T w e n t y S i d e d
Last entry covered the pop-up religions of a hypothetical Mass Effect 4. We don’t want them to only exist in the background, or in codex entries and tie-in novels. They would – hopefully – be woven into the experience of playing the game, and the best way to do this is through character quests.
By “character quest” I mean one that’s centered around a party member and isn’t part of the game’s primary campaign. I’ve thought for years that the character quest is one of the most underutilized plays in the RPG playbook. They both create a deeper connection between the player and their party members and connect those party members to the setting. Anyone who’s played the Mass Effect series probably cares about the genophage largely because of Mordin and Wrex, or the Geth-Quarian conflict because of Tali and Legion. I suspect that one of the reasons Mass Effect 2 was so successful was because it had so many character quests – by runtime, they’re the bulk of the game.
They’re also a muscle that Bioware still exercises. The most recent entries in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises (Inquisition and Andromeda, respectively) were certainly flawed, but they both had decent characters that I usually found myself liking by the final credits. As I’ve said earlier in this series, parts of the Bioware formula still work, and this series seeks to focus on the (relatively) simple and doable.
If we are going to follow the Bioware formula, shortly after the tutorial/kiddie pool area the player’s party will be crashed by two characters: one who does magic (or biotics/jedi stuff/whatever) and one who doesn’t. Think Bastila and Carth in KOTOR, Morrigan and Alistair in Dragon Age: Origins, and Kaidan and Ashley in Mass Effect. This combination has several benefits. The most immediate mechanical one is that, regardless of what class/build they choose, the player isn’t saddled with an unbalanced party.
But the mechanical contrast is never the only one. Usually there are personality contrasts as well. One might be jokier or more outgoing (Carth, Alistair, Ashley) while the other is more private or intense (Bastila, Morrigan, Kaidan). Other contrasts include their attitudes towards authority (Alistair believes in the system somewhat, Morrigan is skeptical), religion (Ashley is openly religious, Kaidan is either not religious or keeps it private), or the player themselves (in Andromeda, Liam is eager to make friends while Cora – initially at least – nurses professional resentment).
There’s one combination in particular that I think is particularly well done: Alistair and Morrigan of Dragon Age: Origins. Not only is there contrast in personality (Alistair is the wisecracker, Morrigan the reserved, mysterious one), they also have origin stories and family connections that factor into the plot later. Having these two with you from the beginning grounds aspects of the setting in something familiar and personal.
With those two in mind, I’m going to try and design an “Alistair” and a “Morrigan” for a hypothetical Mass Effect 4. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that both are human, though they don’t have to be. For names I used the Mass Effect name generator at fantasynamegenerators.com and picked what I thought were the two names that had the most natural gravitas: Elton Goatley and Dagny Bigford. These two character templates are not meant as explicit recommendations but rather as an example of how the two characters might contrast each other.
Elton Goatley, who we’ll just call “Elton,” is the biotic of the pair. In these pairings it’s more common to have the male half be the snarky half, so for the sake of variety we’re going to make Elton more of a Kaidan-type. We’re also going to make Elton the more spiritual of the two – he’s going to be an adherent of one of the setting’s newly-constructed religions. In keeping with his character, he considers his faith a private and personal matter, but over the course of the game you can get him to open up if you talk to him enough.
Dagny Bigford, who we’ll just call “Dagny,” is Elton’s opposite in most ways. She prefers shooting and punching things to casting space magic at them, and cracking raunchy jokes to brooding silently in a corner. She’s not naturally inclined towards religion or spirituality, and may even be hostile to its periodic excesses. But she also has doubts and fears of her own, which she’ll only talk about with someone she trusts (i.e., the player).
Even as Elton and Dagny contrast each other, they should contrast themselves. For instance, every so often (but not too often) have Elton crack wise, and every so often (but not too often) have Dagny have an introspective or vulnerable moment. They should also be hostile/skeptical of each other during the first third of the game, more cordial by the second, and friends who recognize each other’s good qualities by the third. (Dragon Age 2 did this especially well with the characters of Isabela and Aveline.)
Of course, these won’t be the only two characters, just the first two. Characters – and there attendant quests – are going to be main source of content in this game, in keeping with Mass Effect 2 as a rough template to follow. We’ll cover additional characters in the next entry, as well as their roles in the story.
(I realize that this was a relatively short entry – I’ve been busy with other projects, which I hope to share more about soon. But I haven’t forgotten about this one either. More to come.)
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
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?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
In hindsight, I think it weakens the story of the game, as experienced by the player: most of the play time will be spent fighting enemies to reach goals that have little to do with the overall goal of destroying the collectors: there are like three missions directly against the collectors in the whole game, and a dozen against various mercenary groups.
It works out in the sense that it puts the focus on the parts of the game that are good.
One thing that would have helped is if more of the character quests had asides to the main plot. Stuff like Legion’s recruitment mission also being a main plot mission, or Tail’s foreshadowing that ultimately went nowhere. Maybe it would have felt contrived if every character’s main quest touched on the Reapers or Collectors somehow but there could easily have been more than the almost nothing that we actually got.
In contrast, I found the main storyline of ME2 to be by far the worst part of the game (a position I expect many on this blog may agree with), and think the game would have been far superior without it, as just a series of character vignettes or a plotless teammate-a-thon.
Setting aside the fact that without the main plot it’s not clear what the teammates are for, or that ME2 was ostensibly part 2 of a trilogy, this attacks the wrong part of the equation; yes, it’s true that late period Bioware and Bethesda games might be better without their main plot, but either is dramatically worse than if the games had a main plot that lived up to the standards of their best sidequests.
Let’s face it, even with the plot, it’s not really clear what half of the ME2 teammates are on the team for. Looking at you, Thane.
Thane? Why, he was clearly there to fight Kai Leng in that cutscene in ME3 and save that salarian guy who I can barely remember.
Then he died, to show everyone that Kai Leng is a badass!
He was there to be one of Shepard’s love interest of course. What else is his purpose?
You’re half-kidding, but he was literally designed to be appealing to the ladies.
Oh it did, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The main quest being relatively sidelined doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as long as what they’re fighting for is easy to understand big picture and leads well into other things. Tournament arcs come to mind quickly of a character based main story that still does well. The tournament itself provides a nice backdrop for the rest of the cast’s character stories to take center stage and provide the real meat of the story.
Mass Effect 2’s main story was bad because it was badly done, not because it had such a small runtime. The collectors make for boring enemies because they’re only loosely attached to the rest of the series and don’t have any good payoffs before or after the ending. The whole bit is essentially a side story in the rest of the series. Wouldn’t be so bad in isolation, but it leaves 3 to handle the entire story load and we all know how well that ended turning out.
Given that they basically punted on a good main story line, the focus on individual character arcs in recruitment/loyalty missions was the saving grace of the game.
If they had written a decent main story then I would agree with your point.
ME2 is a character and universe study, getting to know them and recruit them IS the overral goal. It’s why it’s perhaps the most popular entry despite having such a terrible “main” story.
I’d say the main quest of ME2 had something it did well: simplicity.
‘Here is a bad guy, doing a bad thing. We want to stop them doing the bad thing. It won’t be easy, and it will require a load of preparation and research.’
So you build up your forces, learn about the enemy, prepare…and then at the end, put all your squad members, knowledge and upgrades to use. Your goal starts as [X], stays [X], everything you do remains at worst two steps removed from [X], you work your way towards [X] at a steady pace, and then after you achieve [X] the game ends.
For sure, the actual *details* of the main quest were dumb, and it didn’t add anything to the story of the trilogy as it was basically messing around with a made-up side enemy, but I can appreciate the structure nonetheless.
(Compared to the current situation I have in System Shock 2, wherein I’m lost and being horribly murdered by cyborg nurses as I scour an entire floor for the means to unblock an elevator shaft…so that I can get BACK to what I was doing before I got in the elevator…)
Yeah this. Of course, you never actually do any research about your enemy, and your choices for recruitment are utterly bizarre given the little you do know about the Collectors.
But, as others said above, it all works out great because most of the characters are fantastic, and you spend so much time focused on them.
Did you double check that the name generator wasn’t set to “hobbit”?
I’m imagining Elton John in a goathead facemask, and Dagny Taggart Railroad Tycoon from Atlas Shrugged.
…you could do worse for companions.
From a game design perspective, leading the player to a more balanced party is a good choice. But is it from a narrative perspective?
I have no clear answer for your question. However, if half of the players quit in frustration because their initial party sucks then the narrative will never get off of the ground.
I think the solution is to have unbalanced parties not suck.
Conflict is almost always good for the narrative. A scene with no conflict is boring, so you inject minor conflicts in there to carry the audience through until the major conflicts have been properly established.
Yes, please can we have more concept art as loading screens!
“Loading screens”? Haven’t we transcended the need for such things by the time Hypothetical ME4 comes out?
Honestly, I can’t picture a BioWare game without loading screens. It’d be like skipping a chance for a Towers of Hanoi puzzle.
Load times are coming back, baby!
Typolice:
Should be “their”.
I like the general concept. As far as characters go, Elton and Dagny seem kind of pedestrian, but in this context that’s actually a good thing. You need something generic to set a baseline, so that the more weird and flamboyant characters stand out.
Also, I really like your last point about characters needing to contrast with themselves. This is something severly underrated in writing – from movies to games, and books. When writing characters, a lot of writers forget that in the real world people aren’t static. Yes, our character does affect the way we react to the world, but we aren’t robots, and every so often we react differently.
To me, it’s one of the ways to tell whether you really know someone – when you know that – despite their character – they’ll do what you expect of them.
Yep. one of the main complaints I can think of with fantasy stories is that they very rarely set such a baseline.
‘Oh, you’re the last ruler of a fallen planet whose destiny it is to reclaim your home from the consuming darkness, are you? Welp, your room’s the third on the left, in-between the renegade member of the all-female secret society of cyborgs from the dawn of civilisation and the telepathic insect scientist who happened to stumble upon the last surviving copy of the Necronomicon and now can only breath cyanide as a result.’
It’s one of the positive aspects (IMO) of ME2’s Jacob; he was, fundamentally, just a guy. In a crew of unique aliens, unstoppable badasses and super-smart prodigies, he was a welcome change.
Lots of people claim Jacob was boring. I agreed with this, but only because Bio didn’t use him to talk about the “average Joe” view of things. We never really understood where he got his skills, why he joined Cerberus, or what he valued. Jacob is fine, but companions have always been used to communicate aspects of the world on Bio games.
We learned about Turians from Garrus, Krogans from Wrex, Salarians from Mordin, and etc. In each case, the character is positioned as a partial outsider to their people- someone who can give an internal and external view.
I understand Jacob not being very popular with other people, but I liked Jacob for similar reasons. It was nice to have a well-adjusted not particularly special guy around. I liked that it was part of the canon, that he wasn’t particularly amazing but his level headedness was useful to have around.
Yeah, Jacob was refreshingly normal. My femshep actually romanced him. He was her rebound from Kaiden, after she sent him to his death on Virmire because it was the right thing to do tactically. After Jacob effectively dumped her in ME3, she finally gave up looking for love and just started banging her secretary.
I didn’t like using Jacob in missions very much because he was “boring”. But I was always glad he was part of the game. His normalcy made everybody else’s uniqueness pop out more.
Also known as Indivisible Syndrome. But they’re making a TV show out of that smouldering dumpster fire, so… /shrugs.
“By “character quest” I mean one that’s centered around a party member and isn’t part of the game’s primary campaign. I’ve thought for years that the character quest is one of the most underutilized plays in the RPG playbook. They both create a deeper connection between the player and their party members and connect those party members to the setting. ”
Ideally Ideally, your character quests should tie in to the main plot. It doesn’t have to be in a huge way, but things like “this character has some sort of relationship with this key plot NPC” makes a HUGE difference.
In an RPG where you want to have player agency instead of running the entire thing on rails, the experience of your plot is going to be rather a mess no matter WHAT you do, because you have to allow for the player experiencing things out of order. Your hero in terms of good game story design is not plot but *characterization*. Good, consistent, interesting characters that have their own arcs and development are what carry your story. The more your characters are involved in plot events, the better, even if the plot itself is an utterly simple “defeat the big bad”. (They don’t have to be companion characters . . . remember even the big bad is a character! How much of BG2 did Jon Irenicus carry all by himself?)
Sadly, this kind of broad-scale character involvement is probably *the single most expensive thing to create* in a modern RPG, particularly with mandatory cinematic animations and voice acting, so it’s really quite difficult to say whether you actually get more bang for your buck out of investing in it! I have a growing suspicion that this is why modern RPG’s feel increasingly lackluster. From a purely artistic standpoint this is THE single most important part of the story experience in a computer RPG, but from a resources/implementation perspective it’s a nightmare.
Also related: making the world itself deeper. By having other characters do things of their own volition, by hinting at lives beyond their role in the player’s story, you make the entire setting better.
Johnny Maceface wants to go and check up on his family? Oh, so there’s more to him than a disfiguring injury and an ability to tank damage!
Then, when you meet his asshole dad who has nothing nice to say about anyone – especially Johnny – it
a) adds depth to Johnny, showing exactly why he’s so willing to put himself in danger, how he got his injury and why he seems so desperate for the player’s approval.
b) allows Johnny to grow (and gives the player some more gameplay / moral choices)
c) shows that this is a universe with shitty parents in it, which is a very human thing that many audiences can relate to.
I think one of the underlying tough decisions that assist with this problem (apart from the expense of animating and voicing everything) is the “we’re going to let you pick what companions you take with you at all times!” ethos, which makes it much worse because to have character involvement in the world you have to have AT LEAST two versions of everything, if not more, because you can’t know whether a given character will even be present or not.
And that goes triple and quadruple for having the characters interact with *each other* when you can’t be sure whether any of them will even be present.
Given the choice between an actually good story and being able to micromanage my party at all times, I’ll take the former, thanks. Sometimes you don’t get to choose who is around you. Sometimes you have to deal with people you find annoying or difficult. That is okay.
Or you could even get more aggressive and make it so that if you refuse to take critically involved characters places *they follow you and show up anyway only now they’re pissed at you and you can’t actually control them because they’re not in your party*.
I’m quite happy with the “this character is required for this mission” workaround.
I think that’d still work ok even if it was almost every mission, as long as it didn’t force me to take the same character too many times.
Something I wish got explored a bit more in fantasy/sci-fi religion is (non-evil) cults slash scisms. As in, instead of ‘The Alien Religion,’ you actually have a few different ones per species, perhaps even rooted in one Faith that… well, split and changed over the years.
Like, you have the great Church of Cosmic Whatever as the original, ‘true’ faith. But then you also have the ‘Cosmic Revival Whateverits,’ or something, that wholly reject parts of the Cosmic Whatevers dogma, while having their own rites & traditions. Maybe even get a bit spicy and have an fiction equivalent to The Church of Satan, that basically turns the whole thing on its head and claim that the good guys and bad guys got all mixed up when victors got to write history to wholly oversimply it.
Not to push too hard against this temporary lift on ‘no religion’ here, but I mean, just look at Christianity. Even just counting the three, main, classical branches you’ve got Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox. And heck, I’m sure plenty would disagree with me just using those three.
I donno, maybe it’s me being European, but it’s always struck me as a really neat way of avoiding Planets Of Hats AND spice things up by having multiple versions of the same religion in your story, but one of the few times I’ve seen it in action is David Eddings Sparhawk series of all things—and love those books, but they weren’t exactly considered high-brow, make you think style works, you know?
The trouble is having it come up in a way where the player cares but isn’t directly “solving” the problem. Maybe you could do it if you have to get their permission to stay in a location, and so you’ve got to understand and follow this branch’s customs in this town (Morrowind managed that one). But otherwise you run into conservation of detail, where the player hears about a split in factions and says “I wonder which one I’ll be killing.”
I think there’s some interesting space to explore in obliviousness to other cultures. There are plenty of historical examples of a dominant power not understanding the subtlety of religious schisms and the mistakes and bafflement that causes would fit well into a fictional universe
Would be a bold move to let the player make those type of missteps that’s torn apart real world empires, honestly, come to think about it.
Like that thing with the grease covered bullets & India. ‘Cow? Nah, they’re pig fat.’ A fictionalized version of those type of blunders.
It’s dangerously close to a ‘ah~ha, gotcha!’ moment, though. Punishing the sort of player that’s just not caring for grokking the lore instead of rewarding the ones that’s been paying attention. You’d have to step very carefully to not piss of your audience even before the ‘this is so CLEARLY based on real world thing X, and I an offended!’ crowd starts howling for your blood.
So… yeah, think there’s some real untapped potential there, but man, you’d be tight-rope walking over a minefield.
I’ll mention
season 4 of the TV show Dexteras to why I don’t like that. In one season,Dexter has multiple opportunities to kill the villain and chooses not to, with the result being that the villain goes kill-crazy and good people die.So the entire second half of the season, and all the long-term consequences, could have been avoided if the main character had been competent.It’s not coincidental that that was the last season I watched. If the main character is making problems bigger, I no longer trust them to be able to solve the problem, and I no longer have a reason to watch them try.
Although, if a companion did that, or an oblivious third party, and the hero had to patch it up, that’s a much better time.
Thing is, it doesn’t have to be drastic or game changing at all.
ME1 had a couple of NPCs (reporters, human supremicists holding a rally on the Citadel) ask Shepard to comment on issues of earth politics, and it means nothing to the overall quest regarding the Reapers. Just a way to hint at a wider universe and get you to express the character a bit more.
(There was also a good point where an Alliance Officer decides he wants to inspect your ship – you can do lots of things, but they don’t affect the plot at all.)
I’m think a third-party is the safest way to do it, potentially the players boss, it’s a rich addition to the world-building and it’s sets up a good ‘on the ground learning about other people’ scenario for the main character.
I do think it would be interesting to let the main character do it, but it would be a minefield as mentioned and videogames can’t be so bold yet!
I could see it used as an inter-party dilemma semi-safely too, honestly.
Like, Alien X is Orthodox Whatever. One of your team is Human Y, a convert to a more progressive sect of Whatever.
You find them at their throats, because certain… ship sanctification rites, or maybe even burial rites, differ between the sects. Neither ‘man’ is wrong, but neither man is ‘right,’ either, and both feel extremely strongly on the subject. Forcing you to either pick a side to please and piss of one of them, cite regulations and piss of both of them slightly less, or if you’re good enough go for some sort of silver-tongued compromise that leaves both sides cooled down if not happy.
Kinda like those scenes in ME2 where you have to diffuse a fight, come to think about it.
Anyway, I think that would be semi-safe as long as you aren’t too unsubtly using a real life analogue. Conflicts of interest happens, after all, and it is part of a Commanders slash Leaders role to smooth waves like that.
The problem with every character having a character quest is that it adds a sense of formulaic roteness to proceedings. When each character is a sort of check list, with predictable and evenly-spaced milestones such as meted-out dialogues and quests, the cast as a whole begins to feel more like part of the game’s content than a breathing part of its story and narrative. This was especially noticeable with the companion quests in Neverwinter Nights.
I think not having a Main quest at all is something worth considering. Just get the Main character a cool ship at the end of the introduction and give them galaxy full of stuff to do. To give an over arching goal just have the player choose a broad goal at the start then mark when you do stuff to towards that, to end the game you can just retire and then learn what effect all your actions had.
The varied characters almost reminds of “ensemble” animes, where they slowly give you the backstory of all the B-characters throughout the series. The better animes do the same trick where they partner up opposites, who either start out as best buds (with the lampshading of “how come they haven’t killed each other yet”), or who start out antagonising each other and learn to work together.
This is the primary reason I find the New Vegas companions superior to the Fallout 4 companions. Boone, Veronica, and Arcade provide you perspective as members of their various factions. Cass is an introduction to NCR and its politics. Lily reminds you that the Nightkin collectively suffer from mental illness and aren’t just dumb monsters. Raul, who is the most setting irrelevant, is neutral to the Legion.
Contrast 4. Delete anyone but Piper, Valentine, Deacon, Dogmeat, Danse and Garvey and you don’t lose much except you have less friends. They enrich the player’s experience, but do nothing to enrich the setting.
Aw man, is this series dead?
Unsure if necro-ing this comments section is accepted, but here goes.
First off, I’d like to point out that we all still want to hear more neat ideas about a ME4/5 (on most forums I’ve seen, they’re calling it ME5). I’ve blazed through all of Shamus’s writings on this website about the ME series in the last 36 hours, and I very much enjoyed them. I’ve got quite a few great ideas for my own writings, now (and not just the ME fanfiction…)!
Second, with more direct relation to the page topic, I think that a neat way to let players play as non-Humans while conserving writing resources and making the story interesting, perhaps have a limited pool of characters that can be customized slightly, and then make the eventual ‘party’ out of them. Your player selection at the beginning of the game determines who is the ‘main’ character.
This would, obviously, have the problem of needing several party characters who could believably be appointed as the ‘main character,’ but that could be made believable.
For example, a hypothetical main plot of “Explore your way around the Solar System, looking for enough [plot tokens] in destroyed [starships/Reapers/etc] to repair the Charon Relay, while dealing with the overall issue of whether or not that Relay should be activated.
For that, it could be reasonable to have a range of characters end up as the ‘main’ character in charge of the mission:
A Human soldier, who serves whatever government has replaced the Systems Alliance, or possibly a replacement to the Council;
A Human engineer (or other tech-focused character) who has worked on salvaging old SA wrecks from the War for usable materials and would probably be the technical-side lead for the expedition even as an NPC;
A Quarian engineer who specializes in maintaining or salvaging the VI systems still left on old hulks;
An Asari diplomat who works at trying to smooth the issues between the various species stranded on Earth;
An Asari scientist who is old enough to remember the pre-Reaper galaxy personally, and so is a valuable experienced specialist;
A Turian military officer (not a common soldier) who has the best track-record in leadership positions, but not personally skilled in technology or history;
(wild card) A Volus merchant/industrialist who has managed to work his/her way to the top of the weird post-apocalyptic economy of Earth and the Sol system, and is possibly bankrolling the expedition anyways.
The player picks one of the above as their main character, and the plot goes from there. Whichever characters aren’t picked are available as party member NPCs, but the studio only really needs to write their dialogue for the main story once, and add a few optional extra dialogue sentences here and there depending if the character is the ‘leader’ or not of the expedition.
Pls come back daddy