T w e n t y S i d e d

What happened to the artists at BioWare? I can’t believe this is the same company that brought us Jade Empire. The orange and cyan metal base motif is way overdone in this game. This has been a long time in coming, and I know Mass Effect 3 isn’t the ugliest game they’ve ever made, but it’s a pretty big step down from where they were a decade ago.

You could argue that this isn’t the same company that made Jade Empire. A lot of the old staff is gone, and the ones that remain are vastly outnumbered by the people hired since the EA acquisition.

The art here goes against everything the game needs to be doing right now:

1. Keep the color palette fresh.
2. Show (as opposed to tell) us about the Quarian civilization and culture, particularly what it might have been like before the Geth kicked them out.
3. Make us care about Rannoch, and show us why they’re willing to risk their entire species to reclaim this place.
4. Give us a glimpse of the vibrant, life-bearing galaxy we’re trying to save from the Reapers.

It’s really mystifying that they elected to make Rannoch a blue and orange rocky wasteland. Remember that we were already on a rocky wasteland when we visited the Turians earlier in the game, and the previous mission had us fighting Geth in a dark, blue and orange metallic area. I’m not insisting that Rannoch should look any particular way. I’m just saying it would have been better as almost anything besides what they gave us.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So the Reapers are invading homeworlds. They’re aiding or augmenting the Geth. The galaxy is allegedly running low on resources. This is the worst possible moment for the Quarians to attempt to retake their homeworld.

After reading what other people are saying about this plot, I have to say that the problem isn’t how stupid the Quarians are. As others have pointed out, lots of wars are started for stupid, short-sighted reasons. Perhaps even most of them. I think the problem isn’t that the Quarians are being stupid, it’s that the game isn’t properly justifying this stupid and allowing the player to respond. Shepard just says that this is terrible timing.

What we needed was an argument where the player can express these frustrations:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP25: Finally, Some Action!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Really Hacket? Killing civilians isn’t the M.O. of Cerberus? This is a preposterous claim that goes against every single thing the game has ever shown us about Cerberus, across all three games. Hackett seemed like the last sane man in the galaxy. Now he too has turned into a Plot Zombie, mindlessly believing things that the writers demand without regard to what the game itself has shown us.

They were shooting civilians on Mars. They fed colonists to a thresher maw to test the scientific effects of feeding colonists to thresher maws. They invaded the Citadel and went out of their way to pointlessly shoot up the mall even though the place had no strategic value. They murdered a bunch of people in Mass Effect 1. They tortured and murdered children to make a better biotic. They dumped a bunch of scientists into a dead reaper and didn’t bother checking up on them until the whole team had been turned into husks. In Jacob’s Mass Effect 3 mission (which I think we’re skipping) they’re trying to kill a bunch of of scientists and their families because they want to leave Cerberus, and they want to leave Cerberus because Cerberus is the kind of place that would kill you and your whole family for trying to quit.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP23: Dead Civilians for Breakfast”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.