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Mass Effect Mass Effect Series Retrospective by Shamus Young

Drax

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Every chapter of the review manages to surprise me even more with BW's stupidity.
 

Frozen

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Im not crazy to read a novel about why these games are crap but especially about ME3 I don't know has anyone address the simple issue that main plot (beside stupid ending) has no sense.

Why are Reapers targeting earth? I was expecting it to be some reveal about "muh umans special" but at the end we have nothing.

Its clear that like 90% of their forces are set up to harvest earth population and even with that rest 10% are winning against the rest of the galaxy.

So why is so important to "retake earth" even if it would be possible (at the beginning of the game we don't know shit about the crucible) Why would anyone help us for pointless futile retake attempt?

And when they take control of the Citadel why ship it back to earth?

I know the thought process behind it but they did it in reverse- designers wanted certain things to happen (unite the galaxy forces, retake earth Crucible to the Citadel round earth etc.) so they just did it ignoring its illogical in relate to story and plot.
 

HansDampf

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On top of this, her vocal performance is really odd. She’s not fearsome, she’s catty. She doesn’t sound like a queen or a war chief. She sounds like an entitled diva.

Wow... He wasn't kidding.
Just imaging what a female Krogan should sound like. Then watch this.

2015-01-07-Drag_Queen__8.png
 

user

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On top of this, her vocal performance is really odd. She’s not fearsome, she’s catty. She doesn’t sound like a queen or a war chief. She sounds like an entitled diva.

Wow... He wasn't kidding.
Just imaging what a female Krogan should sound like. Then watch this.


Jeeeeezzz, was this written and voice acted by angsty teens?
 

Nutria

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Strap Yourselves In
She sounds like the doctor from Star Trek: Discovery... who is... you know... a man. What were they going for here?
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Next planet!

Andromeda Part 17: Welcome to the Bungle

mea_splash.jpg




The next stop on our tour of the Heleus Cluster is Havarl. Like the other planets, the climate is out of whack. Unlike the other planets, this place suffers from an overabundance of life rather than a shortage.

Havarl


mea_havarl1.jpg




Havarl is overgrown with a thick jungle[1][2] and all of the native flora and fauna is exceedingly dangerous. Everything is toxic, poisonous, or filled with murderous intent.

The game says this is the ancestral home of the Anagara and that they had to abandon it when it became too inhospitable, but that doesn’t really fit with what we’re shown. I’d expect to see bits of Angaran cities poking out of the overgrowth. They’re a spacefaring species, so their cities must have been pretty impressive. But instead the “cities” are just endless sections of Remnant architecture that form horizon-smothering black walls around the play area. I imagine this is another detail that would have been ironed out if the game had been given time for polish.

I do like that this world offers some contrast with the other four and isn’t yet another lifeless hellscape for us to colonize.

As with the other worlds, you need to visit the monoliths, then do the vault, and then the game tells you the planet is stabilizing. Then you run around and do fetch quests and kill the mooks congregating around map markers until the planet hits 100%. Whee.


mea_havarl2.jpg

These walls completely blot out the horizon, reducing this planet to a single a box canyon. Shit guys, put some overgrown cities on the horizon. That's what skyboxes are for.


The big plot on this planet is dealing with the pervasive racism the Angara practice. On one hand, having some degree of tribalism or prejudice is usually a good thing for worldbuilding. It can make your world feel large and complex by highlighting the various factions within it. It doesn’t even need to be capital-R Racism to work. Sure, conflicts based on geography, religion, and skin color are easy and obvious, but you can base the conflict on all kinds of things. Urban vs. rural. Traditionalism vs. technophilia. Laborers vs. academics. Young vs. old. Entrenched ruling class vs. newcomers. Hedonism vs. asceticism. Idealism vs. pragmatism. Group conformity vs. personal liberty. All the writer needs to do is suggest these sorts of factions exist within the culture and the audience can extrapolate a much larger world from these small details.

Sadly, the writer can’t do that here because they only made one alien race for us to meet and they’re basically a stagnant monoculture. The only divide among the Angara is that some of them are space racists that hate all aliens, and the rest… aren’t? What you end up with is a theme repeated again and again where the cool and awesome Humans teach the backward Angara that racism is bad. (The Humans also brought a bunch of sidekick races with them, showing how open-minded and progressive they are.) The whole thing is shallow and cringe inducing.

The exchange comes down to something along the lines of, “You’re NOT going to kill me? Man, I would have killed you without hesitation. I guess I need to rethink my entire worldview. Thank you, Human.”



mea_havarl3.jpg

Okay, I see some purple trees. That's good. We finally have a planet that doesn't look like part of Earth. The game needed a lot more of this sort of thing, but this is a start.


Barf. It’s really disorienting how hard this game is working to copy a bunch of extraneous details of the Mass Effect setting, while the creative sensibilities of the author game run directly counter to everything the first game worked to establish. In a way, it reminds me of the way Shadow of War copied the trappings of Tolkien while running directly counter to it in terms of the tone of the world:

When a book or movie is adapted to video games, we often get hung up on the small details of lore and whether or not the writers get it “right”. And that’s fine, up to a point. It’s nice when the writers take the time to get all the little details just so. It feels good to see that thing from the book or movie, fully realized in a game world that meshes with our prior experience or imagination. But when you’re adapting a work of fiction, getting the lore right isn’t nearly as important as matching the original in tone, themes, and aesthetic texture.

I know the original game occasionally flirted with the idea that Humans are special, but it also had lots of moments where Humans were at a clear disadvantage compared to the other species. Here the special-ness of Humans has been embraced as a central part of the world. Humans are intellectually, technologically, and morally the superheroes of Andromeda.

You can’t fool me, Andromeda. I knew Mass Effect 1 personally. You sir, are no Mass Effect 1.

Star Map


mea_aya1.jpg

Humans are special, but their special-ness doesn't even come from our protagonist. Instead all our superpowers come from the omnipotent narrator AI we invented, who is a character with no conflict, no growth, and no arc.


Getting back to the main story: We’ve recently rescued the Moshae and she takes us into a vault on their homeworld[3]for the next batch of exposition. Because Humans Are Special, Ryder is able to effortlessly and instantly read this Remnant computer that the Angara have never been able to figure out.

These terraforming vaults are somehow “connected”. The vault shows Sara a map of the Heleus cluster, with all of these lines connecting the systems. It looks a bit like an internet map. If you follow the connections it all converges on a single location, which is called Meridian. We know nothing about this place, but Ryder theorizes that it’s some sort of central control station for all the vaults[4]. If we could find it, then we could activate all the vaults remotely and terraform the entire cluster in one go.



mea_aya2.jpg

The Humans stop by and explain all this technology to the locals, and then the locals turn around and make decisions about what what the heroes should do next. Once again: This is backwards.


This star map shows all these connections converging on Meridian, but Sara says we need to “find” Meridian. Huh? Aren’t we looking at a map? Isn’t it, right now, showing us where Meridian is? Don’t these points of light correspond to the star systems in our immediate vicinity? There aren’t that many stars here in the Heleus cluster, so it seems like we ought to be able to work things out from here.

I can accept that this map isn’t actually a map and is actually an abstract diagram. It’s just that the dialog doesn’t ever address this. Sara is looking at a map that appears to show us where Meridian is, and then she says we need to find Meridian. It’s just sloppy.



mea_aya3.jpg

I don't know why you aliens couldn't figure this shit out. Didn't you try waving your hand at it and being smug?


But whatever. Fine. We need to find Meridian. The Moshae was a prisoner of the Archon, and she reveals that he already knows where Meridian is. He had some sort of artifact showing the way. He keeps this artifact on his flagship. So Sara decides we need to assault his flagship and steal this intel.

Except, if it’s that easy to storm his flagship, then why are we even afraid of the guy? Ryder keeps talking about him like he’s this invincible foe and we need to find a way to beat him, and now she’s devising plans that involve making a direct assault on his seat of power. I can totally buy the notion that our scrappy outsiders from the Milky Way have a tactical / technological edge that makes the assault possible, but if that’s true then why don’t we just kill this guy and be done with it? Why storm his ship to steal a map to gain a super-technology to stop him if we can just storm his ship and wreck his shit?



mea_aya4.jpg

No, I'm not offline. YOU'RE offline. My internet is just fine.


I’m not saying the game should end here. I’m just saying it’s weird that nobody notices or discusses this idea and nobody worries that assaulting the Kett flagship is an impossible task.

To find the Archon’s ship, we need to track down a traitorous Angaran who’s been in contact with the Archon. We find this guy at Kadara Port, so that’s where we’ll be heading next.

Kadara Port


mea_kadara1.jpg

Oh look, yet another main character is a Human in a leadership position. So far we have Alec Ryder, Foster Addison, Sloane, Reyes, Bradley, Jien Garson, Nozomi Dunn, and the player. Did we forget to bring aliens with us, or are they all stuck serving drinks and sweeping the floor?


Kadara port is a seedy location with smuggling, dive bars, illicit drugs, thuggish cops, and murder in the streets. Up top is the nightclub, and down below are the slums. It feels like the Heleus cluster version of Omega from Mass Effect 2. And like Omega, it’s ruled by a super “cool” character. And like Omega, your dialog options are constrained to “swaggering hardass dunce” and “bootlick”. You can’t just be professional and ignore her posturing.

Sloane started out as chief of security aboard the Nexus, but now she rules Kadara port. Like, literally. She’s got this big throne room and everything. I’d love to know if she got her face tattoos before or after the rebellion. Did Alec Ryder recruit this Mad Max looking nutter to be his chief of security, or did she give herself a makeover after the rebellion?

Speaking of the rebellion, let’s stop and look at the Andromeda timeline. Fourteen months ago the damaged Nexus arrived in the Heleus cluster with their leadership DOA. In the fourteen months since then:
  1. The Nexus forms a new leadership and wakes up a bunch of personnel.
  2. They survey the area, discover the golden worlds are a bust, and move the Nexus to a safe location away from the scourge.
  3. They deploy equipment and personnel to create two different outposts / colonies.
  4. After some indeterminate time, the colonies fail due to the harsh environmental conditions and constant Kett attacks.
  5. Sensing that they’re all trapped on a space station with dwindling supplies and the leadership has no plan, the inhabitants of the Nexus get nervous. The inhabitants begin making demands or asking for information. Also they want to wake up their families. They are rebuffed by the Nexus leaders.
  6. The people protest / riot.
  7. The Nexus leaders cut a deal with the Krogan, offering them more political power if they’ll get the rioters under control. The Krogan do as they are asked.
  8. The Nexus leaders screw the Krogan. (Somehow this ends with the Krogan leaving and not with them simply killing the leadership.)
  9. The rioters steal a bunch of supplies and strike out on their own, becoming Exiles / Outcasts.
  10. The Outcasts scout around and find Kadara.
  11. Sloane wipes out the local Kett, which solidifies her position as leader.
  12. The Outcasts construct(?) and settle Kadara port. (The game claims the port used to be an Angaran location, but this place is clearly made of Initiative modular buildings and looks nothing like the distinctive Angaran style. So this is a problem with either the writing or the art design.)
  13. Sloane becomes queen or whatever.
  14. Someone invents a narcotic and Sloane builds her economy around it.
  15. The city bifurcates into haves and have-nots, complete with slums under the city and separate nightclubs for the two economic classes.
That’s a very busy fourteen months!

Also note that there aren’t any dates attached to any of this. How long between arriving and the rebellion? How long did the rebellion last? Months? A few days? Mass Effect 1 had dates of major historical events that stretched back centuries and allowed us to form a clear picture of what happened in the past. Here in Andromeda, we can’t even get a basic frame of reference for what the rebellion was like, even though that event happened recently and is currently a driving force in the plot.



mea_kadara2.jpg

Wait, they got KICKED OFF? And they had nothing? Earlier the story claimed they left, and stole tones of supplies.


This writer must hate worldbuilding.

In any case, Kadara Port is presented as matter-of-fact, and the current situation is considered normal. The city feels lived in. It’s not like people say things like, “Man, what a wild couple of weeks this has been! Sloane is running things now!” Instead it feels like the current situation has been the status quo for years.

I moved to a new apartment a few years ago, and fourteen months later I was still thinking of it as the “new place”. Fourteen months is nothing.

The Rediscovered Country


mea_kadara3.jpg




The designer is trying to accomplish two contradictory things here. They want the player to be the Pathfinder. A trailblazer. They want the player to feel like they’re exploring the new frontier. At the same time, they want to have established cities and locations filled with humans and they want us to get into gunfights with other humans out in the wild. (Shoehorning in boring human foes when it doesn’t make sense? Where have I heard that one before?) These two ideas are fundamentally incompatible and are probably the result of different creators pulling the project in different directions.

Making things worse is that this timeline undercuts both ideas. Fourteen months is long enough that the player feels like they’re showing up too late to count themselves as a trailblazer, but it’s not long enough to justify the city being this firmly settled and lived-in. It certainly can’t justify how so many people have gone all Lord of the Flies out here in the wilderness, to the point where they’re beyond reason or redemption. These people aren’t just criminal, they’re practically feral.



mea_fine.jpg

Everything is fine.


How I’d have done it:

This timeline doesn’t work and the writer is making things difficult for no good reason. If you want to have the player exploring an already-settled place, then just move the timeline so that you’re waking up a few years after the Nexus, rather than just fourteen months.

Or better yet, get rid of these human settlements, fill the cluster with new aliens to meet, and let the player be a goddamn explorer.

There’s a lot wrong with Kadara, so we’re going to need to spend another entry on this place to sort this out.
 

Freddie

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Next planet!

These walls completely blot out the horizon, reducing this planet to a single a box canyon. Shit guys, put some overgrown cities on the horizon. That's what skyboxes are for.

Sadly, the writer can’t do that here because they only made one alien race for us to meet and they’re basically a stagnant monoculture. The only divide among the Angara is that some of them are space racists that hate all aliens, and the rest… aren’t? What you end up with is a theme repeated again and again where the cool and awesome Humans teach the backward Angara that racism is bad. (The Humans also brought a bunch of sidekick races with them, showing how open-minded and progressive they are.) The whole thing is shallow and cringe inducing.
1st. hmm....

Barf. It’s really disorienting how hard this game is working to copy a bunch of extraneous details of the Mass Effect setting, while the creative sensibilities of the author game run directly counter to everything the first game worked to establish. In a way, it reminds me of the way Shadow of War copied the trappings of Tolkien while running directly counter to it in terms of the tone of the world:
[..]

I know the original game occasionally flirted with the idea that Humans are special, but it also had lots of moments where Humans were at a clear disadvantage compared to the other species. Here the special-ness of Humans has been embraced as a central part of the world. Humans are intellectually, technologically, and morally the superheroes of Andromeda.

You can’t fool me, Andromeda. I knew Mass Effect 1 personally. You sir, are no Mass Effect 1.
Doesn't really appear to be ME1 indeed. Humans had gained a seat in the Council, they were clearly new comers. It wasn't just history in dialogue and Codex, but interactions not only with Council, but Udina, being not necessarily a villain, dick yes, but most importantly a politician in dire straits with the situation to begin with and dialogue with some C-sec personnel. This all created sort of mental setup where player as human had quite a strong agenda in subterms, not just completing quests but HOW to complete quests. There were options for that, I even hoped for more.

I don't know how much humans were special but finding and understanding mass effect drive one successful battle against Turians, in context, it put humans in position of intergalactic curiosities. There was interesting detail that humans had Biotics. All species presented in Council had biotics. Krogans, Yellyfish, Elcorians, were only associates. Quarians didn't even had an embassy. Biotics, and that humans had ability for that was the greatest hook in series for humans.


mea_aya1.jpg

Humans are special, but their special-ness doesn't even come from our protagonist. Instead all our superpowers come from the omnipotent narrator AI we invented, who is a character with no conflict, no growth, and no arc.


Getting back to the main story: We’ve recently rescued the Moshae and she takes us into a vault on their homeworld[3]for the next batch of exposition. Because Humans Are Special, Ryder is able to effortlessly and instantly read this Remnant computer that the Angara have never been able to figure out.
2nd. Hmmm

mea_aya2.jpg

The Humans stop by and explain all this technology to the locals, and then the locals turn around and make decisions about what what the heroes should do next. Once again: This is backwards.
3rd. Hmm.. Actually, what the hell is going on here? BioWare super exclusive team is drinking white male tears just fine as long as they find some local they can civilise?

There is no value in these races, in their culture and history, but that BW diverse team can civilise them. Yeah... thought so.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Andromeda Part 18: Choose Your Own Misadventure

mea_splash.jpg




I said earlier in this series that the dialog is a mess. I’m not going to document every single non-sequitur, cringy one-liner, false binary choice, and incoherent bit of exposition. We’ve already established that this game is lacking in polish and there’s no need to belabor that point. But even beyond the lack of polish you can see problems that couldn’t be fixed by throwing more time at them. Even if the game had been fully baked, the cutscenes would still be clumsy and inefficient. There’s a conversation here on Kadara that really drives home the crude way the dialog is put together.

You head to the Kralla’s Song, a local dive bar. The goal is to to meet with a contact who will go by the name “Shena”. But before we talk about the cutscene, let me ask some rhetorical questions about this bar…


How Does This Place Work?


mea_kadara4.jpg

At some point in the last 14 months, someone took the time to make a sign that says "DRINKS" in English.


How did this particular Asari bartender come to “own” this bar? Who supplies her alcohol? How do her customers earn a living so that they can be her customers? This city is already divided into haves and have-nots, complete with slums. What is this wealth based on? Are they basing their economy on money they brought with them from the Milky Way? Why do smugglers exist in this quasi-lawless city? What could they possibly be smuggling? From where?

Hey Shamus, no fair demanding details from this drama-first world! Do you need to know where the bartender got his booze in Mos Eisley spaceport?

In Star Wars, we were shown a little corner of a great big universe and we were able to assume all sorts of things existed just off-screen. The problem in Andromeda is that the writer put in just enough details to paint themselves into a corner. We know that this city is basically it for humans in this galaxy. This is the most advanced settlement we have. In Star Wars you can assume a wide galaxy full of breweries, gambling dens, competing government powers, some sort of institution to manage galactic currency, and so on. We know that none of those things exist in Andromeda. Kadara Port isn’t some obscure corner of a sprawling complex society, it’s the first tiny foothold of a new one. This place isn’t Las Vegas, it’s Plymouth Rock[1].

Again, the writer is shooting themselves in the foot by offering just enough details to make the world implausible and confusing but not enough to make it interesting. It’s not like this setup is horrible or anything. I’m just trying to show that this team didn’t seem to know what kind of story they were trying to tell.

Meet With Shena


mea_kadara5.jpg

Pay up or I'll continue to vandalize my own property!


Like I said, we’re here to meet with someone that goes by the name “Shena”. The scene plays out like this:

As the cutscene begins, we see the bartender shouting at a Krogan that he needs to pay for his drink. The Krogan shrugs her off and walks away. Then she pulls out a knife and stabs her own bar, and he comes back and pays.


Ryder takes a spot at the end of the bar. A guy comes in, buys two drinks, and offers one to Ryder. The player can accept the drink, or refuse and the guy will drink both.

The guy introduces himself as Shena and then immediately tells you his name is actually Reyes. (After the cutscene, SAM will refer to him as Mr. Vidal. That normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but we just arrived on this planet and the game has been throwing a lot of proper names at us for several minutes. Having one character with three names in two minutes is perhaps making things needlessly convoluted for our poor player.)

Reyes gives you the exposition you need and then leaves. Then the bartender demands that you pay, even if you haven’t had anything to drink. Ryder then uses her omnitool to pay while saying, “Keep the change,” even though she’s paying digitally and there wouldn’t BE change.

“I always do,” says the bartender who works in a world that runs entirely on digital currency with no concept of needing to make change.

-Fin-



mea_kadara6.jpg

I hate code names too. Which is why I don't USE ONE.


You can probably see how this scene was constructed. The writer is using tropes as shorthand to fill in the world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As TvTropes will tell you, tropes are tools. The problem here isn’t the tropes themselves, but the careless usage of them that makes the situation incoherent or simply immersion-breaking.

Having a bartender threaten the customers is good cinematic shorthand to show that this place is dangerous and a bit of a dive. Except, having a Krogan be afraid of a woman stabbing her own bar is just… off. I admit that it’s not impossible for a Krogan to be cowed by threats, but was this really the best way to construct the intended mood?

Having someone use a codename is a good way to convey that they’re into cloak-and-dagger stuff, but having him casually blow his cover because he “hates nicknames” makes the entire codename feel like a childish waste of time, both in and out of universe.



mea_kadara7.jpg

I can't really capture how awkward the cup-handling and drinking animations are in these screenshots. Trust me, they're off.


Having someone pretend to buy you a drink but then stick you with the bill is a time-honored tradition in movies[2] but it doesn’t work here because the player has the option to refuse the drink.

Having the protagonist tell a server to “keep the change” is a common way of showing they’re honorable and generous, but it doesn’t work here because this world would have no concept of change.

Sure, with more time someone could have fixed these stiff faces, the unintentionally comical animations[3], the janky camera work[4], and odd poses[5], but the problems with this scene go all the way down to the script, and you don’t fix script problems in the polish stage.

It’s not a horrible scene, but it’s not a brilliant one, either. It’s trying and failing to be stylish. One scene like this wouldn’t be a big deal, but as the hours wear on and all the scenes feel wobbly like this, it degrades the quality of the world itself. Nobody comes off as interesting, witty, intriguing, or surprising. The bad parts feel amateurish and the good parts feel merely functional.

Choose Your Own Misadventure


mea_kadara8.jpg

SEE? This game has roleplaying.


Choice has always been a big part of this series. That’s not to say the choices always made sense or were satisfying, but the effort was there. The choices were a means of roleplaying, a means of self-expression, a way to explore different points of view, and a way of empowering the player by giving them direct agency and a little sliver of authorship over the world.

Sometimes choices are big and far-reaching in scope, like when you chose to save the galactic council[6]. Sometimes it was personal, like when you had to choose between saving Kaiden or Ashley. And sometimes it was just expressive and ephemeral, like when you decided what Shepard should say to the crew before they embarked on their mission in Mass Effect 1.

Sometimes choices just existed to create tension. You’d find yourself dealing with (say) a hostage situation. Or perhaps that one time in Mass Effect 1[7] where you have to confront the dangerously suicidal woman who spent most of her childhood as a prisoner of Batarian slavers. You don’t get to make “choices” in the sense of choosing the fate of a species or a companion, because the stakes are personal and you’re not really in control of the situation. But rather than have the dialog play out as a fixed cutscene, the writer has the player choose their responses. This creates the impression (sometimes real, sometimes an illusion) that it’s possible to say the wrong thing. This tends to focus you on the scene in a way that just isn’t possible in passive media.



mea_suvi1.jpg

Based on context, it looks like my options are: 7) Explain to me the concept of divine creation. 4) Yes! I also believe in God. 6) No, your beliefs are wrong. Also, who devised this numbering?


Here in Andromeda, this new development team seems to be aware that choices are important to Mass Effect, but they don’t seem to understand why. Or perhaps they just didn’t see player expression as a priority and they think of choice as this mechanical obligation.
  • Andromeda doesn’t offer as many choices.
  • When it does offer you a choice, it’s often nakedly a false choice between Emphatic Yes and Reserved Yes. It’s true that the earlier Mass Effect games occasionally did this, but the false choice was often hidden so that you needed to play through twice before you could detect it. Here in Andromeda the practice is both pervasive and obvious.
  • Even when the choice is genuine, it’s usually a binary. In Mass Effect 1 I complained that the “release Rachni Queen” vs. “kill Rachni Queen” idea didn’t totally work because simply leaving her caged was the most cautious course of action. Here in Andromeda it feels like every decision has been reduced to a choice between two unreasonable extremes. Example: In your conversation with Suvi, she mentions that she believes that the universe was created by a (vague, non-denominational) God. Your only responses are to say she’s wrong or to agree with her. There’s no way to respect her beliefs without becoming a believer yourself!
  • Even when the player is given reasonable options, the obfuscated dialog means they can’t always tell what they’re choosing. If I select “I disagree”, does that mean Ryder is going to offer a counterpoint to the other person’s position, or is she going to be irrational and sanctimonious? Deus Ex: Human Revolution fixed this problem seven years ago: When the player hovers over a dialog option, simply show the full text of what they’re about to say. That way the player can see what they’re choosing without the designer needing to clutter up their precious cinematic views with the full text of all options at once. It’s baffling to me that Andromeda didn’t adopt this. It’s an easy solution and it solves a ton of problems. Not only does Andromeda not show you the text ahead of time, but the short text it does show you is often completely unrelated to when you end up saying. The shorthand labels are often useless or misleading.
  • Even when you can tell what you’re choosing, the choices don’t always work because you’re not given enough information. The game offers me the option to show clemency to a criminal, but I have no way of knowing what their crimes were or what their punishment would be if I turned them in. I can’t weigh the risks because the game doesn’t tell me the risks. The game is just asking me if I’m open to the general notion of second chances, and for the vast majority of people the answer to that question is “it depends”.


mea_fine.jpg

Everything is fine.


Once again, we see the team copying the superficial trappings of Mass Effect while completely misunderstanding the nature and purpose of the things they’re trying to imitate.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
"How did it get this bad? I really need to know."

Andromeda Part 19: Breaking REALLY Bad

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Last week I complained that Andromeda doesn’t offer a lot of real choices. Even in cases where the game manages to offer you a real choice between two different options and even if the dialog wheel manages to make the options clear, it’s often completely unsatisfying because the situation itself is often incoherent. For example:

Oblivion


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Okay, you no longer have access to the bacteria that acts like penicillin. Have you tried using, you know, REGULAR penicillin?


If you visit Dr. Nakamoto in the Kadara slums, he’ll tell you that when he came to Kadara he discovered a kind of “bacteria” that had antibiotic[1] properties. But then someone discovered that at high doses it was an addictive psychoactive drug. Sloane began producing the drug to make money and solidify her power.

So then Dr. Nakamoto asks us to “get the formula back” from her, so that he can use it to treat his patients here in the slums.

Dude! You JUST SAID it was a naturally-occurring bacteria, and now you’re calling it a “formula”?

Both statements were part of the same linear dialog. But even if we ignore that as more of this writer’s careless mashing together of random science words, this still doesn’t make sense. Since Dr. Nakamoto invented this formula / discovered this bacteria, he ought to still have access to it. Either it’s a bacteria and he can just find more wherever he got the original stuff, or it’s a formula and he ought to still HAVE it. Did his hard drive die? Even at that, he should be able to remember what he did to create it the first time. It’s not like he poured years of research into discovering a complex new compound. This isn’t some obscure knowledge that’s been lost to the mists of time. Going by the established timeline, he apparently stumbled on this bacteria sometime in the last couple of months. The entire premise comes off as childish.

But fine. We drive to the other side of the map to Sloane’s drug lab so we can-



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All hail the Pathfinder, who is going to wreck our nonsense economy by murdering people for making perfectly legal drugs.


Hang on. Why is Sloane’s drug lab so far from the city!? Why wouldn’t she keep it safe within the walls of the fortified city she rules with an iron fist!? In our world, drug labs are hidden because they’re illegal. But Sloane is both dictator and drug dealer, so that’s not a problem for her.

Back in Mass Effect 1 there were quests that just involved walking around and talking to people in adjacent rooms, but apparently the Ubisoft-inspired design means we need to drive across the map for every pissant fetch quest.

Once we get there, the drug lab is guarded by mooks. Once they’re all dead, we talk to the doctor running the place. She begs us not to “take” the formula, because then she won’t have it. If she can’t make drugs for Sloane, then Sloane will kill her.



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Oh, you're UNARMED? That line would make a lot more sense coming from a human and not a species known for magic space powers. Are you sure you're using the right character model?


But… isn’t this a formula? Like, a recipe? How is it possible that it can only be “owned” by one person at a time? Assuming you’re not planning on starting a war with Sloane, then the most reasonable course of action ought allow BOTH sides access to the formula. Sloane can make her drugs and Dr. Nakamoto can treat the poor sick people. Again, the choices in this game push you to unreasonable extremes and don’t allow you to ask reasonable questions. It’s like you’re not supposed to think about the mechanics of the decisions you’re making and the only point for this quest is to just dispense Paragon or Renegade points. Except… this game doesn’t have Paragon or Renegade points.

My brain hurts now, but I’ll give the writer credit they don’t deserve and assume that the “formula” is actually a cell culture? Or something? But then at the end of the conversation Ryder “takes” the formula using her multitool. So I guess it’s a formula after all, and Ryder is just being an asshole and erasing it off the lady’s computer and the lady stupidly doesn’t have backups of this information that’s apparently critical to her survival? And I guess Sloane doesn’t have backups even though her economy depends on it?

After the conversation you see that the drug actually comes from plants that are growing in these hydroponic containers around the room. And we don’t take any of the plants with us. But, if it’s a plant then what did I just steal off the computer? And how will Dr. Nakamoto make more if he doesn’t have access to the plant or any sort of equipment to cultivate it?



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Oops. I apologize for claiming this quest is childish earlier. Clearly this is a mature story for grownups.


The game pretends like taking the formula from Sloane and giving it to Dr. Nakamoto is the nice thing to do, but what’s to stop Sloane from just taking it again? She’s going to notice that someone knocked over her drug lab and that Dr. Nakamoto is making medicine again. She’s a magnificent dumbass, but she’s at least smart enough to realize these two facts are related. Giving the formula to Dr. Nakamoto ought to result in him turning up dead in a couple of weeks and Sloane resuming selling her drugs to all the jobless and penniless losers she keeps in the slums.

So the drug is either a bacteria, or a recipe, or a plant. This is a quest with two characters, three linear dialogs, and one binary choice. This is the simplest possible framework for a sidequest. This is “Baby’s First Sidequest”. Talk to A to get the quest, talk to B to obtain the item, and return to A to resolve it. Yet somehow the writer couldn’t even manage to keep this ultra-simple scenario straight. The premise was nuts, the morality was hopelessly confused, and the dialog contradicted itself multiple times, even within the same linear conversation.



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Sure they do. Whatever, SAM.


Sure, you can construct your own explanation that the “formula” is the process by which you harvest a bacteria that only grows on a particular plant. And I suppose if you keep writing, you’ll eventually hammer out a version of Mass Effect Andromeda script that’s worth turning into a AAA game. I just wish someone had done that before they recorded all this dialog.

Even if we ignore the nonsensical elements, this choice is completely uninteresting because it ends in a binary decision with an obvious and objectively correct answer. Choices are supposed to be interesting. They’re supposed to make us choose between two things we want, or perhaps trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. But this quest has a choice between the right answer and a wrong one. Gosh, do I give the drug to the selfless doctor treating the poor in the slums so he can save more lives, or do I leave it here so the tyrannical and predatory Sloane can continue to amass wealth and power for herself and turn this planet into even more of a shithole? What a conundrum! This is like Mass Effect 1 offering us the choice between “Kill the Rachni Queen” and “Help Rachni Queen kill Liara”.



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Why is this choice missing the MOST OBVIOUS COURSE OF ACTION?!


Just to make the whole thing as wrongheaded as possible: Once you enter the drug lab, Dr. Farenth is standing right in front of you. Once you initiate the conversation with her, you MUST choose to either take the formula or allow her to keep it. You can’t end the conversation and explore the room before making your decision. Since there is incriminating evidence against Dr. Farenth on datapads around the room, this design choice is unforgivable. The game presents you with a (dumb, nonsensical) mystery about who really invented Oblivion and why, but it won’t even allow you to gather all the facts before railroading you into a ridiculous binary decision.

Why would you bother wasting resources creating a choice that’s obviously dumb and runs directly counter to the player’s goals? Why spend resources on that dialog? The only people who will choose this are the ones who click through the conversation without listening and don’t bother reading the datapads where all the villains explicitly announce their villainous nature in their one-paragraph diaries.

Incoherent


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Okay, so the story is drivel. But at least we have this wonderful 2004-era linear box canyon to drive down.


This sort of incoherency runs throughout the game. This would be bad enough in regular fiction, but for the nerdy sci-fi genre this is just shameful.

At one point you check the “security camera footage” at the security station on the Nexus, and it apparently has random footage of two people meeting in the wilderness on a planet on the other side of the cluster.

In another quest SAM claims he’s trying to trace a signal, but then he thinks he’s somehow “repairing” a signal, before he claims he’s been “decrypting” the signal.

In another quest someone tells you that our communications are getting a lot of interference. They tell you to make sure the Kett aren’t “tapping” our communications. Those are two different concepts. Am I supposed to invent some headcanon based on quantum communications where passive surveillance causes detectable interference, or is the writer just playing “fetch quest Mad Libs” with random science words?

The main quest has you looking for a “transponder”. Once you have it in your hand, it acts like a two-way radio. Somehow using it to call the Kett tells you where the Kett flagship is. (A transponder broadcasts its OWN location. If you’re holding a transponder, then you’re telling the Kett where YOU are, not the other way around!)

At another point you need to free up some electrical power on a spaceship. There’s a machine using tons of energy. An Asari woman tries to shut it down. She tells you, “I tried unplugging it, but… nothing.” If you’re interested, you can see a livestream of my reaction to that scenario.

I get that we’re not doing details-first sci-fi now. I’m not insisting that someone make all of these things scientifically accurate. If you want to use random bullshit magic technology then just make up some silly science words like “Harbulary Batteries” and stick to that. But the game keeps showing its technology is just stuff we’re already familiar with and then depicting it doing nonsensical things. It’s like an episode of Star Trek written by someone who just got blackout drunk.



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Eberydhing ish fibe.


It’s tempting to make a few mean-spirited comments about the lack of skill and / or intelligence on the part of the writer, but at this point that feels like a weak explanation for what we’re seeing. Anyone capable of forming complete sentences ought to understand the conceptual difference between bacteria, a recipe, and a plant. Everyone capable of using a computer understands what happens when you unplug something from an electrical outlet. Everyone over the age of six ought to understand that security footage can only exist for locations where security cameras have been installed.

If you’re smart enough to get hired by BioWare and not kill yourself using the coffeemaker in the break room, then you have the capacity to avoid making these kinds of blunders.

Which suggests that this nonsense is… deliberate? Is this a joke? A cry for help? There’s an urban legend / rumor that some of the bored writers for the CSI shows used to make their technobabble stupid on purpose, to see what they could get away with. Is this something like that?

On the other hand, this isn’t just the work of one person. Sure, a writer was involved. But then a director guided a voice actor through it and a mission designer scripted it. This gibberish had to pass through at least four people.

Just… how did it get this bad? I really need to know.
 

Freddie

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Which suggests that this nonsense is… deliberate? Is this a joke? A cry for help? There’s an urban legend / rumor that some of the bored writers for the CSI shows used to make their technobabble stupid on purpose, to see what they could get away with. Is this something like that?

On the other hand, this isn’t just the work of one person. Sure, a writer was involved. But then a director guided a voice actor through it and a mission designer scripted it. This gibberish had to pass through at least four people.

Just… how did it get this bad? I really need to know.
That is indeed the most interesting question.

Some background digging brings up following:
WikiPedia said:
Director(s) Mac Walters *
Producer(s)
  • Fabrice Condominas
  • Mike Gamble
  • Fernando Melo
Designer(s) Ian S. Frazier

Writer(s)
  • John Dombrow
  • Cathleen Rootsaert
  • Chris Schlerf
* Mac Walters took over Gérard Lehiany in 2014
Some part of it might be some people working on project they really don't want to. There was this banned guy in other who wrote about that trying writing for games is better than flipping burgers. So some responsibility could be attributed to HR. Despite Shamus optimistic view, I do speculate if there were people writing for this game, where better solution for the project and employees were been that those people were doing something else.

For the lack of oversight... guys got a gig, they push their vision with whatever concepts and promises so they can keep the gig. Things don't go as promised and just then there are couple of people with actual experience with franchise attributed to team. Other really wanted to do something else than Mass Effect, but after what happened with ME3 his options might not have been what he thought. For other there are three possibilities. Either he didn't care, nor he couldn't wrestle to change direction, or... winners in this disaster are Disney with their Star Wars and Microsoft with their Halo.

But it really is a question of higher up's in EA. They have repeatedly let teams wander in whatever directions with their lack of oversight or conflicting goals. Command & Conquer series is infamous example of this and events that lead to cancellation of latest Star Wars games are repetition of that pattern.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Andromeda Part 20: Character Arks

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The last few entries have been much too negative. Okay, most of the last 19 entries have been pretty negative. Sorry. Let’s switch things up and talk about something good. Let’s talk about…

The Ark Missions


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Everything is NOT fine.


We started the game on the Human ark, but there are three other arks out there: Salarian, Asari, and Turian. Like the Human ark, each of these is a ship with about 20,000 sleepers on board. All three are intercepted by the Kett[1], who begin doing genetic experiments on the inhabitants.

At various points you’ll track down one of these arks and find out what happened to them. I like these missions because all three of them tell a nice self-contained story. It presents a question like “what happened here and how do we get out of it?” and then it lets you work through to the answer without distracting you with a half dozen other questlines. The plot points happen every minute or two as you move from room to room, rather than being separated by driving around in the open world or passing through the tedious planet-hopping loading screens. The ark missions are where the game feels the most like a proper Mass Effect game and not a series of Ubisoft-style open-world distractions.

Also, the arks are often dark, which provides a nice quasi-spooky atmosphere. Seeing the familiar ark layout after it’s been looted is unsettling in a way that blasting your way through Kett Heinous Medical Science Lab #267 isn’t. I suppose it helps that on the arks, the beige foes stand out from the white scenery, while Kett installations usually feature a soup of beige-on-beige that all blends together.

I spent some time in the last couple of posts talking about the unsatisfying choices in the game. We get another one at the end of the Turian ark.

The Turian Pathfinder


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Isn't there someone ELSE I can give the job to? The rules of succession are apparently very flexible.


You team up with Avitus, the second in line for the position of Turian Pathfinder. You search the ark for Macen, the current Pathfinder. At the end you discover that Macen is dead.

Avitus, filled with doubt, doesn’t want the title. You’re given a binary choice where you can either accept his refusal or attempt to give him a pep talk. The first time I went through this quest I thought Avitus sounded like too much of a mope. I figured the last thing the poor Turians needed was an unmotivated Pathfinder. So I let him pass on the job.

And then it turns out that this means the Turians don’t get one. No Pathfinder. Avitus wanders off and leaves his people in the lurch.

This choice is a failure on two counts. One, it’s not clear that you’re choosing between “Loser depressed Pathfinder” and “No Pathfinder at all”. In fact, our entire adventure is taking place because the Pathfinder title was passed to unqualified Sara instead of the fully-trained Cora. Apparently the rules of succession are incredibly flexible. It’s pretty reasonable for the player to assume that the job can just pass to whoever is next in line or whatever. If this is not the case, then the dialog should make that clear.

The second problem is that this is a simple right answer vs. wrong answer choice. It’s not like you’re balancing two desirable but mutually exclusive outcomes. You’re not trying to decide between the lesser of two evils. You’re not weighting idealism against pragmatism. If you choose one option then you get a bad outcome. If you choose the other then your pep talk basically changes Avitus’ entire outlook and he transforms into a confident hero.

In a game with so few choices, it’s a shame that the few we do get are so uninteresting. This is frustrating because they wrote the lines, recorded the dialog, scripted the different outcomes, and created the different cutscenes. The spent the money, but the entire premise of this choice was flawed from the beginning. I know this game suffers from an overall lack of polish, but this choice wasn’t going to get any better in the polish stage. The problems with this scene go all the way back to the dry-erase board.

I realize I promised I was going to be more positive. Look, I’m doing what I can. I still think the ark missions are pretty okay. It’s just tragic to see so much money and so many manhours of creativity were squandered building missions on top of scripts and ideas that needed a total re-write.

Let’s get back to the main quest…

Transponder


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Don't you hate when there's tons of open space around but someone else insists on parking RIGHT BESIDE YOU anyway?


So after dicking around on Kadara and putting up with Sloane, Ryder has finally obtained a “transponder” that tells her where the Kett flagship is.

When we follow the signal, we find that the flagship has captured the Salarian ark. The Kett are unpacking the ark and experimenting on the Salarians. So this mission is actually doing double duty. It’s both an ark mission and part of the main story. In the first half of the mission you explore the ark, wake up the Salarian Pathfinder, and tell her to get the ship ready to launch. In the second half you go over to the Kett flagship to steal the map that tells you how to find “Meridian”, and do some sabotage to the flagship so that the Salarian ark can escape.



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I didn't want to say anything, but yeah. Your plan was pretty dumb. Go back to cryo sleep and wait for the enemy to go away? I don't see how that was supposed to work.


Again, this stuff on the ark is pretty good and I liked the Salarian pathfinder. The pacing is good, the visuals are not too bad, the premise is fine, and the dialog manages to tell a story without contradicting itself.

Halfway through the Kett flagship there’s a cutscene where you blunder into a forcefield and end up…

Trapped in a Cutscene


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Oh no. We've been captured by the bad guy. He'll probably torture us, but with any luck he won't monologue at us.


Your three-person squad is held in an immobilizing field while the Archon comes in and mocks you. Then he stabs you in the neck and injects you with something. Then he leaves you all alone, with no guards, still holding your weapons, with a promise that he’ll come back later. This isn’t just cartoon villain behavior, this is Saturday morning cartoon villainbehavior. It’s just silly.

But Shamus! This is actually part of his plan that you escape so that…

Right, right. I get that. I do. But the writer 100% needed to lampshade this. Yes, it’s true that possibly this half-hearted capture was deliberate on the part of the Archon. His real goal was to inject Ryder and let her go so he could follow her to Meridian. That explains why we were left with our weapons and no guards. Fine. We know this, but Ryder doesn’t. This situation ought to strike the team as inexplicable.



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Liam is SO DONE with this monologue.


In Star Wars, our heroes escape the Death Star in the Millenium Falcon. It seems pretty incredible that such a small group of people could escape something so impossibly powerful. Our characters notice this, and they talk about it. Leia is intelligent and reads the situation correctly: They let us go because they’re tracking us. The prideful Han Solo assumes they escaped due to his great skill. Two lines of dialog manage to lampshade this situation to preserve believability in the minds of the audience while also characterizing two of our leads. At the same time, it creates tension because we realize maybe we’re not actually safe and this escape may simply be setting us up for something worse. That’s efficient dialog!

Andromeda doesn’t do this, so instead of creating character banter, building tension, and making our bad guy look cunning, it makes it look like our villain is a dumbass and our leads have short attention spans.

SAM points out that the field is only active if you’re alive. He proposes stopping Ryder’s heart[2] so the field will turn off. It works. Then Ryder frees the other two squad members and they continue with the mission.

But this lack of lampshading is a minor nitpick. The real problem with this scene is that this is the big set-up for the villain’s plan at the end, and it doesn’t work.

The Idiot Ball is Given to The Audience


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The Archon is a character with lots of dialog and nothing to say.


We know Ryder was injected in the neck with something. SAM immediately identifies it as a “biological transmitter”. After the mission, someone says that the Archon was able to use it to access Sara’s memories. I’m not sure how we know this, or how we know what specific memories he accessed, but… fine.

The problem is that nobody makes any further effort to remove this transmitter. My trust in the writer was pretty low already, but I sort of assumed that this removal happened off-screen. I actually went to talk to the ship’s doctor, assuming I’d get some post-op dialog making it clear she removed the item. When she had nothing to say on the matter, I thought that perhaps there was a scene where this thing was extracted by the doctor, but it had to be cut to get the game out the door. I just couldn’t imagine that the story as written would have the heroes forget about it, because that’s just too brazenly stupid.

Everyone knows this happened. It ought to be everyone’s top priority once the mission is over. The bad guy has injected some technology into our hero. What could it do? Read her mind? Mind-control her? Kill her? Poison her? Broadcast her position? It could do any or all of these things. We don’t know.



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Also in this mission: The designer recycles the Cardinal boss fight from earlier where we fight someone who hovers around the battlefield in the A-pose with a regenerating shield gizmo.


And yet apparently everyone just forgets all about this. I faulted the earlier games for inflicting “cutscene incompetence” on our lead, but this is maximally worse. This isn’t just stupidity on the part of one character for one scene, this requires that every single character on the Tempest be inflicted with a case of writer-imposed stupidity that goes on for the rest of the game. It also assumes the player is a dum-dum that can’t remember what happened five minutes ago.

The big reveal at the end will be that this biological transmitter has been broadcasting Ryder’s experiences to the bad guy, so that as she unravels the alien technology, he gets all the answers at the same time. This would be a fun and clever move if it were properly set up, but it’s not.

How I’d have done it:

You could fix this with just a couple of lines of dialog. Have the doctor extract the transmitter after the mission. So we in the audience think she’s in the clear. Then at the end the bad guy would say something like, “What, did you think I only put ONE transmitter into you?”


Sure, that’s dumb action schlock. But that’s fine. That’s all I’m asking for. Just do the bare minimum of effort to act like these characters have memories and planning horizons longer than five seconds.

Save the Krogan


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An exalted Krogan looks like a regular Krogan, except 10% more spiky and 100% more naked.


I guess I should mention the choice at the end of the mission, if only because it’s one of the precious few choices in the game that actually works. As you’re escaping with the map to Meridian, you get a call from the Salarian Pathfinder. She’s pinned down by Kett and isn’t going to make it. At the same time, Drack’s team of scouts are here, and they’re about to be exalted. You can save the Pathfinder or you can save the scouts, and both choices have repercussions.

If you save the Pathfinder, then the scouts get exalted. You’ll face them as mini-bosses from time to time in future missions. An exalted Krogan really is a handful, so you will feel the brunt of this choice directly. (Also, Drack will be disappointed in you.)

If you save the scouts, then you won’t have to face them in the future and Drack will be grateful. But the Salarians won’t have a Pathfinder[3].

It’s a good choice. The game needed more like this. I’m pretty sure this is the only meaningful choice in the game.

Give Appeasement a Chance


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What we gained? We gained TWENTY THOUSAND SALARIAN LIVES. Why does nobody bring this up!?


After the flagship, we return to the Nexus and Sara announces her plan to voyage to Meridian, where she thinks she’ll be able to activate all the climate-control vaults at once and make the entire cluster habitable.

Director Tann opposes the idea. That’s fine. There are a lot of good reasons to oppose Ryder’s scheme:
  1. Meridian will no doubt be guarded by the enemy. For whatever reason, we only brought one Tempest-class ship on this voyage. It’s designed for exploration, it has no weapons, and there’s no reason to risk it on a military endeavor like this.
  2. You’re the Pathfinder, not a military general. Your job is to find habitable places for our people. If you die when picking a fight with the Kett, then we’re all screwed.
  3. Our colonies are coming along just fine without this Meridian thing. (Assuming these puny four-acre outposts are as valuable as the game pretends they are.) You’re risking everything for a technology we don’t apparently need.
But instead, Tann opposes the plan because he doesn’t want to “provoke the Kett”. This line is ridiculously out of place considering that you just got done with a mission where the Kett tried to harvest the entire Salarian ark. Tann is Salarian, so the Kett harvesting ought to have left an enormous impression on him!

Sure, you can argue that Tann is just dedicated to the way of appeasement, but that doesn’t fit with the other parts of the story that are trying to pretend he was a brutal dictator during the Nexus rebellions before becoming a timid weasel when he met you. This character is all over the place and the writer has no idea what he’s supposed to be.

I’m sure this scene is here to mirror the bit in Mass Effect 1 where the Council takes away the Normandy and grounds Shepard. Except, this scene doesn’t work because the story has already established that Tann has no real authority over Ryder.



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Everything is fine.


In fact, after the meeting Ryder and the remaining pathfinders immediately get together and begin to make plans to ignore Tann, because who cares what he says? Even if he really is a secret tyrant, he has no real military muscle and can’t impose his will on you.

It’s a scene where Tann uses a nonsense argument that’s wrong for his character to give you an order he has neither the means or authority to enforce in order to set up a conflict that’s completely irrelevant to your efforts. Once again, the writer is using established tropes but doesn’t seem to understand what they’re for, how to use them, or how to integrate them with the story.
 
Last edited:

Reinhardt

Arcane
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Messages
29,232
Eternal jew strikes again. Baiting for posts and then moving them. Because he can.:argh:
 

Freddie

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It’s a scene where Tann uses a nonsense argument that’s wrong for his character to give you an order he has neither the means or authority to enforce in order to set up a conflict that’s completely irrelevant to your efforts. Once again, the writer is using established tropes but doesn’t seem to understand what they’re for, how to use them, or how to integrate them with the story.
What it was actually some sort of AI that wrote this? Closely guarded secret designed by EA. All that telemetry collected from players over time finally at work. Investors would love it once made public, no need to hire those writers at all. Instead we can now destroy entire franchise just by simply pressing a button, awesome.
 

EverlastingLove

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Andromeda Part 21: Not-so-Great Scott

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All of the surviving Pathfinders meet and agree to ignore Tann’s orders for everyone to abandon the main plot. The meeting is interrupted with the news that Scott is awake. So let’s see how that plot thread has been going.

There are two ways things can go with your sibling. One is kinda dumb, and the other is dumb and obnoxious.

Scott is Confused


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Then again, I might NOT say that. Because it's really dumb.


If you visit Scott while he’s still in a coma, then SAM will use Scott’s cranial implant to “make contact”. Scott will be able to converse with you from within his coma, with his ghostly disembodied voice coming out of SAM’s speaker system. He’ll ask about Dad and he’ll ask about Habitat 7, and if you tell him that Dad is dead and the planet is a wasteland, then he’ll freak out, panic, and the doctor will give him something to help him… sleep???

The writer evidently doesn’t understand the difference between “coma” and “paralysis”. If you’re having a lucid conversation and forming memories[1]Scott remembers this conversation later., then your brain is not in a coma.

It’s a nonsensical, melodramatic conversation that doesn’t really do much to characterize Scott. I have no idea why the scene is here.

But if you skip this conversation then you’re setting yourself up for a worse one…

Scott is Angry


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You're worried you're the biggest idiot in the galaxy? Dude, competition has been FIERCE lately. Don't worry. You're not even in the top 10.


If you don’t visit Scott while he’s in a coma, then the conversation you have with him when he wakes up is just as nonsensical but also a lot more frustrating. Scott will get angry at Sara because she’s been “too busy to tell me that dad is dead?” He’s apparently angry that you were off doing your job and not here to comfort him?

Unlike the other option, this conversation does indeed give Scott meaningful characterization: It characterizes him as idiotic, irrational, childish, and hopelessly self-absorbed.

Scott is a grown man. He was in the military. He ought to understand the idea that his sister has massive responsibilities as Pathfinder and isn’t free to camp out by his bedside. Literally tens of thousands of lives are on Sara’s shoulders, and this dipshit is mad because she wasn’t there when he woke up? Is he five?



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Keep in mind this guy could also be our main character, so it's really strange to see him acting like a selfish pouty child.


Just to drive home what a complete butthead he is, the game even gives you an interrupt prompt. If you press it quickly enough, you can try to hug him. And then he shoves you away like a sullen child. Given what a stoic hardass Alec Ryder was, how did this fragile creature ever make it out of childhood and into the military?

Sure, you can make excuses for him. He was confused. He just woke up. He was still reeling for the news that Dad is dead. Fine. I can believe that people are a little off when they wake up from a coma. The point is, this is how the writer chose to introduce this character. He may be Sara’s little brother, but he’s a complete stranger to the audience and this is his big first impression. It’s not like it would have shattered our immersion to have him behave rationally.

At the end of the game, the Archon will kidnap this ninny and that plot point sort of requires that we care about him, so it’s a shame our interactions with him are so goofy.

(Protip: Visit him while he’s still in a “coma” and tell him Dad is dead, but then don’t tell him about the failed golden worlds. This seems to make for the least annoying conversations.)

Fake Meridian


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Yeah, I bet the leadership will be THRILLED when you announce you did the thing they specifically ordered you not to do.


Our heroes travel to what they assume is Meridian. The plan is to turn on the entire terraforming network. When they arrive, they find a “massive” space station made of Remnant Technology. How massive? Is it larger than the Nexus? The game doesn’t say.

We learn that this isn’t actually Meridian. The Kett call it Khi Tasira, so let’s stick with that for a name. The Remnant technology at work here gives this place gravity and even an atmosphere. (It’s actually raining when you arrive.)

We shoot a lot of Kett mooks and even more Remnant robots. We do some Remnant puzzles and hike down a lot of Remnant walkways. Eventually the game drops its first big reveal…

The Remnant Made the Angara


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The lighting in here is goofy so you can't see inside the pods, but these are all full of prototype Angaran bodies. (They look just like normal Angarans, if you're curious.)


We find a room filled with Angaran bodies in capsules. These are early Angaran “prototypes”. Whoever ran this place was engineering a species to live in this cluster.

This is a fine idea for a reveal, although it lacks punch because the Angara are – like so many other details in this setting – relentlessly vague. We don’t know enough about their religion or history to have a sense of how this news might impact them.

This information is neither an answer to a standing question, nor is it in conflict with truths that the Angarans hold dear. It’s certainly an interesting bit of trivia, but it doesn’t impact our story because it doesn’t change anything.

How I’d have done it:

In Suvi’s dialog, the writer has been playing around with the concept of creation as a divine act. Maybe that’s a theme the writer wanted to explore and it never got fleshed out, or maybe that was never intended to be more than character flavor. If this was a theme the game was intended to explore and if we wanted to do something a little risky, then we could turn the standard creation story on its head: We could make it so that the Angara believe they evolved over millions of years, and that belief has shaped their religion. We’d need to put some meat on the bones of their religion for this to work, but we could easily do this through exploratory dialog with Jaal / the Moshae.

There’s a lot you can do with this idea, but I’m not going to make you sit through six paragraphs of fanfic religious exposition. The point is, the Angara believe they evolved here and are frustrated that they can never find evidence of their forebears. They have this theory that there’s some “lost” Angaran homeworld out there, and they’ve built up all these myths around the idea.

(There’s the nagging question about how the space-faring Angara came to forget their history and have no record of the first Angara waking up wherever their creator species dumped them. This is a problem in both my version and the original text. Ideally we’d patch over that somehow, but let’s just move on.)

They believe their purpose is to find this lost homeworld, which they imagine would be ideally suited to their species and thus a paradise. Then Jaal is hit with this big reveal that they didn’t evolve, they were designed by a benevolent creator. This would make a mess of their religion. If we made it so their government leaders were also religious in nature[2]Which I think is the case with the Moshae, but I’m not sure what she DOES, in terms of government., then telling them the truth might make this information a threat to the existing power structure.

As written, the story has the party conclude that they need to tell everyone right away. That’s okay, but there’s no decision to make and thus no tension. To make it interesting for the player, we could make it so the Angaran religion is explicitly beneficial to them, and telling them the truth will threaten that pillar of their society. Perhaps it will threaten the power of the Moshae, and since you’ve gained her as an ally you really don’t want to create a situation where she could be deposed. Are you willing to hide the truth from the Angara for your own benefit?



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The creators of the Angara apparently left behind hundreds of capsules of discarded prototypes. Not sure why these test tube specimens are clothed. There's already a nude Angara model in the game, so I'm not sure why they didn't go with that. Not a big deal, but still kinda odd.


Jaal could then feel the burden of this terrible secret. Does he tell his people the truth, or allow them to continue searching for a nonexistent lost homeworld because it’s good for them? Does he value truth, or stability? (And then he could turn to the player for advice, because that’s how these games work.)

Also, this reveal is so huge that I really feel like Jaal needs to be here when it happens. Currently, the game allows you to pick any two squadmates for this mission, but I’d insert an excuse for why we need to bring Jaal. (I stupidly forgot to bring him for this mission, even though I intended to. Which is why I don’t have any screenshots of Jaal’s reaction. I had to watch it on YouTube. Still, that’s on me. I actually brought Liam, which… why did I bring Liam?! He’s less interesting than Jaal on any mission. So silly.)

I imagine the gameplay director would hate the idea of forcing the player to bring Jaal. Players that don’t care about Jaal might resent being forced to take him. But if you’re going to do a huge reveal like this then we need to make allowances for it in the gameplay. The character-specific loyalty missions force you to take the related character, so we could just make this Jaal’s loyalty mission if that’s what it takes. As it stands, having this big reveal happen without Jaal around is like having Darth Vader reveal his true identity to R2D2 instead of Luke.

If messing around with creation vs. evolution seems too risky or too much of a “big idea” to spend on a side-plot like this, then we can scale it down to the homeworld idea I mentioned above: The Angara have no record of their existence as a pre-spacefaring race, and really want to know where they came from. Then here they discover the answer to the question is “a lab”.

The point is that for this reveal to have some heft, it ought to challenge something the Angara believe or answer a standing question for them.

Along the way we run into some scourge tendrils running through the station. The dialog seems to indicate that the scourge originated here, and was a result of this place being damaged. That’s a nice idea, although the dialog is a spontaneous exchange between gunfights. You don’t get a dialog wheel and you can’t talk about or explore it. Sad face.

We get to the end of this murder dungeon and we get our final reveal…

This Isn’t Meridian


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You're going to read us some text you magically translated without difficulty? This is our big reveal? Come on.


A lot of the “storytelling” in this game has been offloaded to datapads, audiologs, one-way exposition conversations, and having the quasi-omniscient SAM just narrate exposition at us. I don’t know if this is because the new writer just isn’t interested in exploratory dialog, or if the large scope of the game required them to make many shallow dialogs rather than a few deep ones. Whatever the case is, you can maybe forgive most of this as a necessity of the change in focus and development priorities. But not here.

This is roughly the “big reveal” at the end, equivalent to the conversation we had with Vigil at the end of Mass Effect 1. In Mass Effect 2 I said the reveal lacked punch because it was just EDI interpreting data for us rather than having a conversation with someone. This is worse still, since it’s basically SAM translating an audiolog for us. The creator of Meridian recorded a message to nobody in particular, explaining that their project was under attack and that they were sending away “Meridian”.

This is our big reveal. This is where you explain your science-magic, deliver your plot twist, and put the adventure into some kind of context. You should not do this using an AUDIOLOG.

For crying out loud.



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The ARCHON was wrong? Ryder, YOU'RE the one who's been making wild assumptions since the beginning!


How I’d have done it:

How about we turn on this gizmo and we find an AI like Vigil[3]Yes, Vigil was a Virtual Intelligence, not Artificial Intelligence. Fine. Whichever. This far from Mass Effect 1, that line has become quite blurry., that’s broken and doesn’t realize it. It sees Jaal, and figures he’s an explorer and he’s finally reached the cradle of his species. The AI explains that all of the wonderful habitable worlds out there (it doesn’t know that the scourge wrecked everything) are a gift from the creator.

This cluster was like a garden. They tilled the land (terraformed the planets) and planted the seeds (the Angarans) so that life would flourish. As far as this AI knows, the Angaran are a powerful and prosperous people living on paradise worlds.

The AI can then tie this into some kind of theme. We already have the side-plot with Cora and the Rose garden she wants to grow. We could connect those two ideas with some sort of setup / callback thing[4]The game actually does this a bit. After this mission Cora emails Ryder. Obviously you want the thematic connective tissue to be part of the story and not jammed into optional codex / datapad / audiolog content..

When it’s over, the AI can ask Jaal what they did with Meridian. Jaal / Ryder can respond with, “Isn’t THIS place Meridian?” Then the AI can explain what Meridian is.

It turns out Meridian is a planet. We don’t know anything about it, but Ryder’s copy of the script says it’s valuable and we need it. She even says she needs to “Find home.” I guess she knows Meridian is a habitable planet and not just a big ball of machinery to run the terraforming network.

Of Course we Need a Boss Fight Here


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I hope you don't have plans this evening, because this dude has HP for DAYS.


The Kett show up and pick yet another fight. I’m fine with the idea that the Archon is just throwing waves of dudes at you to hide the fact that he’s spying on you through the transmitter you stupidly forgot to remove[5]That is, I’m fine with him attacking you. The transmitter itself is bullshit., and he fully expects you to plow through these mooks and continue on your way. However, he sends his super-powerful underling[6]Seriously, this guy’s HP bar is gargantuan. It’s not a hard fight so much as a really time consuming one. and his backup dancers. They make a big deal of announcing that their goal is to capture Ryder.

If we wanted to be extra generous we could imagine that the Archon is being double-clever by pretending he wants to capture you when he really wants you to escape, and if this plot had even a sliver of cleverness in it I might be willing to believe that. But I suspect this dialog is leftover from some earlier edit or is the result of different writers working at cross-purposes. It makes no sense that the Archon would want to kill OR capture Ryder at this point, since his long-term plan is to have you figure out the Meridian network for him.

Ryder uses her Remnant mojo to order the station to attack the nearby Kett vessels. The Kett are wiped out, and it’s clear they can’t get anywhere near this place now that the defenses are up.



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In this datapad diary to his troops, the Archon claims that humans call this place Meridian. But we call it meridian because the Moshae says the ARCHON called it Meridian. Not only does this alien macguffin have an English name, but the origin of the name makes no sense.


At this point, the good guys don’t really need Meridian. The big threat was that the Archon might figure out how to use this control center and un-terraform all our planets. That’s no longer possible. We’re safe. The most sensible thing for Ryder to do at this point would be to go back to her terraforming / Kett killing. We know there’s a planet-sized thing out there, but we don’t know where it is, what it does, or even if it still exists.

This isn’t a plot hole or anything. The audience is naturally curious about this mystery they’ve been chasing, and their drive to see it through is more than enough to cover for the fact that our protagonists no longer needs it. Still, it would be nice if there was some peril pushing our story forward.

Well, this was our big reveal and it sort of fizzled out. I’ll admit it’s better than the big reveal at the end of Mass Effect 3, but that’s a very low bar indeed.

We’re nearing the end now. Next week we’re going to embark on the final mission. Not to freak you out, but I’m actually going to have a few nice things to say before the end.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=45806
 
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EverlastingLove

Learned
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May 2, 2018
Messages
97
Another one, man, this plot is a mess and the worldbuilding is awful

Andromeda Part 22: Actually Meridian

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The plan is for Ryder to return to the control center from the previous mission. I realize this is a very minor point[1]Particularly in a story as troubled as this one. but it feels strange to come back here so soon after our last big visit. Imagine if the Enterprise crew had their meeting with V’ger, left, and then turned around and came back for a few more words. Imagine if Neo turned around and visited the Oracle a few minutes after his first visit. It’s not wrong or anything, but it seems like an odd way to pace the story. I’d never thought about it before, but it does seem like casually re-visiting the mysterious location of revelation takes some of the mystique out of it. It’s less that I’m bothered that Andromeda does this, and more curious how it made me notice that other stories don’t do this sort of thing.

At any rate, Ryder is here to release a bunch of Remnant robots. The robots will fly through the currents of the scourge, and we can follow them to Meridian. I’m not sure why small robots traveling for ten minutes would arrive at the same location as a planetoid that’s been cruising for centuries through the ever-shifting scourge, but it seems to work out.



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Nice try, writer, but this clumsy line doesn't BEGIN to pay off the whole "Pathfinder" idea you mangled.


This is where the Archon springs his trap. He begins talking to Ryder through her SAM implant. He monologues at you for a bit, saying things like, “FALL TO DARKNESS, PATHFINDER. YOU WERE ALMOST WORTHY.” (The subtitles aren’t in all caps, but the line delivery is. This guy sounds exactly like Harbinger in Mass Effect 2, including the same pitch-shifted reverb vocal FX.) Then the Archon does…

Well, it’s not clear what he does here.


Can Someone Explain the Rules to Me?


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Everything is NOT fine.


In Star Trek, there are a lot of rules. You can’t use the transporter when the shields are up, but communications work just fine. Sensors don’t work in a nebulae, but they work through shields. You can’t fire weapons when you’re cloaked but you can fire them through your own shields thanks to the shield modulation frequency. If your enemy learns your shield frequency, then they can shoot through your shields. The list goes on and on. These rules don’t often make scientific sense, but they’re the rules of the universe and we’re able to accept them as givens in this universe. A lot of Trek action sequences involve exploring these rules and how they interact in different situations, which is why writers are willing to burn precious screen time making those rules clear to the audience.

In Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, we don’t get a lot of rules. Sure, there are shields and zap guns and some sort of faster-than-light travel, but for the most part you can just intuit how things work based on real-world analogues: X-Wings are jets, Star Destroyers are like naval destroyers, deck guns shoot down X-Wings, and so on. If the storyteller does take the time to explain a rule, it’s usually something super-important and conceptually easy to grasp, like “A little missile from these jet things can go in this hole and blow up the big evil moon.”

The problem in Andromeda is that this is (sort of) a drama-first[2]I don’t know if this is really the intent, but it’s the most charitable of the possible readings. I’d rather believe the writer thought that details are just dumb fluff that don’t matter rather than assume they were trying to build a coherent system and failed. story with a bunch of fussy details-oriented moving parts left over from the previous games, and the writer doesn’t seem to know how to reconcile this. We have plot elements that the writer never explained, and now we need to understand how they work to follow everyone’s reasoning.



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Your goal is to stagger towards the door. It feels just like the slow walk to the beam at the end of Mass Effect 3, except this time you've got the Archon monologuing at you.


The Archon uses the mystery gizmo he injected into Ryder. It apparently sabotages Ryder’s SAM implant, which seems to injure and weaken her. I guess this is because of the way SAM was connected to Ryder at the start of the game, but since the writer never explained how that worked this comes off as random. The start of the game told us that being disconnected from SAM would kill her, without getting into specifics. Now the writer is trying to pay off a premise they didn’t properly establish.

Ryder’s implant is disabled, but the Archon continues to use it to talk to her anyway. He announces that he’s figured out that she’s able to interface with all this Remnant tech because she’s got an AI in her head that does everything for her. So he’s going to go to the human ark and kidnap Scott, and use Scott’s implant.

But… I thought you had to be the Pathfinder? Like, wasn’t that the whole point of that scene at the start of the game? SAM has this special connection to Sara that allows her to interface with the computer. The other members of the Pathfinder team have SAM implants, but they can’t interface with alien tech. Moreover, the story makes it clear that SAM is the one who understands the alien stuff and does all the interfacing. SAM obviously isn’t willing to help the Archon, so what good will an implant do him? Why kidnap Scott? The Archon can torture Scott all day, but that wouldn’t make SAM willing to help the Archon, even if Scott had the super-special Pathfinder connection.

Maybe the writer had a mental model for how all of this was supposed to work, but they never bothered telling us what it was so it all feels lazy and random.

At this point Sara passes out and we switch to playing as…

Our Backup Reserve Protagonist


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Okay, but how does rebooting a computer on the ship fix the sabotaged implant inside her head?


SAM tells Scott that he needs to reach a computer console and reset / reboot Sara’s implant. I thought it was destroyed or disabled, but apparently rebooting the connection will fix it? But what’s to stop the Archon from severing it again?

Sara will still be able to use her class profiles[3]You can switch between different types of combat bonuses based on what powers you want to use. It sort of allows you to class-switch in the field. after this reset and in the past the game made it clear that this was something only a Pathfinder could do. Is the writer saying she’s still got Pathfinder powers, or are they saying she’s transcended SAM and no longer needs his help to do these amazing things, or is this a compromise made in service of gameplay, or is this a simple oversight?



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SAM can open doors and hack computers remotely through walls, but he apparently can't NOT help the Archon? Just... what?


Scott reboots a random computer terminal to fix his sister, which makes no sense. Didn’t the Archon attack the implant inside her head? How does making changes on this end fix that? Moreover, wouldn’t it make more sense for Scott to fight his way to SAM node? That’s where this goofy adventure began and where Pathfinder powers were conferred, so it would make narrative sense to return there when doing whatever this is. Also, why doesn’t the Archon capture SAM node? That’s what he’s really after anyway. He wants access to SAM’s magic ability to manipulate Remnant tech. But instead of capturing SAM, he chases Scott around.

The mechanics of this are completely unclear so it’s hard to care about all of this supposed peril. Whatever. Once Scott reboots the random computer, more goons show up and capture him in a cutscene.

We switch back to Sara, who is on her feet again.

Details? Drama? What am I Watching?


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Sara gets a nosebleed when she interfaces with the computer to summon the Remnant fleet. Scenes with Archon dialog have the same effect on me.


Sara stumbles over to a computer console and summons a remnant fleet. Without SAM’s help it’s really hard for her to use Remnant tech, so this gives her a nosebleed. But wait, why doesn’t she have SAM’s help? The entire previous section was all about restoring her connection to SAM so that he could keep her alive. Which means that SAM is helping her again, right? So… why can’t he help her with these consoles? The dialog makes it sound like SAM is gone, but earlier dialog made it clear that Scott was trying to restore SAM and that’s what got Ryder on her feet again.

Is the writer saying that this reboot has made Scott the Pathfinder? If so, then why couldn’t we have done that at the beginning of the story and made Cora Pathfinder?

The game never explained what SAM was doing to interface with these computers. Sara just held up her hand and machines did what she wanted. I wasn’t even sure if we were supposed to understand that she was just “typing” on these consoles[4]She is holding her hand over a keyboard-looking thing, and the pieces move around as if being pushed down. but they didn’t have time to animate it properly so they just showed her holding her hand still. What is Sara doing to control these machines? Is she able to emit wifi signals from her fingertips? What is this based on? Alpha waves? Electrical impulses? The power of love?

I should make it clear that I’m not trying to “gotcha” the writer over some breach of narrative orthodoxy. “Oh you broke the rules of storytelling and sinned against the gospel of Joseph Campbell, therefore you are a bad writer and that means I, the critic, win.” I’m not asking these questions because I’m trying to fill in the technical details of the Mass Effect wiki. I’m not trying to rules-lawyer the writer over the details of their own story. I’m asking these questions because this story does not work. The things I’m asking for here are fairly basic building blocks of drama. This is like having a Superman story where you never explain the rules of kryptonite so at the end the audience has no idea why this glowing green rock takes away his powers.



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The team is all here for the big speech before we go fight the Big Bad, but since the last 45 minutes of story were random bunk and hokum, this moment has absolutely no inertia.


We need to understand the challenge the protagonist is facing so we know what we’re rooting for. We need to understand the peril before we can experience their fear of failure. We need to understand the capabilities of the protagonist before we can share in the self-doubt that creates the tension within the story. Before we can be impressed at their overcoming impossible odds we have to know what they can and can’t do. We need to understand these things ahead of time so that when they overcome the physical danger, resist temptation, solve the mystery, or make the right decision, we understand how this moment led them to victory. If we have a hero overcoming a challenge we don’t understand using powers that were never explained to meet a goal we don’t know about, then none of those things are contributing to the drama. Mass Effect Andromeda has vaults, SAM, Remnant devices, the scourge, the Archon’s floating scanner gizmo, and Ryder’s implant, and none of them are explained well enough that we know what is or isn’t possible. It’s one giant lazy confused hand-wave.

Guardians of the Galaxy is vague as hell about the rules of the world but gets away with it because the plot is a very simple “keep the bad guy from getting the magic space rock” kinda deal and the characters themselves are doing all the heavy lifting in terms of drama. Andromeda can’t go that direction because the crew of the Tempest aren’t a driving force in the plot and their character arcs are small, self-contained, optional, and completely disconnected from Ryder and the battle for Meridian.



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Oh, hey doc. If you have time, can I make an appointment to have you GET THIS ALIEN TECH OUT OF MY BODY? No? We're not even going to discuss it? Okay then.


This moment where Ryder commands the Remnant is supposed to be like the moment in Thor: Ragnarok where Thor discovers he never really needed the hammer and is the GOD OF THUNDER whether he has his weapon or not. The problem is that the game is trying get a payoff for rules they never established. In Thor, that big turning point of “the power was inside of you all along, Dorothy” was explained to us by Odin[5]Also: The fact that Thor and Odin still had unfinished business was established earlier in the story during the Hulk fight., and acts as the moment of change within Thor’s character arc. Here in Andromeda we’re missing that pivotal scene. Once again, the writer is borrowing tropes without understanding how they work or how to integrate them with a story.

How I’d have done it:

I have no idea how I’d untangle this mess without re-writing the entire game. By this point in the story all of the writer’s cut corners and missed opportunities become insurmountable. Still, let me see what I can do here:

At various moments throughout the story, we can have points where Ryder has to use a Remnant console[6]There’s still the problem that you can complete the main story and skip a lot of the messing around in the vaults, so this idea wouldn’t totally work. Like I said, we’re too late in the story to fix a lot of these problems.. When Ryder activates the monoliths on the various planets, we need a little dialog from her indicating that this is more than just her flipping a switch. We should telegraph to the player that something fantastical and mysterious is going on. Maybe she swoons a bit when she activates a major device. When she regains her composure, she’ll say something to her team:

“I’m okay. I’m just… I saw something. Or someone. I feel like I made contact.”

“I saw it again. It’s not a person, it’s the vault network. I could feel how large it is. Terrifying.”

“Not so bad this time. I feel like every time I use one of these, I understand the network a little more. Or not the network. The Remnant. It’s hard to say.”

“I saw a lot more that time. I don’t know if I can explain it, but the network is more than a bunch of machinery and computers. There’s a kind of intellect here.”

The thing we’d lean into here is that SAM isn’t seeing this. Only Ryder is. To SAM, the network really is just a ball of machinery. Then at the end when Ryder can suddenly control Remnant systems, we understand it comes from this mysterious bullshit we’ve been building up over the course of the game. This means it will feel like a proper payoff to a proper setup. This will also make our lead character into a legitimate protagonist by giving her growth and agency so she’s more than a meat-based taxi for SAM.

If something is supposed to be vague and mysterious, then you need to build that up. The first Mass Effect game did that with the Cypher. Sure, the Cypher was a bunch of vague nonsense, but the writer sold the hell out of it. They used camera framing, dialog, and musical cues to telegraph that HEY KIDS SOME STRANGE ALIEN HOODOO IS GOIN DOWN WATCH OUT.

I’m not going to try to fix all the nonsense with Ryder’s implant. It’s random, it’s annoying to think about, and none of it works. I honestly can’t tell what the writer was trying to accomplish and my first instinct would be to say, “Throw the SAM character away. He’s a disaster, he undercuts our protagonist, he doesn’t fit in this setting, and you’re using him like a crutch to avoid revealing characters and ideas through exploratory dialog.”

We’re almost at the end. Next week we’ll find out about this Meridian place.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=45960
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Andromeda Part 23: A Pretty Good Slog


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Our heroes reach Meridian, which they discover is a kinda Dyson sphere type thing, except roughly the size of a moon[1]. Ryder and her crew race after the Archon to reach Meridian. He’s going to Meridian to… activate it? But I thought the space station was the control center for the network? Whatever. We’re basically repeating the previous chapter where we have to stop the bad guy from gaining control of the alien superweapon, except now he actually has the means to operate the superweapon. Also he’s got Scott as a hostage, which ups the odds if you care about him. Also, Meridian is a lush habitable world and would make a good home for the Initiative.

Meridian


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Scott and the captain are just sitting in these chairs, but the animations make it look like they're restrained. It's odd.


The Archon has hijacked the Human ark and is piloting it to Meridian. He’s got Scott and the captain on the bridge as prisoners and he’s monologuing at them, because that’s literally the only thing this idiot ever does. He talks so much and says so little it’s infuriating. He yammers at Ryder. He jabbers to these two. He leaves long-winded datapad messages lying around. The whole thing would be unintentional comedy if his dialog wasn’t so tedious.

Ryder is chasing the Archon in the tempest. And for no reason whatsoever, Ryder decides to leave her spaceship, jump in the Nomad, and race after him on the ground.

I guess saying “no reason” isn’t fair. The reason is that the end of Mass Effect 1 had us eject from the Normandy so we could drive after the bad guy in the Mako, and this game is copying ideas from Mass Effect 1 whether they make sense or not.

The Archon is on the bridge of the Human ark, with both Scott and the captain as hostages, along with 20,000 human sleepers[2]. Perhaps sensing that the Archon’s position is too strong for our hero to overcome, the writer has him do something completely nonsensical. The Archon abandons the Human ark and flies off in a shuttle with Scott, leaving the captain alive and free to resume control of the ark. I guess he couldn’t spare four or five mooks to stand on the bridge and point guns at people?

How I’d have done it:

Instead of the Archon giving the humans back their arc, have him leave some goons behind on the bridge. Then have the humans overpower the goons and reclaim the ship. Instead of having the Archon do something inexplicable and stupid, have the bridge crew do something heroic and exciting. That will make us like them and care about their survival.
This entire sequence is so awful that pointing out something as pedestrian as plotholes seems petty, but this one would be important if we actually cared about this unfolding drama. The humans have regained control of their ark. The Archon has taken Scott into the bowels of Meridian, planning to use Scott and SAM to take control of it. Laying aside the question of how the Archon could compel SAM to do something, this doesn’t work because SAM’s hardware is on the Hyperion. That gives us an instant win button. If it looks like the Archon might win, we can just turn SAM off[3]. I realize this might make Ryder sad, but since the Archon is threatening to destroy / subjugate the entire cluster, that seems like a small price to pay.

The Archon talks a lot, but it’s not clear what his immediate plans are and it’s also not clear what the network can do. He’s basically threatening to take all the barely-habitable shithole planets and make them totally uninhabitable, which at this point would threaten the lives of like, a hundred people. And that’s assuming Meridian works fast enough to be an immediate threat. For all anyone knows, terraforming takes years.

This is the final showdown with our big villain and we’re not sure what the super-weapon can do, how fast it works, or what the bad guy’s immediate plan is. If it turns out to be a problem we could just unplug SAM and cut the Archon off from the network. Even with simple plot elements like a cartoon villain and a doomsday weapon, the writer still can’t construct basic things like clear stakes and dramatic peril.

The Slog


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I've never seen anything quite like this in a game. It's better if you're playing the game yourself and can move the camera around. It's hard to capture the sense of scale and distance in a simple screenshot.


Here we are in the classic end-game slog. A lot of games suffer from this, particularly titles from BioWare, Obsidian, and Bethedsa. The plot has reached maximum tension, and now a lot of that tension will be lost as plot comes to a halt so we can gun down mooks for the better part of an hour. This particular slog is actually not bad by the standards of the genre.

Visually, this section is spectacular. I know I’ve been merciless to this poor game for the last few entries, but I want to give kudos to the folks who put together this ground sequence. We’re driving around at high speed while a huge battle rages overhead. We’re on the inside of a sphere, which gives us a horizon like we’ve never seen before. The continents in the distance make the space feel huge, which makes everything seem more epic. There’s some radio chatter and a couple of quick cutscenes that sell us on the notion that the other characters in the story are active and doing things and not just waiting for Ryder to shoot all the mooks.

Yes, we have to kill a bunch of dudes that feel very unimportant right now. But we also get a lot of reaction to player choice and a pretty good fireworks display. Based on the choices you’ve made, the lives you’ve saved, and the allies you’ve acquired, various groups will show up here at the end. Some will fight with you on the ground, while others will take part in the ship-to-ship battle raging overhead. All of this happens against the wild backdrop of a lush green planet that’s been constructed inside-out. While it makes no sense for Ryder to decide to drive around down here, it does make for a pretty amazing show. It’s a good sequence all around. Honestly this might be one of the best parts of the game. It’s fun, gorgeous, and reactive to player choice.



mea_end11.jpg

Those ships flying overhead are the friends and allies we've made during the course of the game. It's a nice moment, although it's not clear why we're driving when literally everyone else on both sides of the conflict are flying.


If we can look past the confused themes, confused plot, horrendous villain, embarrassing dialog, plot holes, and bland characters, then this scene gives us a glimpse at the game that might have been. (Or perhaps the game they were trying to make.) There are moments of brilliance mixed in with the dross of Andromeda, and that makes the narrative failings sting all the more.

Protip: Resist the urge to ignore the mooks and charge straight for your goal. A lot of progress is secretly gated by combat encounters, which means you need to kill all the enemies in the area before the next door will open or the required cutscene can trigger. I got trapped at several different points in the game when a lone mook would get stuck someplace out of reach and I’d have to reload the most recent save. For whatever reason, the ending sequence is particularly susceptible to this problem. I understand they didn’t have time for polish, but I wish the developers had at least removed these kill requirements. Being able to skip fights isn’t nearly as damaging as getting stuck.

The Archon keeps bellowing about what a badass he is while also running away from our hero. He’s abandoned the Human ark and is flying towards the Meridian control center in a shuttle. Ryder is chasing after him in her space-tank, for some reason.

All In


mea_end14.jpg

This entire scene where the Hyperion goes down has a VERY Star Trek vibe. Not just the bridge design, but in the entire concept and execution. Although I really do question how many of these people will make it to their cryo pods.


The Human ark isn’t designed for atmospheric flight and it can’t stay up. It crashes on the surface of Meridian, meaning the 20,000 sleepers on board are now stuck here. This place is either their new homeworld, or their grave. This is a fantastic moment for upping the stakes of this final showdown, although it has the unfortunate side-effect of rendering a majority of your efforts in the game moot. Ryder spent all those hours terraforming worlds to make room for those tiny little outposts. We worked so hard to establish these minor footholds in the jungle, on a glacier, and in two different deserts.

The Earth is 75% ocean and huge portions of the remaining landmass are harsh. Only a small percent of the Earth’s surface is made up of comfortable, arable farmland. And yet we’ve managed to cram almost 8 billion people on this rock. Meridian looks like it’s made entirely of fertile ground with a temperate climate. The starting population of the Andromeda Initiative – all races included – is less than a million. There’s enough space here to keep everyone comfortable for centuries[4].

Who is going to want to freeze their ass off on Voeld or get roasted alive on Elaaden when there’s all this open space on Meridian?



mea_end13.jpg

Now THIS is how you establish stakes!


Mass Effect Andromeda has these two parallel goals of establishing colonies and stopping the Archon, and in the end the latter sort of renders the former irrelevant. It’s not that this is wrong or anything. I’m not saying this ruins the game. It’s just an odd way to construct our story, and serves as more evidence that perhaps this project was pulled in two different directions by different parts of the design team.

Conjecture: I think the planet terraforming stuff is what was left over after the team finally cut the “massive procedurally generated open-world” exploration” stuff. It doesn’t have much synergy with the main plot, and here at the end it’s rendered moot by it. While I think the main story of this game is terrible on account of the atrocious main villain, I think it would have been a good call to cut the terraforming stuff and give those resources to the main story. Bad or good, the story is what this audience is here for and the terraforming is dull busywork that’s incompatible with the main plot.

Before Meridian: Why do I need to track down Meridian when we’re making good progress just activating the vaults one at a time?

After Meridian: Why do we need all those dinky outposts when we have this vast lush world?

The two plots just don’t work together, and spreading development resources across two different, incompatible, and largely isolated stories didn’t do this game any favors.

We’ve still got to settle up with the Archon. We’ll deal with him next week.
 

Infinitron

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It's just over:

Andromeda Part 24: The Boss Fight at the End

mea_splash.jpg




Maybe this series was longer than it needed to be. My original retrospective covered all three games in 50 entries. Here I’ve spent half that on just a single game. Despite that, I’ve skipped at least as much material as I’ve covered. Sometimes I worried that I wasn’t covering the game in enough detail to really drive home how numerous the problems are, and other times I felt like I was beating a dead horse. Mass Effect Andromeda is an enormous game and there’s a lot wrong with it.

Regardless of how we got here, we’re now at the endgame. Ryder chases the Archon to the heart of the Meridian control system for…

The Big Dumb Showdown


mea_end15.jpg

I know it's hard to get a sense of scale from these screenshots, but that's the Archon and Scott on top of this big mound of space triangles.


So we arrive at the central control room. The Archon is up on a platform, using his floating robot to use Scott to use SAM to use Meridian to summon a giant robo-worm for you to fight. He gives us one last monologue before the fight starts, and it’s yet another repetition of the same cartoon dialog we’ve been hearing since the first act of the game.

The Archon gets one sort of interesting line here where he bellows, “I am the genetic inheritor of a thousand species!” That hints at why he thinks he deserves to win. You could probably expand that idea and do something useful across the entire story, but at this point it’s far too little and much too late.

The player has probably fought this same robo-worm boss several times already on the various habitable worlds, because this game designer thinks that if something is fun once then doing it four times will be four times as fun[1].



mea_end16.jpg

Just shut up and let's get to the fighting.


The pieces are now in place. Our big dumb bad guy has a damsel we don’t care about, and is using the damsel to access a machine we don’t understand to summon a re-run boss monster we need to defeat so we can push three buttons and win the game. The entire sequence is a microcosm of Mass Effect Andromeda. It’s somehow both insultingly simple and needlessly convoluted at the same time.

The worst part of all of this is that the Archon WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP. All of his faults are amplified to maximum intensity here. Here are some of his actual lines:

ALL YOUR WORLDS WILL BURN!

YOU ARE UNWORTHY!

YOUR PEOPLE WILL BEG FOR MERCY, AND THEY WILL BE DENIED!

You have to listen to a dozen variations of this repeat for eighteen solid minutes[2]. It’s not a great boss fight to begin with, but it’s so much more tedious with this dunce announcing the inevitability of his victory while you gun down his minions.



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At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan the Accuser starts belting out his big speech on the punishment he’s bringing. The thing is, the screenwriter doesn’t make us listen to the whole thing, because that wouldn’t advance the plot or entertain the audience. We get just enough of it to get the idea, and then the good guys do their thing. If the Archon is going to do this much talking, then he really needs to be saying something. And if he doesn’t have anything to say, then he needs to keep his mouth shut. Our villain is a boring thug who talks like a cartoon character and has nothing interesting to say but who keeps talking anyway. It’s like being stuck in an online shooter against an exasperated tryhard who keeps screaming nonsense into his mic and we can’t mute him for some reason.

After listening to his howling for a third of an hour, the writer doesn’t even see fit to have it lead up to something. Ryder doesn’t refute his ideals. Archon doesn’t get a reaction shot where he realizes he’s lost and expresses panic. You don’t see his belief system shatter as he experiences doubt for the first time in his life. He doesn’t die screaming in some horrible conflagration of lasers and exploding machinery. You don’t even get a moment where Ryder looks down at his body and drops a one-liner.

If you’re going to write childish action schlock, the least you can do is make proper action schlock!



mea_end20.jpg

This is Ryder's big hero moment where she summons her strength and finally overpowers the villain. She's activating a computer console.


In fact, his death scene makes it seem like the writer thinks this is a tragic moment. He falls from his doom machine and lands on the central platform with a light shining on him, eyes closed. The score is telling us this moment is “somber” and not “triumphant”.

Maybe the writer was trying to make a callback to the death of Saren, overlooking the fact that:
  1. Saren was a three-dimensional character and not a bellowing tryhard.
  2. Saren was a tragic figure because he tried to outwit a Reaper and failed. There’s nothing “tragic” about the Archon.
  3. You can actually sort of redeem Saren through dialog, making him realize he’s been indoctrinated.
  4. Most importantly: Saren only spoke when he had something to say. And at the end, he conceded victory before he died.
For contrast, the Archon just falls down and exits the story without comment.



mea_end17.jpg

This guy is dead and he's still hogging the camera.


Shamus, maybe they’re ignoring him on purpose to show they stopped thinking about him the moment he died?

I would really approve of that. The thing is, if you’re going to have the heroes ignore the villain, then you need to show them ignoring the villain. For example you could do something like this:

SAM: Pathfinder. Meridian is now operational. You may activate it when ready.

(Ryder looks around to see the Archon’s dead body, ingloriously draped over a nearby console.)

Ryder: Sure, just let me… (Ryder grunts as she casually shoves the Archon off, into the abyss.) …move this. (Operates the controls.) There. That should do it.

(The lights come on, showing the terraforming network is now operating.)

THAT is how you show the hero doesn’t care about the villain. Instead, it feels like the game treats him with undeserved reverence that makes the whole thing dissonant.



mea_end19.jpg

This is the final shot of the Archon. Note the lack of being blown up, vaporized, impaled, crushed, or other bodily dishonor according to this rules of action-schlock villain demise.


After all the Archon monologuing the writer forces us to sit through, it feels very strange to have nothing for either party to say once the fighting is over. That’s it? You don’t have a coda? You don’t want to underscore a theme or refute a thesis? No jokes, no callbacks, no inversion of earlier dialog? Not even a crude taunt on the part of Ryder to make the dying Archon taste a little of his own medicine? The hero isn’t going to cut off a final monologue? You’re not going to give the player some sort of visceral show by having the Archon burned or atomized by the unwieldy machine he was trying to control? You don’t want to give him some sort of karmic retribution or ironic death? No moment where he realizes he was wrong?

Sure, a lot of these might have been cliche or lame[3]. I’m just baffled that the writer brought us all this way and had nothing to say at the end.

I suppose it’s possible that this writer was wary of repeating the sins of Mass Effect 3, which tried so hard to talk about BIG IDEAS with SYMBOLISM and ended up collapsing into nonsense. And to be fair, I guess this simple story that says nothing is better than Mass Effect 3’s infuriating puzzle box of contradictions and incoherency. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for more than this from a game with the BioWare name and a budget of $100 million. Somewhere between “saying nothing” and “saying something stupid” is the opportunity to say something interesting. That’s the entire point of this genre.

You Win!


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Thanks for showing up about 20 minutes late, everyone.


After the fight, we emerge into the daylight and someone says the Nexus wants to know what happened. We can be a jerk and tell them off, or we can be nice and give them the good news. Which is really odd. The game will let us disrespect the mildly annoying Director Tann, but not our genocidal main villain?

After the credits roll, we cut to a view of a Kett ship. Another Kett leader glowers at her display screen, turns, and walks away menacingly. Fade to black.

So this is the writer’s big idea for a sequel hook? Next time, we can fight the exact same unimaginative aliens? Is this the plan for Mass Effect going forward? These boring one-note assholes are supposed to carry a franchise? If this is their plan then I guess it’s for the best that the series died here. In fact, it’s a huge relief.

Wrapping Up


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I'm not kidding. This is our after-credits stinger. Another glowering Kett despot with the same flying gizmo, walking menacingly towards the camera.


We’re done with the plot. This is where I’d analyze what the game had to say and speculate on upcoming games. But since it didn’t really say much of anything and the franchise doesn’t seem to have a future[4], I don’t know what I can tell you. It’s just over.

That’s it for the plot of Mass Effect Andromeda. Next week I’ll have some final words on BioWare, and then I think we’re done with this franchise for good.
 

raz3r

Novice
Joined
Mar 3, 2019
Messages
25
I had lots of fun reading your retrospective and having finished the game with all subquest I believe you nailed every single part. The only thing I slightly disagree with is the end, I'd rather go big and fail than go for a generic story and fail anyway. That said I do too believe the franchise is done for good, at least the Andromeda part of it, in the Milky Way they could potentially create any game they want, they only need to find the guts to pick an ending.
 

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