T w e n t y S i d e d
Our heroes reach Meridian, which they discover is a kinda Dyson sphere type thing, except roughly the size of a moonIt’s got a sparkly lens flare or whatever at the center instead of a full-sized star.. Ryder and her crew race after the Archon to reach Meridian. He’s going to Meridian to… activate it? But I thought the space station was the control center for the network? Whatever. We’re basically repeating the previous chapter where we have to stop the bad guy from gaining control of the alien superweapon, except now he actually has the means to operate the superweapon. Also he’s got Scott as a hostage, which ups the stakes if you care about him. Also, Meridian is a lush habitable world and would make a good home for the Initiative.
Meridian
The Archon has hijacked the Human ark and is piloting it to Meridian. He’s got Scott and the captain on the bridge as prisoners and he’s monologuing at them, because that’s literally the only thing this idiot ever does. He talks so much and says so little it’s infuriating. He yammers at Ryder. He jabbers to these two. He leaves long-winded datapad messages lying around. The whole thing would be unintentional comedy if his dialog wasn’t so tedious.
Ryder is chasing the Archon in the tempest. And for no reason whatsoever, Ryder decides to leave her spaceship, jump in the Nomad, and race after him on the ground.
I guess saying “no reason” isn’t fair. The reason is that the end of Mass Effect 1 had us eject from the Normandy so we could drive after the bad guy in the Mako, and this game is copying ideas from Mass Effect 1 whether they make sense or not.
The Archon is on the bridge of the Human ark, with both Scott and the captain as hostages, along with 20,000 human sleepersMinus however many have woken up since we arrived in Andromeda.. Perhaps sensing that the Archon’s position is too strong for our hero to overcome, the writer has him do something completely nonsensical. The Archon abandons the Human ark and flies off in a shuttle with Scott, leaving the captain alive and free to resume control of the ark. I guess he couldn’t spare four or five mooks to stand on the bridge and point guns at people?
How I’d have done it:
This entire sequence is so awful that pointing out something as pedestrian as plotholes seems petty, but this one would be important if we actually cared about this unfolding drama. The humans have regained control of their ark. The Archon has taken Scott into the bowels of Meridian, planning to use Scott and SAM to take control of it. Laying aside the question of how the Archon could compel SAM to do something, this doesn’t work because SAM’s hardware is on the Hyperion. That gives us an instant win button. If it looks like the Archon might win, we can just turn SAM offOr smash him. Or put him in sleep mode. Whatever.. I realize this might make Ryder sad, but since the Archon is threatening to destroy / subjugate the entire cluster, that seems like a small price to pay.
The Archon talks a lot, but it’s not clear what his immediate plans are and it’s also not clear what the network can do. He’s basically threatening to take all the barely-habitable shithole planets and make them totally uninhabitable, which at this point would threaten the lives of like, a hundred people. And that’s assuming Meridian works fast enough to be an immediate threat. For all anyone knows, terraforming takes years.
This is the final showdown with our big villain and we’re not sure what the super-weapon can do, how fast it works, or what the bad guy’s immediate plan is. If it turns out to be a problem we could just unplug SAM and cut the Archon off from the network. Even with simple plot elements like a cartoon villain and a doomsday weapon, the writer still can’t construct basic things like clear stakes and dramatic peril.
The Slog
Here we are in the classic end-game slog. A lot of games suffer from this, particularly titles from BioWare, Obsidian, and Bethedsa. The plot has reached maximum tension, and now a lot of that tension will be lost as plot comes to a halt so we can gun down mooks for the better part of an hour. This particular slog is actually not bad by the standards of the genre.
Visually, this section is spectacular. I know I’ve been merciless to this poor game for the last few entries, but I want to give kudos to the folks who put together this ground sequence. We’re driving around at high speed while a huge battle rages overhead. We’re on the inside of a sphere, which gives us a horizon like we’ve never seen before. The continents in the distance make the space feel huge, which makes everything seem more epic. There’s some radio chatter and a couple of quick cutscenes that sell us on the notion that the other characters in the story are active and doing things and not just waiting for Ryder to shoot all the mooks.
Yes, we have to kill a bunch of dudes that feel very unimportant right now. But we also get a lot of reaction to player choice and a pretty good fireworks display. Based on the choices you’ve made, the lives you’ve saved, and the allies you’ve acquired, various groups will show up here at the end. Some will fight with you on the ground, while others will take part in the ship-to-ship battle raging overhead. All of this happens against the wild backdrop of a lush green planet that’s been constructed inside-out. While it makes no sense for Ryder to decide to drive around down here, it does make for a pretty amazing show. It’s a good sequence all around. Honestly this might be one of the best parts of the game. It’s fun, gorgeous, and reactive to player choice.
If we can look past the confused themes, confused plot, horrendous villain, embarrassing dialog, plot holes, and bland characters, then this scene gives us a glimpse at the game that might have been. (Or perhaps the game they were trying to make.) There are moments of brilliance mixed in with the dross of Andromeda, and that makes the narrative failings sting all the more.
Protip: Resist the urge to ignore the mooks and charge straight for your goal. A lot of progress is secretly gated by combat encounters, which means you need to kill all the enemies in the area before the next door will open or the required cutscene can trigger. I got trapped at several different points in the game when a lone mook would get stuck someplace out of reach and I’d have to reload the most recent save. For whatever reason, the ending sequence is particularly susceptible to this problem. I understand they didn’t have time for polish, but I wish the developers had at least removed these kill requirements. Being able to skip fights isn’t nearly as damaging as getting stuck.
The Archon keeps bellowing about what a badass he is while also running away from our hero. He’s abandoned the Human ark and is flying towards the Meridian control center in a shuttle. Ryder is chasing after him in her space-tank, for some reason.
All In
The Human ark isn’t designed for atmospheric flight and it can’t stay up. It crashes on the surface of Meridian, meaning the 20,000 sleepers on board are now stuck here. This place is either their new homeworld, or their grave. This is a fantastic moment for upping the stakes of this final showdown, although it has the unfortunate side-effect of rendering a majority of your efforts in the game moot. Ryder spent all those hours terraforming worlds to make room for those tiny little outposts. We worked so hard to establish these minor footholds in the jungle, on a glacier, and in two different deserts.
The Earth is 75% ocean and huge portions of the remaining landmass are harsh. Only a small percent of the Earth’s surface is made up of comfortable, arable farmland. And yet we’ve managed to cram almost 8 billion people on this rock. Meridian looks like it’s made entirely of fertile ground with a temperate climate. The starting population of the Andromeda Initiative – all races included – is less than a million. There’s enough space here to keep everyone comfortable for centuriesUnless you’re an idiot and you brought the Krogan with you, in which case you’ll be up to your ears in Krogan in about a decade..
Who is going to want to freeze their ass off on Voeld or get roasted alive on Elaaden when there’s all this open space on Meridian?
Mass Effect Andromeda has these two parallel goals of establishing colonies and stopping the Archon, and in the end the latter sort of renders the former irrelevant. It’s not that this is wrong or anything. I’m not saying this ruins the game. It’s just an odd way to construct our story, and serves as more evidence that perhaps this project was pulled in two different directions by different parts of the design team.
Conjecture: I think the planet terraforming stuff is what was left over after the team finally cut the “massive procedurally generated open-world” exploration” stuff. It doesn’t have much synergy with the main plot, and here at the end it’s rendered moot by it. While I think the main story of this game is terrible on account of the atrocious main villain, I think it would have been a good call to cut the terraforming stuff and give those resources to the main story. Bad or good, the story is what this audience is here for and the terraforming is dull busywork that’s incompatible with the main plot.
Before Meridian: Why do I need to track down Meridian when we’re making good progress just activating the vaults one at a time?
After Meridian: Why do we need all those dinky outposts when we have this vast lush world?
The two plots just don’t work together, and spreading development resources across two different, incompatible, and largely isolated stories didn’t do this game any favors.
We’ve still got to settle up with the Archon. We’ll deal with him next week.
Footnotes:
[1] It’s got a sparkly lens flare or whatever at the center instead of a full-sized star.
[2] Minus however many have woken up since we arrived in Andromeda.
[3] Or smash him. Or put him in sleep mode. Whatever.
[4] Unless you’re an idiot and you brought the Krogan with you, in which case you’ll be up to your ears in Krogan in about a decade.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
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Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Maybe, just maybe, the idea was to convey the conflict between people who want to do space exploration and colonization and those who are all for staying on planet earth and preventing it from being destroyed.
It would be a conflict that maps rather nicely to your description, I believe.
While humanity and allies flew to colonize a new galaxy, terraformed planets and tried to find a new home, in the end humanity is stuck on a lush planet with the goal of preventing a (pseudo-?)religious megalomanic from destroying all inhabitable planets and making them uninhabitable.
I think this might actually be a rather nice attempt at presenting an ideological conflict on the topic of spacefaring and environment/climate issues.
On the other hand, I might be giving the writers too much credit. I like the idea, though, and think the plots don’t necessarily conflict with each other as much as you think.
It’s a shame, really. Meridian is easily the best environment in the game, the dyson-moon thing is a great fit for Mass Effect-style sci fi, and yet you spend maybe ten minutes on it (in a place to get a good view, anyway – you spend a lot more time in a Generic Remnant Dungeon). Forget the Nexus – make Meridian a hub world, make the main quest about discovering/exploring/defending it, and it could become as iconic as the Citadel. That “skyline” is a view that could make fetch quests bearable. Andromeda would have gone from “that game with the wonky animation” to “that game where HOLY SHIT YOU PLAY ON A DYSON SPHERE”.
I expect that was probably the intent for the sequel they were obviously setting up (which may never happen because, well, see everything Shamus has written up to this point).
Oddly, the plot holes in this section of the game didn’t bother me nearly as much as the earlier sections. Probably, it was because everything was moving so quickly that I didn’t stop to think about the nonsense logic.
I agree that Meridian is the best environment in the game, but there are other great ones as well that you spend maybe 10 minutes in each.
The asteroid “planet” with super low gravity that Vetra’s loyalty mission takes place on. It’s so much fun to drive across an empty landscape, hit a jump and go flying over a ravine.
The volcano planet that Peebee’s loyalty mission takes place on where stuff periodically falls into the lava. (And yes, having a volcano/lava level is almost obligatory in video games, but even with that, this planet seemed cool)
And then either finally or perhaps first, Habitat 7 with its floating rocks, lightning, and weird mushroom plants. If you hadn’t already been turned off on the game by all the negative reaction on the internet, Habitat 7 makes you feel like you’re going to be in for a great game.
These were all super cool, visually interesting settings and yet we spent basically no time in any of them. Instead we had two boring orange desert planets that we spent a ton of time going back and forth between rock formations. It is a shame, like Shivan says because parts of this game, individual moments work really well. The rest though…
Ark. Although if the Archon also has the humans’ arc it would be good if he gave that back, too.
Maybe that’s how he got his head-ring. He keeps stealing everyone’s arcs, but doesn’t know what to do with them, so he just wears them like a trophy.
You know what would be interesting, if you have a side quest where you find out all the female krogans were secretly sterilized before loading them into their ark. The krogan break in the new worlds and any enemies, then when everything is set up they realize they were doomed from the start and they get gunned down.
Maybe have the archon promise the krogan a legacy if they betray the others if the player tells others about this.
It would have been better if they’d never been on the arks in the first place. The krogans’ story was perfectly and thoroughly seen through in the original trilogy. Of course nobody’s unwilling to give them another shot if the writers had something new to do or say with them. But it’s obvious that they really, really didn’t, and they’re here for sheer familiarity’s sake.
As Shamus said earlier they could’ve used the drell, a species in need of a new homeworld and not really explored in the first three games. If they wanted a returning fan favourite, the quarians are howlingly obvious candidates. Or they could have given us something interesting, you know, a non-humanoid race like the rachni or elcor. But no, they went with a choice both silly and banal, then produced them in the laziest way possible.
Not just Drell. This would be an opportunity to use the “enemy” species from ME, explore what they are like, and see the situations that result.
We never got our hanar sidekick, did we? Just cram that one into a krogan -sized mech suit and you’ve now got a hilariously polite murder machine.
Personally, I want an Elcor companion. They’d be perfect for a heavy-weapons role and could have interesting/different abilities.
And the potential for dialog is amazing: Is he being sarcastic? Is he being earnest? No-one can tell except other Elcor!
Wouldn’t the elcor himself tell you? “Sardonically: there is no way this plan could fail. Our victory is assured.”
Somebody did a gag about a Hanar imitated Dirty Harry, which was pretty hilarious. Hanar companion would be *amazing*.
It’s no great a criticism, but I do think the ME games limited their writer’s palette just a bit too much in their choice of companions. The humans were usually the least interesting of the bunch, and the almost-exactly-human Asari similarly a bit on the bland side. At least around here, people really got engaged with the less-humanoid Krogan or Quarian. The Quarians are particularly interesting as a design choice because they have no facial animations, and therefore were extra-hard to deliver a good conversation with.
Heck, the drell would have given us a reason for multiple desert planets!
They went out of their way to say these Krogan were suffering from a less bad case of the genophage as a reward for going on the trip. Depending on what the new viability of offspring is… they might actually be fine? Like, if the normal Krogan birth rate is 1000x human and the genophage birthrate is 1.5 times human and the gene therapy rate is 2 times human, that wouldn’t actually be too bad? Yes, Krogan would outnumber everyone else in a few generations, but if the relationship isn’t on the wrong foot, that could still be peaceful.
Unless you actually kill each one, Krogan outlive humans, Salarians, and maybe Turians. They can live in places lichen would have trouble. And they’ll be really, really angry.
Clearly, the solution is simply to disable or halt the terraforming systems on some or all of the currently-inhabited worlds, then relocate all the Milky Way colonists AND most of the surviving Angarans to Meridian (the game suggests the entire cluster’s Angaran population might add up to a few million tops, thanks to the limited resources available while fighting a losing war with the Kett, plus attrition from said war), then give most or all of the borderline-habitable world’s to the Krogan. The Krogan as a rule apparently prefer living in conditions where they have to fight to survive- not surprising considering they’re evolved for just that – and it has the added benefit of serving as the same kind of population control as their original native environment did (though less harsh, but that’s fine since the genophage isn’t a solved problem for them). Meanwhile Meridian appears capable of comfortably supporting everyone else all by itself for several generations while they figure out remtech, and prepare some more worlds suited to their own species in the cluster.
I hate end-of-game slogs. Even Planescape: Torment had to make us earn its superlative final confrontation by having us fight through a fortress crowded by the dullest enemies (who were also a pain to fight to add insult to injury).
I remember Fallout New Vegas being another particularly egregious example.
Is FNV that bad? I remember my stealth-orientated character having to kill all of about 4 dudes in order to get to Lanius, who famously you don’t have to fight at all.
Depending on which side you’re on and what allies you have at the end you can pretty much run past most of Hoover Dam. It’s definitely no Curst Dungeon.
I don’t remember the combat at the end of New Vegas being particularly bad…but holy shit, there’s a bit where you’re running between near-identical large chambers in Hoover Dam and I swear the objective marker was broken. I must have spent about 15 minutes running back and forth going: ‘This place is identical to where I just was! Where the fuck am I?!’
Naturally, more Legion mooks would spawn in when you changed rooms, because got to you’ve got to keep that exciting pace up as the player angrily wanders around, lost.
…that’ll teach ME to attempt that optional ‘help out the defenders before counterattacking’ objective.
The last couple of quests in FNV’s main questlines are pretty crappy, aside from dealing with President Kimball. Does ANYONE remember that power station quest that House and Independent players have to go through?
That power station quest has a story function for House/Indie players though, because before then it’s more than possible to leave the NCR alone, or in large part work with them. Then the game gives you a mission which says ‘You have to murder these guys. They aren’t threatening you, but they’re in your way. Time to show your true colours, because shit’s serious now.’
If the writing had been done right and we trusted the narrator, would the odd sitting positions have been seen not as bad animations, but as a shot at making the chairs of so many waiting rooms so low? It’s specially annoying when you see those ankle low seats in the waiting room to a traumatologist or a rheumatologist, where the patients are supposed to have mobility issues and may be unable to stand up from them.
They got superglued to the chairs.
This would be great for a comedy game
[setting: boss room, starring: protagonist, love interest, big bad]
Big Bad: ah, there is our hero, wont you get up to greet him miss?
Love interest starts struggling
Big bad: come on, you can do it, take me out, here ill show my back to you, I wont hate you if you take me out now
LI starts struggling more
Protagonist: what did you do to her
BB: well I explained my plan to her and she saw things were better like this
protagonist: Wha-
LI: Dont listen to him, I would never do that
BB: Well, or I would like to say that, but no, I just glued her in the chair, but that look of your face. well worth it
:D
‘What can I say? I’ve got an adhesive personality – people tend to stick around me. Miss Love Interest and I, well, I feel we’ve really bonded; she’s been practically glued to that chair.’
‘I’m literally glued to it, you ass!’
Protagonist: …glue?
BB: We were out of rope. It’s a shame, I liked that chair.
Protagonist: Why didn’t you just wriggle out of your pants?
LI: Well excuse you!
Protagonist: He’s threatening to destroy the moon!
LI: Well you’re threatening to destroy my dignity!
I hate it when a person complains about that kinda stuff in a story. Especially if the love interest and protagonist are already totally down with eachother. Im like “you still have your underwear, the only people seeing you is the big bad who is about to get pummeled and your boyfriend who you probably gonna be nasty with anyway”. And then they start to reason.
‘Dammit, I’ll buy you another pair of pants after we’ve saved the Moon! Now get out of that damned chair and HELP!’
Seriously. Have you ever tried to separate a guy from his favorite pair of worn out jeans? The moon is doomed.
With due credit to The Incredibles:
“We are talking about the greater good here!”
“I am the greatest good you are ever gonna get!”
This is also the moment when, if you made the various correct decisions, you can save the life of Captain Dunn. During my first playthrough of this game, I had actually forgotten who this character was because I had interacted briefly with her once at the beginning of the game and she had left zero impression on me. So from my perspective, I saved a character that I didn’t know and didn’t care about from a danger that was created and resolved in virtually the same breath. But I found I was able to roll with it pretty well. I figure that not all of my decisions had the carry the weight of the world on them. Sometimes it’s nice to save a throw-away character.
For my money, this was the best part of the game. It still wasn’t flawless, but the momentum felt pretty good and I felt like I was heading toward something big. It was good to see that some of my choices paid off with various allies popping in to say “hello.”
Also, this is the moment where your choice of whether or not to help out the Archon’s rival comes to a head. Either you agreed to help the rival and he’d disable his ship so that he wouldn’t have to fight you, or you told him to frak off and to bring his worst. The sad thing about this is that I’ve played it both ways and in terms of how it affects your progress during this slog, I admit that I noticed no real difference. It ends up being another of those choices that could’ve had big ramifications in a sequel, but ended up not mattering much in this game.
Now that I think about it, the human ark crashing would have worked better as the midway point of the overall story.
@Shamus you say “the writer” but it’s multiple, and while a few of them did write a lot of dodgy lines here and there (“my face is tired” etc.) I can’t help but feel that when you say “the writer” you really should write the “lead writer” they either sucked, or was rarely working on this project, a good lead writer would have caught all these issues and tweaked/fixed them.
Unless game director or some upper management decided to make their lives hell for some stupid reasons (deadlines, budget, manpower, and other studios worked on andromeda AFAIK not “just” that one studio, some things where outsourced.)
He specifically uses “the writer” to avoid pointing fingers at any individual.
It’s very hard to tell who or what caused any particular issues when looking at a multi-year development cycle involving hundreds of people without any real insider information.
We can speculate and put the blame on any number of individuals, but we just don’t know enough to make any solid conclusions, and we’d probably end up arguing over how to distribute the blame for any number of issues. Which is pretty pointless, toxic, and almost certainly a waste of time.
I’m not entirely clear on why you’re driving ever. I mean, why do people in the Mass Effect universe still used wheeled vehicles at all? The mass effect is so ubiquitous and, presumably, so cheap that it’s used to power firearms, for heaven’s sake. All cars in Mass Effect should be Jetsons-style flying cars.
In this particular case, however, I’m sure that Ryder & Co. are driving to the final showdown rather flying because the developers have already implented a driving mini-game/mechanic rather than a flying mini-game/mechanic. (“We have one vehicle in this game. It’s stupid, but we’re gonna use it!”) Why they felt they needed a vehicular section here at the end at all I couldn’t tell you. For pacing’s sake, maybe? Because it was easier than showing the same thing in a cutscene? I dunno.
I’ve actually wondered if mass-effect powered firearms really are all that common in the Mass Effect universe. Sure, we see a lot of them, but we’re military/special forces types and go around shooting at other such people. Biotics are allegedly exceedingly rare and we just see them frequently because they all end up in the military world too. I suspect that away from protagonists and the military, guns are actually quite expensive in that universe.
In Mass Effect 1, there’s a few nods to how expensive and valuable Element Zero is. During that optional Admiral’s tour of the Normandy he complains about how much eezo went into building the Normandy and how it could have been better used. Also in Mass Effect 1, if you get the Renegade-only mission, you can see the Alliance is prepared to negotiate with a complete nut in order to get mining rights to an asteroid rich in Element Zero. (In fact, this mission is notable that Admiral Hackett really just expected Renegade-Shepard to lose his/her cool and shoot the jackass, but he’ll still honor any deal you make with the guy because Element Zero is just THAT valuable to them)
Even Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC backs this up in a weird way. Specialist Traynor’s little toothbrush seems like a throwaway gag, but it’s mentioned that it costs [a surprising amount of money] and it’s reacted to as though it’s an incredible expense – and it’s not a bullet-spewing machine of destruction. It just scrubs teeth.
So I think the Mass Effect and Element Zero isn’t actually that ubiquitous – we just always play very well-funded elite military units that fight against the same. (At least for a while. The rules of the setting get softer as time goes on.) Meanwhile the wheel is one of the most important technologies anywhere for letting you move heavy vehicles around for less energy; I’d assume all manner of lower-cost equipment would still be wheeled/tracked just so you don’t need a very expensive eezo core to make it fly.
That’s actually a really well thought out point. I never thought about how expensive eezo tech was.
That’s a justification for why other vehicles might be wheeled. The very well-funded elite military unit should still have flying vehicles.
Hm. Here’s a possible counter-argument. Please forgive me if I screw up some of the lore in the process.
All Asari are biotic. Biotics are caused by exposure to Element 0 during gestation. Therefore, all Asari are exposed to Element 0 during gestation. Even the ones with poor parents. So I don’t see how Element 0 can be all that scarce or all that expensive.
I think your selection-bias argument is reasonable, but I don’t find it persuasive. The games may occasionally say that Element 0 is rare, expensive, or both, but they don’t treat Element 0 that way, not when every gun, spaceship, and Asari that the player sees in a universe full of guns, spaceships and Asari is full of the stuff.
The Asari homeworld (Thessia) is noted as being exceptionally full of Element Zero. Because there’s so much Element Zero on the planet, apparently everything from its biosphere has enough exposure to develop biotic abilities. So despite it being rare galaxy-wide, its abundance in that one spot has altered the entire Asari species and that’s (part of) why the Asari are so wealthy and influential – they have massive reserves of a rare and valuable element right in their homeworld.
This does raise questions about Asari born and raised anywhere that isn’t Thessia – how many generations removed from a homeworld-born Asari would you have to be before they exhibited no powers whatsoever? The series never even comes close to exploring this kind of question, probably because from game 2+ that kind of worldbuilding fell by the wayside. Oh well.
We don’t really know how much Element Zero actually needs to go in each spaceship, rifle, shield, and Biotic out there. The civilizations we see are (presumably) scouring every possible source of Element Zero for as much of it as they can possibly extract, and what you witness in-game is a non-trivial fraction of the galaxy’s total Element Zero reserves. (I’m stretching a little here – the writers in the first game say that about 1% of the galaxy has had some kind of cursory exploration, and mentions a few known ways Element Zero comes to be – presumably exploration prioritizes possible eezo sources?). I’m willing to at least meet the worldbuilders halfway. If they say it’s rare and valuable, I’ll treat it like it is; particularly if they can craft some good stories like that Renegade mission (UNC: The Negotiation) from it.
Speaking of which, the entire Reaper Cycle is based on funneling all the technological civilizations down the mass effect tech tree. Now sure, we know that the next cycle builds on the ruins of a previous one and even if we assume that eezo magically doesn’t get expended or is ridiculously efficient while creating the said phenomenon how long would it take to actually run out of it if it is so crucial to running all the technology. I mean, on the one hand I can’t picture Reapers meticulously dismantling all the guns and eezo using consoles to then seed it all over the galaxy again, and on the other hand even if they did recover it a lot of it would still get destroyed when they, say, blew stuff up. If I were generous towards the writers I might have said that the reason eezo is so scarce is because it’s been mined out by like hundreds of civlizations over thousands of years.
Oh, silly Shamus. Everyone knows that it’s only the Chosen One who can do anything right! That’s half of what the Archon’s been saying throughout the game!
If the humans on the ark had had to save themselves they’d probably have failed miserably. Shit, if they hadn’t been Humans, they probably would have failed so hard they made the situation worse, like activating a self-destruct timer on Meridian that no-one knew existed.
It’s too bad this wasn’t a game about dueling Chosen Ones. You get so far in the game and you find out the Kett are an extra-galactic initiative trying to colonize the andromeda galaxy, but their planets need to be colonized the other way.
I have a better idea. What if – prepare to have your mind BLOWN – what if the Kett were just a rogue cell?
You jest, but I seem to recall that you can read messages from the Archon’s second in command that pretty much state the Archon isn’t fully following the directive laid down by the leader of the Kett empire.
How to make the “let’s drive the car” decision make sense: have Liam decide to make the chase a joyride as well instead of just waiting for the Tempest to try and catch the shuttle – you can either agree, try to stop him but get dragged along, or suffer through a boring-but-sensible decision.
Forgive me if I’m being dense, but…
“Also he’s got Scott as a hostage, which ups the odds if you care about him.”
Shouldn’t that be, “up the *stakes?*
Wonderful article as always!
You guys are a lot more patient than I am. I can’t even imagine sticking out this game long enough to reach Meridian. I gave up somewhere on the ice planet.
Did you try to get 100% viability on the way? That’s almost done in my run. I’m not sure outposts on Kadara and Elaaden are worth it at this point.
Everything’s fine.
I think the music should be mentioned now. All four ME games have some pretty solid tracks that compliment their respective scenes well (and more often then not are the sole reason the scene works at all).
Andromeda has mostly okay’ish tracks that are serviceable. But the Meridian combat stands out: It has these big brass flourishes that often line up with you using a power and blowing dudes away.
This track tries so hard to sell the generic endgame slog as “the big damn heroes are here to save the day” and I found myself letting it work.
I did like the initial drop on Meridian, where you’re suddenly racing through a battlefield as things happen around you. Even the side-quest characters making cameos is cool. My main problem with this sequence is that by this late in the game I’d forgotten who most of them were and ended up pausing the game at least once to try to look up some scientist or another on the wiki after hearing her shout some encouragement. Of course, after this sequence we enter the final dungeon which is just more Remnant architecture with kett opponents so my excitement was short lived.
Honestly I kind of wish they’d built the plot backwards from the Meridian battle. As people have pointed out a number of times the whole “we need to colonise planets!” plot doesn’t really make sense once Eos has been secured- further planetary colonisation is a luxury rather than a necessity. If they’d made the entire plot about gathering allies in order to build a large enough army to fight the Archon in an open battle for Meridian (having already been found and fortified by the kett before the game began) the plot might have had a more coherent direction.
I can only speculate that these endgame slogs are a result of the writer/writers trying to build anticipation or pump up the climax of the story.
They drop the big reveal, force you into the final act… and then pad out the gameplay to try and stretch out that moment. WE HAVE TO STOP SOVEREIGN FROM CONTROLLING THE CITADEL! is the driving force at the end of ME1, and they hope to ride out that feeling for a while by having you cut down tons and tons of Geth to do so. Maybe they’re worried that without the padding, the sequence isn’t memorable and would be over too soon?
Seems weird. Pivotal scenes in a book may only be a page or two; in a movie they might only be 1-2 minutes and be <1% of the total run-time. Why try to push a 20-hour story's climax into a 2-hour grind for 10% of the total story? (I'm just counting the core missions – sidequesting is a weird thing with no real equivalent in other media)
Or maybe they're trying to establish the final villain? This is the biggest bad, so they must command the biggest horde?
To me, it’s about giving the gameplay itself a fitting conclusion. The final mission HAS to be longer than any sidequest, with at least slightly bigger component maps. Ideally, the encounters inside also bring together everything you’ve fought before. Part of it also has to do with the genre being so intertwined with dungeon-crawling (Even if the ‘dungeon’ for the sidequests you’ve done before is a pre-fab building in the middle of a procgenned landscape). To an extent, every mission in an RPG is a ‘dungeon”, so the final mission needs to be the biggest, grandest dungeon in the game.
A final boss without a final dungeon to house it is just lame.
Of course, there IS a fine balancing act between making the dungeon big enough to feel like a final epic crawl, and making the dungeon TOO big and turning it into a slog, or failing to bring everything together properly.
The final dungeon of Breath of Fire II (My favorite JRPG of all time because it has a pantsless catgirl with a cute butt) drags itself out for too many more levels than it should, largely obfuscated because of the lack of visible progress – I think it’s 16 repetitive levels of the same tileset in a vaguely spiral pattern (But, at least it comes with the BIS weapon for said catgirl, and cute bell collar). But, the final showdown in Mass Effect 1 worked really well, because you were invested in the environment (Suddenly, you’re fighting on the Citadel), the Elevator of Loading becomes a part of the environment, and you can see your progress as you fight your way to the top – while showing the height of your power to the best the Geth had. A bunch of games fall into the trap of not making it clear that you’re making progress – either with a repetitive dungeon with no end in sight, or CONSTANT changes in the dungeon so you lose any sense of progress (I think KOTOR2 hit this problem – along with a failure to wrap everything up properly)
Done right, though, and it’s a really satisfying conclusion to the game that lets you really play your party to its maximum effectiveness (Because now you have the BIS gear and fully-developed party) against a sufficient number of sufficiently diverse encounters to satiate the thrill of having your party be at full power, Your party composition and gearing has been a plan, and the “Final Slog” is when that Plan comes together and gives you the opportunity to fully unleash on all the encounters you previously thought “I can hardly wait until I get X ability/weapon’. A final boss really can’t provide the same satisfaction as the final dungeon’s clearing of encounter after encounter (On that note – the encounters need to be diverse, with no individual composition/situation repeated no more than 3 times)
If you DON’T have a Final Dungeon for your RPG about assorted Dungeons (Even if the dungeon’s a ruthless businessman’s merc-reinforced high-rise tower, or a ship taken over by very angry psychics pissed at their negligent politician, or a prison holding the most dangerous people in the galaxy, or the ruins of an abandoned psychic testing lab), it can leave the final battle feeling like it comes out of nowhere, and the game is over too soon.
Of course a final dungeon can’t bring everything together if the game is only half-paced, which KotoR 2 and ME:A both suffer from.
My hypothesis is that the lategame is often where corners get cut and combat slogs are likely the easiest type of content to make for these types of games. The Shadowrun Returns games in particular demonstrate this nicely in the Shadows of Hong Kong DLC, or nearly all fan content. The main campaigns themselves are full of dialogue and subterfuge and character development but everything else is just “you shoot a million guys in a hallway”
The endgame slog is because the story climax should also have a gameplay climax. The BEST example of this I can think of is the Suicide Mission from Mass Effect 2. It’s unique, exciting, and feels like the epic climax to every preparation you’ve made up to that point. You were warned the whole game how dangerous and challenging this would be and then you get there… and it’s dangerous and challenging! Righteous. Mass Effect 1 is also pretty good because you get the most fun and exciting Mako moment in the game followed by probably the best on foot combat of the game (climbing around in zero G! saving the non-combat area from attackers!). The bosses in both games are iffy, but that’s down to Bioware often struggling in boss design.
Other end game slogs I thought were great and fitting *BIG SPOILERS since I’m discussing end games here*:
-Fire Emblem (GBA): It’s time to face the evil Dragon God guy. And all his fodder are dragons too! This is where you get to bring out all the stops and take your strongest max level team, use only the best weapons, etc. I thought this was a great time, though I admittedly didn’t try it on super duper hard difficulties.
-Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Prepare your team and your equipment and your memories (whaaa). The way this game works, you can spend in-game YEARS prepping for the final push, which is awesome imo. Once you think you’re good, head into the crater at the heart of the world. The final boss is a poisonous alien living in a meteor crater! All the enemies on the trip in are uber strong, which makes sense because they’ve adapted to just live in horribly fatal poison. As you fight him, he’ll literally devour your memories of your years of traveling. If you don’t have enough distinctive memories to spare, your team will become a mess of amnesiac blunderers who don’t even remember what they were trying to do. This game did not receive enough credit for the most awesome “what counts is the journey, not the destination so much” metaphor in a game storyline that I’ve ever seen.
-Halo Reach. (This one is cheating and not the most fitting of the category). Your PC, Noble 6, has handed off the plot football to Master Chief and decided to stick around in the lost battle of Reach to kill every alien they can get their hands on. We pick up after a time skip. You’ve clearly been fighting as part of a unit in that time, but they’re all dead besides you. All the best equipment is available for use if you do a bit of hunting… because everyone who could have used it is dead. As you kill the Covenant, they just keep on coming after you. Your equipment isn’t so factory fresh anymore, so hits to your armor after shield loss cause permanent damage. Eventually, your helmet cracks and the HUD stops functioning properly, but you can keep going. As you use up all the ammo around you, maybe you pick up some Covenant guns to keep going. But inevitably, the weight of numbers WILL break you. It’s a really great expression of a last stand trope through mechanics and I’ve never seen another game try something like this (okay, except the next one on my list).
-Final Fantasy Crisis Core. We’ve known what the ending was before the game even started. Zack dies to Shinra forces, but saves Cloud’s life in the process. So the back half of this game is just a build up to the execution, essentially. Zack reaches peak likability as a character and then faces a never ending gauntlet of the most basic, easy to kill enemy unit in the game. At first, it’s trivial. But then time changes and it’s clear Zack has been fighting non-stop for hours and hours. Your stamina is wrecked and attacks come out slower. Then your equipment stops producing special moves. Then the sword starts to be too heavy for Zack to lift and he can’t run around the battlefield anymore. Finally, you’re taking single plodding steps to kill enemies one hit at a time while CONSTANTLY being shot and blown up by grenades. When the ending comes, it’s almost like a mercy, but they show all the people Zack is leaving behind just to rub it in on you.
And some terrible ones:
-Final Fantasy III. Defeat a bunch of bosses in the big bad dungeon tower we crafted for the end game. Okay, that’s cool, checks out. Now go through this tunnel with more bosses and no saves in between. What? Now kill the super duper end boss, with yet more no saving and no recovery. Just… come the eff on now.
-Lunar 2. Load up on resources and head into the bad guy zone to face the evil God at the heart of everything. Cool! It’s a mysteriously tall tower. Pace your resource use… somehow against the strongest fodder in the game without knowing how far away the destination is or how many boss fights you actually have to do (it’s a 3 phaser, one of the phases that you have to lose for story reasons, but only after crossing a damage threshhold that is invisible to the player). Guh… The only nicety is the ability to fully heal for free if you retreat all the way out, but you can’t replace expended resources at all. I had to grind 6-8 levels to make up for the wasted resources that I didn’t know I was wasting the first trip.
-Dragon Age 2. I would label this as a good slog except for a major problem. You have to side with the Templars or the Mages. If you side with the Templars, the leader of the mages taps into forbidden magic to fight you. Then you realize the leader of the Templars has been corrupted the whole time, so you have to kill her too. And if you side with the mages, the leader of the mages taps into forbidden magic and… loses the ability to distinguish friend from foe and attacks you anyway. So you have to kill the same boss. And then you go after the Templar leader and coincidentally find out she was possessed, which is less important here because you planned to kill her anyway. Both endings should not be the same. They just didn’t want to not have you fight a boss they worked on, which is understandable but shitty from a story perspective.
It is borderline common knowledge that DA2’s development was very rushed and they ended up with less content than they wanted to, the endings are not the only case when people who should theoretically be on your side (or at least assume you are on their side) just turn on you because “OMG we need to squeeze another hour of content out of the assets we already have”.
Yep, that is definitely why. I love the game anyway, but I can’t just let go major flaws like this one without being honest that they ARE flaws.
Thanks for the heads-up. Given how much this segment sounds like it borrows from the first Mass Effect, I would have barreled through everything like I have less than a minute to get to the Conduit. Then I would have gotten killed by all the enemies I left behind in my haste.
I am glad I am not the only person that despite a lot of the slog of the game I almost forgot about it during the last endgame push. (That is until I had to actually fight the Big Doofus at the end). There was that brief moment where I was enjoying myself completely. If only.
I think you mean “ante Meridian” and “post Meridian”.