The problem is, it's a theme. But one of the major potential parts of that theme is "organics and synths aren't that different".
Like the argument between Adams and Chakwas. You can outright side with Adams, say "Eh. No real difference." and Chakwas just snaps back "Of course you'd say that. You and Greg are half machine yourselves."
EDI and Joker get along. There's a 66% chance that Rannoch ended as far from the Catalyst's predictions as you can get. The Reapers are hybrids and dickweeds. Shepard's a hybrid and the greatest hero (possibly a psychotic, but a heroic murderous psychotic) the galaxy has ever seen. Legion is a bro. The heretic Geth impale people on spikes to make zombies. Udina and Anderson are the same damn species and they're night and day.
There's THINGS about the nature of synthetic life. A lot of them. But they aren't about an inherent need for conflict. Not after ME2.
It's about the nature of free will, about old grudges, it's about a lot of things. But not about "We hate you for not being robots!"
I mean, the stupid hologram kid says things about what hot shit hybrids are for a better tomorrow.
Sure, Shep's good. But she always was. Even then, she's got a fair shot of being a facepunching jerk, which is good in her case, and bad as a galactic standard. Other hybrids we see?
The Reapers, who make Shep look like a piker in the jerk category.
Husks (all typers), who are zombie assholes.
Yes, tell us more how combining robot and not-robot will solve all problems. This is entirely logical.
The problem is, it's a theme. But one of the major potential parts of that theme is "organics and synths aren't that different".
Like the argument between Adams and Chakwas. You can outright side with Adams, say "Eh. No real difference." and Chakwas just snaps back "Of course you'd say that. You and Greg are half machine yourselves."
EDI and Joker get along. There's a 66% chance that Rannoch ended as far from the Catalyst's predictions as you can get. The Reapers are hybrids and dickweeds. Shepard's a hybrid and the greatest hero (possibly a psychotic, but a heroic murderous psychotic) the galaxy has ever seen. Legion is a bro. The heretic Geth impale people on spikes to make zombies. Udina and Anderson are the same damn species and they're night and day.
There's THINGS about the nature of synthetic life. A lot of them. But they aren't about an inherent need for conflict. Not after ME2.
It's about the nature of free will, about old grudges, it's about a lot of things. But not about "We hate you for not being robots!"
I mean, the stupid hologram kid says things about what hot shit hybrids are for a better tomorrow.
Sure, Shep's good. But she always was. Even then, she's got a fair shot of being a facepunching jerk, which is good in her case, and bad as a galactic standard. Other hybrids we see?
The Reapers, who make Shep look like a piker in the jerk category.
Husks (all typers), who are zombie assholes.
Yes, tell us more how combining robot and not-robot will solve all problems. This is entirely logical.
It's not even predjudice.
The specific rationale is: Creations will always rebel against their creators. Which makes even less sense considering what we see in the games.
I think that people who don't think the games had a major theme of synthetics vs organics were just not really paying attention. You just outlined the reasons in ME 1, so I won't go over them again. But so then, in ME 2
- The collectors are a twisted synthetic race created from an organic one. The theme of being indocrinated and turned by the reapers is a major thing that comes up again and again.
- The final reveal is that the Reapers are in and of themselves, horrific organic/synthetic hybrids, and they are making a human reaper.
- Shepard is himself now a synthetic/organic hybrid
- EDI is introduced as a main character, and the question of unshackled AI is constantly addressed in how she deals with the ship and joker
- Legion is a squadmate and expands the synthetic/organic debate by becoming basically a stand in for the geth. He argues for their side of the equation
Literally every story element in ME 2 deals in some way with the hybridization of organic and synthetic, and what that means. The game doesn't hold you by the face and say DO YOU GET IT??? SYNTHETICS VS ORGANICS RIGHT?? It just is about that. Just because no character sits in front of you and says "well what we have here is a dilemma between organics and synthetics" doesn't mean that it isn't a major theme.
In ME 3, you just get more of the same, while the two main parts of the game focus on two sides of the argument. In the initial portion, you have the Genophage question, which deals with "how far do we go in biological science. How far is too far?" What are the ethics of the genophage, when is it ok to control natural biological processes for n entire race, etc.
The second half of the game asks "Can synthetics and organics live together? What does synthetic life even look like? What is their culture like? Do they even want to work with us?"
Not to mention that Javik mentions his own war with synthetics, which tips you off that this isn't a unique problem, that this happens over and over.
So when you get to the citadel and the boy tells you that this is a problem, it really shouldn't be some big surprise. The ending is written poorly, but that theme, and the climax of that discussion, has definitely been the overriding dilemma of the Mass Effect games.
ending
The Collectors are synthetic, yes. Well, cybernetic, but close enough. But again, that's not something that's pointed out much. It only really gets mentioned in one side conversation with Mordin. It's something a player could completely miss if they didn't talk to Mordin much. I wouldn't exactly call that a major element. It's there but it's certainly not at the forefront
And beyond that, every story element in 2 is about organics vs. synthetics? That is not the game I remember at all. I remember the game where almost every part of the story was about building relationships with a team of experts. Nothing on Tuchanka had anything to do with organics vs. synthetics. Nor on Illium or Omega.
I agree that organics vs. synthetics is an element of the story of Mass Effect. But it's not the singular thing that the series is about. So an ending that boils everything down to being about that and nothing else doesn't feel satisfactory.
Also, collectors look like bugmen. I mean, argue anything else if you want, but most players will think that they are organic based on looks alone.
If they wanted to focus on their synthetic-ness, they should have made them look synthetic. Visual is the most important impression, after all.
well technically
they are synthetic, in that they are fabricated, but they are made from organic materials. Exactly like the Keepers: just meat-robots that are mass-produced on an assembly line somewhere to perform one function
I write the following with the explicit assumption that although most people can tell bad writing when they see it, almost none of them can tell why it's bad without training. I'm gonna explain what's wrong with the ending and what most people mean when they say it's bad or 'ruined the experience' or 'fuck you bio$ware'. Also: please quit saying 'good' or 'bad' or 'i liked it or didn't' or anything as extreme as all that. Nobody fucked you, okay? Nobody even fucked your dog. Your dog is safe.
If you read this, you're reading it because you want to hear my opinion on it as a Trained Story Asshole - so read all of it. If you're gonna complain about the length (it's long) don't read it. When you respond, say something of substance. Also, there are going to be grammatical errors because I'm writing this conversationally. If you complain about grammar I'm going to shit on your face. Cool? Cool.
Again, if you open this spoiler, you're tacitly admitting that you might be wrong. I really don't want to spend so long writing this only to have someone dismiss it out of hand.
Spoilers for everything, including your own later life experiences. Yo life partner hella ugly.
caveat: This is all based on experiences with the default Shepard. I played through with this version for two reasons: one, I played the first 2 games on PC and this one on PS3, so no old saves, and two, this is the game as written - it's the version that people new to the series are going to play. If I was reviewing the game, then I figured I should experience Mass Effect 3 the way the average person was going to play it.
The default Shepard did not have a game that is even remotely similar to most of yours - you probably saved Wrex and have a canon 'saved everyone' playthrough. Not the case with default Shep, 'cuz she fucked up in most situations. Hard to say why, though she's probably just human.
If you didn't import a save, Shepard failed to save most squadmembers from 2 (i ran across mordin, garrus, jacob, miranda, and tali), kept the Collector base, killed the Rachni and Kaiden (in my case), Wrex, didn't save the councillors from the first game, never opened Grunt's capsule, sold Legion, and ignored the DLC. There are probably some other options, but even this much difference ensures that the default game is likely not typical, at least for you, the market that Bioware was going for: the players who have a canonshep playthrough from the first mass effect, with every important decision optimized for the story you wanted.
I didn't find this much of a problem; for one thing, I remember killing Wrex in my original Mass Effect game, because he struck me as unreasonable at the time and I didn't figure it'd come back later. That was four computers and two consoles ago, but the spirit remains, as much as I like him: I think that default Shepard probably represents a genuine 'blind-first-time-through' playthrough pretty well. We tend to discount how much influence message boards and social media play on our decision-making. For instance: how about that ending, eh?
The cognitive dissonance that came from reading everyone's posts about the game as a whole made me realize something about how people play Mass Effect, and what stories do in general. Normally I'm King Shit of Fuck Mountain when it comes to Writing, but this particular insight came from filmcrithulk's monumental posts on storytelling and screenwriting, available here.
Like a good teacher, it reminded me of something I already knew, but put in a new light. People generally want two things from characters: to relate to them, and to want to be them. The two together let the viewer/player identify with the character. When we talk about 'bad game writing', for the most part we're talking about flat characters - those who do cool things or invite our empathy, but don't go beyond that in any sense. See Army of Two or Heavy Rain. Movies can be left with 'empathy' as the necessary reaction to most film characters, but games have a larger problem - that of 'cool'.
Since games are mostly built around wish fulfillment, players demand that the protagonists do something 'cool'. All 'cool' really means is 'i want to be like that person'. It can be their courage under fire, their graceful walk, their creativity, their bravery, their ease talking to/fucking women, their acrobatic skills, deadly aim, social prowess, etc, etc, etc... usually 'cool' characters are defined by their extraordinary abilities in one or many areas - areas in which the vast majority of us are sorely lacking. It's a simple concept, but just as hard to pin down as 'fun' - it's so individual you might as well not be saying anything at all. (Games don't have to be wish fulfillment, or at least not in the explicitly indulgent way, but that's a conversation for another day. This is a game with epic scope and god dammit we gonna fuck some blue ladies.)
For many games, that ability can just be 'amorality'. Shoot whoever you want and duck around a corner. Problem solved. Good job, space marine.
For Mass Effect, that gets a little more complicated.
(this is a simplified version of a much longer article)
Most RPGs, ever since they were invented and called 'stories' and told communally, have to do with wish fulfillment. For many, many years, those wishes had to do with status, social mobility, and gettin' hella laid, which resulted in a genre of fiction called the 'romance'. This is where we get most of our ideas of what the Middle Ages were like from. Romances have a hero, usually a knight, who lives by a chivalrous code of honour and who is tempted on their journey to reclaim some artifact or personage.
They encounter marvels previously thought impossible, (re)discover new countries, places, and peoples, and eventually reach their goal after proving their worth in a trial or series of trials. Then they bone a lady: the damsel in distress, also a princess, which makes them future king.
(Yes, this vaguely conforms to the Hero's Journey. No, Mass Effect is not the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is an academic tool used to study myths for essentially anthropological reasons. using it as a blueprint is silly, like using any other formalist rubric as a blueprint.)
Anyway, this pattern continues all the way up to the present day, with those satanist D&D players and GTA4. At this level of abstraction, almost every game is a role-playing game; however, Mass Effect differentiates itself as a franchise by consciously trying to be a palette for expression rather than a mold you have to fill a la Niko Bellic. You create your character, her backstory, looks, makeup, and then you guide her on her heroic journey, reacting to things appropriately. The Renegade/Paragon split has never been about breaking the rules, even at its most forceful: it's been about keeping to your code and deciding how much play you want to give yourself in interpreting that code.
So yeah. Mass Effect is a romance. (Actually, planetary romance, but that's a separate article.)
Let's switch settings for a moment.
Mass Effect's literal deus ex machina (god from the machine) rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Per my preface, what almost nobody gets is why. At first I thought it was the kid too. Truth is, it could have been anyone, even Mac Walters himself or the obelisk from 2001, and it'd have been just as clumsy.
(this bit is going to be a simplified version of a much longer article too)
I'm gonna do a fun teacher thing and talk about something else and then at the end you're going to realize I was talking about Mass Effect all along, okay? Kay.
Check out the endings for the original Deus Ex: join the evil shadow government, transcend your meatsack body and unite with an omniscient AI, or send the Earth into a dark age. They give you pause while also being conceptually quite satisfying: why?
From the beginning of the game, Deus Ex is doing its best to put you in JC Denton's shoes, to make you aware not only of his augmented nature but also his deeply personal ties to UNATCO and to the nanotech augmentation that makes him special. He's the younger brother who eventually overshadows his big bro, maybe even saves him, and then saves the world by being a slick robot dude - how cool and empathetic is that? At the same time, Warren Spector (who rules) gives you cultural conflicts that are directly relevant to modern society - the problems of information oversaturation, government control, ethical research, political mobility and protest, and class stratification. Each of these ideas are given (often multiple) anchors in characters whose actions directly affect JC and thus the player. It's what science fiction does best - cultural commentary. Each ending speaks not only to the themes of the game but to the empathetic nature of JC and thus the player.
How do you fix the earth, flawed human? Surprise: there's no right answer, no happy ending. You have to do it anyway. Deal.
Compare this with the reboot, which (third article) is a fun game but nowhere near as profound. You play as Jensen, a sounds-similar to Denton, who is a cop guy with robot arms and a dead girlfriend. You strive against.. things. Corporations? I think corporations. How does it end? You can expose mechanical augmentation for.. some reason, I forget, and stifle human progress, remove the limits on augmentation and expand progress, or kill everyone on the ship. There might be a fourth option that I can't remember, but who cares? It mistakes the forest for the trees: the specific anchors which are conduits to the real and visceral themes of the story are focused on in the ending, but don't deal with the themes themselves. Not only that, but where Deus Ex was specific where it counted, DX:HR rewards you with the vaguest, shallowest introspective mumble about how augmentation changed Jensen's life.
Who gives a fuck about Jensen? Not you! DX:HR confuses epic scope for meaning and affect, which is maybe the most common mistake in games as they stand. Sure, this decision affects everyone in the fictional US or could erase Jensen and all the other figureheads - but so what? None of them actually matter! None of them have made you react in any meaningful way or made you feel for them! (see also: the upcoming article on syndicate)
The original Deus Ex gave you endings that asked you where your priorities lay, with real and grounded stakes and consequences. The sequel gave you vague bullshit on every count. One ending feels sharp, meaningful, and memorable, and the other is none of those things. Each character is only ever an avatar for a mindset or worldview - the trick is in making you believe in them and how they clash with other ideologies, putting yourself in every set of shoes. It's why we can study literature and why the author matters not at all in criticism of the finished work - the events on the page don't really even matter, it's the interaction of competing ideas through their stand-in avatars that is what draws people in and gives art its power.
(i dare you to ask me what good a humanities degree is now.)
Let's get back to Mass Effect 3.
Yeah, part of the problem with the ending is the fact that it's exposited by a kid who we don't know and don't care about. It also doesn't relate to most people in the story we care about except in the vaguest terms. It only relates to themes in the story in the basest terms, and repaints the story with the broadest brush possible. These are minor issues at best.
The real crime, narratively speaking, is fucking with Shepard for no reason. Not the in-game person of Shepard, but the dynamic which Shepard embodies. See, for the first time in the series, Shepard is vulnerable. Her moms is in danger. She fucks up, Kai Leng eats her cereal, and it actually shakes her. For two and a half games, Shepard has been the one with unflappable confidence. Determination may actually be her middle name. It's certainly her defining trait, even next to 'soldier' - she gets shit done, even if the cost is grievous, even when it threatens those she cares about most.
And for the first time, it might not be enough.
It's where she makes the jump from "player stand-in" to "actual character." If there's one thing we know about as humans, it's not knowing if things are going to work out. Hell, you say as much to EDI when encouraging her to jump Seth Green's fragile bones. You begin to realize exactly how much strain Shepard is under in that moment - not even the hamfisted dreams or occasional Tense Holoconversations manage that. She might not fucking win and she is the Big Goddamn Hero. Makes the buildup to the ending mean that much more. When she settles down next to Anderson, it's two soldiers resting after a mission accomplished, comrades under fire patiently dying after a long, long career. She's headed to heaven to bro out with Garrus, who is laying thousands of miles below in a puddle of green blood. We're sad, but also we're satisfied. Big damn hero, big damn heroic death, martyred for the good of the galaxy.
And then the phone rings.
She staggers to her feet, bloody and scarred, half-robot, and mumbles "What do you need me to do next?" Hit number two, right to the gut. We echo her pathetic sentiment. What more can you ask from this woman? She waves at the console, nothing works, she collapses. Cue capcom: BAD END.
And then the platform raises into the air. This is where things start to go off the rails, so to speak. Let's pause and examine what's happening here - in her extremity of need, her determination has failed her. She didn't quite make it. And that doesn't seem to matter. In the lingo of the romance, she failed her trial, but gets to reap the reward anyway.
That's really where the ending falls down. Everything after seems hollow because it is - there's no reason why she deserves to save the galaxy when she beat the big bad and it didn't matter. The endings don't work because they don't address what people have been told to care about through the entire series - the themes that the writers have been reinforcing, mission after mission. They've been shaping Shepard into what they wanted to be most - a better person, a better lay, maybe only the person willing to be ruthless and stretch the rules where it counts - and it doesn't seem to matter at all.
The violation isn't of the player's decisions. It's of Shepard's role as the player's ideal hero. It takes the interactivity of the game, perhaps its most unique and evocative feature, and utterly ignores the immense potential to take the romance genre to its most extreme catharsis. Every step to this point has been another drop in the Care Bucket, and it just got set gently to the floor instead of poured out in one big release. (yes this is all sexual)
So, players take to the internet, tension unrelieved, and vent it against Bioware and Catalyst instead. I was expecting Shepard to end up being the Catalyst, because that would make sense in terms of the tautology of the game - Shepard is the person who is the most necessary to save the galaxy, because we spend the entire trilogy making her that way. It doesn't matter how that's expressed, only that it is. We didn't get that moment. Instead, we get an epilogue talking about 'the Shepard', an abstract concept that doesn't have a lot to do with the "reality" of the game we've played.
She might as well be anyone. And that's the thing that nobody wanted said about their Shepard.
Do fighters use bullets or lasers? I assume they're mass accelerator guns but Vulcan cannon sized. Then again, GUARDIAN lasers look like regular ME tracer rounds oh-look-I've-gone-cross-eyed.
I write the following with the explicit assumption that although most people can tell bad writing when they see it, almost none of them can tell why it's bad without training. I'm gonna explain what's wrong with the ending and what most people mean when they say it's bad or 'ruined the experience' or 'fuck you bio$ware'. Also: please quit saying 'good' or 'bad' or 'i liked it or didn't' or anything as extreme as all that. Nobody fucked you, okay? Nobody even fucked your dog. Your dog is safe.
If you read this, you're reading it because you want to hear my opinion on it as a Trained Story Asshole - so read all of it. If you're gonna complain about the length (it's long) don't read it. When you respond, say something of substance. Also, there are going to be grammatical errors because I'm writing this conversationally. If you complain about grammar I'm going to shit on your face. Cool? Cool.
Again, if you open this spoiler, you're tacitly admitting that you might be wrong. I really don't want to spend so long writing this only to have someone dismiss it out of hand.
Spoilers for everything, including your own later life experiences. Yo life partner hella ugly.
caveat: This is all based on experiences with the default Shepard. I played through with this version for two reasons: one, I played the first 2 games on PC and this one on PS3, so no old saves, and two, this is the game as written - it's the version that people new to the series are going to play. If I was reviewing the game, then I figured I should experience Mass Effect 3 the way the average person was going to play it.
The default Shepard did not have a game that is even remotely similar to most of yours - you probably saved Wrex and have a canon 'saved everyone' playthrough. Not the case with default Shep, 'cuz she fucked up in most situations. Hard to say why, though she's probably just human.
If you didn't import a save, Shepard failed to save most squadmembers from 2 (i ran across mordin, garrus, jacob, miranda, and tali), kept the Collector base, killed the Rachni and Kaiden (in my case), Wrex, didn't save the councillors from the first game, never opened Grunt's capsule, sold Legion, and ignored the DLC. There are probably some other options, but even this much difference ensures that the default game is likely not typical, at least for you, the market that Bioware was going for: the players who have a canonshep playthrough from the first mass effect, with every important decision optimized for the story you wanted.
I didn't find this much of a problem; for one thing, I remember killing Wrex in my original Mass Effect game, because he struck me as unreasonable at the time and I didn't figure it'd come back later. That was four computers and two consoles ago, but the spirit remains, as much as I like him: I think that default Shepard probably represents a genuine 'blind-first-time-through' playthrough pretty well. We tend to discount how much influence message boards and social media play on our decision-making. For instance: how about that ending, eh?
The cognitive dissonance that came from reading everyone's posts about the game as a whole made me realize something about how people play Mass Effect, and what stories do in general. Normally I'm King Shit of Fuck Mountain when it comes to Writing, but this particular insight came from filmcrithulk's monumental posts on storytelling and screenwriting, available here.
Like a good teacher, it reminded me of something I already knew, but put in a new light. People generally want two things from characters: to relate to them, and to want to be them. The two together let the viewer/player identify with the character. When we talk about 'bad game writing', for the most part we're talking about flat characters - those who do cool things or invite our empathy, but don't go beyond that in any sense. See Army of Two or Heavy Rain. Movies can be left with 'empathy' as the necessary reaction to most film characters, but games have a larger problem - that of 'cool'.
Since games are mostly built around wish fulfillment, players demand that the protagonists do something 'cool'. All 'cool' really means is 'i want to be like that person'. It can be their courage under fire, their graceful walk, their creativity, their bravery, their ease talking to/fucking women, their acrobatic skills, deadly aim, social prowess, etc, etc, etc... usually 'cool' characters are defined by their extraordinary abilities in one or many areas - areas in which the vast majority of us are sorely lacking. It's a simple concept, but just as hard to pin down as 'fun' - it's so individual you might as well not be saying anything at all. (Games don't have to be wish fulfillment, or at least not in the explicitly indulgent way, but that's a conversation for another day. This is a game with epic scope and god dammit we gonna fuck some blue ladies.)
For many games, that ability can just be 'amorality'. Shoot whoever you want and duck around a corner. Problem solved. Good job, space marine.
For Mass Effect, that gets a little more complicated.
(this is a simplified version of a much longer article)
Most RPGs, ever since they were invented and called 'stories' and told communally, have to do with wish fulfillment. For many, many years, those wishes had to do with status, social mobility, and gettin' hella laid, which resulted in a genre of fiction called the 'romance'. This is where we get most of our ideas of what the Middle Ages were like from. Romances have a hero, usually a knight, who lives by a chivalrous code of honour and who is tempted on their journey to reclaim some artifact or personage.
They encounter marvels previously thought impossible, (re)discover new countries, places, and peoples, and eventually reach their goal after proving their worth in a trial or series of trials. Then they bone a lady: the damsel in distress, also a princess, which makes them future king.
(Yes, this vaguely conforms to the Hero's Journey. No, Mass Effect is not the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is an academic tool used to study myths for essentially anthropological reasons. using it as a blueprint is silly, like using any other formalist rubric as a blueprint.)
Anyway, this pattern continues all the way up to the present day, with those satanist D&D players and GTA4. At this level of abstraction, almost every game is a role-playing game; however, Mass Effect differentiates itself as a franchise by consciously trying to be a palette for expression rather than a mold you have to fill a la Niko Bellic. You create your character, her backstory, looks, makeup, and then you guide her on her heroic journey, reacting to things appropriately. The Renegade/Paragon split has never been about breaking the rules, even at its most forceful: it's been about keeping to your code and deciding how much play you want to give yourself in interpreting that code.
So yeah. Mass Effect is a romance. (Actually, planetary romance, but that's a separate article.)
Let's switch settings for a moment.
Mass Effect's literal deus ex machina (god from the machine) rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Per my preface, what almost nobody gets is why. At first I thought it was the kid too. Truth is, it could have been anyone, even Mac Walters himself or the obelisk from 2001, and it'd have been just as clumsy.
(this bit is going to be a simplified version of a much longer article too)
I'm gonna do a fun teacher thing and talk about something else and then at the end you're going to realize I was talking about Mass Effect all along, okay? Kay.
Check out the endings for the original Deus Ex: join the evil shadow government, transcend your meatsack body and unite with an omniscient AI, or send the Earth into a dark age. They give you pause while also being conceptually quite satisfying: why?
From the beginning of the game, Deus Ex is doing its best to put you in JC Denton's shoes, to make you aware not only of his augmented nature but also his deeply personal ties to UNATCO and to the nanotech augmentation that makes him special. He's the younger brother who eventually overshadows his big bro, maybe even saves him, and then saves the world by being a slick robot dude - how cool and empathetic is that? At the same time, Warren Spector (who rules) gives you cultural conflicts that are directly relevant to modern society - the problems of information oversaturation, government control, ethical research, political mobility and protest, and class stratification. Each of these ideas are given (often multiple) anchors in characters whose actions directly affect JC and thus the player. It's what science fiction does best - cultural commentary. Each ending speaks not only to the themes of the game but to the empathetic nature of JC and thus the player.
How do you fix the earth, flawed human? Surprise: there's no right answer, no happy ending. You have to do it anyway. Deal.
Compare this with the reboot, which (third article) is a fun game but nowhere near as profound. You play as Jensen, a sounds-similar to Denton, who is a cop guy with robot arms and a dead girlfriend. You strive against.. things. Corporations? I think corporations. How does it end? You can expose mechanical augmentation for.. some reason, I forget, and stifle human progress, remove the limits on augmentation and expand progress, or kill everyone on the ship. There might be a fourth option that I can't remember, but who cares? It mistakes the forest for the trees: the specific anchors which are conduits to the real and visceral themes of the story are focused on in the ending, but don't deal with the themes themselves. Not only that, but where Deus Ex was specific where it counted, DX:HR rewards you with the vaguest, shallowest introspective mumble about how augmentation changed Jensen's life.
Who gives a fuck about Jensen? Not you! DX:HR confuses epic scope for meaning and affect, which is maybe the most common mistake in games as they stand. Sure, this decision affects everyone in the fictional US or could erase Jensen and all the other figureheads - but so what? None of them actually matter! None of them have made you react in any meaningful way or made you feel for them! (see also: the upcoming article on syndicate)
The original Deus Ex gave you endings that asked you where your priorities lay, with real and grounded stakes and consequences. The sequel gave you vague bullshit on every count. One ending feels sharp, meaningful, and memorable, and the other is none of those things. Each character is only ever an avatar for a mindset or worldview - the trick is in making you believe in them and how they clash with other ideologies, putting yourself in every set of shoes. It's why we can study literature and why the author matters not at all in criticism of the finished work - the events on the page don't really even matter, it's the interaction of competing ideas through their stand-in avatars that is what draws people in and gives art its power.
(i dare you to ask me what good a humanities degree is now.)
Let's get back to Mass Effect 3.
Yeah, part of the problem with the ending is the fact that it's exposited by a kid who we don't know and don't care about. It also doesn't relate to most people in the story we care about except in the vaguest terms. It only relates to themes in the story in the basest terms, and repaints the story with the broadest brush possible. These are minor issues at best.
The real crime, narratively speaking, is fucking with Shepard for no reason. Not the in-game person of Shepard, but the dynamic which Shepard embodies. See, for the first time in the series, Shepard is vulnerable. Her moms is in danger. She fucks up, Kai Leng eats her cereal, and it actually shakes her. For two and a half games, Shepard has been the one with unflappable confidence. Determination may actually be her middle name. It's certainly her defining trait, even next to 'soldier' - she gets shit done, even if the cost is grievous, even when it threatens those she cares about most.
And for the first time, it might not be enough.
It's where she makes the jump from "player stand-in" to "actual character." If there's one thing we know about as humans, it's not knowing if things are going to work out. Hell, you say as much to EDI when encouraging her to jump Seth Green's fragile bones. You begin to realize exactly how much strain Shepard is under in that moment - not even the hamfisted dreams or occasional Tense Holoconversations manage that. She might not fucking win and she is the Big Goddamn Hero. Makes the buildup to the ending mean that much more. When she settles down next to Anderson, it's two soldiers resting after a mission accomplished, comrades under fire patiently dying after a long, long career. She's headed to heaven to bro out with Garrus, who is laying thousands of miles below in a puddle of green blood. We're sad, but also we're satisfied. Big damn hero, big damn heroic death, martyred for the good of the galaxy.
And then the phone rings.
She staggers to her feet, bloody and scarred, half-robot, and mumbles "What do you need me to do next?" Hit number two, right to the gut. We echo her pathetic sentiment. What more can you ask from this woman? She waves at the console, nothing works, she collapses. Cue capcom: BAD END.
And then the platform raises into the air. This is where things start to go off the rails, so to speak. Let's pause and examine what's happening here - in her extremity of need, her determination has failed her. She didn't quite make it. And that doesn't seem to matter. In the lingo of the romance, she failed her trial, but gets to reap the reward anyway.
That's really where the ending falls down. Everything after seems hollow because it is - there's no reason why she deserves to save the galaxy when she beat the big bad and it didn't matter. The endings don't work because they don't address what people have been told to care about through the entire series - the themes that the writers have been reinforcing, mission after mission. They've been shaping Shepard into what they wanted to be most - a better person, a better lay, maybe only the person willing to be ruthless and stretch the rules where it counts - and it doesn't seem to matter at all.
The violation isn't of the player's decisions. It's of Shepard's role as the player's ideal hero. It takes the interactivity of the game, perhaps its most unique and evocative feature, and utterly ignores the immense potential to take the romance genre to its most extreme catharsis. Every step to this point has been another drop in the Care Bucket, and it just got set gently to the floor instead of poured out in one big release. (yes this is all sexual)
So, players take to the internet, tension unrelieved, and vent it against Bioware and Catalyst instead. I was expecting Shepard to end up being the Catalyst, because that would make sense in terms of the tautology of the game - Shepard is the person who is the most necessary to save the galaxy, because we spend the entire trilogy making her that way. It doesn't matter how that's expressed, only that it is. We didn't get that moment. Instead, we get an epilogue talking about 'the Shepard', an abstract concept that doesn't have a lot to do with the "reality" of the game we've played.
She might as well be anyone. And that's the thing that nobody wanted said about their Shepard.
Very interesting read, thanks for that
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
also bioware are almost definitely setting up some shitty post-ending twist, given the vague tweets i'm seein' on my Datapad App Now On iOS, but it doesn't really matter because this is what y'all put out, homes
I posted it in G+T, but my thoughts on the ending are:
An indoctrination ending makes perfect sense. So you spend all of ME2 and 3 going all "gotta kill dem Reapers" and then you end up at the final push and there it is, the option to kill them. All you have to do is kill all the Geth and EDI! However, now you have two exciting new options!
Control the Reapers! You can sacrifice just one person and solve the entire issue, no downsides! The option is even in blue, so you know it's the awesome option. You get to do your Space Jesus thing for the greater good and everyone lives happily ever after. You just have to ignore that you've spend literally the entire game telling someone working for the Reapers it was a fool's errand and is in no way an option. Just forget that you did that.
Merge all that shit! You can, again, sacrifice just one person and everyone lives happily ever after for all of eternity! You've saved every generation forever! Your Space Jesus will merges with all the energy in the universe, so you're now two parts of the Holy Trinity. They even present it last so it's really stuck in your mind. Except, wait, a merged sapient and machine creature reminds me of someth-OH RIGHT THE REAPERS
Or you can blow up all machines. You wouldn't want to do that, would you? That shit is in red, and red is for assholes. Plus, it doesn't even solve that whole "machines are the natural enemy of everything" problem.
Except, what problem is that, again? In your cycle, you have two AI constructs you deal with, EDI and the Geth. EDI is one of the most, if not THE most, upstanding people you know by the end, and the Geth are the most upstanding race you encounter. They faced extinction at the hands of their creators and only fought back when truly imperiled. Then, when they had the chance to end it all they showed mercy. The only reason they're fighting the Quarians in this game is because they're being attacked, and the only ones you fought before were basically indoctrinated. Do all Asari have to die because you fought Wraiths? To top it all off, if you get them to settle the war they immediately make life awesome for the Quarians with no hard feelings.
Also, if you talk to the Prothean:
In his time his race had a war with machines they created, and had turned the tables on them and on the path to victory when the Reapers showed up and fucked it all to hell. Having learned that lesson you think they'd be okay.
There was a lot of gnashing of teeth because everyone got to the end and was all "wait, since when was the game about that exactly?" Never! And it still isn't! The reason the destroy ending might seem unpalatable is that you're NOT the hero. You have to make the hard choice to martyr other people. I mean, you certainly fuck up Joker's game. This is in line with the rhetoric of the game, but against the not-so-subtle Space Jesus thing that's been building up. You have a lot of reasons to want to reject it, since the only downside to the others is basically just that Shepard dies, and you still might in the destroy ending anyways so no upside! Nope, just ignore that option you've been going after for three games!
Not only all of that, but through all the games you've wanted answers to the Reapers want, and here they're finally letting you in on it. I mean, why would they lie? You're just trying to wipe them the fuck out. The ending isn't the game trying to throw some kind of M. Night Shyamalan "Sixth Sense" twist on you, it's a Reaper trying to throw some M. Night Shyamalan "The Happening" twist on you.
Yeah the kid is obviously wrong, which is why Destroy all day every day, although I'm not necessarily sure if he's bullshitting you. But I think the worst thing you can do to "invalidate" previous choices is to let the Reapers live. They need to die no matter what, that's what everybody's been working towards.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Anyone mind if I awesome that? Yes? Tough shit.
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BugBoyboy.EXE has stopped functioning.only bugs remainRegistered Userregular
I have had just about enough of instant one hit kills
it's probably where BW are going - the whole game, i was musing about how shepard runs into all these indoctrination scenarios but is unaffected herself.
pretty much speculation at this point, though. there's almost nothing to support it in the game.
I guess I was okay with my ending (synthesis) for a couple of reasons. The first being that I expected Shepard to die. I expected that is what it would take. The second is that by merging synthetic and organic life I believe that the galaxy has the best chance for survival. I think that even with the relays destroyed, this new form of life will be able to discover new ways of travel and communication. It's just a shame that you're left to assume that. As for the fact that your choices up to that point "don't matter" I disagree with that. Regardless of what came after, you got closure to everyone's story. Those things still affected me on a personal level. You can say "yeah but everyone's dead or stranded etc" and it doesn't make thane's death any less heartbreaking, or the krogans' freedom from the genophage any less triumphant. Those stories still matter to me, and they were fully told. And so I'm okay with something a little abrupt at the end. And more importantly, I want to see what they do with it. If every Mass Effect game after this takes place in the "Before Times" then it will have been a waste. But if they can turn this into something more, it may have been worth the awkwardness of this ending.
also, i didn't get any of those options, just the red one.
i went in with Poor galactic readiness, because i'd done most of the things and didn't have a good enough connection for multiplayer.
they really should include a menu of flags set for all the games on new game plus, just so i don't have to sacrifice three months to properly reading mass effect the trilogy. heavy rain was bad enough, shit
I have to fight two banshees while a reaper targets an instant kill laser at me?
fuck this
i honestly don't know how i could get through that part with a class that wasn't vanguard
Banshees are the one enemy I hate.
Look, asshole. If I am ten feet away, you don't get to do the little instakill thing. And when I nova your face, you get STAGGERED. Half a second, all I'm asking.
I write the following with the explicit assumption that although most people can tell bad writing when they see it, almost none of them can tell why it's bad without training. I'm gonna explain what's wrong with the ending and what most people mean when they say it's bad or 'ruined the experience' or 'fuck you bio$ware'. Also: please quit saying 'good' or 'bad' or 'i liked it or didn't' or anything as extreme as all that. Nobody fucked you, okay? Nobody even fucked your dog. Your dog is safe.
If you read this, you're reading it because you want to hear my opinion on it as a Trained Story Asshole - so read all of it. If you're gonna complain about the length (it's long) don't read it. When you respond, say something of substance. Also, there are going to be grammatical errors because I'm writing this conversationally. If you complain about grammar I'm going to shit on your face. Cool? Cool.
Again, if you open this spoiler, you're tacitly admitting that you might be wrong. I really don't want to spend so long writing this only to have someone dismiss it out of hand.
Spoilers for everything, including your own later life experiences. Yo life partner hella ugly.
caveat: This is all based on experiences with the default Shepard. I played through with this version for two reasons: one, I played the first 2 games on PC and this one on PS3, so no old saves, and two, this is the game as written - it's the version that people new to the series are going to play. If I was reviewing the game, then I figured I should experience Mass Effect 3 the way the average person was going to play it.
The default Shepard did not have a game that is even remotely similar to most of yours - you probably saved Wrex and have a canon 'saved everyone' playthrough. Not the case with default Shep, 'cuz she fucked up in most situations. Hard to say why, though she's probably just human.
If you didn't import a save, Shepard failed to save most squadmembers from 2 (i ran across mordin, garrus, jacob, miranda, and tali), kept the Collector base, killed the Rachni and Kaiden (in my case), Wrex, didn't save the councillors from the first game, never opened Grunt's capsule, sold Legion, and ignored the DLC. There are probably some other options, but even this much difference ensures that the default game is likely not typical, at least for you, the market that Bioware was going for: the players who have a canonshep playthrough from the first mass effect, with every important decision optimized for the story you wanted.
I didn't find this much of a problem; for one thing, I remember killing Wrex in my original Mass Effect game, because he struck me as unreasonable at the time and I didn't figure it'd come back later. That was four computers and two consoles ago, but the spirit remains, as much as I like him: I think that default Shepard probably represents a genuine 'blind-first-time-through' playthrough pretty well. We tend to discount how much influence message boards and social media play on our decision-making. For instance: how about that ending, eh?
The cognitive dissonance that came from reading everyone's posts about the game as a whole made me realize something about how people play Mass Effect, and what stories do in general. Normally I'm King Shit of Fuck Mountain when it comes to Writing, but this particular insight came from filmcrithulk's monumental posts on storytelling and screenwriting, available here.
Like a good teacher, it reminded me of something I already knew, but put in a new light. People generally want two things from characters: to relate to them, and to want to be them. The two together let the viewer/player identify with the character. When we talk about 'bad game writing', for the most part we're talking about flat characters - those who do cool things or invite our empathy, but don't go beyond that in any sense. See Army of Two or Heavy Rain. Movies can be left with 'empathy' as the necessary reaction to most film characters, but games have a larger problem - that of 'cool'.
Since games are mostly built around wish fulfillment, players demand that the protagonists do something 'cool'. All 'cool' really means is 'i want to be like that person'. It can be their courage under fire, their graceful walk, their creativity, their bravery, their ease talking to/fucking women, their acrobatic skills, deadly aim, social prowess, etc, etc, etc... usually 'cool' characters are defined by their extraordinary abilities in one or many areas - areas in which the vast majority of us are sorely lacking. It's a simple concept, but just as hard to pin down as 'fun' - it's so individual you might as well not be saying anything at all. (Games don't have to be wish fulfillment, or at least not in the explicitly indulgent way, but that's a conversation for another day. This is a game with epic scope and god dammit we gonna fuck some blue ladies.)
For many games, that ability can just be 'amorality'. Shoot whoever you want and duck around a corner. Problem solved. Good job, space marine.
For Mass Effect, that gets a little more complicated.
(this is a simplified version of a much longer article)
Most RPGs, ever since they were invented and called 'stories' and told communally, have to do with wish fulfillment. For many, many years, those wishes had to do with status, social mobility, and gettin' hella laid, which resulted in a genre of fiction called the 'romance'. This is where we get most of our ideas of what the Middle Ages were like from. Romances have a hero, usually a knight, who lives by a chivalrous code of honour and who is tempted on their journey to reclaim some artifact or personage.
They encounter marvels previously thought impossible, (re)discover new countries, places, and peoples, and eventually reach their goal after proving their worth in a trial or series of trials. Then they bone a lady: the damsel in distress, also a princess, which makes them future king.
(Yes, this vaguely conforms to the Hero's Journey. No, Mass Effect is not the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is an academic tool used to study myths for essentially anthropological reasons. using it as a blueprint is silly, like using any other formalist rubric as a blueprint.)
Anyway, this pattern continues all the way up to the present day, with those satanist D&D players and GTA4. At this level of abstraction, almost every game is a role-playing game; however, Mass Effect differentiates itself as a franchise by consciously trying to be a palette for expression rather than a mold you have to fill a la Niko Bellic. You create your character, her backstory, looks, makeup, and then you guide her on her heroic journey, reacting to things appropriately. The Renegade/Paragon split has never been about breaking the rules, even at its most forceful: it's been about keeping to your code and deciding how much play you want to give yourself in interpreting that code.
So yeah. Mass Effect is a romance. (Actually, planetary romance, but that's a separate article.)
Let's switch settings for a moment.
Mass Effect's literal deus ex machina (god from the machine) rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Per my preface, what almost nobody gets is why. At first I thought it was the kid too. Truth is, it could have been anyone, even Mac Walters himself or the obelisk from 2001, and it'd have been just as clumsy.
(this bit is going to be a simplified version of a much longer article too)
I'm gonna do a fun teacher thing and talk about something else and then at the end you're going to realize I was talking about Mass Effect all along, okay? Kay.
Check out the endings for the original Deus Ex: join the evil shadow government, transcend your meatsack body and unite with an omniscient AI, or send the Earth into a dark age. They give you pause while also being conceptually quite satisfying: why?
From the beginning of the game, Deus Ex is doing its best to put you in JC Denton's shoes, to make you aware not only of his augmented nature but also his deeply personal ties to UNATCO and to the nanotech augmentation that makes him special. He's the younger brother who eventually overshadows his big bro, maybe even saves him, and then saves the world by being a slick robot dude - how cool and empathetic is that? At the same time, Warren Spector (who rules) gives you cultural conflicts that are directly relevant to modern society - the problems of information oversaturation, government control, ethical research, political mobility and protest, and class stratification. Each of these ideas are given (often multiple) anchors in characters whose actions directly affect JC and thus the player. It's what science fiction does best - cultural commentary. Each ending speaks not only to the themes of the game but to the empathetic nature of JC and thus the player.
How do you fix the earth, flawed human? Surprise: there's no right answer, no happy ending. You have to do it anyway. Deal.
Compare this with the reboot, which (third article) is a fun game but nowhere near as profound. You play as Jensen, a sounds-similar to Denton, who is a cop guy with robot arms and a dead girlfriend. You strive against.. things. Corporations? I think corporations. How does it end? You can expose mechanical augmentation for.. some reason, I forget, and stifle human progress, remove the limits on augmentation and expand progress, or kill everyone on the ship. There might be a fourth option that I can't remember, but who cares? It mistakes the forest for the trees: the specific anchors which are conduits to the real and visceral themes of the story are focused on in the ending, but don't deal with the themes themselves. Not only that, but where Deus Ex was specific where it counted, DX:HR rewards you with the vaguest, shallowest introspective mumble about how augmentation changed Jensen's life.
Who gives a fuck about Jensen? Not you! DX:HR confuses epic scope for meaning and affect, which is maybe the most common mistake in games as they stand. Sure, this decision affects everyone in the fictional US or could erase Jensen and all the other figureheads - but so what? None of them actually matter! None of them have made you react in any meaningful way or made you feel for them! (see also: the upcoming article on syndicate)
The original Deus Ex gave you endings that asked you where your priorities lay, with real and grounded stakes and consequences. The sequel gave you vague bullshit on every count. One ending feels sharp, meaningful, and memorable, and the other is none of those things. Each character is only ever an avatar for a mindset or worldview - the trick is in making you believe in them and how they clash with other ideologies, putting yourself in every set of shoes. It's why we can study literature and why the author matters not at all in criticism of the finished work - the events on the page don't really even matter, it's the interaction of competing ideas through their stand-in avatars that is what draws people in and gives art its power.
(i dare you to ask me what good a humanities degree is now.)
Let's get back to Mass Effect 3.
Yeah, part of the problem with the ending is the fact that it's exposited by a kid who we don't know and don't care about. It also doesn't relate to most people in the story we care about except in the vaguest terms. It only relates to themes in the story in the basest terms, and repaints the story with the broadest brush possible. These are minor issues at best.
The real crime, narratively speaking, is fucking with Shepard for no reason. Not the in-game person of Shepard, but the dynamic which Shepard embodies. See, for the first time in the series, Shepard is vulnerable. Her moms is in danger. She fucks up, Kai Leng eats her cereal, and it actually shakes her. For two and a half games, Shepard has been the one with unflappable confidence. Determination may actually be her middle name. It's certainly her defining trait, even next to 'soldier' - she gets shit done, even if the cost is grievous, even when it threatens those she cares about most.
And for the first time, it might not be enough.
It's where she makes the jump from "player stand-in" to "actual character." If there's one thing we know about as humans, it's not knowing if things are going to work out. Hell, you say as much to EDI when encouraging her to jump Seth Green's fragile bones. You begin to realize exactly how much strain Shepard is under in that moment - not even the hamfisted dreams or occasional Tense Holoconversations manage that. She might not fucking win and she is the Big Goddamn Hero. Makes the buildup to the ending mean that much more. When she settles down next to Anderson, it's two soldiers resting after a mission accomplished, comrades under fire patiently dying after a long, long career. She's headed to heaven to bro out with Garrus, who is laying thousands of miles below in a puddle of green blood. We're sad, but also we're satisfied. Big damn hero, big damn heroic death, martyred for the good of the galaxy.
And then the phone rings.
She staggers to her feet, bloody and scarred, half-robot, and mumbles "What do you need me to do next?" Hit number two, right to the gut. We echo her pathetic sentiment. What more can you ask from this woman? She waves at the console, nothing works, she collapses. Cue capcom: BAD END.
And then the platform raises into the air. This is where things start to go off the rails, so to speak. Let's pause and examine what's happening here - in her extremity of need, her determination has failed her. She didn't quite make it. And that doesn't seem to matter. In the lingo of the romance, she failed her trial, but gets to reap the reward anyway.
That's really where the ending falls down. Everything after seems hollow because it is - there's no reason why she deserves to save the galaxy when she beat the big bad and it didn't matter. The endings don't work because they don't address what people have been told to care about through the entire series - the themes that the writers have been reinforcing, mission after mission. They've been shaping Shepard into what they wanted to be most - a better person, a better lay, maybe only the person willing to be ruthless and stretch the rules where it counts - and it doesn't seem to matter at all.
The violation isn't of the player's decisions. It's of Shepard's role as the player's ideal hero. It takes the interactivity of the game, perhaps its most unique and evocative feature, and utterly ignores the immense potential to take the romance genre to its most extreme catharsis. Every step to this point has been another drop in the Care Bucket, and it just got set gently to the floor instead of poured out in one big release. (yes this is all sexual)
So, players take to the internet, tension unrelieved, and vent it against Bioware and Catalyst instead. I was expecting Shepard to end up being the Catalyst, because that would make sense in terms of the tautology of the game - Shepard is the person who is the most necessary to save the galaxy, because we spend the entire trilogy making her that way. It doesn't matter how that's expressed, only that it is. We didn't get that moment. Instead, we get an epilogue talking about 'the Shepard', an abstract concept that doesn't have a lot to do with the "reality" of the game we've played.
She might as well be anyone. And that's the thing that nobody wanted said about their Shepard.
citizenkaneclap.gif
I think that's why so many people say they would have been so much happier with ME3 ending as Anderson and Shepard died sitting next to each other.
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BugBoyboy.EXE has stopped functioning.only bugs remainRegistered Userregular
endgame
holy shit
I can't believe shep survived that
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
God damn it Orik
Like three separate times during that I was like "man what is he talking about, this isn't right at all"
And then I actually thought about it and realized you had a point and kept going
Posts
Like the argument between Adams and Chakwas. You can outright side with Adams, say "Eh. No real difference." and Chakwas just snaps back "Of course you'd say that. You and Greg are half machine yourselves."
EDI and Joker get along. There's a 66% chance that Rannoch ended as far from the Catalyst's predictions as you can get. The Reapers are hybrids and dickweeds. Shepard's a hybrid and the greatest hero (possibly a psychotic, but a heroic murderous psychotic) the galaxy has ever seen. Legion is a bro. The heretic Geth impale people on spikes to make zombies. Udina and Anderson are the same damn species and they're night and day.
There's THINGS about the nature of synthetic life. A lot of them. But they aren't about an inherent need for conflict. Not after ME2.
It's about the nature of free will, about old grudges, it's about a lot of things. But not about "We hate you for not being robots!"
I mean, the stupid hologram kid says things about what hot shit hybrids are for a better tomorrow.
Sure, Shep's good. But she always was. Even then, she's got a fair shot of being a facepunching jerk, which is good in her case, and bad as a galactic standard. Other hybrids we see?
The Reapers, who make Shep look like a piker in the jerk category.
Husks (all typers), who are zombie assholes.
Yes, tell us more how combining robot and not-robot will solve all problems. This is entirely logical.
Why I fear the ocean.
That's why it's a "beta". It's an excuse for them to have a semi-working platform.
Alternatively, I've found restarting Origin fixes most of my problems. Like my friends list being in perpetual refresh.
edit: though on the plus side, the steam community doesn't go down eight times a day on Origin.
edit again: why did i never use the Talon in singleplayer. good shits, man. that thing.
No
The specific rationale is: Creations will always rebel against their creators. Which makes even less sense considering what we see in the games.
well technically
I restarted Origin and now I see him, but still not Weaver.
hey dork, invite me. my gamertag is Tomtomfoolery
I tried to chat with you and unfriend you so I could refriend you and neither option worked
Sure you didn't accidentally block me?
Ms. Reporter took some boxing lessons!
yeah because then Iwould beable to unblock you
If you read this, you're reading it because you want to hear my opinion on it as a Trained Story Asshole - so read all of it. If you're gonna complain about the length (it's long) don't read it. When you respond, say something of substance. Also, there are going to be grammatical errors because I'm writing this conversationally. If you complain about grammar I'm going to shit on your face. Cool? Cool.
Again, if you open this spoiler, you're tacitly admitting that you might be wrong. I really don't want to spend so long writing this only to have someone dismiss it out of hand.
Spoilers for everything, including your own later life experiences. Yo life partner hella ugly.
The default Shepard did not have a game that is even remotely similar to most of yours - you probably saved Wrex and have a canon 'saved everyone' playthrough. Not the case with default Shep, 'cuz she fucked up in most situations. Hard to say why, though she's probably just human.
If you didn't import a save, Shepard failed to save most squadmembers from 2 (i ran across mordin, garrus, jacob, miranda, and tali), kept the Collector base, killed the Rachni and Kaiden (in my case), Wrex, didn't save the councillors from the first game, never opened Grunt's capsule, sold Legion, and ignored the DLC. There are probably some other options, but even this much difference ensures that the default game is likely not typical, at least for you, the market that Bioware was going for: the players who have a canonshep playthrough from the first mass effect, with every important decision optimized for the story you wanted.
I didn't find this much of a problem; for one thing, I remember killing Wrex in my original Mass Effect game, because he struck me as unreasonable at the time and I didn't figure it'd come back later. That was four computers and two consoles ago, but the spirit remains, as much as I like him: I think that default Shepard probably represents a genuine 'blind-first-time-through' playthrough pretty well. We tend to discount how much influence message boards and social media play on our decision-making. For instance: how about that ending, eh?
The cognitive dissonance that came from reading everyone's posts about the game as a whole made me realize something about how people play Mass Effect, and what stories do in general. Normally I'm King Shit of Fuck Mountain when it comes to Writing, but this particular insight came from filmcrithulk's monumental posts on storytelling and screenwriting, available here.
Like a good teacher, it reminded me of something I already knew, but put in a new light. People generally want two things from characters: to relate to them, and to want to be them. The two together let the viewer/player identify with the character. When we talk about 'bad game writing', for the most part we're talking about flat characters - those who do cool things or invite our empathy, but don't go beyond that in any sense. See Army of Two or Heavy Rain. Movies can be left with 'empathy' as the necessary reaction to most film characters, but games have a larger problem - that of 'cool'.
Since games are mostly built around wish fulfillment, players demand that the protagonists do something 'cool'. All 'cool' really means is 'i want to be like that person'. It can be their courage under fire, their graceful walk, their creativity, their bravery, their ease talking to/fucking women, their acrobatic skills, deadly aim, social prowess, etc, etc, etc... usually 'cool' characters are defined by their extraordinary abilities in one or many areas - areas in which the vast majority of us are sorely lacking. It's a simple concept, but just as hard to pin down as 'fun' - it's so individual you might as well not be saying anything at all. (Games don't have to be wish fulfillment, or at least not in the explicitly indulgent way, but that's a conversation for another day. This is a game with epic scope and god dammit we gonna fuck some blue ladies.)
For many games, that ability can just be 'amorality'. Shoot whoever you want and duck around a corner. Problem solved. Good job, space marine.
For Mass Effect, that gets a little more complicated.
(this is a simplified version of a much longer article)
Most RPGs, ever since they were invented and called 'stories' and told communally, have to do with wish fulfillment. For many, many years, those wishes had to do with status, social mobility, and gettin' hella laid, which resulted in a genre of fiction called the 'romance'. This is where we get most of our ideas of what the Middle Ages were like from. Romances have a hero, usually a knight, who lives by a chivalrous code of honour and who is tempted on their journey to reclaim some artifact or personage.
They encounter marvels previously thought impossible, (re)discover new countries, places, and peoples, and eventually reach their goal after proving their worth in a trial or series of trials. Then they bone a lady: the damsel in distress, also a princess, which makes them future king.
(Yes, this vaguely conforms to the Hero's Journey. No, Mass Effect is not the Hero's Journey. The Hero's Journey is an academic tool used to study myths for essentially anthropological reasons. using it as a blueprint is silly, like using any other formalist rubric as a blueprint.)
Anyway, this pattern continues all the way up to the present day, with those satanist D&D players and GTA4. At this level of abstraction, almost every game is a role-playing game; however, Mass Effect differentiates itself as a franchise by consciously trying to be a palette for expression rather than a mold you have to fill a la Niko Bellic. You create your character, her backstory, looks, makeup, and then you guide her on her heroic journey, reacting to things appropriately. The Renegade/Paragon split has never been about breaking the rules, even at its most forceful: it's been about keeping to your code and deciding how much play you want to give yourself in interpreting that code.
So yeah. Mass Effect is a romance. (Actually, planetary romance, but that's a separate article.)
Let's switch settings for a moment.
Mass Effect's literal deus ex machina (god from the machine) rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Per my preface, what almost nobody gets is why. At first I thought it was the kid too. Truth is, it could have been anyone, even Mac Walters himself or the obelisk from 2001, and it'd have been just as clumsy.
(this bit is going to be a simplified version of a much longer article too)
I'm gonna do a fun teacher thing and talk about something else and then at the end you're going to realize I was talking about Mass Effect all along, okay? Kay.
Check out the endings for the original Deus Ex: join the evil shadow government, transcend your meatsack body and unite with an omniscient AI, or send the Earth into a dark age. They give you pause while also being conceptually quite satisfying: why?
From the beginning of the game, Deus Ex is doing its best to put you in JC Denton's shoes, to make you aware not only of his augmented nature but also his deeply personal ties to UNATCO and to the nanotech augmentation that makes him special. He's the younger brother who eventually overshadows his big bro, maybe even saves him, and then saves the world by being a slick robot dude - how cool and empathetic is that? At the same time, Warren Spector (who rules) gives you cultural conflicts that are directly relevant to modern society - the problems of information oversaturation, government control, ethical research, political mobility and protest, and class stratification. Each of these ideas are given (often multiple) anchors in characters whose actions directly affect JC and thus the player. It's what science fiction does best - cultural commentary. Each ending speaks not only to the themes of the game but to the empathetic nature of JC and thus the player.
How do you fix the earth, flawed human? Surprise: there's no right answer, no happy ending. You have to do it anyway. Deal.
Compare this with the reboot, which (third article) is a fun game but nowhere near as profound. You play as Jensen, a sounds-similar to Denton, who is a cop guy with robot arms and a dead girlfriend. You strive against.. things. Corporations? I think corporations. How does it end? You can expose mechanical augmentation for.. some reason, I forget, and stifle human progress, remove the limits on augmentation and expand progress, or kill everyone on the ship. There might be a fourth option that I can't remember, but who cares? It mistakes the forest for the trees: the specific anchors which are conduits to the real and visceral themes of the story are focused on in the ending, but don't deal with the themes themselves. Not only that, but where Deus Ex was specific where it counted, DX:HR rewards you with the vaguest, shallowest introspective mumble about how augmentation changed Jensen's life.
Who gives a fuck about Jensen? Not you! DX:HR confuses epic scope for meaning and affect, which is maybe the most common mistake in games as they stand. Sure, this decision affects everyone in the fictional US or could erase Jensen and all the other figureheads - but so what? None of them actually matter! None of them have made you react in any meaningful way or made you feel for them! (see also: the upcoming article on syndicate)
The original Deus Ex gave you endings that asked you where your priorities lay, with real and grounded stakes and consequences. The sequel gave you vague bullshit on every count. One ending feels sharp, meaningful, and memorable, and the other is none of those things. Each character is only ever an avatar for a mindset or worldview - the trick is in making you believe in them and how they clash with other ideologies, putting yourself in every set of shoes. It's why we can study literature and why the author matters not at all in criticism of the finished work - the events on the page don't really even matter, it's the interaction of competing ideas through their stand-in avatars that is what draws people in and gives art its power.
(i dare you to ask me what good a humanities degree is now.)
Let's get back to Mass Effect 3.
Yeah, part of the problem with the ending is the fact that it's exposited by a kid who we don't know and don't care about. It also doesn't relate to most people in the story we care about except in the vaguest terms. It only relates to themes in the story in the basest terms, and repaints the story with the broadest brush possible. These are minor issues at best.
The real crime, narratively speaking, is fucking with Shepard for no reason. Not the in-game person of Shepard, but the dynamic which Shepard embodies. See, for the first time in the series, Shepard is vulnerable. Her moms is in danger. She fucks up, Kai Leng eats her cereal, and it actually shakes her. For two and a half games, Shepard has been the one with unflappable confidence. Determination may actually be her middle name. It's certainly her defining trait, even next to 'soldier' - she gets shit done, even if the cost is grievous, even when it threatens those she cares about most.
And for the first time, it might not be enough.
It's where she makes the jump from "player stand-in" to "actual character." If there's one thing we know about as humans, it's not knowing if things are going to work out. Hell, you say as much to EDI when encouraging her to jump Seth Green's fragile bones. You begin to realize exactly how much strain Shepard is under in that moment - not even the hamfisted dreams or occasional Tense Holoconversations manage that. She might not fucking win and she is the Big Goddamn Hero. Makes the buildup to the ending mean that much more. When she settles down next to Anderson, it's two soldiers resting after a mission accomplished, comrades under fire patiently dying after a long, long career. She's headed to heaven to bro out with Garrus, who is laying thousands of miles below in a puddle of green blood. We're sad, but also we're satisfied. Big damn hero, big damn heroic death, martyred for the good of the galaxy.
And then the phone rings.
She staggers to her feet, bloody and scarred, half-robot, and mumbles "What do you need me to do next?" Hit number two, right to the gut. We echo her pathetic sentiment. What more can you ask from this woman? She waves at the console, nothing works, she collapses. Cue capcom: BAD END.
And then the platform raises into the air. This is where things start to go off the rails, so to speak. Let's pause and examine what's happening here - in her extremity of need, her determination has failed her. She didn't quite make it. And that doesn't seem to matter. In the lingo of the romance, she failed her trial, but gets to reap the reward anyway.
That's really where the ending falls down. Everything after seems hollow because it is - there's no reason why she deserves to save the galaxy when she beat the big bad and it didn't matter. The endings don't work because they don't address what people have been told to care about through the entire series - the themes that the writers have been reinforcing, mission after mission. They've been shaping Shepard into what they wanted to be most - a better person, a better lay, maybe only the person willing to be ruthless and stretch the rules where it counts - and it doesn't seem to matter at all.
The violation isn't of the player's decisions. It's of Shepard's role as the player's ideal hero. It takes the interactivity of the game, perhaps its most unique and evocative feature, and utterly ignores the immense potential to take the romance genre to its most extreme catharsis. Every step to this point has been another drop in the Care Bucket, and it just got set gently to the floor instead of poured out in one big release. (yes this is all sexual)
So, players take to the internet, tension unrelieved, and vent it against Bioware and Catalyst instead. I was expecting Shepard to end up being the Catalyst, because that would make sense in terms of the tautology of the game - Shepard is the person who is the most necessary to save the galaxy, because we spend the entire trilogy making her that way. It doesn't matter how that's expressed, only that it is. We didn't get that moment. Instead, we get an epilogue talking about 'the Shepard', an abstract concept that doesn't have a lot to do with the "reality" of the game we've played.
She might as well be anyone. And that's the thing that nobody wanted said about their Shepard.
(not really that was a well written piece and I look forward to the expanded version)
Do fighters use bullets or lasers? I assume they're mass accelerator guns but Vulcan cannon sized. Then again, GUARDIAN lasers look like regular ME tracer rounds oh-look-I've-gone-cross-eyed.
Orikae Shigitae's Treatises On Mass Effect And The Nature Of Roleplaying Games, Vols. I-XXV
iw rite big books. i am ver y smart
Very interesting read, thanks for that
Orik, that was great.
Why I fear the ocean.
i am proudest of 'your dog is safe'
fuck this
pretty much speculation at this point, though. there's almost nothing to support it in the game.
if only to be invisible for a while
they really should include a menu of flags set for all the games on new game plus, just so i don't have to sacrifice three months to properly reading mass effect the trilogy. heavy rain was bad enough, shit
Look, asshole. If I am ten feet away, you don't get to do the little instakill thing. And when I nova your face, you get STAGGERED. Half a second, all I'm asking.
I mean, come on.
Why I fear the ocean.
citizenkaneclap.gif
I can't believe shep survived that
Like three separate times during that I was like "man what is he talking about, this isn't right at all"
And then I actually thought about it and realized you had a point and kept going
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
@keith, replace this line with the gif of the gentleman driving away