T w e n t y S i d e d
The plan is for Ryder to return to the control center from the previous mission. I realize this is a very minor pointParticularly in a story as troubled as this one. but it feels strange to come back here so soon after our last big visit. Imagine if the Enterprise crew had their meeting with V’ger, left, and then turned around and came back for a few more words. Imagine if Neo turned around and visited the Oracle a few minutes after his first visit. It’s not wrong or anything, but it seems like an odd way to pace the story. I’d never thought about it before, but it does seem like casually re-visiting the mysterious location of revelation takes some of the mystique out of it. It’s less that I’m bothered that Andromeda does this, and more curious how it made me notice that other stories don’t do this sort of thing.
At any rate, Ryder is here to release a bunch of Remnant robots. The robots will fly through the currents of the scourge, and we can follow them to Meridian. I’m not sure why small robots traveling for ten minutes would arrive at the same location as a planetoid that’s been cruising for centuries through the ever-shifting scourge, but it seems to work out.
This is where the Archon springs his trap. He begins talking to Ryder through her SAM implant. He monologues at you for a bit, saying things like, “FALL TO DARKNESS, PATHFINDER. YOU WERE ALMOST WORTHY.” (The subtitles aren’t in all caps, but the line delivery is. This guy sounds exactly like Harbinger in Mass Effect 2, including the same pitch-shifted reverb vocal FX.) Then the Archon does…
Well, it’s not clear what he does here.
Can Someone Explain the Rules to Me?
In Star Trek, there are a lot of rules. You can’t use the transporter when the shields are up, but communications work just fine. Sensors don’t work in a nebula, but they work through shields. You can’t fire weapons when you’re cloaked but you can fire them through your own shields thanks to the shield modulation frequency. If your enemy learns your shield frequency, then they can shoot through your shields. The list goes on and on. These rules don’t often make scientific sense, but they’re the rules of the universe and we’re able to accept them as givens. A lot of Trek action sequences involve exploring these rules and how they interact in different situations, which is why writers are willing to burn precious screen time making those rules clear to the audience.
In Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy, we don’t get a lot of rules. Sure, there are shields and zap guns and some sort of faster-than-light travel, but for the most part you can just intuit how things work based on real-world analogues: X-Wings are jets, Star Destroyers are like naval destroyers, deck guns shoot down X-Wings, and so on. If the storyteller does take the time to explain a rule, it’s usually something super-important and conceptually easy to grasp, like “A little missile from these jet things can go in this hole and blow up the big evil moon.”
The problem in Andromeda is that this is (sort of) a drama-firstI don’t know if this is really the intent, but it’s the most charitable of the possible readings. I’d rather believe the writer thought that details are just dumb fluff that don’t matter rather than assume they were trying to build a coherent system and failed. story with a bunch of fussy details-oriented moving parts left over from the previous games, and the writer doesn’t seem to know how to reconcile this. We have plot elements that the writer never explained, and now we need to understand how they work to follow everyone’s reasoning.
The Archon uses the mystery gizmo he injected into Ryder. It apparently sabotages Ryder’s SAM implant, which seems to injure and weaken her. I guess this is because of the way SAM was connected to Ryder at the start of the game, but since the writer never explained how that worked this comes off as random. The start of the game told us that being disconnected from SAM would kill her, without getting into specifics. Now the writer is trying to pay off a premise they didn’t properly establish.
Ryder’s implant is disabled, but the Archon continues to use it to talk to her anyway. He announces that he’s figured out that she’s able to interface with all this Remnant tech because she’s got an AI in her head that does everything for her. So he’s going to go to the human ark and kidnap Scott, and use Scott’s implant.
But… I thought you had to be the Pathfinder? Like, wasn’t that the whole point of that scene at the start of the game? SAM has this special connection to Sara that allows her to interface with the computer. The other members of the Pathfinder team have SAM implants, but they can’t interface with alien tech. Moreover, the story makes it clear that SAM is the one who understands the alien stuff and does all the interfacing. SAM obviously isn’t willing to help the Archon, so what good will an implant do him? Why kidnap Scott? The Archon can torture Scott all day, but that wouldn’t make SAM willing to help the Archon, even if Scott had the super-special Pathfinder connection.
Maybe the writer had a mental model for how all of this was supposed to work, but they never bothered telling us what it was so it all feels lazy and random.
At this point Sara passes out and we switch to playing as…
Our Backup Reserve Protagonist
SAM tells Scott that he needs to reach a computer console and reset / reboot Sara’s implant. I thought it was destroyed or disabled, but apparently rebooting the connection will fix it? But what’s to stop the Archon from severing it again?
Sara will still be able to use her class profilesYou can switch between different types of combat bonuses based on what powers you want to use. It sort of allows you to class-switch in the field. after this reset and in the past the game made it clear that this was something only a Pathfinder could do. Is the writer saying she’s still got Pathfinder powers, or are they saying she’s transcended SAM and no longer needs his help to do these amazing things, or is this a compromise made in service of gameplay, or is this a simple oversight?
Scott reboots a random computer terminal to fix his sister, which makes no sense. Didn’t the Archon attack the implant inside her head? How does making changes on this end fix that? Moreover, wouldn’t it make more sense for Scott to fight his way to SAM Node? That’s where this goofy adventure began and where Pathfinder powers were conferred, so it would make narrative sense to return there when doing whatever this is. Also, why doesn’t the Archon capture SAM Node? That’s what he’s really after anyway. He wants access to SAM’s magic ability to manipulate Remnant tech. But instead of capturing SAM, he chases Scott around.
The mechanics of this are completely unclear so it’s hard to care about all of this supposed peril. Whatever. Once Scott reboots the random computer, more goons show up and capture him in a cutscene.
We switch back to Sara, who is on her feet again.
Details? Drama? What am I Watching?
Sara stumbles over to a computer console and summons a remnant fleet. Without SAM’s help it’s really hard for her to use Remnant tech, so this gives her a nosebleed. But wait, why doesn’t she have SAM’s help? The entire previous section was all about restoring her connection to SAM so that he could keep her alive. Which means that SAM is helping her again, right? So… why can’t he help her with these consoles? The dialog makes it sound like SAM is gone, but earlier dialog made it clear that Scott was trying to restore SAM and that’s what got Ryder on her feet again.
Is the writer saying that this reboot has made Scott the Pathfinder? If so, then why couldn’t we have done that at the beginning of the story and made Cora Pathfinder?
The game never explained what SAM was doing to interface with these computers. Sara just held up her hand and machines did what she wanted. I wasn’t even sure if we were supposed to understand that she was just “typing” on these consolesShe is holding her hand over a keyboard-looking thing, and the pieces move around as if being pushed down. but they didn’t have time to animate it properly so they just showed her holding her hand still. What is Sara doing to control these machines? Is she able to emit wifi signals from her fingertips? What is this based on? Alpha waves? Electrical impulses? The power of love?
I should make it clear that I’m not trying to “gotcha” the writer over some breach of narrative orthodoxy. “Oh you broke the rules of storytelling and sinned against the gospel of Joseph Campbell, therefore you are a bad writer and that means I, the critic, win.” I’m not asking these questions because I’m trying to fill in the technical details of the Mass Effect wiki. I’m not trying to rules-lawyer the writer over the details of their own story. I’m asking these questions because this story does not work. The things I’m asking for here are fairly basic building blocks of drama. This is like having a Superman story where you never explain the rules of kryptonite so at the end the audience has no idea why this glowing green rock takes away his powers.
We need to understand the challenge the protagonist is facing so we know what we’re rooting for. We need to understand the peril before we can experience their fear of failure. We need to understand the capabilities of the protagonist before we can share in the self-doubt that creates the tension within the story. Before we can be impressed at their overcoming impossible odds we have to know what they can and can’t do. We need to understand these things ahead of time so that when they overcome the physical danger, resist temptation, solve the mystery, or make the right decision, we understand how this moment led them to victory. If we have a hero overcoming a challenge we don’t understand using powers that were never explained to meet a goal we don’t know about, then none of those things are contributing to the drama. Mass Effect Andromeda has vaults, SAM, Remnant devices, the scourge, the Archon’s floating scanner gizmo, and Ryder’s implant, and none of them are explained well enough that we know what is or isn’t possible. It’s one giant lazy confused hand-wave.
Guardians of the Galaxy is vague as hell about the rules of the world but gets away with it because the plot is a very simple “keep the bad guy from getting the magic space rock” kinda deal and the characters themselves are doing all the heavy lifting in terms of drama. Andromeda can’t go that direction because the crew of the Tempest aren’t a driving force in the plot and their character arcs are small, self-contained, optional, and completely disconnected from Ryder and the battle for Meridian.
This moment where Ryder commands the Remnant is supposed to be like the moment in Thor: Ragnarok where Thor discovers he never really needed the hammer and is the GOD OF THUNDER whether he has his weapon or not. The problem is that the game is trying get a payoff for rules they never established. In Thor, that big turning point of “the power was inside of you all along, Dorothy” was explained to us by OdinAlso: The fact that Thor and Odin still had unfinished business was established earlier in the story during the Hulk fight., and acts as the moment of change within Thor’s character arc. Here in Andromeda we’re missing that pivotal scene. Once again, the writer is borrowing tropes without understanding how they work or how to integrate them with a story.
How I’d have done it:
I have no idea how I’d untangle this mess without re-writing the entire game. By this point in the story all of the writer’s cut corners and missed opportunities become insurmountable. Still, let me see what I can do here:
At various moments throughout the story, we can have points where Ryder has to use a Remnant consoleThere’s still the problem that you can complete the main story and skip a lot of the messing around in the vaults, so this idea wouldn’t totally work. Like I said, we’re too late in the story to fix a lot of these problems.. When Ryder activates the monoliths on the various planets, we need a little dialog from her indicating that this is more than just her flipping a switch. We should telegraph to the player that something fantastical and mysterious is going on. Maybe she swoons a bit when she activates a major device. When she regains her composure, she’ll say something to her team:
“I’m okay. I’m just… I saw something. Or someone. I feel like I made contact.”
“I saw it again. It’s not a person, it’s the vault network. I could feel how large it is. Terrifying.”
“Not so bad this time. I feel like every time I use one of these, I understand the network a little more. Or not the network. The Remnant. It’s hard to say.”
“I saw a lot more that time. I don’t know if I can explain it, but the network is more than a bunch of machinery and computers. There’s a kind of intellect here.”
The thing we’d lean into here is that SAM isn’t seeing this. Only Ryder is. To SAM, the network really is just a ball of machinery. Then at the end when Ryder can suddenly control Remnant systems, we understand it comes from this mysterious bullshit we’ve been building up over the course of the game. This means it will feel like a proper payoff to a proper setup. This will also make our lead character into a legitimate protagonist by giving her growth and agency so she’s more than a meat-based taxi for SAM.
If something is supposed to be vague and mysterious, then you need to build that up. The first Mass Effect game did that with the Cypher. Sure, the Cypher was a bunch of vague nonsense, but the writer sold the hell out of it. They used camera framing, dialog, and musical cues to telegraph that HEY KIDS SOME STRANGE ALIEN HOODOO IS GOIN DOWN WATCH OUT.
I’m not going to try to fix all the nonsense with Ryder’s implant. It’s random, it’s annoying to think about, and none of it works. I honestly can’t tell what the writer was trying to accomplish and my first instinct would be to say, “Throw the SAM character away. He’s a disaster, he undercuts our protagonist, he doesn’t fit in this setting, and you’re using him like a crutch to avoid revealing characters and ideas through exploratory dialog.”
We’re almost at the end. Next week we’ll find out about this Meridian place.
Footnotes:
[1] Particularly in a story as troubled as this one.
[2] I don’t know if this is really the intent, but it’s the most charitable of the possible readings. I’d rather believe the writer thought that details are just dumb fluff that don’t matter rather than assume they were trying to build a coherent system and failed.
[3] You can switch between different types of combat bonuses based on what powers you want to use. It sort of allows you to class-switch in the field.
[4] She is holding her hand over a keyboard-looking thing, and the pieces move around as if being pushed down.
[5] Also: The fact that Thor and Odin still had unfinished business was established earlier in the story during the Hulk fight.
[6] There’s still the problem that you can complete the main story and skip a lot of the messing around in the vaults, so this idea wouldn’t totally work. Like I said, we’re too late in the story to fix a lot of these problems.
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I love that even with the nosebleed and near death experience Ryder still has that stupid bloody smile.
Optimistic to the end, eh?
Eberyding iz bine!
Why does my face taste like pennies?
Perhaps it’s just tired?
I notice that there’s not complaints about the lack of an EVERYTHING IS FINE picture. But there’s really doesn’t need to be, becuase there’s multiple images of Sara that are every bit as good. Man, that smile.
Well, we got an “Everything is NOT fine”, so that works, too.
In this screenshot, why does the lady with the white hair looks like she doesn’t even care anymore?
Perhaps she is a stand-in for the player! Or the writer?
She’s daydreaming about her time with the Asari commando squad.
The heck with that; she’s daydreaming about the next time she gets to hang out with my Ryder.
That’s the weirdest nose bleed I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen plenty). Is her nose completely blocked, that only a trickle of blood can escape?
Learnt a new word today, thanks.
Nosebleeds are for casuals. Real video game protagonists leak cerebrospinal fluid.
That would explain the dialogue.
Writers too we may suspect!
Maybe she just gets turned on by alien technology?
I’m not questioning the “why”, only the resulting nosebleed. It’s too narrow.
I might’ve been more okay with this half-baked, handwave-y nonsense if the Archon had shown himself to be clever at any point in this game. It’s possible I could’ve lived with this had the game planted the seed and I could think “I may not understand what’s going on here, but clearly the Archon is intelligent and cunning enough to have figured out all of these moving parts and knows how to move them in his favor.” But the game doesn’t even begin to lay any of that groundwork. I barely have any impression about what the Archon is as a character, and I certainly didn’t get any sense that he’s intelligent or a worthy adversary in any way.
Okay, even with a smart Archon, I wouldn’t have been okay with this. Even fictional universes only work if there’s a rule set in place that’s clear and limits both what the protagonists and antagonists are allowed to do. This is just a game of mumbo-jumbo science Mad Libs where the players don’t understand the parts of speech.
There’s nothing quite like 1) a dumb villain, who 2) thinks they’re intelligent, but 3) won’t shut up. It’s like the writing equivalent of the Project management triangle.
You can have any two of the above and get away with it, but try and have all three and it just won’t work.
Also, I’d have said if you really wanted the Archon to be smart you’d have to rewrite a lot. you can say anyone is smart if the details of the story are unclear.
Yeah – it’s hard to judge the capabilities of any character when they advance or fail because of an opaque narrative that’s not governed by any apparent rules or standards. It’s the next-level version of a character succeeding or failing thanks to a cut scene.
I’m trying to think of an example of a truly smart video game villain. Are there any?
Every one of them is defeated by a guy who gets easily distracted by flower picking subquests and who spends most of his time playing Gwent or Blitzball. You’d think that during all that time the hero is playing in those tournaments that you could make your move to conquer the world.
It’s difficult to write a compelling smart villain who is nevertheless overpowered by a wandering murderhobo and his/her friends, and this even allowing for Goblet of Fire-like plots where the villain has the ability to capture/defeat the hero at any time but chooses not to and instead make the hero dance through ridiculous hoops.
Jade Empires. Final villain was brilliant, Shamus has a writeup.
Cool, so a 15 year old game has one. Good to know.
Bob Page worked well enough. You also didn’t specify “recent” so if you don’t like one from a 15 year old game you need to specify.
I don’t know that the complaint is so much that the Archon isn’t some evil mastermind who’s outwitting Ryder with this big move. I think that the complaint is that the story and its rules/limits are so squishy that it’s impossible to gauge from the Archon’s big move if he’s brilliant or not. At least that’s my complaint about this particular aspect. You can’t really even tell what the Archon is doing, and what our characters choose to do in response only creates more confusion instead of less.
In Andromeda, this is a moment when we’re supposed to feel outwitted by the Archon despite the fact that his plans required our characters to be stupid when we as players knew better. And having now completed this game three times, I still can’t really give a good explanation of what the Archon actually does to “win” in this moment. Did he cleverly navigate a set of rules and restrictions that this game had and never bothered to explain to us? If so, he’s a brilliant villain and we have nothing to judge it against. Or did he just throw some vaguely-science-y word salad at us that has no mooring in the game’s reality just so he could be put in a position to have beaten us. Then that’s just terrible writing and we still have nothing to judge it against. And looking at what happens in these scenes, I see no appreciable difference. To me, that’s a problem.
I’m okay with a villain that has enough ineptitude to be unable to destroy the world while we’re out looking for mining nodes. I can appreciate that you have to make these concessions for the gameplay, especially when you go open-world. However, I think that when you’re in the throes of the story in what’s ostensibly a narratively-driven game, your villain needs to at least make sense, if not be a mastermind.
I agree with most of what you’re saying. More and more I think that SAM is one of the biggest problems with this game and I even liked him in my playthroughs. But he sucks the oxygen out of every scene he’s in, and that’s all of them. Peebee’s supposed to be the Remnant expert, but after two seconds in a Vault, SAM is the one solving the problems, so Peebee’s just reduced to an annoying source of DPS for your team. Liam, theoretically, has responsibilities in settlement relations, but SAM takes over that too and tells you what needs to be done, which makes Liam pointless. And so on.
And so, given his centrality, you’d think they’d spend more time establishing the rules around him, which is what you said and I really agree. My point was that it is far more frequent than not in video games that your villains do have these ass-pulls that come from them having read the script, or outsmart you in a cutscene. I just don’t know how many games make total sense when you look at them from the villain’s perspective. It seems to me that a lot of villain plans rely on the players being stupid at a specific time, so I have a hard time dinging the Archon on this particular thing. I didn’t hate him the way Shamus does; I just found him bog-standard.
Okay, I have to ask, and I hope this doesn’t sound mean. I promise I don’t mean it that way.
Why?
I’ve just gotten access to Kadara in my playthrough, and I’ve taken the time to hit 100% viability on Eos, Havarl, and Voeld. At this stage, I already feel like I’m soldiering through the content for the sake of seeing the series in its entirety, rather than genuinely enjoying what I’m doing.
Did you want to experiment with different playstyles? I’m kind of in Shamus’ position here, because my inability to aim has left me as little more than a biotic combo generator.
Ha! A completely reasonable question, especially if you’ve seen how much I’ve complained about Andromeda. One can only conclude that I actually love the game, or that I really like punishing myself.
I had my initial playthrough when the game first came out and I played as a tech power-based Scott Ryder who romanced Cora. Once all the patches were out, I figured I might give it another try to see if it would be a better game for it. It wasn’t really, but on the second playthrough, I was a biotic-based Sara Ryder who romanced Peebee. The third playthrough happened just a couple of months ago because I knew that this writeup was coming and I wanted to have the game fresh in my mind so that I could comment with a modicum of confidence. On this third playthrough, I played as a sentinel-based Scott who romanced Vetra. I don’t think I’m going to play it again and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that anyone else do so either.
In regard to the various power sets and what makes for the more “fun” gameplay, the sentinel was the best for my money. The class’s passive bonus is a somewhat-significant shield boost, which matches well with the biotic charge if you like getting in there and mixing it up with the enemies. Add the tech-based energy drain skill to that which strips enemy shields and adds them to your own shields, you can make for quite the tank-y character. You can have the zippy, vanguard playstyle without nearly the same amount of risk that a pure vanguard has. Though I suppose that if the risk is what makes the vanguard fun for you, then that might not be the way to go.
Thanks for answering without shouting at me. :-)
It makes sense now; I was imagining my ME1 runs, which were essentially back-to-back. For some reason, a time lapse between playthroughs didn’t occur to me. The only other reason I could come up with was the three-romance achievement.
My play style is pretty risk-averse, so I’ve never tried Biotic Charge. I just fling Pull/Throw/Singularity/Throw/Pull until all the red dots are gone. If I decide (for whatever reason) to have another go, I’ll take your Sentinel suggestion to heart.
Baal, from Diablo 2 and LoD. Sure, you beat him at the end, but he’s already wrecked the world at that point, and outsmarted you (and/or Tyrael) multiple times along the way. Pyrrhic victory at best.
When did Baal or Diablo managed to trick the player in D2? I seem to remember spending most of that game simply catching up to the enemy. They didn’t have cunning plans as much as a massive headstart.
‘Go to [place] before [badguy] does [X]!’ the questgivers would say, and it became a tradition that by the time I got to [place], [badguy] would have got there, done [X] ages ago and either moved on or was hanging around waiting for me. I’m pretty sure the only reason I even met the Lord of Terror was that he’d just done everything else he wanted and finally decided I was enough of a threat/annoyance to bother with; dude was just hanging around in his castle when I finally caught up.
What tricks/twists there were came across (to me at lest) as equal parts ‘clever plan by the bad guys’ and ‘made-up-at-a-later-date retcon that allows the game to happen in the first place’ or an incentive to buy the expansion pack.
As you noted, they don’t really trick the player, but they did outwit Tyrael several times, like Diablo bringing an add before he ends up confronting Tyrael.
Mephisto and Diablo were presumably busy managing their minions or something when you catch up to them, and they take time out to (try to) deal with the invader.
Baal managed to dodge Tyrael and stay off the radar long enough to get his soulstone and an army. Then he finds a backdoor to his objective and corrupts the worldstone beyond salvaging. So, a phyrric victory, but Baal does get another bite at the apple.
Diablo in 3 wasn’t super clever, but he was smart enough to set up his resurection from two games earlier and patient enough to keep his mouth shut until the right moment until he’s ascended, unlike the previous ultimate general who told you everything he was going to do. If he just shut up in act IV he would have been more impressive.
Zero from the Zero Escape games.
They just get smarter and smarter.
EDIT: And maybe the final villain from Nier Automata. It’s hard to say.
Well, the only villain, I consider to be a primarily smart one, before anything else, is Sarevok, from first Baldur’s Gate
Yep, old Koveras was one of the first I’ve thought about too.
He even kinda-sorta outsmarted the player once, in the library.
I was going to mention Sarevok.
I’d nominate the villain “C” from Trails of Cold Steel. He basically accomplishes everything he sets out to do in the first game, and plays the hero like a fiddle. The larger Circle of Ouroboros might also qualify. Their individual members get defeated in various battles, but their overall plan seems to be proceeding well in spite of everything the various heroes of the series can do.
Dagoth Ur.
While they do end up getting defeated by the Player Character, who by that point might be the provincial leader of every guild and two religions, he is doing everything he can to oppose the player. He’s just too weak to do so quickly or directly.
I have to disagree here. Dagoth Ur can be defeated by a beginning player within, what 10 minutes of starting a new game.
Pedant Patrol: From one of the captions, “this moment has absolutely no inertia.” Surely, “momentum, no?
Of course not. There can be no momentum without inertia.
“Moment of inertia”?
Inertia results from mass. The lack of inertia is a *puts on sunglasses*…
Nitpick: “This is like having a Superman story where you never explain the rules of kryptonite so at the end the audience has no idea why this glowing green rock takes away his powers.”
We do have no idea why green glowing rocks from his home planet take away his powers.
Maybe, given the amount of explanation we’re missing out on it should be something like, “at the end the audience has no idea whether there’s any connection between Superman losing his powers and the green glowing rocks in his vicinity.”
I think Shamus is more alluding to the sort of situation where kryptonite itself hasn’t been established yet, and so you have a scene where Lex Luthor holds up a glowing green rock and says “Now you are powerless, Superman!’, and Superman loses his powers. We have no idea why in the world exposing Superman to a glowing green rock would make him lose his powers and so are likely to simply be very confused.
To be fair, saying it like this makes it sound cooler than it is, because it CAN be used to introduce a element as a mystery. But for that, Superman ALSO has to be confused about why that happened. Alternatively, you can patch over it with Superman having kept it a secret from everyone, although that can easily seem like a retcon. But, at any rate, Shamus isn’t really asking for the details of the mechanism, but instead that a rule needs to be established showing that the glowing green rocks are kryptonite and that kryptonite takes away Superman’s powers before you can rely on that as a dramatic element.
Yes. We don’t know WHY the green rock does that, but we do know that it does.
We don’t know how kryptonite works, but it’s been established that it does. Lex Luthor never shows up out of nowhere with a glowing rock, there’s usually a sequence where he explains what he’s got. The 90s cartoon had an entire episode dedicated to Luthor and Superman learning about kryptonite and testing its properties.
They explain it. The science may be comic book nonsense, but it’s explained. “Radioactive elements from the planet’s core, deadly to the inhabitants.” Now the obvious question is “But not deadly to anyone else?” and stories have ran with that before. Lex Luthor contracted cancer for constantly exposing himself to a radioactive rock at one point.
Thor 1: You have to prove that you are worthy of the hammer.
Thor 3: Actually, the hammer is just a tool, the power is all yours from the beginning.
Infinity War: Turn out you need a hammer after all, so go make one.
More like:
Infinity War – “We need to make new merchandise for this guy that looks different from the one we made for his last movie!”
Thor 1: Whoever holds the hammer, if they are worthy, has the power of Thor. Notably they do not get the power of the hammer, but the power of Thor.
Thor 3: Yep.
Infinity War: A god hitting something with a god-slaying axe/hammer is more deadly than shooting lightning or punching. Seems fine to me.
He really could have used a good weapon in Ragnarok, as even with his powers he couldn’t do much against his sister. The minions, yes. Hela, no.
Then of course Infinity War was right after Ragnarok, with Thanos showing up right at the end of the latter. The opening of Infinity War clearly showed his powers alone also weren’t enough against Thanos. It’d be the height of stupidity to face Thanos again without picking up a weapon.
I’m not a fan of temporary character switches. I didn’t like it in Andromeda, and I didn’t like it in Mass Effect 2 either. Granted I think the
twist of controlling Jokerwas effective, at least on the first playthrough. It was highly disorientating and it did a great job at showing how horrifying the Collectors are when you’re not Commander Shepard, the all conquering badass. But now that sequence just feels… weird – and not just because the set-up to that sequence was terrible. When you play as Commander Shepard for upwards of 120 hours (the total time of my last trilogy playthrough), it feels really odd to control another character for five minutes. But then, I wasn’t a fan of it in Final Fantasy VIII or the Witcher 3 either.I think it at least served some purpose (debatable as that may be) in ME2, but I struggle to think why it was used here. Because Scott and Sera are twins the developers thought it’d be neat to play both? To breakup the cutscenes? To show how uber the Pathfinder (Unlike Sera, Scott is stuck with just a couple of grenades, a pistol, and no powers) is? Or cheap pathos since
Twinsies is about to get kidnapped?If by the Witcher 3 you’re referring to that section in Hearts of Stone, I have to say I really enjoyed that. It did a great job of demonstrating the character of Geralt by simply showing us what he could be like, instead. It also made a nice change of pace from the endless sword fights.
Which section are you referring to? I only remember playing as someone else in The Wild Hunt and the Witcher 2…
You also play as Ciri a few times in the main story.
I assume Jenkins is referring to the Ciri sections (which at least have the benefit of occurring repeatedly so it’s not a weird one-off).
Yeah, but did they happen in Hearts of Stone? I think they didn’t but I don’t remember.
I actually think you got to play as Olgierd, but I can’t remember that, as well :D
You get to play Olgierd’s arsehole brother at a wedding.
As far as the Ciri sections are concerned: I did like the section in the sauna where you actually got to roleplay her a little, and the rather sweet section with the girl in the swamp. Overall though the bits where you actually fight with her I could definitely have done without.
OH YES, I remember now! With Shani, right? That was actually one of my favourite parts of that expansion! Thank you for reminding me!
:thumbsup:
Yes I’m sorry, I meant the parts with Ciri. I’ve not played any of the DLCs so I’m unaware of other characters.
To be fair, from what I remember the scenes were well done and you were given some cool abilities that Geralt didn’t have at least. I was getting pretty frustrated with the zigzagging “Find Ciri” plotline at times, so I’m probably (unfairly) harsh on the Ciri interludes for that reason. It was a lot better than what we got in Mass Effect at least.
I am not the biggest fan of The Witcher 3 (there were parts I absolutely hated), but I did play through all of it, and I don’t remember a character switch in Hearts of Stone. I only remember having to run around as Ciri in the main game.
EDIT: Late to the game, I see. That wedding bit actually was all right.
I mostly agree. I think it worked in Dragon Age: Origins, because you got to play as the party members who’ve been with you the whole game while they tried to break your PC out of prison in one section, or while they fought different fronts of the Final Battle. It really made your party feel like a team and the last battle as something needing more than just you and two or three companions to deal with.
But the Joker sequence in ME2, while it had some good dialogue, was basically a rail stealth game with all the sophistication of Dragon’s Lair (Do you go left, or wait for the baddie to pass? WRONG ANSWER–skulls and Game Over!) and didn’t make much sense to begin with–why did your ground assault squad have to leave the Normandy during an upgrade but no one else on the crew did? An answer was given but it still felt specious.
The twin sequence in ME:A just felt like you were just doing the tutorial mission again, only with fewer character options! Maybe there was a better way to integrate coma-twin into the plot without taking too much away from your main PC, but this wasn’t it.
If I remember correctly you can also break yourself out of prison in DA:O basically meeting the rescue party at the door.
I remember the ME2 section very fondly but it might be because I’ve last played it years ago and mostly remember the dialogue, which I’m a great fan off.
That said I hate when they do this in JRPGs. Especially in older games that did not have the presence of mind to level all of your party members at the same time and then boom, fight a major boss with 3 characters whom you haven’t levelled since the beginning of the game! Bonus points if all the characters are present in a cutscene immediately following the fight.
Weren’t you going to say nice things this week?
Next week.
The tale grew in the telling.
Remember when Gandalf, with a stupid smile on his face, held up his hand and some particle effects automatically removed Saruman’s curse from Theoden? While his staff narrated the history of the Middle Earth?
Granted, “particle effects removed the magic curse” is basically what happened.
But A Wizard Did It, and the curse is mostly for justifying the current situation, so it’s not a huge problem.
And there is certain expectation that Gandalf the White can overpower Saruman’s magic (while Gandalf the Grey would have failed). The rules, however minimal, are still stated and followed.
*Puts on pedant hat*
Book or movie? In the movie, yeah, that’s what happens. In the book there was no magic to dispel, just years of Wormtongue isolating Theoden and feeding him demoralizing “advice” like an abuser. Then Gandalf comes in, throws the curtains open and Wormtonge to the curb, and starts Theoden on a crash diet of pep talks.
I mean, Gandalf does use some magic at first in order to ensure he has command of the room to get past Wormtongue’s goons (basically a bigger version of what he did to shock Bilbo out of his ring-mania at the start of FotR), but apart from that it’s a human drama sort of situation, rather than the magic handwave vs. handwave fight it is in the movie.
I remember the book being vague about whether there was any magic or not; I think they say he’s under Saruman’s “influence” and it’s up to the reader whether that’s magic or just advice.
Just reread that section of the book, and I can definitely say that they never refer to Théoden being under Saruman’s influence, only Wormtongue’s. Since Wormtongue is never shown to have any sort of magic, I think it’s pretty clear Théoden was not under any sort of enchantment.
On a side note, it never ceases to amaze me that in a version where no one is willing to do anything on the side of Good without getting a pep talk from a member of the Fellowship, (e.g. Treebeard, Faramir, etc.), the one time that really does happen in the book, Jackson gives us a ludicrous long-distance wizard duel instead. It’s like he just couldn’t stop himself; he had to change every single plot point.
There’s kind of a running pattern in the movies where PJ will take something that was mundane but magic-adjacent in the book and interpret it to be straight-up magic. Probably because he thinks its more exciting or visually interesting, but it often comes at the cost of a character depth moment.
Another example that comes to mind is in Rivendell, when Bilbo in a moment of weakness snaps at Frodo and makes a grab for the ring, only to immediately feel ashamed. In the book this was just a lapse of mental fortitude, and is a glimpse of how traumatized and fractured his time with the ring actually left him, despite him doing his best to put up a show of health.
In the movie though, PJ takes a line about Frodo for a moment seeing an echo of Gollum in Bilbo’s expression to mean Bilbo was literally physically transformed into a Gollum-like creature for an instant by magic. I assume he did this because he thought it was a cool visual, but it takes a bit of characterization away from both Bilbo and Gollum (IIRC in the book Gollum looks the way he does because of centuries of junkie-like self neglect, not because the ring magically mutated him).
There’s purely dramatic non-magical examples too. Like in the book the ents change their mind after seeing the deforestation around Isengard because Middle Earth has never seen this kind of industrial-scale landscape alteration before, and they realize that for the first time, a political dust-up among the fast peoples isn’t going to just average out with no effect on the ents like they always had before. In the movie, the ents change their mind after seeing the deforestation around Isengard because “Oh my god: they killed Kenny! You bastards!” I assume this was changed because the more emotional reaction would read easier and more dramatically for the cheap seats, but it came at the cost of SEVERELY dumbing down the ents.
To be fair, there are a lot of changes I’m actually either on board with (like combining characters to give Arwen a more direct involvement, and shifting the forging of Anduril to much later in the story) or sort of indifferent to (Faramir being initially tempted by the ring before rejecting it). And there are times where PJ punched up the action in ways that IMO didn’t do any harm to the characters or story (like actually battling the cave troll in Moria), or were actually good (extending the battle of Helm’s Deep to really sell the harshness and potential last-stand feel, or adding that orc general character to the battles of Osgiliath and Pelannor fields). I really like the movies overall, but they’re huge, so statistically everyone’s bound to have a few pet-peeve bits about them, regardless of whether they’ve read the books or not.
The book still has Gandalf getting his staff past the guards, who were specifically instructed to take it.
I attributed that to Gandalf pulling Jedi Mind Tricks on the guards, because he needed his staff to overcome Sauroman’s influence.
Nice example of a zeugma. Love it!
We’re also not quite on “actually Meridian” yet, so…
In regards to returning to a place you just came from, in all the examples you gave, those are the sorts of locations you may return to far, far more down the line. So let’s say you have a place of revelation in Movie/Season 1, and then all kinds of stuff goes down. Act Two of Movie/Season Three, the characters realize they have to go back to that place of revelation because they missed something. This typically works best if the writers clearly planned this from the start, as it will not only give a sense of how far along you’ve come, but can also re-contextualize the events of the first film/season/book/game/whatever. Be it in knowledge, skill, maturity, or some character factor, they were missing that special something that revealed the whole picture the first time. But now they have it, and they are able to obtain the final piece of the puzzle before the final final showdown.
That’s typically how it’s done, at least. If I were to hazard a guess, the developers had more planned but then needed to do some trimming… which begs the question of why have the characters leave in the first place, but I didn’t play the game and have already forgotten details from last week’s entry, so who knows?
As for everything else, I’m reminded of Halo of all things. Not necessarily due to any plot similarities, just in how I feel like Cortana set the stage for “constant voice in your ear interpreting surroundings and informing you of your objective”. The funny thing is, I feel like Bungie had a better handle on how to implement such an A.I. buddy. Cortana was your informant, but you were still the soldier. She didn’t really accomplish any tasks for you. She’d provide information and let you know where to go, but the way it was written Cortana also sounded as if she was bouncing ideas off of you as she tried to figure things out. This gave a sense that she was always interacting with the player (well, really Master Chief, our almost silent protagonist), and that she didn’t magically know all the answers. This allowed her to have her own sense of purpose and agency without overriding the player’s.
When they took her away, they took her away at a point where having her voice in your ear would ruin the atmosphere of the moment. She’s in the Halo’s computer and sends you off on a mission of importance without giving you all the necessary information. It’s done in a sort of “there’s no time” fashion, though logically now would be a great moment to prepare the Chief for the Flood. Still, this is an example of “drama-first”, so in a panic she sends you off to try and stop the Covenant from unleashing the Flood. It doesn’t work, and it is in this level where the only person to interpret what you’re seeing is… you. As such, the game sells you on the horrific mystery of what’s to come, and to this day I still remember when, sixteen or seventeen years old, my brother and I playing co-op first fought the Flood.
I feel like Bioware Montreal knew they wanted an A.I. companion for Ryder that, when they were gone, the player would feel the absence. The problem is it sounds to me like they tried way, way too hard to make you like SAM, and then failed to make it clear precisely how the player relies on SAM. The funny thing is, if you simplified it down, you could get the same impact by simply taking all of Ryder’s special powers away. Go full Iron Man 3 with it. Instead, the rules are unclear and… quite frankly, it could be your own tone, but SAM just sounds annoying to me.
Cortana also guesses, gets confused, becomes frustrated, has eureka moments and expresses empathy and care. I do not think her impact in the story would be so powerful had she been an omniscient near-omnipotent deus ex machina.
Strangely, Marathon (Bungie’s previous FPS) started out with an all knowing AI trying to attain Godhood (or something, it’s been a while) and it unravelled slowly, delaying the humanization.
Not quite. The main AI in the Marathon series, a loveable asshole by the name of Durandal, was very… humanized from the first. Mainly due to starting out completely insane. He got better, but he was constantly making jokes, philosophizing, writing songs about his own greatness, and generally showing human traits for the whole series. Often, he was as much trouble as the actual enemy, since his sense of humor was… not the most socially acceptable.
Very, very unlike SAM.
When we start Marathon, we find some displays with bits of current-events written in a very matter-of-fact voice. Are they not from Durandal? Again, it’s been years since I played the game, maybe I am just confused.
It’s been a long time, but from what I remember, Marathon (the ship) had three AIs. There’s the goodie AI (I forget her name) who was constructive, polite and rational. There is the baddie AI (Durandal). And there’s the other one who I don’t remember having any speaking role or doing anything. The first and third of these were in charge of all the interesting bits of the ship, while Durandal was in charge of… doors. He was basically the janitor.
But it’s Durandal who takes over the ship, lets half the crew die and enslaves the rest, sends out a signal to a race of aliens to come over and invade the Marathon, just so he can jack their ship and set his (extremely ambitious) plans into motion. Durandal has both a superiority and an inferiority complex, and he’s both insane and hyper-intelligent, and boy, is that a personality that takes a helluva good writer to make stick. And yet Bungie basically managed it, delivering a better story than they would manage with Destiny, despite the latter enjoying the benefit of several decades of tech advances and several hundred million dollars of additional budget.
I really think it’s fair to say that the original Halo series had better writing/directing than the original Mass Effect trilogy. Bungie had a clear vision of their product- an updated spess marine shooter- threw in some pompous monomyth and generic plot elements (The Ancients! The Fanatic Empire! Space zombies!), and made a drama-first game to throw it in. Mass Effect gave us familiar tropes with new spins on them, and then proceeded to hit it with a hammer. They went from « humans are outsiders » to « humans are bestest », they made the humanoid species stereotypes and incompetents, they made the non-humanoids jokes, and on and on. And even when they tried to up the combat focus they screwed it up.
Even the endings : Master Chief rescues Cortana, starts a civil war in the Covenant, saves Earth and the human race, and blows up the thingy of the week. Yes, he’s lost in space, but you won. Shepard… saves earth, maybe? It’s still a desolate wasteland with no remaining infrastructure. You blow up the mass relays, you’re constantly beclowned by some nebulous evil organization, and you only end the game when you obey the villain.
Despite really being a fan of what Halo 1 and 2 did in the story/lore department, I’m gonna have to disagree with you when it comes to an analysis of the franchise as a whole. However, it also comes down to Halo 1 and 2 versus Mass Effect being Star Wars versus Star Trek. They both take place in space, but they both are working at very different things. The problem is that, after Mass Effect 2, EA kept trying to get ME to be more and more like Halo.
When you get right down to it, though, both franchises went downhill after starting so well. But I am always in the minority when it comes to when Halo went wrong. For me, the book “Fall of Reach” was the first sign of things going badly. I really did not like that book when I first read it, and I remember completing Halo 3 feeling like they wasted every good possible set-up Halo 2 had left them. I mean, you have a Covenant Civil War going on, and then there’s only ONE mission where the Elites help you out… and just the Elites. They’re never present at the same time as human soldiers. There may as well be no Civil War.
I could also rant about how the ideal Halo 4 would have been Master Chief dying at the end of Halo 3, and the next iteration of the series being the Arbiter trying to unite the Covenant. The problem is that wouldn’t make for a good new “trilogy”, which was no doubt the intent when Microsoft put 343 Studios together. Heck, even I dunno how you’d end that game in a satisfactory way. It makes for a great narrative but where do you want the franchise to go after that? I don’t know, I just feel like it would have worked better taking inspiration from something like Macross and its midway plot turn of momentous importance than making all the Covenant the bad guys again as humans fight them and the forerunner (also: why the Hell are the forerunner a completely different race when the implication, from Halo 1 to 3, was that the forerunner were humans that then planted the seeds here, hence why, in Halo 1, 343 Guilty Spark refers to Master Chief as the reclaimer? Note how he, in The Library, has no name for the Covenant beyond “the other species”. Frustrating).
Bleh. Franchises with potential are squandered so much these days. I suppose it means I should be glad we’re not getting a Titanfall 3, because who knows how badly they’d screw that up.
Back to the start can work well. After all, Shep finishes her investigation mission in ME1 in the same chamber where she got ordered it.
Of course they never go there in between because the writers weren’t as much hacks as Andromeda
If you haven’t played it, then I’ll confirm for you. SAM is INFURIATINGLY annoying. He’d be bad enough if he was just there for plot or level moments, stealing all the credit from you, but even in regular gameplay he just. Won’t. Shut. Up. One for the history books in the category of “What the Hell Were They Thinking!?”
This has definitely been the case for me. The number of nifty ambient dialogues that have been assassinated by announcements of mining locations or classifications of the building I’m passing is unacceptable.
Just sounds like the writers would prefer that they were working on a more typical Fantasy RPG. Easier to handwave everything away with “it’s magic!”.
I have way less problems with SAM and the Pathfinder’s link and I think that aspect of the criticism is uncharitable. It’s just the Arc Reactor from Iron Man. “Doing this saved your life, but removing it or turning it off would kill you.” And just like in the first Iron Man, it will kill the hero in a dramatically appropriate way, where they can helplessly flounder and struggle against their fate to try to save their own life, but will need a friend’s help to actually survive.
Now some of the other questions are totally fair. Like when your sibling saves you, is that like a bandaid fix that doesn’t fully restore the hero’s strength? And why doesn’t the Archon kidnap the computer instead of essentially the input device FOR the computer? It would be way more natural if SAM was kidnapped (and controlled by alien forces into doing their bidding) and hero Ryder was functioning off of the computer equivalent of backup power. Like, you don’t lose any combat strength for gameplay reasons, but they could explain that this power will run out and you’ll still die in like 2 days or whatever is the right length for a ticking clock for this finale.
I played Andromeda and completed it, but I totally don’t remember this part. I played as Scott, and I don’t remember controlling Sara at any point. Maybe I just blocked it out? At this point, I don’t remember much of the main plot, just a lot of shooting at either Kett or Remnant. I must not have been paying much attention to the main story. I do remember that the Archon was very annoying.
Oh, I definitely remember playing as the twin. Shamus has glanced over it but the narrative excuse is that at the same time as the Archon activated his thing to sever the SAM connection the Archon also launched an assault on the Nexus. Your twin has to fight their way to some room to interact with a console in time to save Ryder and get kidnapped by the Archon.
I remember it quite clearly because I was playing on the hardest difficulty mode and by this point had Ryder around the 80s level range. As it turns out, Andromeda doesn’t scale enemy hp to player level (which is good) but it does to difficulty (which in this instance is bad). While the only fights you encounter in this section are relatively easy (I don’t recall anything more dangerous than 2 of the most basic enemy type at a time), the power gap between my late game character and the twin were massive. Fights that would have reasonably taken me seconds thanks to heavily upgraded weapons and a powerset I’d cultivated since the beginning of the game now took minutes as I was unable to use the grenade ability the twin gets effectively due to lack of practice, and the inflated enemy hp from difficulty meant I had chip away at the enemies health over the course of several minutes per encounter.
And then when I finally got back to Ryder, the game pulls an entire fleet of Remnant battleships out its backside just so we can see some stuff blow up in a space battle a couple of scenes from now. I was not impressed.
Okay, does anyone else feel like the armor design got way worse in this game? Maybe that was already the case in ME3 and I just didn’t pay enough attention, but I feel like the ME1+2 armor designs were far more clean and simple. These all seem overdone.
Yeah, it’s way too busy. I don’t remember it being that bad in ME3.
You know what really, really infuriates me? This stupid trend this games have had for the last few years of having sections where you have to sloooooowly walk/stagger through a place until something lets you be able to run again. Why the hell do they keep doing this? It’s not fun or entertaining in any way, it’s just tedious. Wanna show how a character is weak or sick? Fine: do it in a goddamn cutscene instead of forcing us to play through it.
The worst part is when characters aren’t even weak in any shape or form but they’re still forced to walk really slowly, as if that somehow were to add pathos to the scene. No. Stop it. You’re making a videogame and not a movie. If you want to make a movie, go make a goddamn movie, for fuck’s sake. All your stupid-ass attempts at showing depth are going to be destroyed the moment the player regains proper control again and decides to jump and crawl over a table while two people are having a conversation next to them.
On the other hand we generally keep telling devs that they should be putting things in gameplay and not in cutscenes, and the slow movement thing is the closest a game can give the player to a kinesthetic experience of the character being for some reason impaired. That said I will agree that it is overused and, as is often the case, many devs got a memo that “it’s a powerful device” but don’t understand why and instead of making it effective (see Journey) turn it into a 5 minute slog that completely breaks the pacing.
Because Another World did it and every one wants to be as cinematic as that. Never mind that Eric Chahi actually knew what he was trying to achieve in terms of tone and mood.
I started Murdered: Soul Suspect last week, and was treated to this as the very first interactive part of the game, after the intro cutscene, and for this annoyance was rewarded with the continuation of the cutscene it had interrupted…
Then of course it turned out that the keys are not rebindable, and wasd is the only movement set, not even arrow keys (I’m left handed), and so after the cutscenes were over and I’d done some pointless walking around I quit and tried to see if I could find out how to change this. Only to return to find out that the game hadn’t autosaved after the cutscenes and I had to re-watch them, as they were unskippable. After some messing about failing to get autohotkey to work to use arrow keys, I decided to play with wasd. After about 30 minutes of playing I realised the game was so bad that I didn’t want to play it anyway.
At least it’s another game ticked off my backlog, even if not for the usual reason of completion. Thank goodness it was only £3 in a Steam sale.
Typo patrol! “Sensors don’t work in a nebulae” should remove that last e, to make it singular.
Another typo: “fight his way to SAM node” should, perhaps, be “to a SAM node” or, maybe “to Sam Node”? Happens again a couple sentences later.
I know it’s odd, but the main computer where SAM runs is called “SAM node”. You’d think that, being a node, it would be one of many. But apparently this is not the case.
Can we at least capitalize “Node” so it’s a proper noun?
I don’t know but I’ve been told, Dierdre took the other nodes.
Let’s go burn that Gaian witch!
The interaction with Remnant consoles could be fixed but as you said would need a rewrite of things.
For example, resetting/activating the “machine” on each world could have just kicked it into a backup mode, able to sustain life (the planets could be dying and the player/hero now prevent further bio collapse), you’d need to not just restart all the terraforming machines but also restart the control center as the entire network would be needed to be active for terraforming to work.
And why the entire network? Because the automated systems would need to ferry resources from one world to another to feed the terraforming machines.
Sure it might be a bit sloggish being required to trek around to all the worlds, but it would make sense from a story point of view.
There is also a missed opportunity here, when you shift to playing as the sibling, it would have been cool if half the game was with one sibling and the other half with the other. And the actions you did with the first sibling would determine how much crap the 2nd sibling would have to deal with.
Near the grand finale the game might switch between the two at certain points where maybe one is dealing with the control center and he other the Archon and switching which character is controlled during cutscenes.
As far as companion relationships just to keep things simple, sibling B can’t romance the same companion that sibling A did and vice versa. Things one sibling say or do could also cause a companion/squadmate to become prejudices against the other sibling which could be fun too.
A planet that sibling B has to visit may be very hostile to the Ryder name due to how sibling A handled things in the first half of the game.
These are the kinds of things that only videogames/interactive games can do, no movie or book could do this ind of narration/storytelling.
I seem to recall some mention somewhere in the game that Ryder and SAM’s continued interfacing with Remnant tech is altering the Pathfinder’s neural pathways, which is why Ryder is able to command Remnant bots after being cut off from SAM.
And I believe the Archon wanted your character’s sibling to piggyback on their implant to interface with SAM to use SAM to facilitate the Archon interfacing with Remnant tech, and doing so in such a way that SAM doesn’t have much influence.
Super behind by now, so I suspect Shamus will be the only one to read this for a while, but here we go anyway.
My gut response to this was, “no, don’t do that!” Because, poorly realized as he was, I felt like SAM was supporting evidence for my view (and yours) that there’s nothing about synthetic intelligence that’s inherently antagonistic to organic intelligence.
Which in turn triggered a cascade realization – they SHOULDN’T have made SAM, precisely because that’s what he is, and ME3’s ending provides the option to have at least 3 answers to that question, and none of them are explicitly canon. SAM only makes sense to someone who either chose the green ending, or at least agrees that synethic and organic beings can coexist without having to meld (which, really, is a 4th answer Bioware failed to offer).
To someone who answered that question with red or blue, SAM is an overt threat to not only Ryder but the entire colony project, and they ought to be just waiting for the other shoe to drop. That it never actually does would inevitably be seen as an indictment of their view, and therefore a contradiction of their decision in ME3 – which is something Bioware had explicitly said they didn’t want to do. SAM is a backdoor statement about which ending to ME3 is “correct” even if there’s no position taken by the game about which “happened.”