Effect relays, because they were used to genocide thousands of species.”
“We can’t study Reaper weapons, because they’re designed to genocide civilizations.”
“We can’t study Reaper coffeemakers, because those helped keep the Reapers awake and energized during their centuries-long reaping process.”
Maybe you could make this a springboard for some gritty philosophical Socratic Questioningabout the nature of evil and the presumed necessity of using the methodology of evil to defeat evil. But the game can’t go there because Shepard doesn’t actually take a coherent stance or position for us to judge. He says things that sound moral-ish, but you can’t explore his thinking. The writer is just throwing random genre tropes together and expecting that coherency will magically emerge from the resulting soup of clichés.
In any case, this ending choice undercuts the thinking of the entire game. If we’re willing to work with Cerberus to save a few colonies, then certainly we should be willing to work with them to get what we need to save the whole galaxy. This is supposed to big the big important choice of the entire game, and it’s stupid, nonsensical, it undercuts the rest of the story, and runs directly counter to the themes of the genre and the first game in particular.
I’m not saying it’s dumb to blow up the Collector base, or that keeping the base is the only smart move. Now that the choice is in the game, by all means: Blow that sucker up. By this point the player is likely meta-gaming the decision by trying to intuit what they think the writer was trying to say about what BioWare was planning to do in the third game. You could justify almost any course of action here, based on which parts of the text you’ve allowed into your own personal head-canon. Depending on what you assume about Cerberus or indoctrination, blowing up the base might make total sense.
No, I’m saying this choice itself is completely inappropriate for this story, this game, and even this genre. It’s wrong in the same way that Shadow of Mordor was fundamentally at odds with the themes of Lord of the Rings.
And why is this a choice between “give technology to Cerberus” and “blow up technology”? Isn’t it supposedly really hard to get in here? Is the author suggesting that Cerberus has the force of arms to take this station away from Shepard if Shepard doesn’t want to share? This forms a hilarious rock-paper-scissors: The Collectors are stronger than Cerberus, who are stronger than Shepard, who is stronger than the Collectors.
Remember that we’re trying to prove the Reapers exist. (Again.) The presence of this base just might rouse the galaxy to action.
Like I’ve been saying all along: The Mass Effect series didn’t suddenly go wrong at the very end. You can see the same mistakes of the Mass Effect 3 ending repeated here: You get an incoherent choice that arises by arbitrarily limiting player options. It mimics the conventions of big end-game moral choices without actually saying anything (or allowing the player to say anything) about morality or the values of the people involved. It’s abrupt, awkward, and forced, and is more concerned with making sure the game ends with an explosion than making sure it ends coherently. The only difference is that at the end of Mass Effect 2, there was still the hope that the final game might somehow untangle all these problems and make it all work.
On top of it all, Miranda’s turn feels completely unearned. She’s been willing to make excuses for everything Cerberus has done. And now she’s willing to betray the organization because she draws the line at studying the technology of the machine gods who are trying to kill us? What is her morality even based on?
This might be a nice payoff if she’d spent the entire game gradually becoming more disillusioned with her employer and questioning her loyalty. That would actually make a fantastic character arc. But she’s never budged. Even when confronted with the horror of the research station where Cerberus tortured children to make a better biotic, she was adamant that those guys were only a rogue cell and that Cerberus had nothing to apologize for. She never had a crisis of faith moment. She’s never confided to Shepard that she’s having doubts. And then we get to this choice and all of a sudden she goes full paragon[2] when the fate of the galaxy is on the line.
And then to rub salt in the wound, in Mass Effect 3 it turns out this decision doesn’t matter anyway. Even if you blow up the base, Cerberus still gets their hands on the baby Reaper and the Reaper tech. So even if you can push through this mess with your sense of immersion intact, it will turn out you did it all for nothing. They could have just rolled the credits as soon as you killed the Reaper, because this whole scene didn’t matter.
Best Three out of Five!
The writer isn’t done neutering the Reapers quite yet. Shepard blows up the collector base and we cut to an internal view so we can hear Harbinger talking to… himself, I guess?
Harbinger releases control of the head Collector as it scurries around its exploding base. As the base crumbles and burns we hear Harbinger say, “We will find another way.” This suggests that, much like the writers, the Reapers have no plan. This machine god can’t do more than pout and say basically, “This isn’t over! I’ll figure something out!” I suppose we should be grateful he’s just talking to himself and not shouting all of this at Shepard.
Then we cut to the abyss of dark space. A million Reapers wake from slumber. And now we’re right back where we started at the end of Mass Effect 1: The Reapers might be coming, we don’t know when they will strike, we don’t know how they’ll reach us, and we don’t know how to stop them. We have a team that might be all dead and a base that might have been blown up.
People say[3] that Mass Effect 2 “doesn’t go anywhere”. But the reality is actually worse than that. The plot doesn’t just stand still, it goes backwards. It doesn’t just fail to set things up for part 3, it dismantles the things that drove the story in part 1.
The first game left us with:
At the close of Mass Effect 2:
- A ship. (The Normandy-1)
- A crew (The original squad.)
- Leadership. (The Council, and to a lesser extent The Alliance, if the writer found that angle useful.)
- A mandate. (Go and learn about the Reapers and the previous cycles so we can save our civilization and perhaps break the cycle forever.)
The audience has no idea what either party is planning, or how immediate the threat is. Bothsides need to “find a way” to achieve their goals. Nobody in this world knows what they’re doing. The Council and Alliance aren’t doing anything. Shepard doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. The Reapers are trying to “find another way”. And Cerberus is either our only hope or cartoonishly evil, depending on which scenes of the game you choose to believe. The story is now directionless. Not only did the Mass Effect 2 writer fail to give themselves anything to work with in Mass Effect 3, they also destroyed the groundwork established by Mass Effect 1.
- A ship. (The Normandy-2. I guess. If Cerberus doesn’t have a way to repossess it.)
- A crew? Maybe? Although they could be mostly dead.
- Leadership? Who? You may or may not explicitly quit Cerberus at the end. Are we going to go back to the Council? The Alliance? Nobody believes in the Reapers now, and even the events of this ending don’t seem to change that.
- What’s our mandate? Shepard makes a big speech to TIM about finding some way to beat the Reapers without using their technology, but it’s not at all clear what he plans to do. He wasn’t looking for answers at the start of this game. Is he going to start now? Does he even have a plan?
This isn’t just a plot that goes “nowhere”. In Mass Effect 1, Shepard said he was going to walk to Mordor. Then in Mass Effect 2 he sawed his own legs off and ate his map. Then just before the closing credits he announces he still needs to get to Mordor.
I wish Mass Effect 2 was a plot that went nowhere. That would have been a dramatic improvement.
I remember the ending being unsatisfying and nonsensical (much like the rest of the plot), but I certainly never micro-analysed it like this guy. I'm looking forward to his upcoming book, 'Why <insert ME2 author name here> ruined my life'. Entertaining reading - it'll be interesting to see what he makes of ME3. I sleepwalked through most of that game, rolling my eyes as I went, but I do remember it as being more straightforward and satisfying (or at least less bafflingly infuriating) than ME2. ME-lite-lite. Still preferred ME2 as a game, though.
