Mass Effect 3 (2012) Review: Beating a Dead Horse Edition

Lucas Versantvoort / February 11, 2015

After the success of Mass Effect and the even bigger success of Mass Effect 2, everyone was awaiting with baited breath the game that would conclude the story of Commander Shepard in stunning fashion. And in 2012, the game hit store shelves and sure enough, the game was memorable, though for other reasons than an ardent Mass Effect fan might hope.

            The story starts with Earth being attacked by the Reapers. You escape Earth in the SSV Normandy with your crew and spend all efforts on gathering as many allies as possible. Depending on your decisions in previous games, this might prove easier/more difficult than anticipated. It is up to you to try to make everyone see the bigger picture, that focusing on their own little quarrels doesn’t matter much if the Reapers wipe everyone out in the process. This amounts to you helping the other species and garnering favors and securing promises of aid against the final assault against the Reapers. Meanwhile, Cerberus, the organization you helped in the previous game, has turned against you, its leader (TIM) having a plan of his own of ‘ending’ the Reaper threat. Eventually, you are informed of an ancient Prothean superweapon that might prove key to wiping out the Reapers and saving the universe.

            So…the story. Is it any good? I’m going to go with the always highly useful answer of ‘yes and no.’ It is true that several sections are incredibly potent, but it’s offset against a plethora of narrative issues: drivel like Shepard’s nightmares about the one kid he couldn’t save on Earth. Puh-lease… You mean to tell me that after two games of allowing you, the player, to decide Shepard’s character through dialogue options and so on, now you’re going to actively write him as a dramatic character? I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. What if someone’s renegading? After pragmatically killing of hundreds of enemies—and sometimes entire species— in cold blood over the course of two games, making Shepard go all emo about one boy just doesn’t work dramatically. I also remember this clichéd missions featuring a bomb on Tuchanka where the Turian Lieutenant Victus sacrifices himself to redeem his honor and save the rest and of course he goes out with a one-liner: “Victory, at any cost.”  I can almost hear the solemn trumpet solo in the background…

On the other hand, what the game does positively nail is the feeling of things coming to an end now that the Reapers have finally showed up. Even when I was just strolling through the Citadel, I had the feeling that I should get my ass moving and save the Universe. There was this constant air of melancholy permeating every second of the game. And that’s precisely the feeling that, for better and for worse, BioWare was going for with this entire game. It’s the same deal with Final Fantasy XIII: there’s little to no exploration, because the main characters are fugitives. In Mass Effect 3, the Reapers are killing everyone, so there’s little to no time for sightseeing (no exploring the homeworlds of the Turians and Asari); there’s only a race against time to gather as many allies as possible and defeat the Reapers.

            All in all, the story is flawed (to speak nothing of the ‘radically different’ endings), but there are times, as I said, when it gets it completely right. The perfect example is the chapter involving the Krogan. This is where everything comes together, where the gameplay is tense, the storytelling is tight and the choices are meaningful. You can let Mordin sacrifice himself for the good of the Krogan future, or, if you did certain things beforehand, can save him as well. You can confront Mordin with your worries about future Krogan aggression and fatally wound him, etc. The great thing here is that it feels like a self-contained chapter that has a clear beginning-middle-end structure and builds on the themes connected to the Krogan and Salarians. It all comes together wonderfully. More importantly, it’s emotionally satisfying.

Speaking of which, that’s another problem with ME3, the fact that it has to tie everything together and make sure your that all your choices made in the previous games matter. It sounded ambitious when BioWare first announced its plans of letting you transfer saves from one game to the next, but in practice, it’s clear BioWare bit off more than it could chew. Rather than having all your previous choices make a real difference, they don’t mean a lot in the end, a fact emphasized by their being given a number of War Assets. Remember the huge decision at the end of ME2? Whether or not to destroy or save the Collector base? All that does in ME3 is give you a measly few War Assets…whoop-dee-fuckin-doo. That’s the problem when you’ve created a canvas as big as this: it becomes impossible to make all the player’s choices matter without most of them feeling inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things. The direct consequence is that you become more easily aware of the underlying machinations of what triggers what event. You quickly identify certain short scenes as being a little reward for you having done something in one of the other games. It doesn’t exactly enhance the narrative flow when you’re like “oh okay, he shows up, because I did this in ME2.” You instinctively realize it doesn’t really matter. Minor characters make little more than glorified cameos for one scene and are never seen again. It’s the same thing that plagued ME2. To save or not to save the Council; that was the big question at the end of ME and all it meant in ME2 were a few pointless scenes featuring the Council, that’s it. It didn’t change anything substantial.

In terms of gameplay, the game suffers from/enjoys the same features that separated ME2 from the first game. Just like ME2 was more of a shooter than an RPG, ME3 symbolically does away with all RPG elements and goes into full-on Gears of War mode and never looks back. Oh sure, BioWare may have claimed they’d introduce “added RPG elements,” but the simple fact is that no one in their right mind would consider this an RPG. Even the classes themselves aren’t truly unique enough to provide for radically different gameplay styles. In the end, it all boils down to moving and shooting, getting behind conveniently placed cover and shooting, and so on…

Ugh...

            And don’t even get me started on War Assets, a feature with which you can keep track of the support you’ve gathered throughout the game (individuals, armies, technology and so on). What baffles me is that it flat out tells you the minimum number of points necessary to even get access to one of the main endings. It’s so immersion-breaking it defies belief. So let me get this straight, you spend three games immersing yourself into this universe and all these characters and prepare for the coming onslaught of the Reapers and now you get a system that blatantly tells you when you are ready to defeat the Reapers, the almighty species against which victory is nigh impossible? Yeah…do you see how that doesn’t really fit into an emotional storyline where you desperately fight to save the universe and everyone in it? What kind of computer is even able to predict this, anyway!? I understand that a game in the end is entirely ‘technical,’ that it takes into account certain variables and that you are assigned a certain ending as a result and all that, but how about we don’t confront the gamers with this emotionally inert nonsense? You’re supposed to effectively suppress aspects of game design, not shove it into people’s faces. Right after reaching the minimum amount of points necessary, I remember thinking, “well, no matter what I do, I guess I’m now able to defeat the Reapers.” Not exactly the kind of emotional response you’d want to get out of a dramatic narrative. What's worse is that you need to compete online for assets, otherwise you can only gain 50% of all assets. So, 50% is gained through single player, while the rest through online multiplayer and iOs/Android apps. I was furious when I first discovered this, cuase it felt my single player experience was being fucked around with by needless online components.

            Other things that left a bad taste in my mouth are little things like BioWare’s decision to increase Ashley and Liara’s cup sizes for what I’m sure was a very valid reason with lots of narrative implications. Even worse is the inclusion of Jessica Chobot as reporter Diana Allers who you can take with you on the Normandy, so she can ‘broadcast the truth to the people’ and all that. You can romance her, but it’s just a fling, so why would you? For those of you who don’t know, she was involved with IGN at the time, which casts an all the more dubious light on not just her casting, but on the notion of ‘objective video game journalism.’ Just this casting choice alone can easily make me dislike the game as a whole, depending on my mood. BioWare also screwed up side quests, more specifically the giving of objectives. Most side quests involve only going to some planet and find some object or something, but the objectives don’t necessarily state which planet you’re supposed to go to and even when they do, you’re not told exactly where it is. Apparently, you’re supposed to just wander the galaxy and hopefully stumble upon the right planet at some point. How do you screw up something as simple as side quests? Another “new and exciting” feature was that you could give voice commands through Kinect with a headset. How anyone could think this is what gamers want is beyond me. Because you know…sometimes I look at my controller and I think, “man, I wish I could just do away with all those buttons and just talk to my TV, because that would definitely increase my immersion into the game world and raise my enjoyment levels by at least 100%.” The entire notion is just ridiculous, a failed attempt at blurring the lines between your living room and the game world.

Just...wow...

            For what it’s worth, there were enough good moments to warrant my purchase of Mass Effect 3. The attempt here was obviously to create a stunning, emotionally compelling, cinematic finale and they somewhat succeeded. But for every compelling moment, there were things that annoyed me: the fact that ME2’s teammates can’t join you on your ship (BioWare instead obsessively focused on ME’s cast and gave ME2’s cast a couple of cameos for good measure), the lack of conversations with your teammates, the immersion-breaking War Assets, the lack of differences between classes, Diana Allers, the fucking cup sizes, the relatively boring new characters, the obvious appeasing of the LGBT community by shoving gay romances into the proceedings (I have nothing against gays, but it’s weird how Shepard and Kaidan can all of a sudden ‘bat for the other team’ even though this was never implied in previous games, not to mention how underwritten Steve Cortez was), EVE’s hot cyborg body, the dream sequences, not to mention the endings themselves…and that final screen... BioWare tried and occasionally succeeded, but they bit off more than they could chew here.

Mass Effect 2 (2010) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / February 4, 2015

After the incredible success of the first Mass Effect in 2007, developer BioWare knew it had a franchise on its hands and merrily went on its way to develop the sequel. Mass Effect 2 was released in 2010 to even more critical acclaim than its predecessor. Though fan debate still persists as to which one of the two is better, it was undeniable that it was a success.

            The story kicks off several weeks after the ending of the first game. Our ship, the SSV Normandy, is attacked by some kind of enemy ship and everyone’s forced to evacuate. Commander Shepard is unable to escape in time, however, and so dies from suffocation. Naturally, this being the beginning of the game, nobody’s doubting Shepard’s eventual return. (So much for dramatic purpose…) Shepard’s body is recovered by Cerberus, a pro-human organization. Cerberus, as opposed to the bureaucratic fuckwits on the Citadel, are very aware of the threat posed by the enemies (Collectors) that attacked the Normandy and, realizing Shepard’s immense charisma and leadership, spared no expense in recovering and reviving Shepard. This is two years later. Shepard awakens and hesitantly joins Cerberus. He is told by its leader, TIM, that the ship emerged from the Omega-4 Relay and that no ship has ever returned after passing through. Shepard is thus tasked with crafting a team of talented individuals, passing through the Relay and kill the Collectors that want to assume direct control over humanity.

"I'll relinquish one bullet. Where do you want it?"

            What first has to be said is that while this storyline sounds interesting, it really isn’t. In fact, it’s a typical BioWare placeholder while you complete the parts of the story that actually are interesting, the side quests involving your teammates. This is both the game’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness from a narrative point of view: while the recruit and loyalty missions of your teammates are great and allow for some great characterization, it also strips the main storyline of any tension and complexity for the most part, turning it into ‘here are the big bad aliens with some master plan that you don’t care one iota about, now go kill them.’ Overall, it’s quite a far cry from Saren, the first game’s antagonist who at the end is revealed to be a more complex character than you thought and whom you could actually reason with at the end. And what do we get in Mass Effect 2? Giant enemy crabs… Even worse is that the main threat mentioned in the first game, the Reapers, are pretty much AWOL in this game, only revealing themselves at the very end, like a friendly reminder, ‘hey guys, yep, we’re still here and we’re still invading.’ Particularly now, when the third game’s been released and we can judge the trilogy in retrospect, do we see how the Collectors storyline is pretty much filler in the bigger scheme of things.

            Thankfully, the missions involving your teammates pretty much save the day and they’re effective enough to make you forget about the main storyline’s weaknesses. Whether it’s helping Garrus get revenge or convince him not to, or helping Jack deal with her past life in a Cerberus prison facility, or defending Tali when she unfairly faces exile, etc., it’s all pretty engaging and forms the emotional core of the whole experience. Indeed, this game is a very good example of what people mean when they say that characters are what define BioWare’s games, which is indeed the case here as they draw attention away from the poor main storyline. Though the main story does feature the excellent final suicide mission, it is mostly due to the bond you’ve developed with your teammates that the mission is as tense as it is.

            Now, the gameplay. This is where things enter Your Mileage May Vary territory. It’s obvious BioWare took the gameplay of the first game and streamlined it, reducing various RPG elements and turning the whole deal more into an action-packed third-person shooter. If that’s your thing, then it won’t bother you at all. In fact, you will probably appreciate combat more now that the experience has been ‘tightened.’ On the other hand, if you belong more to the RPG crowd, you’ll spend combat lamenting the presence of regenerating health and the reduction of things like talents. One need only compare this and this to see what I mean. Personally, I can’t help but feel BioWare, now that EA was their publisher, either wanted or was told to look to Gears of War for ‘inspiration’ so that they might hope to widen their audience. Unfortunately, decisions of this nature in the end mostly serve to anger the series’ loyal fans as they start bemoaning the loss of RPG elements and what not, so you have to wonder what’s the preferred option here: alienating your fan base for a few extra copies sold, losing sight of your game’s unique aspects in the process or just ‘be Mass Effect’? As for me, I’ve never really loathed the gameplay so much as tolerated it.

Oh man, this is way too fun for me...

            Something concerning gameplay that’s always baffled me was the positive critical reception of scanning planets for minerals and what not. This basically boils down to accessing a computer, selecting a part of the planet that the scanner indicates is rich with minerals, launching a probe and automatically collecting the spoils. That’s it. Why online critics praised this mind-numbingly boring busywork continues to mystify me, especially considering that in the first game you could actually control a vehicle and explore planets. Sure, there was extremely little to do there, but at least you were out there, exploring. Instead, you get to analyze every single planet in search of various types of minerals in a way that anticipated BioWare’s embracing of endless ingredient farming in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The criticism that in that Inquisition you’re a leader reduced to gathering item farming is also valid in Mass Effect 2. Why can’t I tell some of my subordinates to gather minerals while I tend to some of the more important matters at hand, like saving the universe: “Sorry guys, I’m a bit busy with recruiting and psycho-analyzing my teammates and saving the human species from the Collectors, so could you do me a solid and take on the almighty task of gathering minerals by yourselves?”

            Also, the morality system returns. Like the first game, you’re allowed to engage in conversation and depending on your responses and actions, you’ll either fill your Paragon or Renegade meter, aka good guy or bad guy. This is all fine and dandy, but the main problem is twofold: first of all, due to the dialogue wheel you’re always aware that the upper right options are the Paragon options and the bottom right the Renegade options. As a consequence, you can basically shut your brain off during conversation, because if you’re paragoning, all you have to do is always select the upper right option. Mass Effect 2’s story throws all kinds of tough moral subjects and questions at you, so it’s disappointing that responding to these things requires no intellectual effort on your part. Secondly, a handful of times the upper right option doesn’t ‘feel’ like the Paragon option, like at the end of Legion’s mission, where you decide between rewriting the Heretics’ code or destroying the base, the first option being the one that grants you Paragon points even though it seems like the artificial intelligence version of brainwashing. Another example is when you romance Miranda and she, towards the final suicide mission, begs you to promise her that you won’t die, as your death would be too devastating for her. The upper right option causes Shepard to say, “I died once already. I don’t plan on doing it again” while the middle option makes Shepard tell Miranda that he can’t promise her such a thing. Obviously, a great deal of gamers felt the middle option to be the more realistic one, the first option reminding of the scene from Team America where Lisa tells Gary that if he promised her that he will never die, she would make love to him right then and there, to which he unsurprisingly responds, “I. Promise. I. Wrisingly responds, “I. t of your time bonding with your teammates, the final mission is incredibly tense.ill. Never. Die.” Many gamers felt that telling Miranda he can’t promise such a thing was the more mature thing to do, so you can imagine their confusion that the ‘I will never die’ option was the Paragon option. Dragon Age: Origins handled conversation options much better with its simple list of options, because the order of options was always random and not listed from nice to evil. This naturally forced you to think carefully about your responses.

            All in all, you could argue that the downfall of Mass Effect, culminating in Mass Effect 3, started here in pure gameplay terms if nothing else, but it’s the characters that save Mass Effect 2. The characters are the sole reason why I’ve played through Mass Effect 2 over and over again. It’s my favourite game in the series. I like to compare it to Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, where The Dark Knight, though featuring a narrative with zero connections to the overall storyline, is almost everyone’s favourite. Similarly, Mass Effect 2’s story is of almost no consequence in the bigger scheme of things, but is nevertheless a lot of people’s favourite game in the series.

Your Choices Matter: or the Illusion of Choice

Lucas Versantvoort / September 18, 2014

Fig. 1 - the council telling it like it is

More and more games these days like Mass Effect allow you to make choices, through multiple choice questions, timed button presses, etc. These games allow the gamer to basically express their own thoughts, morals and in doing so directly influence (a part of) the game’s storyline. The gamer is granted the feeling that he’s actively creating his own story. This, however, is not completely true, of course. The gamer is merely granted the illusion of choice.

            Game developer Bioware’s Mass Effect series is a perfect example (talk about beating a dead horse…), because one of the game’s primary appealing factors is the fact that you, as has been stated many times, are able to create “your own Shepard” [the main character], that “your choices matter” (fig. 1). You, as Shepard, have to save the universe from a gigantic threat known as the Reapers. This adventure spans three games and allows the gamer to make many different types of choices. Important decisions include: at the end of the first game, do you save the Council? Do you keep the Collector Base instead of destroying it in Mass Effect 2? These are two key decisions, since they take place at the end of both part 1 and 2. So you’d think your decisions here would have a great impact in how the story develops, but the truth is, they don’t. If you save the Council, you get a short conversation with them in ME2 among other things, but nothing really changes. The story will basically proceed in the same way as if you had sacrificed the Council. Same thing with the Collector Base. You’d think saving or destroying it, would have a massive impact on Mass Effect 3, since it’s the end-game decision, but all it changes is that you get a few extra War Assets in ME3 and it changes one or two parts of a conversation with the Illusive Man (who wants you to save the base).

Fig. 2

            This is all made worse by the infamous ending to ME3. Whereas Bioware told the gaming community how their choices through all three games would impact 3’s ending to the point where you wouldn’t be able to typically tell whether you got ending A or B (in other words: countless, nuanced endings), the end result was something entirely different. In the end, you can only make three different choices during which the choices you made throughout the trilogy matter not. Gamers were promised a branching storyline which would reflect your actions throughout the trilogy (which would look something like fig. 2), in the end the storyline’s branches all ‘collapsed’ to three choices (more resembling fig. 3 except with three endings).

Fig. 3

Another popular game which focuses on gamer choice is Telltale’s The Walking Dead. It follows the basic premise of many zombie films, using the zombie apocalypse as a background for social interaction between a variety of characters. The player controls Lee, who is on his way to prison for murder when a zombie makes the car crash allowing Lee to escape. He stumbles upon a girl, Clementine, and together they head out looking for others, trying to survive. You, as Lee, will encounter many different people and you will engage in many a conversation with them. Indeed, conversations are easily the most important part of the games besides combat which mostly consists of timed-button presses. So important is gamer choice that Telltale includes a notice at the start of the game, saying: ‘This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.’ And yet, even in this game which proudly totes its promise of being able to create ‘your own’ story, suffers from many of the same problems that also plagues Mass Effect.

Fig. 4 - Indeed

            We thus arrive at the two opposing forces in player-driven games: choice vs drama. Being given the ability to make choices in-game as a player, gives the player a feeling of control, the ability to drastically alter the fates of characters and the game world. This is however an illusion as the game world is controlled by the developers that made the game. In Mass Effect and The Walking Dead, both companies want to tell dramatic, engaging stories. This cannot be done by giving the player the ability to do anything he wants. It would mean creating a story-driven game with nearly infinite possibilities which would be too much work (fig. 4). Therefore, a compromise between player choice and ‘pre-written’ drama is inevitable. The player is allowed to make choices within the confines of the story the company has made. Certain events can be influenced by the gamer, whereas others cannot.

            This has an interesting effect however: gamers are more likely to protest against inevitable outcomes they don’t like. I think this has to do with the difference between video games and other media capable of producing fiction like films and books. Whereas the viewer accepts a film as a complete whole, one which he has no control over, a video game is by its very nature interactive. The player can control (to a certain degree) what’s happening on screen. Add to that the fact that The Walking Dead and Mass Effect emphasize player-choice and the reason why gamers are more likely to protest against certain inevitable outcomes they don’t like, becomes much clearer. The viewer knows it has no control over a film, but a gamer playing a player-choice driven game is unlikely to immediately accept what’s happening in the story as unchangeable when the whole purpose of the game is that you, the gamer, control the outcome.

            This is (among many reasons…) why many were/are upset over Mass Effect 3’s ending: it wasn’t the ending of your Shepard’s story, but merely three standard endings (basically good/neutral/evil). As such, it didn’t feel like the logical outcome of the ways in which you’ve been playing as Shepard. Control and player-choice were drastically reduced (or even removed) in favor of making a grand statement about human life in general. Drama came before player choice.

            Mass Effect offers another example of choice being taken away from the player. I refer to the character of Thane, an assassin who is capable of being romanced by a female Shepard. Thane is very ill however and it’s only a matter of time before he dies. This raises a question: should he die for the sake of drama and as a form of penance, since he’s killed so many in his life? Or should you have the option of saving him, somehow finding a cure and risk losing the former’s potential for drama? Allowing Thane to live would negate the penance-subplot, but it would benefit the romance. Bioware chose the former: Thane dies and there’s nothing you can do about it. This led to some discussion whether or not you should have been capable of saving him. People couldn’t bear watching the story develop in a way they didn’t want it to, because it was supposed to be their story, since Mass Effect was player-driven.

            Another example can be found in The Walking Dead. (Warning: massive spoilers). There is a shocking scene in Episode 3 when there’s an argument between on the one hand Carley and Ben and on the other hand Lilly who is convinced Carley and Ben have betrayed the group by sneakily stealing medical supplies. You, as Lee, can side with one or the other in this argument, but no matter what you do or what you say, eventually Lilly shoots Carley at point-blank range. This is one of the game’s inevitable outcomes. Despite the game designers emphasizing how this game is player-choice driven and how it ‘adapts to your choices,’ you have zero control over this event. Again, because the gamer had so much control over events up to this point, there is a greater sense of frustration here than in other media, as to why this had to happen. Why can’t I save Carley? Why do I have control over this and not over that?

            Telltale decided to go for drama. Before she’s shot, you (Lee) have a chance of becoming a bit closer to her. Many gamers (including yours truly) liked Carley, so people got liked seeing their relationship develop. Then Telltale decided to use this sympathy to create drama (basically preying on the viewer’s emotional attachments, but hey…that’s drama), by shortly afterwards letting Carley get killed by Lilly. I was shocked when I first saw I, but, more importantly, I remember one of the first things I thought was ‘I’m going to check the internet real quick to see if there’s a way of saving her.’ This is extremely telling of what I’ve been saying up till now, about how we’re less likely to accept events in a player-choice driven video game than in other media. Rather than accept what happened, I went online hoping to find a way to change Carley’s fate. Imagine my frustration when I found there was none.

            So, in the examples above we see the conflict between the companies’ desire to tell a dramatic story and the nature of player- and choice-driven games. If certain inevitable outcomes are changed on the player’s behalf, it can drastically reduce the drama and perhaps the whole point of a narrative. Would I have liked to see Carley live? Of course. Would I have liked to see Thane survive? Yes. But at the same time I understand the developers’ need to tell an engaging, dramatic story with Big Messages etc. and this requires certain parts of the story to be unchangeable. One starts wondering whether there’s a balance to be found between catering to the players’ demands and compelling drama.

            What about a solution? Obviously, I don’t have one. One would think giving the player more control over everything would be better. Everyone could decide for themselves the fate of characters like Carley and Thane. But it's hard to make that work in terms of drama. You can compare it to another game, WWE ’13. In this wrestling game, you are capable of creating your own storylines, just like how storylines in the WWE are also written beforehand. While a nice feature, it doesn’t create any potential for drama at all, since the player is constantly aware he’s literally controlling everyone and everything. It’s impossible for him to ‘lose himself’ in the story. This is why 'pre-written' drama in video games is a necessity to some extent. You can see how this tension between choice and drama remains both a problematic and interesting topic of discussion. 

Images:

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http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/level-10-nonlinear-storytelling/

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