T w e n t y S i d e d
Last week I complained that Andromeda doesn’t offer a lot of real choices. Even in cases where the game manages to offer you a real choice between two different options and even if the dialog wheel manages to make the options clear, it’s often completely unsatisfying because the situation itself is often incoherent. For example:
Oblivion
If you visit Dr. Nakamoto in the Kadara slums, he’ll tell you that when he came to Kadara he discovered a kind of “bacteria” that had antibioticAs in “penicillin” not “biotic space powers”. properties. But then someone discovered that at high doses it was an addictive psychoactive drug. Sloane began producing the drug to make money and solidify her power.
So then Dr. Nakamoto asks us to “get the formula back” from her, so that he can use it to treat his patients here in the slums.
Dude! You JUST SAID it was a naturally-occurring bacteria, and now you’re calling it a “formula”?
Both statements were part of the same linear dialog. But even if we ignore that as more of this writer’s careless mashing together of random science words, this still doesn’t make sense. Since Dr. Nakamoto invented this formula / discovered this bacteria, he ought to still have access to it. Either it’s a bacteria and he can just find more wherever he got the original stuff, or it’s a formula and he ought to still HAVE it. Did his hard drive die? Even at that, he should be able to remember what he did to create it the first time. It’s not like he poured years of research into discovering a complex new compound. This isn’t some obscure knowledge that’s been lost to the mists of time. Going by the established timeline, he apparently stumbled on this bacteria sometime in the last couple of months. The entire premise comes off as childish.
But fine. We drive to the other side of the map to Sloane’s drug lab so we can-
Hang on. Why is Sloane’s drug lab so far from the city!? Why wouldn’t she keep it safe within the walls of the fortified city she rules with an iron fist!? In our world, drug labs are hidden because they’re illegal. But Sloane is both dictator and drug dealer, so that’s not a problem for her.
Back in Mass Effect 1 there were quests that just involved walking around and talking to people in adjacent rooms, but apparently the Ubisoft-inspired design means we need to drive across the map for every pissant fetch quest.
Once we get there, the drug lab is guarded by mooks. Once they’re all dead, we talk to the doctor running the place. She begs us not to “take” the formula, because then she won’t have it. If she can’t make drugs for Sloane, then Sloane will kill her.
But… isn’t this a formula? Like, a recipe? How is it possible that it can only be “owned” by one person at a time? Assuming you’re not planning on starting a war with Sloane, then the most reasonable course of action ought allow BOTH sides access to the formula. Sloane can make her drugs and Dr. Nakamoto can treat the poor sick people. Again, the choices in this game push you to unreasonable extremes and don’t allow you to ask reasonable questions. It’s like you’re not supposed to think about the mechanics of the decisions you’re making and the only point for this quest is to just dispense Paragon or Renegade points. Except… this game doesn’t have Paragon or Renegade points.
My brain hurts now, but I’ll give the writer credit they don’t deserve and assume that the “formula” is actually a cell culture? Or something? But then at the end of the conversation Ryder “takes” the formula using her multitool. So I guess it’s a formula after all, and Ryder is just being an asshole and erasing it off the lady’s computer and the lady stupidly doesn’t have backups of this information that’s apparently critical to her survival? And I guess Sloane doesn’t have backups even though her economy depends on it?
After the conversation you see that the drug actually comes from plants that are growing in these hydroponic containers around the room. And we don’t take any of the plants with us. But, if it’s a plant then what did I just steal off the computer? And how will Dr. Nakamoto make more if he doesn’t have access to the plant or any sort of equipment to cultivate it?
The game pretends like taking the formula from Sloane and giving it to Dr. Nakamoto is the nice thing to do, but what’s to stop Sloane from just taking it again? She’s going to notice that someone knocked over her drug lab and that Dr. Nakamoto is making medicine again. She’s a magnificent dumbass, but she’s at least smart enough to realize these two facts are related. Giving the formula to Dr. Nakamoto ought to result in him turning up dead in a couple of weeks and Sloane resuming selling her drugs to all the jobless and penniless losers she keeps in the slums.
So the drug is either a bacteria, or a recipe, or a plant. This is a quest with two characters, three linear dialogs, and one binary choice. This is the simplest possible framework for a sidequest. This is “Baby’s First Sidequest”. Talk to A to get the quest, talk to B to obtain the item, and return to A to resolve it. Yet somehow the writer couldn’t even manage to keep this ultra-simple scenario straight. The premise was nuts, the morality was hopelessly confused, and the dialog contradicted itself multiple times, even within the same linear conversation.
Sure, you can construct your own explanation that the “formula” is the process by which you harvest a bacteria that only grows on a particular plant. And I suppose if you keep writing, you’ll eventually hammer out a version of Mass Effect Andromeda script that’s worth turning into a AAA game. I just wish someone had done that before they recorded all this dialog.
Even if we ignore the nonsensical elements, this choice is completely uninteresting because it ends in a binary decision with an obvious and objectively correct answer. Choices are supposed to be interesting. They’re supposed to make us choose between two things we want, or perhaps trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. But this quest has a choice between the right answer and a wrong one. Gosh, do I give the drug to the selfless doctor treating the poor in the slums so he can save more lives, or do I leave it here so the tyrannical and predatory Sloane can continue to amass wealth and power for herself and turn this planet into even more of a shithole? What a conundrum! This is like Mass Effect 1 offering us the choice between “Kill the Rachni Queen” and “Help Rachni Queen kill Liara”.
Just to make the whole thing as wrongheaded as possible: Once you enter the drug lab, Dr. Farenth is standing right in front of you. Once you initiate the conversation with her, you MUST choose to either take the formula or allow her to keep it. You can’t end the conversation and explore the room before making your decision. Since there is incriminating evidence against Dr. Farenth on datapads around the room, this design choice is unforgivable. The game presents you with a (dumb, nonsensical) mystery about who really invented Oblivion and why, but it won’t even allow you to gather all the facts before railroading you into a ridiculous binary decision.
Why would you bother wasting resources creating a choice that’s obviously dumb and runs directly counter to the player’s goals? Why spend resources on that dialog? The only people who will choose this are the ones who click through the conversation without listening and don’t bother reading the datapads where all the villains explicitly announce their villainous nature in their one-paragraph diaries.
Incoherent
This sort of incoherency runs throughout the game. This would be bad enough in regular fiction, but for the nerdy sci-fi genre this is just shameful.
At one point you check the “security camera footage” at the security station on the Nexus, and it apparently has random footage of two people meeting in the wilderness on a planet on the other side of the cluster.
In another quest SAM claims he’s trying to trace a signal, but then he thinks he’s somehow “repairing” a signal, before he claims he’s been “decrypting” the signal.
In another quest someone tells you that our communications are getting a lot of interference. They tell you to make sure the Kett aren’t “tapping” our communications. Those are two different concepts. Am I supposed to invent some headcanon based on quantum communications where passive surveillance causes detectable interference, or is the writer just playing “fetch quest Mad Libs” with random science words?
The main quest has you looking for a “transponder”. Once you have it in your hand, it acts like a two-way radio. Somehow using it to call the Kett tells you where the Kett flagship is. (A transponder broadcasts its OWN location. If you’re holding a transponder, then you’re telling the Kett where YOU are, not the other way around!)
At another point you need to free up some electrical power on a spaceship. There’s a machine using tons of energy. An Asari woman tries to shut it down. She tells you, “I tried unplugging it, but… nothing.” If you’re interested, you can see a livestream of my reaction to that scenario.
I get that we’re not doing details-first sci-fi now. I’m not insisting that someone make all of these things scientifically accurate. If you want to use random bullshit magic technology then just make up some silly science words like “Harbulary Batteries” and stick to that. But the game keeps showing its technology is just stuff we’re already familiar with and then depicting it doing nonsensical things. It’s like an episode of Star Trek written by someone who just got blackout drunk.
It’s tempting to make a few mean-spirited comments about the lack of skill and / or intelligence on the part of the writer, but at this point that feels like a weak explanation for what we’re seeing. Anyone capable of forming complete sentences ought to understand the conceptual difference between bacteria, a recipe, and a plant. Everyone capable of using a computer understands what happens when you unplug something from an electrical outlet. Everyone over the age of six ought to understand that security footage can only exist for locations where security cameras have been installed.
If you’re smart enough to get hired by BioWare and not kill yourself using the coffeemaker in the break room, then you have the capacity to avoid making these kinds of blunders.
Which suggests that this nonsense is… deliberate? Is this a joke? A cry for help? There’s an urban legend / rumor that some of the bored writers for the CSI shows used to make their technobabble stupid on purpose, to see what they could get away with. Is this something like that?
On the other hand, this isn’t just the work of one person. Sure, a writer was involved. But then a director guided a voice actor through it and a mission designer scripted it. This gibberish had to pass through at least four people.
Just… how did it get this bad? I really need to know.
Footnotes:
[1] As in “penicillin” not “biotic space powers”.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The “genius” of power cables that cannot be unplugged is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe if you don’t unplug them from both the device and the outlet at the same time, the cables use the power to turn into electric snake monsters? Perhaps the device just absorbs power directly from the wall in defiance of all logic, but requires a cable plugging into it to make it feel better about itself or it will malfunction? I suppose it’s possible that the cables are just really hard to pull out…unless you unplug them on both ends at the same time…how and why would that work? I don’t think I’m going to be able to unplug anything for the next week without bursting into laughter.
There’s an awful window in my basement that takes three people (five hands) to open and close. Maybe it is like that? Although I have rigged it with some gaffer tape so that it only takes two hands and a foot and I can do it on my own. So /shrug?
Lots of people are coming up with technobabble fanfic to cover this situation, and it’s funny how easy this line is to fix, but IMO the real missed opportunity here is the chance to humanize our characters. The thing that actually happens in that segment is that, whenever you mess with the plugs, the Kett realize you’re there and send some troops in. So let the asari’s VA emote, and give her some panicked lines about how she only just got away from the Kett the last time, and they’ve already killed [random person she was close to], and what is she supposed to do she’s only 100 and she’s not cut out for this, and she feels like a coward for holding up the bridge crew but the Kett will kill her if they come back, etc etc etc. Use emotion to remind players what they’re really here to do, both in the short term (not just fixing some random ship, but defending people from an alien hegemony) and the long term (we’re new here, most of us have no clue what we’re doing, and we have to get a foothold in a hostile galaxy).
Really, this seems like a repeat of the colonist situation from ME2: Bioware has forgotten what peasants are actually for, so they’re just using them as MMO-style objective dispensers.
I think we’re missing the opportunity here.
How far away can you remove the device the socket and it still draws power? Inches? Metres? Light-years? If we pack the machine onto a probe and launch into space, can we get the probe to draw power from the machine which is drawing power from its cable back on the planet?
Does the power suffer from interference, can we modulate the power demand of the machine to send signals? Is this power draw bound by relativity?
I know this universe already has quantum entangled devices and mass effect relays, but this miraculous machine might be a breakthrough that makes all that so much easier!
I believe that person invented a perpetuum mobile and asked the one question nobody ever before asked about this contraption: “How can I turn it off again?”
Sadly, it will now forever use lots of power which it first produced itself and nobody will realize what they did.
Either that or your character could say “so it’s running on its internal battery backup now and isn’t pulling power from the ship, is what you’re telling me.”
But then that’d be mission accomplished since the goal was to stop the thing from drawing power from the ship.
Clearly that Asari didn’t enact the 13 Rites Of Permission, recite the Psalm Of Disconnection and beseech the Omnissiah’s blessing before pulling the plug.
She angered the device’s Machine Spirit!
The machine, the asari, Ryder and the entire Initiative being purged for heresy seems like a mercy at this point.
This game should be charged with heresy at this point.
calls Exterminatus on Bioware for good measure
I always consider it a terrible portent when a “serious” story uses a plot point that I recognize as a joke from a comedy that came before it. With that in mind, this is from “Tragical History”, the Archer episode where the mainframe is being invaded by a computer worm:
Malory: Just turn off the mainframe.
Lana: [holds up an unplugged power cord] Yeah. We tried that.
Malory: Then how is it still on?
Krieger: Because the worm has transformed the mainframe…into a sentient being.
[musical sting]
Malory: What!?
Krieger: I’m kidding. There’s a battery backup.
… Now I want an Archer video game. With abilities like Danger Zone and letting you play each character.
My first thought was the machine also has backup power, which SHOULD have been what the writer suggested. Then an objective could be to destroy the backup power, which would let the player shoot something that could explode. That’s a win/win!
I can imagine a device that uses special model of locking plug-socket combination, precisely to prevent some dumbass from just pulling the plug and damaging expensive equipment which needs a programmed shutdown sequence. The quest would have said dumbass complaining that she tried to pull it off but didn’t succeed, scanning would have SAM tell us the problem, and then you used the device. “Oh wow”, says the questgiver, and Ryder quips about how it can be tricky to find “Shut Down” from main menu. Make her elderly human instead of Asari, and it’s a cute little joke about the kind of troubleshooting more than a few around here have done to their relatives. That kind of computer illiteracy might not make much sense in the future, but whatever, it’s a miniquest.
Maybe this kind of stuff gets written 3am under perma-crunch, by people selected on the basis of “writing is nerdy and all these guys are nerds, so you three there, go write up these 30 quests”.
Do you remember Superman 3 where they unplug the supercomputer and it just plugs itself back in and then turns someone into a horrific robot woman?
Yeah, probably that right? Yeah, makes sense
I had managed to go all this time without being aware of the existence of Superman 3. Thanks to you, I have now read the plot summary on wikipedia AND mentally pictured a Reeve Superman movie with Richard Pryor in it. Thanks for that. You monster.
It’s better than Superman 4.
That doesn’t excuse Superman 3!
No, but it mitigates it. I actually do enjoy the whole bit where red kryptonite turns Superman into a womanizing drunk who straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa. That was way funnier than the intentionally comedic bits with Richard Pryor.
Does anyone have a timestamp for this in the linked stream?
Try 1h52m52s
That’s the value the link has.
Obviously the machine generates negative energy from the positive energy it extracts wirelessly from the wall. And puts it back in via the cable. Unplug it and you’ve only solved half of the problem.
Or plug is just there to stop it from running away.
I headcanon’d that there the device was set up like nukes allegedly are, where you need two people to push the button, or two keys, something along those lines in order to REALLY make ABSOLUTELY SURE you SERIOUSLY want to drop that bomb.
It’s still a flimsy excuse but it helped me pretend the nonsense of “unplugging didn’t turn it off” had some sanity behind it for long enough to get through the mission.
I guess it would have worked if there was either some unplugging mechanism that needs to be operated by two people, or there were several power cables and that person only found one (or mistook the network cable for the power one, or somesuch …) all of that could have worked but, alas, it was not to be …
Weeeelll, there is precedence for a machine which could not be turned off by unplugging it, and it comes, of all things, from Star Trek:
https://youtu.be/JD_L2oOzTgQ?t=105
(sorry, that was the only video with that scene which I could find … that red-shirt just disconnected the power cable.)
…and that’s how you take that premise and make it work.
My headcannon was, “that’s not a power cable, that’s a control cable. Now we know why we couldn’t shut it down remotely”.
The sad part is that the takeaway around the corporate board table will be that the market does not want sci-fi games with a story anymore.
And that the sales were below expectation. As usual.
The only thing I can think of is that the Asari is so freaking stupid that she didn’t realise there were multiple plugs.
SAM explains: “The device requires two people for shutdown – one disconnecting the cables, and another at the device itself.”
See? Makes perfect sense. You can’t expect the cables to stay disconnected if someone isn’t standing near the device.
Once you get the bombs you can place one on one plug and then run and stand on the other. Very standard industrial design.
Good thing SAM was there to explain that, otherwise the player might have had to solve a fairly simple problem themselves and momentarily feel good about themselves.
I have to say that this is kind of impressive in just how bad it is. The more I learn about the later Mass Effect games, the more it seems like I made the right decision in deciding to drop the series after seeing what they did to ME2.
Ed Greenwood (of Forgotten Realms fame) said once that he deliberately put in bad sections for his editor to find and remove. It acted as bait/protection against other stuff he did not want edited. IE busy work for the editor to distract them. Then his editor didn’t cut anything out. Stuff like the main character taking a hurried squat-shit in the hallway was left in. It was embarrassing for him.
In this case the route cause was a lack of trust. The author did not trust the competence of the editor. Therefore they were deliberately given easy pitches to hit. Except they were so incompetent that they still whiffed it. The author was also to blame for playing those kinds of games in the first place.
Point is that office politics can be weird. There can be perverse incentives in creative works.
Ed should have been fine if he had kept careful track of every bad section he left in and removed those after his editor did a pass. Unless it goes directly from the editor to the printer, but that makes no sense. That implies that the editor could make a huge change without discussing it with the writer and then that change would be in the final version without any more drafts.
Direct to the printer is exactly what would happen.
I remember a quite well known rock band (think it was Black Sabbath) who said something similar about the infamous practice some acts have of making their venue riders ridiculously complicated. They’d do it to test if the venue was paying attention; if the rider came out wrong, they’d be ready for the fact the sound engineering etc was likely to be off too.
I believe this practice was made famous by Van Halen and their M&M’s clause. Their agreements with venues included a clause that their room include a bowl of M&M’s with the brown ones removed or VH could cancel the show without notice or recompense due to breach of contract. The reasons being exactly as you state; if the venue missed something like that, despite the possible consequences, then it was entirely possible that they didn’t follow instructions missed things like power requirements or even safety precautions.
Yeah, it was that VH was taking a major-market stage show to places that weren’t used to such involved setups. I recall that on one occasion the M&Ms were wrong, so David Lee Roth (being DLR) started breaking stuff and caused $1,000+ worth of damage. Meanwhile, improper setup of the stage at that same show had caused $10,000+ in damages.
I read that story somewhere recently and seem to remember that the damage caused by DLR, even in his own words, was closer to 50% of the damage caused because the stage had been set up on a floor not build to support it. So good thing they cancelled the show, but still a pretty shitty reaction.
Van Halen would put M&Ms with the brown one removed in the contract, specifically to provide a quick test of whether or not someone cared about the contract- and the structural engineers relied on other parts of the contract regarding venue suitability for safety-of-life stuff, since they brought more lights with them than other bands.
https://www.thisisinsider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9
So a written version of the Battle Chess duck?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess#Development
> An apocryphal story of the development was the invention of “The Duck” (an example of Parkinson’s law of triviality): The producers of the game were known to demand changes to the game, presumably to make their mark on the finished product. To this end, one animator added a small duck around the queen piece, but made sure that the sprite would be easily removable. Come review, the producers, predictably, okayed everything but asked for the duck to be removed.
Eberydhing ish fibe.
I’m eager to see if this starts to become even more drunk/demented as time goes on…
Yeah, I laughed when I saw this. Even went back to older parts to see if that was the first time it happened (it was). That would have been even better if Shamus had been switching a single letter every part and we only noticed now.
Don’t worry, some of us would’ve noticed a single-letter switch before now.
I know, we’d have noticed and called the typo. Maybe that’s why he didn’t do it.
I lol’ed when I read this. And I’m at work <_<.
This really reminds me of that one moment in ME2, I think it’s during Garrus’ recruitment mission with all the mercenaries. You stumble on a room with a lone Asari mercenary, going “I’m actually just a naive innocent person, please let me go”, and in the room there’s a datapad where she goes “actually I eat children hahaha”, but you can’t search the room or do anything before passing judgement on her, so your choices are
A. shoot person professing to be innocent in cold blood, even though you didn’t really have any way of knowing she was a dick
B. let this person immediately go without any suspicion only for the game to tell you “actually, you were dumb, haha”
Except at least it was just a little moment in a big quest, whereas here it’s the resolution of an entire sidequest supposed to be building the world, which makes it far worse.
That was in Samara’s recruitment mission, and yes, the problem of making you choose something then only letting you know the facts after the choice is done (and you can’t do anything else about it) started in ME2.
Maybe they think that’s how you give a game replayability?
Maybe, but that’s a really shitty way to go about it. If anything, it’s more likely that the player will reload a previous save.
So, save scumming as the intended play style?
*cough*
You mean ‘replayability’
“Efficient content exploration”
Thus the title:
Make
Anyone
Save
Scum.
It’s even a clever idea since it’s both the player’s behaviour playing it and the character’s in-universe.
I think that’s fine. It was deliberately set up like that, and in real life you do sometimes have to make choices before knowing the facts. What was Shephers going to do? Temporarily abandon her mission to escort the girl to custody?
Plus the game does show a small cut scene of her sneaking a gun behind her back to shoot you and only going with the sob story when she realises you’ve got her outgunned.
This is called “making a choice with imperfect information” and is how basically every choice in the real world is made. I think giving the player a blueprint to a perfect choice every single time would be HORRIBLE writing. This specific choice is good because a flaw in the writing is that Paragon choices tend to have no flaws or downsides. Do you want to let this person go (and they will become a space nun and donate $10 billion to charity) or kill them (which will make you feel a bit better for a few seconds and imply that you’re a horrible murderer) every time gets REAL old, REAL fast. I enjoy when Paragon seeming choices have very real consequences because life is not so simple as all that. Showing Javik all his memories again makes him commit suicide because he cannot handle all that information emotionally. Giving the PTSD veteran a gun to “feel safer” causes them to go on a shooting spree because they were indoctrinated/insane. Letting the criminal (currently located deep in the den of crime) go scot free means you let a cold hearted criminal escape. I think a mix of “the vicious decision leads to a tragic outcome (some of those Tuchanka outcomes are HORRIFYING)” and “the sappy decision leads to a preventable tragedy” is what gives the decisions weight.
Yeah, but IRL you can go back on decisions you made beforehand when you get new information: You can fall for the “oh, god, I’m so innocent and you SAVED ME!!111!!” story in the heat of the moment, see all the incriminating evidence lying around, go back out of the room you were in and take the obviously lying Baby-Eater of Pure Evil into custody or even shoot them on the spot. They’re not inexplicably GONE, using an escape route that they, for some reason, forgot to use BEFORE risking confrontation with law-enforcers / mercenaries.
That would of course be awesome, but it’s definitely not something the game supports implicitly. If we assume that an extra level of reactivity like that is out of scope because there’s no programmed behaviour for NPC’s doing a real scripted escape from the compound, I’d still rather have this kind of choice than cut it completely.
You could probably write a followup scene where you can catch the criminal in another cutscene if you go to the main entrance immediately, and confront them again – but that’s double the cost for this event compared to the version which is in the game now. The most feasible solution I can think of is giving Shepard a short response on reading the datapad which implies “they got away” if you let them go with good intentions.
In other words, you can’t really expect a game of this scale to provide a real simulation of this kind of reactivity, so it’s all down to how economically the writers can cheat.
If the game is doing that, there’d better be a good reason “wait there for a minute while I think about it” isn’t an option. It’s one thing if they run and you have to stop them now or never, it’s another if they stand there and you can’t just leave them standing there in plain view while gathering information in slightly-behind-them plain view.
I’m thinking of Grim Dawn, where a dying man tells you his partner shot him, then the partner says the dead guy tried to rape his daughter, and the game doesn’t let you even check to see if the guy has a daughter before making the “let him go” or “shoot him” choice. (Even worse in that the dead guy says there’s only the two of them, so if there’s a daughter at all you’d know he’s lying.)
I think no choice is the better option there. Bad choices leave bad tastes.
There was a reason – you were in the middle of a time-sensitive mission, and she was ready to bolt. You’re a schmuck who fell for a sob story as a ruse by a murderer trying to prey on your noble nature to save her own skin.
So can we play someone who isn’t a moron making snap judgements? That doesn’t seem too much to ask.
Alright, so I had to go watch the Spoiler Warning episode with that merc, and it looks like the reveal is several rooms away behind a pack of mooks, so it’s fine that you can’t do anything at that point. But it also seems like if you interrogate her instead of shooting her immediately, the game locks you into letting her go, which is a bad call.
(Season 4 Episode 24)
In that case there was an escape route. She just had to follow the corpses Shepard and Space Friends left behind to the elevator taking her out of the compound. She also couldn’t really use it before, because she would have been shot. Also, I think you could report her to the police if you found the datapad, so at least she would be on the run.
I think that kind of stuff is just fine if used in moderation, and the events aren’t stupid enough to give you migraine. Which doesn’t appear to be the case with ME:A.
The thing is – she bolts, and is gone by the time you actually have the incriminating evidence.
However, the “Initiation into [Mercenary Outfit] requires murdering someone” was also pre-established before that point, so keen players knew she was a murderer even before we knew WHO she killed, and how she killed them.
Honestly, I think it was a great choice (And, IIRC, it didn’t give Paragade points, to prevent people from being “I need to do this stupid thing just so I can remain The Big Good” about it).
I think the big problem with this choice is the delivery. Discovering a short diary log that pointed out that she’d fooled you after you make your choice is made was clumsy and unsubtle; it feels like the writer cheating.
Compare with a quest in Fallout: New Vegas – you come across a farm that’s having trouble producing crops. Something is irradiating the soil; almost certainly that vault full of feral ghouls nearby. If the crop yields don’t go up the farms will have to be abandoned.
So you get hired to go into the vault and see if you can stop the radiation leak. But once you fight your way to the reactor core you find a note on a terminal that says there’s a group of vault survivors holed up in the reactor chamber (I think?), and they’re running out of food & water.
The situation turns out thus: you can either seal the reactor (help the farmers but dooming the survivors) or unlock the door (meaning the leak can never be sealed and dooming the farms – but helping the trapped people).
I picked ‘seal the leak’ on the basis that I had no idea how old the help message was; I reasoned the survivors were long dead anyway.
Turns out that that was the wrong choice: the survivors were ghouls and very much alive…and, regardless of which choice you make the farms get abandoned anyway!
But – long story short – I didn’t feel ‘cheated’ by the situation like I did in Mass Effect. Part of it was that more effort was put into setting up the situation, making it feel like ‘hard luck’ much more than a moral choice being set up by a writer.
And New Vegas in general was a game in which that quest could have gone differently – including the ‘help’ message being 200+ years old.
You didn’t feel ‘cheated’ in that situation because nobody was cheating you. You just screwed up based on incomplete information.
The Eclipse merc was designed to ‘cheat’ you if you tried going Stupid Good on her and take her word at face value – she was a dangerous killer who was manipulating your sense of morality to avoid getting herself killed. And it sounds like you’re enough of a sucker that she succeeded.
Either you killed her like every other mook you passed, or you let her go and continue with your mission and she bolts before you have time to realize you let a murderer go. And you don’t have the time or manpower to detain her (And she’s unwilling to cooperate). It would have been a really, really petty waste of resources to have three “Shoot her” options instead of just one (Shoot her when she bolts, shoot her when she tries to backstab you when you try to detain her and look around, shoot her because you want to just shoot her) for what was really a small sidequest.
You got conned by someone actively trying to con you and appealing to a weakness in your moral code, and you’re trying to blame everyone but yourself for it.
Actually, you might be onto something here. During some study classes I participated in, designed to confront students with moral dilemmas, lots and lots of twenty-somethings had visibly no grasp of the concept of moral dilemmas at all beforehand. Given binary choices (which, of course, don’t represent all choices in life) like trolley problems or prisoner dilemmas, they couldn’t get their head around the idea of not being able to make the obviously (in their opinion) best decision of saving everyone in a trolley problem, getting the lowest punishment in a prisoner’s dilemma and other similar decisions.
They tended to argue around simple issues for half an hour, asking for information that was irrelevant to the core of the problem but which would have made their decision easier to them. Still, I don’t like the idea of giving the player this kind of information post decision and not allowing them to do anything about it. When I played the Witcher games and a malevolent spirit had already killed some poor sap and disappeared, I was fine with it, as it was out of reach.
If a person is out of your direct grasp because you let them go, but is still very much around the area? At least give the player the ability to make a call and have the person arrested by someone else off screen or such. Being able to correct a mistake made with more information doesn’t take away from the previous decision imho, and if the designers wish to, they can e.g. still have 2 points to dispense half the paragon/renegade points each.
To be fair, most moral dilemmas are so contrived that it is hard to find the thing that is analogous to morality in the world where those problems take place.
They are only ‘contrived’, because all unnecessary/fluff/confounding elements have been stripped away from them.
Nearly every difficult political, economic, or social problem is, at heart, a variation of the trolley problem. Not all of them have the stakes of life or death, but all of them require a distribution of limited resources – which is what the trolley problem asks you to do.
The ‘fluff’ of real-life problems is important.
For example, is it right for a doctor to secretly murder a patient and harvest their organs in order to save three other patients?
Our gut instinct usually says no. But we can make a utilitarian case for three people surviving rather than one person. Mathematically, three is more than one.
But if we think of it as a real-life event rather than an artificial ‘trolley’ problem, and we’re trying to help as many people as possible (rather than using virtue ethics and just saying, “Murder is evil so don’t do it.”) we should consider questions like, what is the life expectancy of the people receiving these organ transplants? How does the doctor choose who to murder? Will he get caught? Will he go to prison? How many lives will be affected if he does? Will he be setting a bad (or good) example to others with his casual murdering? Will people be scared away from going to hospital by this murder? What else might happen that I haven’t thought of?
Unexpected consequences happen all the time in real life and are very hard to quantify. If we “distribute limited resources” by sending food aid to a country suffering a famine, do all their farmers go bankrupt because no-one buys their produce any more when there’s free food available?
Yes, the fluff is important in real life, but only because each of us holds preferences that tell us how to act in given circumstances (and often, those preferences even fail at doing so). Still, after removing the fluff, the basic structure of the problem remains the same and the added information only serves so you can feel better about yourself, believing you solved the problem in the “best way possible” according to your individual code.
The fluff is necessary to make an argument matching the moral structure of the individual trying to solve it, but that only means we need some rearrangements to change a simple trolley problem into another, slightly less simple trolley problem (Edit: and I think that you yourself technically already admitted it in your comment), for example turning 3 people on the rails into “3 senior citizens on the rails”, and suddenly someone might decide they are less worthy of saving.
As an alternative, you might turn this one trolley problem into a network of rails where the basis is that you “kill” someone, no matter where you try to dispose of the trolley. Yes, that makes the problem way more complicated to present, but it still remains a problem of limited ressources or limited alternatives at the very basis.
How is that different from stripping the thing of all details and trying to then solve it in the “best way possible” so you can feel better about yourself? If the underlying premise/task is not “try to solve in the best way possible”, then what is? I can easily “solve” the trolley problem in the sense that I can suggest an outcome, by letting the three people be run over, then going to the fourth person remaining and strangling them from behind. As said, it’s an outcome, just not one anyone would consider in any way good (unless you hate all other humans, I guess).
I do not see how “decide on an individual basis” is any less valid an answer than “always do X”. It’s not hypocritical or inconsistent to change your answer if the question changes.
Well, that’s the big problem: what you see as the “basic structure” which eliminates all unnecessary details, others see as a farce, because you kind of suggest that the basic structure is enough to “solve” the problem in the same way that stripping a real-life math example of all unnecessary fluff makes it possible to abstract the process into (e.g.) a real-valued function, which we can integrate to get the value we want.
You kind of gloss over the fact that, for some people, you might have stripped away those details that were important to them, and only left a husk of a problem too incomplete to “solve”. E.g. “There is a stick half-buried in the ground. How long is its shadow?” We might be able to make guesstimates and give a ballpark answer, but on the other hand, why should we? At that point, it’s just a farce.
I see, we have a different perspective on the entire issue.
Where you believe the goal was finding an optimal solution, I believe the point is not in finding a solution but in teaching the students (to be clear, I was not the lecturer) or whoever thinks about the issue to understand the concept of moral dilemmas, where a perfect solution is not possible.
Thus I think the details you say you require serve in my opinion only to obscure the real issue: a problem where, however you decide, someone has to suffer for it.
The wish to have information about the people in the example so you can maybe find the one most deserving of saving or dish out some punishment or such thus would by my view only serve to make you feel better about yourself and destroy the point of the exercise.
Also: I never suggested the basic structure is “enough to solve the problem”, since I believe it serves specifically to make clear that there IS no optimal solution to the problem.
The details you claim you need? They are, if you can accept this premise (and maybe I’m wrong about it), totally irrelevant.
It’s not a riddle to be solved, it’s a thought experiment used to ponder a moral dilemma, and as such doesn’t have a perfect solution, even with more information.
I’ve always seen the point as introspection; figuring out what questions you would want to ask, and why. If you want more information, ask yourself the question, and then answer the problem for every possible answer to the question you asked.
Ah, yes, what I refer to as “GRAVITY IS DOWN!” Mostly because I first encountered something similar while tutoring a pre-med student in physics 101 in college. In basic mechanics problems, gravity is down, unless you’re told otherwise. Simple, right? Nope, not for her, as she knew gravity was not always down in real life and therefore it couldn’t be assumed to be down.
In retrospect, it was a very good thing she was forced to take two semesters of elementary physics, as that kind of logical problem-solving was rather alien to her. But man, all I remember is two plus hours of circular arguing, including me pointing out where the textbook said gravity was down unless stated otherwise until I invoked God (aka the professor) and even she had to keep saying it.
The best way to do these things would have been to *not* leave a log behind that betrays that person’s true personality.
You’re confronted by a choice – kill or spare. That’s it. You only have the information you’ve already collected up to that point, you make your decision based on that, and that’s it.
Its not like this choice *matters* from a game perspective. This isn’t something that’s going to come back around. Its just a moral choice in the heat of the moment and, like most of those choices, you’ll never ever know if it was the ‘right’ one.
The left behind datapad is just the writers going ‘stop being such a goody two-shoes’ slap in the face. Its their way to tell-not-show you that their world has ‘moral complexity’ – when the very existence of that datapad is *showing* you that no, it really doesn’t.
The thing is – it’s pre-established that the mercenary crew requires all potential recruits to murder someone to join. She already had her uniform, and there’s a quest to find the murderer of the Volus. And, it doesn’t give Paragade points, to avoid punishing Paragon players for not being Stupid Good.
So the game is pretty much asking “Are you going to let a sob story sway you into releasing a dangerous murderer?” It feels really great being able to play a Paragon who can say “No” there, proving you’re not Stupid Good, instead of having every Innocent Sob Story be true, and every murderer twirl mustaches on sight.
And, I guess it really sucks for the schmucks who got reeled in by her sob-story, so the rest of us can point and laugh and go “HA HA” at you losers for falling for such an obvious ruse.
The problem, though, is that it never asks the player “Why?” in turn. I spared the character because I wasn’t playing a murderer myself and wasn’t going to shoot an unresisting person. But the game gives no option to hold someone for later or whatever. The option is cold-blooded killing or literally nothing. You’re not Stupid Good for choosing nothing in that case.
Then you have to accept the consequences. You had no power to detain her, in the context of the greater mission. There are small things that could have made it better (allowing you to radio the police, for example. And a follow-up email about her arrest if you let her go – maybe letting her get away with another murder or six) but those are nitpicks
Ultimately, the scene worked really well in Mass Effect 2 for anyone not poisoned against the game’s writing. But, it sounds like Andromeda tried to ape it without understanding why it worked.
Yeah, you totally got me. It’s not a badly-written scene with no meaning or relevance in the context of ongoing events and no reason for the PC to care, when it would have been easy to develop a small impact on the immediate plot. It’s just that I was “poisoned” against ME2’s plot, which began with the PC begin killed and then immediately ressurected.
Yes, that plot was just so good and no reasonable person would think it was quite badly written, especially not on this site.
It isn’t a badly-written scene. It ties into Samara’s recruitment mission (She’s the one who killed the volus that was being investigated), and it’s an effective, but not unreasonable subversion of the Paragade system. You were in a room with a murderer who knew she was outgunned, and so tried to appeal to the Commander’s pity to try and escape and survive.
No reasonable person would find it badly written, but salty schmucks unwilling to accept that they got conned would look to blame anyone else but themselves for getting conned by a pretty face with a sob story, with nonsense excuses of “I’m not supposed to care about all the details that made it clear it’s a con, because I hate the writing of other parts” or “I should have even more ways to fix my mistake even though my character is not in a situation to have access to those ways” or “The person who knows she’ll be found out if you carry out an investigation will stand still and not bolt if you try to carry out an investigation”
Shamus Young’s “Narrative Collapse” doesn’t only highlight flaws that exist – it also causes people to interpret everything in the worst possible light, even when it’s not warranted.
“No reasonable person would find it badly written, but salty schmucks unwilling to accept that they got conned ”
Okay. That’s enough name-calling out of you. Sit the rest of this topic out.
Some of these suggestions of how to “improve” the writing aren’t very good, though. You should be allowed to search the room first before deciding? The information that could tip the scale isn’t in the room. You should be able to detain her? How, by leaving a squadmate behind? You are on a mission and have no time for that. The game should just tell you perfect information so that you never have to feel bad? The PURPOSE of the scene is to make you feel bad if you make a certain choice. Law abiding characters need to consider how much mercy is TOO much mercy, and a lot of the other scenarios in the game make this too easy on you. Finally, “the game shouldn’t tell you if you made a mistake or not” is bad too. Yeah, just delete the reason the scene exists at all so that… some people don’t feel bad?
I think the option to “call the police so they catch her on the way out” is good… with a twist. The police should say she “resisted arrest” and they killed her anyway. She’s a murdering gang member and the player should have that knife twist that other sentient beings aren’t just levers they can pull to get perfect outcomes. The police hate this gang and don’t have the same moral code as the player does!
The problem I see is not that I, as the player, have not been given all information but that I haven’t been given any way of behaving cautiously, instead I only have the two extremes. In this case of limited information, how about… restraining the mercenary that has given up?
Either give me enough information to make a choice or give me the choice that fits a situation with limited information. If you don’t do either, it’s simply not very satisfying. Games don’t always have to emulate real life.
Or to put it another way – are handcuffs not a thing?
Surely my omni-tool is capable of producing a set of semi-decent restraints on request.
I’m even fine with being told later that the “police” or whatever more-or-less passes for them found that they’d escaped, shot them on sight, or apprehended them nicely and they were tried, convicted and given an appropriate prison sentence.
Or indeed, never finding out what actually happened.
Of course, the first two are far more likely given the rest of the situation…
And the last is the cheapest possible.
Thanes recruitment mission – it was slightly (only slightly) better than described in that there is some flavour text either in the game or codex that says eclipse mercy have to kill to join, so the info is there… but not well presented and pretty easy to miss. So, if you’ve been entirely concentrating across the whole game, and reading all the encyclopaedia you have a small chance of an informed decision? Not so great
It might depend on who your squadmates are, but I remember one of them repeating that information after you decide to let her go. Gee, thanks buddy–that information would have been useful 5 seconds ago!
Well that comes with another problem, in that you’ve…been paying close attention to the plot of Mass Effect 2.
This can do a lot of damage, and require drastic measures to recover from.
That is the sort of medicine I will happily shovel down.
I struggle to make it through this series at times, since the subject matter doesn’t lend itself to analysis that goes much deeper than, GOD this is stupid and WOW it’s unbelievable this shares the same name (and not much more at this point) with a trilogy of videogames that have some really good parts in it (your mileage may vary).
But then the analysis switches to deep cuts like this:
And I remember why I come to this site daily :)
This isn’t some obscure knowledge that’s been lost to the mists of time.
While I never caught much of the Shamecast (Damn you, Different Time Zones!), that “unplugged” reaction was the most delicious thing I’ve seen this week!
I just want to note that “bacteria” is a plural noun; the singular is “bacterium”. >_>
I could see that ‘drug-dealing tyrant vs selfless doctor’ quest actually working as a pretty nasty moral dilemma, if you did that thing that was famously changed ending-slides from Fallout. Where the scum-bag is efficient and creates a nasty city that actually works now but will be a den of injustice for generations… while the good-guy is a naive blue-eyed idiot that will ultimately create something nicer and civilized but kill a lot of people getting there.
The colonies are all in do or die mode, after all. It would make more then a bit of sense having to perform hard ‘triage’ choices like that.
Exactly. With a bit of a rewrite/effort put in, this choice could work really well.
The ‘good’ doctor actually has ulterior motives.
Without a monopoly on the drug, Sloane’s rule will fall apart and the colony descends into chaos.
The drug needs a complex lab and a load of expertise to produce – Sloane simply ran the good doctor out and replaced him with someone willing to abuse the knowledge. So your choice is ‘kill the Asari in cold blood for a greater good’ vs ‘don’t get involved, keep your hands clean’ vs ‘try to reason with the Asari’.
Or hell, even a mercenary choice would work: the Asari doctor offers to pay you money to not take away her magic drug formula. The good doctor is penniless.
So you do the selfish thing…and walk away richer. That makes sense (barring the magic formula that ONLY ONE person can have because Reasons.)
It would even work if the problem was worked in a different way:
The doctor has good motives and the best intentions, but due to his uneconomic mind he can barely produce enough of the bacteria/formula/whatever it actually is to fight back against disease in the city.
In the other case, Sloane sells the stuff as a drug, but she has no control over the actual way people use it. While many fall victim to addiction and the city suffers from severe disfunction due to massive drug abuse, the general health still turns out to be better than under the doctor’s regime because people spread the drug as an antibiotic as well, thanks to information gained FROM the doctor.
It turns out spreading information about a drug that’s sold freely (though expensive/at market value) is way easier for him to do than running the economic operation of its production if he has at least some source of income except the drug.
It also reminds me of a similar choice in Dragon Age Origins with the dwarven succession.
If you go with the nice old dude who likes and supports you, he ends up leading the dwarves into a slow decline as he clings to their rigid cast system and habits.
While if you go with the bastard who plays political games, dislikes and distrusts you, and betrays you in the dwarven noble background, he ends up reforming and revitalizing their society and reversing centuries of decline in a few decades.
From what I remember of the game, Bhelen, the Machiavellian candidate to the Dwarven throne was running on a policy of loosening restrictions for the downtrotten castless.
So, while the Dwarven Noble background Warden is personally betrayed by Bhelen, the Dwarven Commoner background Warden actually has an interest in supporting him. And the wiki even says that Bhelen took the Dwarven Commoner’s half-sister as his concubine, making the connection even stronger.
You mean that city where two good businessmen in the same town are hiring people to kill each other even though they aren’t in competition with each other? Is the ‘good guy’ the one who asks you to record a confidential conversation before hiring you for a kidnapping or murder?
The good guy is the one who won’t make any kind of move without due process; in Fallout, if you visit Killian Darkwater first, the first thing that happens is someone hired by Gizmo tries to assassinate Darkwater and he still refuses to retaliate against Gizmo without sufficient evidence. You can only make a move against Gizmo with Darkwater’s blessing by first getting proof that Gizmo hired you to kill Darkwater, making Gizmo very clearly in the wrong.
You can argue that Gizmo running the brothel and casino doesn’t automatically make him the bad guy, but in optional conversations it’s also implied that the local troublemaking gang is on his payroll and doing things like shaking down competing businesses for protection money.
The deleted ending Mattias refers to is the one where Gizmo is implied to be a better ruler of the town than Darkwater, meaning that your choice boiled down to propping up an openly amoral but benevolent dictator vs. a principled self-righteous extremist. But apparently someone didn’t like that particular bit of moral ambiguity and made Darkwater’s ending the good one (and had Gizmo die ignominiously in his ending)
If you’re going to go down this road though, I think you need a higher standard of writing than Andromeda managed to pull off. The player should have the information available to them to read into the situation and make an educated guess as to how that’s going to play out in the future.
For this specific example, Sloane needs to be less Stupid Evil and to be shown to be holding the city together, even if you don’t like her. The player needs more expose to Doctor Forgettable Name and a chance to see their naivete and idealism. The whole game world needs to be of a standard where the player would consider reading the personalities at hand and making a better guess.
If you can uphold that standard of quality the whole way through, you create a masterpiece. If you just slap “consequences” into the post-credits sequence it’s a really cheap “GOTCHA” moment and the player might throw their controller.
Shamus during the unplugging scene on the stream is literally me while reading this. How did they manage to make the game so stupid? Hoooow? Aaargh! I think I’m getting a nosebleed.
Maybe instead of formula they meant patent, and for some reason everyone on this world REALLY respects intellectual property rights.
This makes so much sense! Just think of the possibilities! We could have a sequel where the Kett steal the patent for the omnitool, so that our heroes can no longer use it! Then, the Angara could steal the patent for Biotics, and now our intrepid heroes will have to find some other ways to blast bad guys. Or, we could have someone totally new steal the license for the software running the Nexus, and we have to buy and install a new OS as quickly as possible!
Man, the stories BioWare will be able to tell….
If this plot doesn’t end with me shooting “Bonerfarts” in a frozen tundra I am not buying it.
I loved that quest… Especially the fact that the HUD evolved with the quest !
Oooh – this is the future. Patents are AI contracts. They are literally self-enforcing.
And patents can be physically controlled by anyone who has physical access to them.
Is it just me, or is it becoming more and more common for works that take themselves very, very seriously to have plot holes or, at least, problematic things in their plots that we can find better ways to solve with five minutes of thought?
After watching that part of the livestream, I can fix this with one small replacement: “I tried unplugging it but … I couldn’t”. The SAM tells you the reason: it’s a two person job because you have to release it from the device itself AND from the plug at the “outlet” to unplug it, and that has to be done roughly simultaneously. Problem solved.
For the drug lab, it’s pretty easy to at least come up with a more interesting choice by simply having Sloane be the one who found it first and started producing it as a drug, but the doctor has discovered that it would work pretty well as an antibiotic that they sorely need. Now, at least, you have the choice between helping people at the cost of taking something away from the person who would be the rightful owner. A really clever writer could find a way to allow you to convince Sloane to let the doctor use it for medicine, too.
Plus, you can use the fact that using a substance that is highly addictive is a REALLY bad idea for a medicine to introduce an interesting choice. The plants or whatever are naturally occurring and can’t be cultivated. There is no way to refine out the addictive properties to make a medicine that doesn’t have those side effects. However, the doctor has come up with a way to genetically alter them so that they’ll produce the medicine parts without the drug parts. He wants you to go in and alter some of them so that they’ll reproduce and, eventually, all of them will only produce the medicine and not the drug.
This would explain why Sloane’s facility is built way out there: that’s where the things are. It would explain why Sloane will lose all ability to make the drug if you do this. It would explain why she’ll kill the scientist for allowing you to do that. Combine it with the above change and you have a choice between producing a needed medicine and destroying the rightful property of Sloane. And this is a choice that even doesn’t map well to the Paragon/Renegade idea and so is a good one for a game that has abandoned it: ignoring legal ownership for a benefit seems Renegade, but helping people by providing medicine by removing an addictive drug seems Paragon.
Again, five minutes of thought. I agree with the questions of how in the world things like this slip through professional playing and editing.
SAM’s reason is *also* stupid. What happens if the cables *aren’t* unplugged at both ends simultaneously? Does the electricity somehow jump the air gap and keep flowing? Does it plug itself back in?
You’d need another line of technobabble or something: “There’s a lot of current in those cables and it could fry you if you try to unplug it while it’s running. I need to stay at the console and technobabble at the right moment so that doesn’t happen.”
And even that implies a design for the machine that would make every member of OSHA spin in their collective graves. “So, you built this gigantic, hazardous, high-voltage machine and *didn’t* include some sort of circuit breaker in case that electricity started flowing where you didn’t want it?”
Easy answer? You can’t, because the seals are under some kind of magnetic tension where you might be able to unhook them separately but you’d never be able to remove either end separately, and power flows until at least one end is removed.
While oddly dangerous designs aren’t something that surprising in science fiction, here you could have a manual circuit breaker but it would only be temporary and they need to shut the whole thing down … and wouldn’t be long enough to unhook it. It’s not unrealistic that a highly advanced system might rely on the computer diagnostics to shut things down in case of a problem, and there’s no problem here other than that it’s using power that the humans would like back.
Really, the key thing here is to find an explanation for why it’s a two-person job. It’s pretty easy to come up with relatively realistic explanations for that which have a lot less plot holes than what the writers actually came up with.
There are quite a few types of connector in common use right now that can’t be (safely) disconnected by a single person.
They’re very large of course, but that is definitely not a problem in Mass Effect – or even any game.
I believe there is only rarely ever something like professional editing in place anymore.
a) For years people have complained in media (at least in Germany) that editors are not paid enough to do their job anymore and thus look for more lucrative work elsewhere.
b) I have been in several job interviews where I was to be hired as an editor. While I believe I’d be able to provide superior work to what I’m currently used to from our media, I was able to confirm first hand that editors are severely underpaid and overworked.
c) The criteria for hiring editors are on occasion ridiculous, as I was able to find out through another job interview a few years back at Nintendo’s German localization office: By every metric given, I was the best candidate interviewed that day, except one: I don’t exactly enjoy Nintendo’s colorful safe-for-children style (and some specific games I was asked about…), so someone else was hired. The other applicant had made multiple glaring mistakes during her editing exercise, had admittedly zero experience in the field (I don’t have much experience, but still more than she did) and a lower degree of education but got the job because I didn’t enthusiastically enjoy the prospect of editing Barbie games…
Sadly, I consider the Kadara stuff to be some of the best story this game has to offer. Perhaps the closest thing that this game has to a decision that matters is deciding which faction ultimately ends up controlling the port. But it also has things like this silly drug/anti-biotic quest.
I’ve always assumed that a lot of this stuff was some first draft writing that was supposed to go through a proper QA process, but they just ran out of time and resources and just said “Let’s just go with what we’ve got. It’s not like Bioware fans would play this game because they’re expecting a quality story or engaging characters.”
Sloane annoyed me too much that even in my second playthrough I let Reyes’s sniper shoot her. What does choosing Sloane get you, aside from her making the cameo in the final battle to say “We got your back Ryder” instead of Reyes?
The only two decisions I can recall making a difference is if you choose to save Drack’s scouts (instead of the Salarian Pathfinder) you will not encounter any more uplifted Krogan units in the game. Allegedly if you accept Primus’s deal to betray the Archon the final battle will be “easier,” but in my second playthrough I was playing on a harder difficulty so I didn’t notice any appreciable change.
And it’s worth noting that the repercussions of those choices are “harder combat” which, if you found the combat system in this game fun (and I definitely did) and wanted a challenge, the Salarian Pathfinder v. Drack’s Scouts choice broke down differently. Saving the Salarian Pathfinder is already a tempting option because she’s the most competent member of the Initiative you get to meet, but there’s the added layer of “And do you want some challenging fights or EZ mode?” which meant that pissing off Drack was a no-brainer.
People often talk about “choices that matter” within the context of Bioware games, but I don’t know that there’s a good unified theory about what that really means.
I think that a general consensus of the definition would be “a choice that fundamentally changes the direction of the narrative,” which I think is a pretty solid criteria. But in that sense, I would say that there’s only one such choice in our venerated Mass Effect 1 – deciding between Kaiden or Ashley. It visibly affects how the rest of the game plays out. And I’m jumping in with a quick edit to add that killing Wrex could be a pretty big deal. There are other choices that people would argue are big choices, like sparing or killing the Rachni queen, or helping the council versus leaving them to their fate. But what do those choices actually affect within the game itself? Some bits of dialogue? Of course a lot of these choices did eventually crop up in the later games (with varying degrees of success), but I don’t think that we can apply these decisions retroactively to the first game if we’re going by the strictest definition of “choices that matter.”
So I can’t help but wonder about the measuring stick that we apply to Andromeda when we gig the game for not having decisions that matter. By the strictest definition, one could argue that ME1 was almost as bad. Of course, it’s easy to argue that ME1 did a lot of other things right to the point that we can give it a pass on this particular gripe and I can comfortably live with that argument.
But I feel like there should be some sort of sub-category I’ll call “choices that will eventually matter.” ME1 had some of those. Heck – even interacting with Conrad Verner ended up carrying a through-line into ME3. But I feel like if we’re going to compare apples to apples here, it seems worth stating that ME:A was replete with this sort of choice. Deciding between Sloane/Reyes, how we handle the Kett facility/the Cardinal on Eos, the ancient AI from Eos, who is the Asari pathfinder and the Salarian pathfinder – these choices could be potentially huge in the sequels that Bioware assumed would happen. And in this sense, I’d say that the Kadara choice is a pretty big one that, like the rest, just so happened to not pan out in the long run.
I think that for me to feel good about dinging Andromeda about not having choices that matter, what I really need to ding Bioware for is hubris. They treated this game more like a complicated lab experiment that they could charge us AAA prices for while they punted all of the actual narrative to the next game that they presumed absolutely must happen because they regarded the franchise as too big to fail.
And if we’re willing to entertain the idea of comparing apples to oranges for a moment, I feel like it’s completely fair to say that Andromeda has a huge benefit of hindsight that the earlier ME games didn’t have: They’ve had multiple ME and DA games that they should have learned how important it is that “choices that matter” really means “choices that matter right now” and included such choices in the game as they’ve learned the lessons from previous games.
I would say that this game did a lot of things wrong narratively and that many of those bad choices stemmed from Bioware deciding to punt any actual story to presumed sequels that may very well never come. But I think that I feel okay with calling the Sloane/Reyes choice as one that mattered within the context of the game even though it had little outward affect in this story as-is. But I can also admit that I’m splitting hairs on this one.
Hanlon’s corollary – never attribute to ingenuity that which you could adequately explain as incompetence, either.
Hanlon’s razors killed thousands. At trial he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but not to murder.
I place “skin”-deep changes in the category of “choices that don’t matter.” In Cora’s loyalty mission you have to choose the Asari pathfinder – either keeping the current one whose bad call got the original Asari pathfinder killed or punishing her for that call and promoting a junior officer to be pathfinder.
This seems like a big choice, but you’re basically choosing between skins for the Asari pathfinder. Sarissa, the one with the questionable judgment, is more light blue and has dark triangular facial tattoos. Vederia, the junior officer, is more purple and has white tattoos around her eyes. Their actions for the rest of the game are basically identical although you’ll get slight changes like, “Thanks a lot, Ryder. I’ll try my best to: atone for my mistake/live up to the faith you put in me,” with only the line’s finish depending on what choice you ended up making. It seems like a lot of the “choices that matter” in Andromeda ended up being “skin”-deep.
That’s on a continuum with Saving/Not Saving the Council in ME1. Depending on your choice you get a differently skinned Asari/Salarian/Turian talking to you at the end thanking you for saving the day. However, the dialogue is sufficiently different within the first game that it feels like your choice meant something. It’s not just “We feel glad you chose to save us” vs. “We feel sad you chose not to save the Destiny Ascension.” They put enough good writing in that contrasts the new council vs. the old council that there’s a difference in game experience even though practically there’s not that much. (in ME2 they basically erase any difference between the choices, so I’m just talking about the immediate effects it has in ME1)
And then at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you choose to Kill Wrex you have to deal with Wreav in the sequels and that produces an entirely different game experience. Even though Killing Wrex is bad because Wrex is awesome, you should do it once just to see a whole different tone and tenor to your Tuchanka experiences without him. But that requires a bunch more writing, animation, and voice acting and while it would be nice to expect this amount of writing out of a game, it’s not really practical for too many decisions.
But I agree with you that we need to define what we mean about “choices that matter” better. I thought Andromeda did an excellent job with the First Murder quest and I thought for awhile about what to do on that one. It seems very similar to the Rachni Queen choice in ME1 in that it invites a good amount of thought but has no real payoff in the game in which you make the choice. But the First Murder quest seems worse by comparison in a game where you choose whether or not to have a Science or a Military Outpost and it only changes a few lines of dialogue, or the Asari pathfinder choice and so on.
I don’t think it’s fair to pin the relative irrelevance of “Killing/Sparing the Rachni Queen” and “Sacrificing Council/Alliance Navy to save Council” on Mass Effect 1. We can’t be retroactive in our judgement – just because later author(s) didn’t take advantage of them doesn’t mean they didn’t matter within the experience of the first game as it happened. If you played these games at launch instead of years later, when you set down your controller at the end of the game you would say that those were meaningful decisions.
Blame Mass Effect 3 for having the Rachni Queen’s death/survival being kinda irrelevant (likely because they wanted to use the Ravager unit one way or another); when the credits rolled on ME1 the consequences of that choice were still up in the air, with a threat of “maybe it’ll matter a lot to our descendants three generations from now”.
Blame Mass Effect 2 for exactly fuckall changing about the Council and it’s irrelevant degrees of human influence. Again, when the credits rolled on ME1 that did seem like a substantial plot hook.
Don’t blame Mass Effect 1 for not having any choices that ended up mattering in the long run.
No one is doing that.
We’re saying that both choices work really well in the context of the game in which they appear. The decision to save the Council happens at the very end of the game and so EVEN THOUGH only a limited amount of dialogue changes in ME1 depending on what you choose, the decision feels momentous. And the repercussions of saving the Rachni Queen are left tantalizingly open. In ME1 itself though, it doesn’t actually matter what you choose about the Rachni Queen. It has no effect on the story after the Noveria debrief.
But what BlueBlazeSpear said, and I agree, is that we tend to judge Andromeda harshly for having a bunch of choices that don’t really matter in game, but those decisions could have mattered in a future with Andromeda sequels. Sure the decision between Sloane and Reyes doesn’t seem crucially important at the end of this game, but if you’re willing to give ME1 plaudits for having consequences up in the air, you have to do the same for Andromeda.
Yeah – that’s really all I was getting at. I’m just a nerd who likes to see a standard of measurement applied equally. Technically, we’re all just laymen here voicing our own opinions and we’re not held to any particular “rules of engagement” like a publicized critic might be when speaking about a game, but if we’re making an honest attempt at literally and contextually criticizing it, it would be nice to have some sort of standard in place in addition to our personal feelings.
Really, I don’t think we even have to quantify these choices as “good” or “bad,” but I do think that we owe it to ourselves to put them on an equal playing field. For myself, I can say that I consistently saved the Rachni queen in ME1 and always felt good about it in that moment. But that was the end of it. The council was slightly preachy about it, but nothing else changed. Any time after that when I ran into Rachni, they still mindlessly attacked me just as surely as if I had killed the queen (but for good narrative reasons). But that didn’t make it less important when I was making the choice.
If anything, the Sloane/Reyes choice affected Andromeda more than the Rachni queen or the council surviving in ME1. In my first playthrough of Andromeda, I found the Collective base on Kadara before I sided with the Outcasts or the Collective and I was allowed into the base and helped them with a quest. I later sided with Sloane and when I came back, they were hostile. On a second playthrough, I sided with Reyes and they stayed friendly with me for the entire game. On a third playthrough (I know), I sided with Sloane before ever finding the base and they were instantly hostile and I never even got the chance to do their quest.
I’m perfectly fine with people saying that they didn’t enjoy the Sloane/Reyes choice, but I will raise an eyebrow if the argument is that it’s because the choice didn’t matter. Because if we’re using this unit of measure on whether a choice “matters” or not, then I would argue that only two choices really mattered in ME1 and the rest was flavor-text fluff. And any argument made that these choices in ME1 went on to be important in later games I would regard as disingenuous because we’ve yet to get later games for Andromeda to see how these choices would’ve stacked up in comparison. And maybe we never will.
Oh goodie! Shamus put a link to some REALLY stupid CSI dialogue in his article.
*follows link, watches video, listens to dialogue intently looking for holes in the words*
Well, I guess it was Hollywood hacker bullshit, but it wasn’t particularly unique Hollywood hacker bullsh-
*pause*
Wait, were both of those characters just using the same keyboard and monitor!?
…I’ll just leave my “engineer,” “computer nerd,” and “human being with half a brain” cards here and go clean out my desk for taking that long to notice…
Are you telling me that you can’t make a computer work better by slapping the keyboard harder, faster and more randomly?!
They weren’t fighting a hacker, they were playing Space War.
Had that same experience with the quest of protesters on the Nexus way earlier. Un-Stasis their relatives, even though you cannot feed them, or let the guards gun those people down. Where the obvious choice is: Put the protesters back to stasis!
After that I didn’t care for this binary choice nonsense any more. I didn’t really listens to the words they said and took the obvious right choice.
That is probably the reason, why most binary choices have those neon lights of “good” and “bad” above them. Else the player have to think about the problem at hand and finds the better solutions 3 to 8 in less than 2 Minutes.
Y’know, I think I could make the power cord mess work with only a few changes to dialogue:
After “I tried to unplug it, but – nothing.”, add “The plug is locked in place, probably by magnets.”
When you scan (or whatever that Detective Mode / Witcher Senses is) the machine, it reads (with no dialogue required): “This machine is currently in Emergency Mode. It draws additional power to sustain security measures, including a Magnetic Lock on its plugs. This Lock cannot be deactivated until the machine leaves Emergency Mode.”
Then a short one-liner from the Dabbling Unplugger that she knows how to override Emergency Mode, but she’ll need to stay at the machine to do so.
Sorted.
Sort of.
Pretty much the same idea as mine above, although with more detail in it …
“At another point you need to free up some electrical power on a spaceship. There’s a machine using tons of energy. An Asari woman tries to shut it down. She tells you, “I tried unplugging it, but… nothing.” ”
What? Isn’t machines continuing to function after being unplugged cinematic shorthand for “the machine is haunted”?
Did ME:A embraced the true supernatural all of a sudden?
Maybe this qualifies as “details first”, but the whole point of an antibiotic is that it kills bacteria.
Is it vaguely possible that a bacteria could produce an antibiotic? Sure. But I’d love to see how that evolved to be selective enough to kill all bacteria except itself.
There’s a reason penicillin comes from a fungus, which is in an entirely different kingdom and is therefore dissimilar enough from bacteria that the antibiotic it produces doesn’t affect it.
Alcohol is produced by bacteria and lethal to them in large concentrations. That’s why you can’t have stronger wine/beer/whatever than roughly 20% vol. without distillation: the bacteria producing it literally pollute themselves to death.
Alcohol is generally produced from yeast, which is a fungus. Highest yeast tolerance that I’m aware of off the top of my head is 23% ABV.
Damn, you’re totally right! Derped hard there.
Alcohol is usually produced by yeasts, which are fungi, not bacteria. [Well, this is redundant now.]
The idea that one bacteria would produce a compound that is harmful to other bacteria isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. There are plants, for example, that produce chemicals that poison other plants. It’s called alleopathy. The thing that amuses me is the idea of an anti-bacterial bacteria. The way Shamus describes it, it sounds as though it’s the bacteria itself that is antibiotic rather than some compound that the bacteria produces–as if it were the mold penicillium that were used to treat bacterial infections rather than the chemical penicillin. I’m imagining the doctor telling a patient: “Okay, open wide while I pour this culture of alien microorganisms down your throat!” Now I’m wishing that I hadn’t imagined that, because it’s gross.
There are apparently some bacteria that eat certain other bacteria. Some scientists are trying to turn them into an antibiotic by genetically engineering them to eat only the “right” bacteria, so I suppose that the idea of an antibiotic bacteria isn’t quite as silly as it sounds. But the idea that an alien bacteria has evolved in such a way that it can already be used in such a fashion is, if not ridiculous, at the very least a staggeringly unlikely coincidence.
Antibiotics don’t kill bacteria specifically – though some do – they kill *microorganisms*. Some antibiotics kill fungus. They don’t kill viruses because the way antibiotics work is that they’re basically poisons (they screw up some metabolic process) – this is contrasted with things like bleach which physically destroy the organism’s structure – and viruses don’t have those.
So a bacteria could produce an antibiotic. It will just be one that its more immune to than whatever it evolved the AB to kill – likely a close competitor microorganism.
Bacteria in real life produce antibiotics specifically to accomplish this.
Here’s my shot at explaining how the writing is this bad:
This was made by Bioware Montreal. Earlier we saw the baffling bit of grammar “you flawed ignorant”, which is a valid construction in French. What if this entire game was written in French, by French people, and then localized by Bob’s Discount Translations two weeks before launch?
On the one hand, it doesn’t seem likely, but on the other hand, it’s the only theory I can find that explains our observations without either deliberate malice or monkeys-at-keyboards levels of incompetence.
This isn’t wonky phrasing though, it’s the foundational shapes and concepts of fiction being used really badly.
From my experience the French are absolute masters at writing about things happening arbitrarily and a character’s choices ultimately meaning zip, so you’d think they’d be perfect for Bioware plots.
I’m going with “instead of farming whole scenes to each writer”, every writer was helping with every scene, and they were given only vague prompts and then no writer was given the task of unifying each scene’s points. The plant that’s a formula that’s a bacteria sounds like three different authors were told “they have an anti-biotic thing that’s the quest hook here.”
Then you get some major time crunch and then filling out the minimal dialog for every planned scene becomes more important than editing each scene.
Worse. It was written in English – but Montreal is in Quebec so everything has to have a French translation and that translation has to be more prominent than the English. So they ran it through Google Translate really quick – because everything on this game is done half-arsed.
Then the VA director needed the script in English for the English localization but didn’t have time so he had an intern run it back through Google Translate.
Clearly, she’s been treating herself with the antibiotic drug.
…I’ll show myself out.
i chuckled
This reminds me of an episode of Leverage that drove me bonkers.
The episode starts with a graduate student at a university who has engineered a GMO potato to be especially nutritious; she’s going to give it away to the poor because she’s a good person. The Evil International Agriculture corp. thinks she’s going to cost them a lot of money this way, so they send in thugs to steal the potato. The Leverage team has to steal it back.
It’s so ridiculous in all the ways the Oblivion story above is ridiculous. They stole a single potato . . . okay? It’d be a farce of science if she didn’t somehow have more than just a single potato from all of her work. Not to mention the fact that she would have ample documentation from having turned “normal potatoes” into “super potatoes;” there’s zero chance she couldn’t replicate that work.
But the documentation is what’s crucial there. See, she’s not some helpless grad student, because everything she creates at the university . . . belongs to the university. So when she says, “Evil International Agriculture corp. stole my work and is profiting off of it. I have proof,” the university lawyers are going to see a chance for the school to make a lot of money.
Could EIA still prevail in court? Yeah, possibly. It’s not as if the process is foolproof. But they’d certainly be wary about the incredible PR hit they’d get from that.
And at the end of the day, noble grad student still has her work, which she can still apply to any other staple crop to help feed the poor. Her expertise (and now, notoriety for standing up to EIA) is still going to get her a pretty lucrative career on the whole.
Or it’s just funny because Evil International Agriculture corp gets a comeuppance over stealing a potato. But it’s terrible writing all the same.
Come on, I think you know exactly what the answer to that is. The real question is whether you want to answer it, or dance around it.
What do you think the exact answer is?
Penicillin addiction.
I’m reasonably sure Robert Bloch wasn’t drunk when he wrote Catspaw, but it’s probably one of the most un-Star Trek-y episodes of Star Trek ever written. It has witches, a haunted castle and curses, which are all very at-odds with the traditional Star Trek “details-first” aesthetic. There were a number of reasons for that – Robert Bloch was primarily a horror writer; it was a Halloween episode (according to Memory Alpha, the only holiday-themed episode of Trek ever); and it was still relatively early in the series, when it was still finding its feet.
Star Trek–especially the original series–is not details-first. Any given episode of Star Trek is very much high-concept first, half-hearted technobabble explanation later (or quite possibly never).
“Captain, I’m reconfiguring the main deflector array to send out a concentrated beam of quantum chronotron particles directly into the target at irregular intervals via subspace. That should disrupt the anomaly at a sub-atomic level giving us the chance to engage our impulse engines and escape!”
“Wow, that sounds complicated. Are you going to have to do much to make that happen?”
“Not at all, Captain. I can do it without leaving my seat. In fact, I did most of it while I was explaining what it was I was doing. Oh, whaddya know, it worked first time!”
Ah, Star Trek technobabble. I love it.
That was more TNG era. TOS era you had to have Scotty complain that it can’t be done and his engines can’t take it until Spock throws out some obscure theory that happens to work, but usually involves Scotty and Spock doing lots of things until finally getting it to work at the very last minute.
Since when is Star Trek details first?
*) The ship moves at plot speed — regardless of how fast or slow it could move in other episodes, it moves exactly as fast or slow as the plot requires.
*) The shields absorb exactly plot damage — regardless of how much they could or could not take in other episodes, they provide exactly the level of protection required to put the ship in danger or not as the plot requires now.
*) The weapons do exactly plot damage — regardless of how much or how little damage they could do in other episodes, they can only damage enemies exactly the amount required by the plot.
*) The technobabble is effectively random — regardless of what words may or may not have meant in other episodes, they mean the heroes can accomplish or not accomplish whatever the plot requires this episode.
*) The ship layout isn’t a thing that matters — regardless of what rooms are mentioned in other episodes, they exist or do not exist in this episode as the plot requires (especially any mention of secondary transporters – if the crew needs to be stranded for the plot, then all the backup transporters magically disappear when the main one is compromised)
It has always, *always* been a plot-driven series, where the technical details are just decorated magic.
“Does this coffee maker make espresso?”
“Yes but it’s a little complicated. First you open the top and put in some special rare plants that have common bacteria growing on them. Then you repair the decrypted signal coming from the machine. Then you activate this transponder over here. Then you unplug it. Then press one of the three colored buttons, it doesn’t matter which one. A few minutes later, you have espresso!”
So I’m sure this is something a lot of other people might say/think, but nevertheless, here’s a thought experiment:
How true is any of the above? Not sure. Just my take on how something like this might happen.
Agh.
I realise there’s no point analysing the dead horse, but also: Hey, you know what makes REALLY LOUSY antibiotics? Something that people are pumping a slight variant of into themselves indiscriminately the next dome over.
And, you know why drugs are expensive? BECAUSE THEY’RE ILLEGAL. If you run your own little pirate dome, you can make drugs cheap. Regular earth drugs. If you want people’s money, you can just take it. Or jack up the cost of food or oxygen. The only reason for drugs is if you’re trying to keep people too doped up to rebel, but that seems bad for a space installation.
How did this happen? Honestly, I guess that even with so many people on the project, the effort was wasted elsewhere, and we ended up with someone cobbling together something that scans right even if it doesn’t pass the sniff test. And because “looking polished” (even, uh, very badly) is prioritised over “makes any sense”, once you have some kind of cut scene, any kind, there’s a big resistance to changing any of the dialogue.
Opium was legal, but literal wars were fought over it and it was a highly lucrative product. Likewise, crack became widespread because it was a lower-cost version of cocaine. Illegality is not the only barometer of price.
The First Opium War happened after China made opium illegal; the British kept selling it anyway so they could afford to keep buying enormous quantities of tea (since China didn’t want to buy anything else they had to offer).
Today in literally-every-sidequest-in-every-modern-“role playing”-game theatre:
On the other hand without this drivel, all of the deliberately silly sidequests in NieR: Automata would be nowhere near as delightful as they are. I guess EA/Bethesda/Ubisoft do have some use after all!
When all you’ve got is a bunch of bullets, you know what they say about every problem…
No seriously. That’s often the actual daily proposition of a job in mission design: we have five different ways you can shoot stuff. How do we make missions which feel like something other than shooting stuff? Okay, so maybe that’s impossible – can you make some missions using these proscribed gameplay objectives which don’t feel like our other missions?
Let’s just say it’s difficult sometimes, to build a theme park when your supplies are two colours of paint, a single size of board, no saw, and ten different varieties of nails.
Now I’m thinking of the Parade Escort.
Is it wrong that I read that in Claptrap’s voice?
To the question of “how did it get this bad,” I don’t think it’s right to assign malice on the part of the artist (e.g. “Is this a joke?”). Whenever something screws up this badly, it’s probably better to look at the system than at any individual. We all know the circumstances of this game’s development; it wouldn’t be surprising if some quests involved splicing together dialog from other quests just to make deadlines.
In the case of this particular quest, it’s possible that the script was written in a sleep-deprived hour and needed to be shipped off immediately so the writer could hastily assemble a script for the next quest. It’s also possible that the writer made their dialog internally consistent, but awkward to say out loud, and then the VO director decided to edit it to sound better, and never had anyone review those edits. Or maybe game designers made the gameplay for the quest, lazily slapped together some placeholder text about bacteria/formula, and the writer needed to hastily build the dialog for it.
So, does the game say Sloane’s drug doesn’t have the medicinal qualities? Because it sounds like the doc could just buy the mass-produced street drug and treat patients with a diluted version of it. Or tell his patients to buy it and dilute it. “The government is mass-producing medicine” isn’t really that bad, right? Surely they’re making more than the doctor could hope to?
I’m glad someone else already said what I was thinking.
“If she’s already making this drug, and it is used in large quantities for recreation, then why not just buy it and use it in the small quantities needed for treatment?”
It’s like the writer arbitrarily invented the one scenario where homeopathic techniques might actually work, and then was like “You know what? Nope.”
Wait, what?
This is a society with functional dry-nanotech – and they’re still using penicillin? Penicillin? Which is only of middling importance today in the real-world compared to other existing anti-biotics.
Also – ‘highly addictive psycho-active substance in large doses’ that just happens to ensure that you’ll shit yourself to death? When it kills all your gut flora?
Even if he had noticed a Petri dish had been mistakenly left open and was contaminated by blue-green mold from an open window, which formed a visible growth with a halo of inhibited bacterial growth around it.
Also – ‘in high doses’.
FFS man. Nothing needs to be done here except to arrange with Sloane to buy some from her and *cut it*. Its not like this isn’t a common practice with real-life medicines. Most of what is in a pill is filler and binder. Just buy some – it will be cheaper than murdering people, making an enemy of the dictator, and then trying to set up a production facility of your own – and them mix it with baking power or something.
It’s not like buying a pure quantity of a drug and then cutting it is an uncommon practice…amongst drug dealers!
A load of Sloane’s underling are probably doling out Medicine-Grade Magical Space Bacterium by freakin’ accident.
I generally don’t care too much about the details, but you reach a point where the developers are just writing garbled English.
The hostile science widget keeps stealing power by spooky transference when you unplug it isn’t too out of the ballpark for Sci-Fi.
You wouldn’t blink if it happened in an episode of Voyager, at least.
But the script needs to technobabble that that’s what’s happening and why throwing it out of the window isn’t an appropriate solution.
Star Trek TOS had a computer reconnect itself when it was unplugged, vaporizing the crewmen in the way. But that was explained and added to the tension, as it really did leave them UNABLE to unplug it. That’s not what happened here. It didn’t mysteriously reconnect itself or drain power some other way. It just needed a special method to unplug it.
That’s nothing like what I just said.
I let the Asari “keep” the formula my first time through, believing that the good doctor must have been trying to steal it since it made no sense to have lost it. Shame on me for thinking they could have been even that clever.
The bit with the remote remote drug lab reminded me of this story where everyone in town knows about the black market. But that was a story made by some random DM, not one written by a team of professional writers…
So, let’s take the power cord thing at its word. After watching the livestream, we have a device that’s holding a bit of the hull in place, at a great cost of power, and needs multiple power cords to get it enough power. That’s not too bad, honestly, and it looks like a jerry-rigged device, so I’ll cut it some slack on the design and OSHA fronts. The weirdness is that
1) There’s no shutdown button. In order to turn it off, each power cord must be disconnected in turn, while someone does…something…at the device.
2) The device continued operating until the last power cord was disconnected.
3) Disconnecting a power cord without doing the thing on the thing would apparently cause it to fuse; the dialog says that she tried to unplug it “but–nothing”. Using the rules as given, that would have caused the device to have fused already.
4) What kind of device fuses when it receives less power than expected?
5) This appears to be a time-critical situation. How important is this piece of equipment that we’re shutting it down properly instead of just pulling the plug(s) and watching the sparks fly? (Alternate quest solution: shoot the machine and move on.) There’s no obvious reason why we need to save the device.
At this point I think it’s questionable whether any Writer (capital W) was involved in this quest whatsoever. This looks like the person responsible for the gameplay took two or more slugs of cheap whiskey and did their best after the fact.
“Okay, so I wanna do a mission where you’ve gotta put one person here and then get another person to push a button there.”
*swig*
*typing*
“So, like. You gotta shut something off? But that’s a two-person job?”
*swig*
*more typing*
“annnnn this NPC here tried to do it buh she couldn’ do ehht alone.”
*swig*
*furious typing with lots of backspace*
“fi’ yearsh of schoo’ fur desighnnng and I gutta fuggin write too? gaarhhhdamn et”
*swig*
*a few more errant keystrokes*
“ohhhkay issss dun. Sayyhhve an’ close! Bed-time on mah dessshk agaaainnn!!!”
The most likely answer? Most of the game was made in a year after four years of abortive attempts, in an era before awareness of the terrible working conditions and crunch culture of game developers really broke out. Most likely everybody working on this was completely out of their mind with exhaustion from repeatedly being given a week to complete tasks that warranted like 200 hours of labour from each team member, by corporate management that doesn’t give a rat’s ass for whinging about “what the fuck that’s not humanly possible what are you suits smoking!”
Even odds that the vast majority of the game’s content was produced by people driven literally insane with fatigue, to a level where little things like ‘quality control’ and ‘making some vague semblance of sense’ are wild flights of fancy to be contemplated after tackling the already herculean task of producing something to fill the mandated content quotas.
Basically. I’m inclined to not crap on Andromeda too much, ’cause the dirty laundry’s been aired since 2017 at least, when Jason Schreier did a story on its troubled development over at Kotaku. Every video game has its challenges and rough patches in development, but Andromeda really seems to have been to hell and back, with conflicts between the studios, a severely understaffed development team, tech troubles, various employee shifts or exits and a creative vision that initially aimed for procedurally generated planets and had to scale back. It’s pretty evident why it ended up as such a confused game and technical mess at launch, and conversely, why publisher-backed and well-supported games like Spider-Man, Breath of the Wild or God of War roll out incredibly polished.
This whole mess with Sloane’s colony reminds me of an optional assignment in ME1. Hackett rings you up and asks if you could meet with a pirate-type in the neighboring system to discuss mining rights. The guy’s difficult, but you’re apparently the best agent on the scene to negotiate (please note: this only triggers if your Renegade is high enough).
So, it turns out this self-styled Lord Darius is worse than Hackett mentioned. He’s a paranoid, pompous prick, constantly veering between insults and accusations of treachery. Darius is willing to hand over the very valuable asteroid, in exchange for weapons, money, and drug-manufacturing supplies. If you don’t kill him for being an ass, however, you find out how and why he got to this point. Darius was originally supported by the System Alliance to keep the Batarians out of this part of space. The Alliance then cut off support and sent an assassin- Renegade!Shepard- to get rid of Darius so they can move in without issue.
Darius says that he fulfilled his end of the bargain, pissed off every rival pirate in this sector, and was then abandoned by the Alliance after they promised him their support. The Alliance says that Darius is too greedy to be worth supporting, and too much of a criminal to simply let go, hence tricking you into assassinating Darius. It’s a gray and grey assignment that’s actually gray: Darius is a vicious thug, but he never would have gotten here if the Alliance hadn’t helped him. He did the job the Alliance was supposed to pay him for. And of course, there’s a reason why the Alliance gave you this assignment, if you have a reputation for killing first and asking questions later.
Aside from the Alliance setting up and abandoning strongmen in the sector, there’s a deeper subtext involving your enemy Saren. Shepard is an official agent of the Council now, but he’s still taking assassination jobs from the Alliance. Is this really so different from Turian patriot (or Turian Supremacist) Saren?
This concept is awesome. Particularly in that I missed it with my Paragon Shepard. Makes the game-world seem that bit more adaptive, in-depth – no way would the Alliance have sent my version of Shepard to do that.
Can you get the story of his betrayal from him…and then kill him anyway? That’s an interestingly ‘Renegade’ thing to do that fits the ‘willing to do bad things for good(ish) reasons’ shtick.
More in-depth that the way the Renegade options sometimes mapped to ‘achieve the same result as Paragon but by shouting’ or “RARR SHEPARD SMASH” in the sequels.
No one’s pointed out yet that in the screenshot the good doctor says “string of bacteria” where it should be “strain of bacteria”?
Or maybe he did literally find only a single “string” of them (of the most numerous organisms around?) and that’s why he can’t replicate his work.
I noticed that too, based on some of the other dialogue in this game, no sense the giving ME:A writer the benefit of the doubt here.
Most likely they simply confused the term “strain” for “string,” which is hilarious, how did this person get a job writing professionally? Especially sci-fi? Any semi-intelligent adult should know this fairly common term right? Did an intern right this?
Honestly a lot of the writing just called out in this blog suggests the person (people?) doing the dialogue aren’t familiar with the English language, which is really bizarre.
So I’ve been thinking about the “I cannot into plugs” thing, and ways it could have been salvaged.
“I tried unplugging it, but…”
Option A: “No, what you unplugged was the user interface, the power connections are over there. Start by plugging the interface back in, SAM will walk you through the shutdown while I fight off waves of mooks.”
Option B: “Okay, so if that isn’t drawing power anymore, what is? SAM, what does your script say?” Insert alternate McGuffin that needs to be turned off, some Kett doodad off in the corner or something.
NPC: “I tried unplugging it, but… nothing.”
SAM: “The device requires two people for shutdown – one disconnecting the cables, and another at the device itself.”
The nearest thing to a sensible explanation I can think of is they meant:
NPC: “I tried unplugging it, but… nothing. No matter how hard I pulled, I couldn’t get the plug out.”
SAM: “The device requires two people for shutdown. One disconnecting the cables, and another at the device itself, to disable the magnetic clamps.”
Editor: “That’s too long and clunky.” (Crosses out some words without really thinking about it because they’re behind schedule.)
“lack of skill and / or intelligence on the part of the writer”
I think there might be some language issues too (French/Canadian) I have no other way to explain the “my face is tired” phrase from earlier in the game.
There where also multiple writers, and I’m guessing that people got assigned an area to work on, while Bethesda Game Studios does that part, the studio making Andromeda did not. Also, “studio” might be wrong as I seem to recall that there where other studios involved (assisting) the main studio so stuff got “outsourced” internally in EA.
“On the other hand, this isn’t just the work of one person. Sure, a writer was involved. But then a director guided a voice actor through it and a mission designer scripted it. This gibberish had to pass through at least four people.”
Dude, Shamus. have you seen the verge pc build video?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=verge+build+video
They had a script writer, a camera man/lady, a editor. In total 11 (I think) people worked on it and saw it and said “Yeah, that seems OK to publish.”
BTW! That formula thing. I assumed that the doctor had the “only” copy (she probably had copies) but Sloan did not, and Sloan could not steal the formula or kill the doctor to get it (for some reason Ryder can though). If worded differently they could have explained this, that the doctor would “loose” exclusive control of the formula and thus the only protection for her life she had. Even with this “fix” there are a bunch more issues with this though.
As an aside, can we agree that making a sidequest about antibiotics in a world where ‘biotic’ is already heavily associated with a primary elements of the worldbuilding is incredibly dumb?
In defense of that NCIS scene, the two “hacker” characters – Abby and McGee – are panicking and irrational, IMO.
Yes, there’s definitely the lack of skill on the part of the writer and that feels like a weak explanation of everything.
I wonder, how they skipped all of the mistakes in the storyline, all of those big holes. Considering, that this isn’t the work of one person, we know, that was IMPOSSIBLE to not recognize them.
I guess that was just on purpose. I don’t know for what reason, but that’s the only option.
The “if you take the formula/bakteria/recipe then I won’t have it” story is surprisingly consistent coming from a company which believes that intellectual property can be stolen, and any game copied is a game stolen.
Any minute now, they’ll start telling us they’re running out of games because the pirates have been stealing them all, and now the Bioware game storage hard drives are empty, and producing more copies is just too expensive.
Well, it was interesting to read before, and of course the plot in Andromeda has a lot of problems but in the last couple of articles it looks like Shamus is just nitpicking rather than focusing on the real plot holes. Some over quoting below:
Assuming you found the evidence before the dialog. If not then it’s a word of this character against a word of that character and the choice is not so obvious. The level designer who put the terminal right near the character is at fault here before the writer.
Sure, a transponder is a transmitter first. But it is also a RECEIVER. And you can definitely use a receiver to locate the original transmitter. I doubt anyone would argue with that.
Come on, everyone capable of using a computer knows that it may or may NOT shut down if you unplug it from an outlet. In the last case it could be connected to UPS or it could be a laptop with its battery charged.
I assume that is all about recreating a formula when you already know it.
Well, remember that infamous “Novichok attack” of the last year? A PRIME MINISTER of Britain said that Russia is responsible because the formula of the poison matched the one of the Russian chemical weapon. Anyone capable of forming complete sentences should’ve thought first “well, if you know the formula of the chemical agent then you should be able to create it yourself”. Yet many people (prime minister included) didn’t even think about it. So yeah most people either do not understand the conceptual difference or just don’t care.
It was interesting to read about Elaaden’s orbit or Archon design, but the kind of nitpicking like the one above is just a little less boring than the plot of the game. It’s my own opinion of course.
“Come on, everyone capable of using a computer knows that it may or may NOT shut down if you unplug it from an outlet. In the last case it could be connected to UPS or it could be a laptop with its battery charged.”
The reason they wanted to unplug the device is because it was using too much power. If they unplug it and it’s still running, the problem is still resolved.