T w e n t y S i d e d

Is it really a good idea to unite everyone behind the humans? I think it depends on what you think the stakes are. I was still carrying around ideas from Mass Effect 1, where the Reapers were an unstoppable, implacable foe that had done this hundreds of times already. Beating them conventionally is a ludicrous hope, so our goal is to fight them as best we can. Remember, in previous cycles they killed everyone, down to the very last being. Empires of billions of people on hundreds of worlds were driven to complete, 100% extinction. If even a handful of people had survived they would have repopulated. You can’t beat these guys with zap guns, which means you’re just trying to last as long as possible, not “take back” conquered territory. That should preclude large offenses.

Here in Mass Effect 3 the characters are fighting to save Earth. It’s hard to tell how we’re supposed to read this. Has their power level been retconned so that beating them conventionally is possible? Is Sheppard supposed to come off as a sad, self-deluded fool who can’t accept the truth that his homeworld is toast and so he’s dragging the rest of the galaxy along with him on a foolish plan? Is this supposed to be a diversion so we can finish building the crucible? (Does the game ever say where it’s being built?)

I don’t know. It’s kind of an important point, since the whole game is spent on this “take back Earth” deal, and I couldn’t even tell if Shepard was the dummy, or the writers.

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.

Note: Consider the comments to be a live-fire exercise in plot spoilering from here on. No need to spoiler tag things for the plot of Mass Effect 3. We plan to discuss everything, including the ending, long before we get there. Have at it.

As a counter-point to what Josh was saying: I’m okay with the protagonist not having a lot of characterization. I don’t need my protagonist to voice my own inner monologue for me, mostly because I’m sure they’ll never get it right. This reveals a pretty big difference between the way different people step into the shoes of a character. Some of us want to have an empty vessel and fill in the margins with our own ideas. (Gordon Freeman of Half-Life fame.) Others want a complex character to get to know along the way. (James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2.)

The advantage of Gordon is that he never “breaks character”. The writers never stuff stupid words in his mouth and make me hate him. If he ever said, “Don’t worry Alyx baby, I’ll never let those Combine bastards hurt you!” it would shatter my connection with the game. Probably forever. However, another player might see that as the only reasonable thing from him to say. With an empty vessel, we can both have our own Gordon. The disadvantage of Gordon is that we don’t get to have a deep, interesting character reveal.

Both approaches are valid, but a game really, really needs to know which one it’s trying to do. And it needs to stick with it. Shepard in Mass Effect 1 was mostly an empty vessel, and I expressed my personality by making decisions. How did Shepard feel about those decisions? That was for me to decide.

Then Mass Effect 2 comes along and they move the focus from the universe to the character. Suddenly TIM is obsessed with you. HARBINGER is obsessed with you. You come back from the dead. Shepard is no longer an observer with a gun. The camera keeps pointing at your face and we keep expecting to see something: Rage, tears, confusion, laughter. Instead we get the deadpan, “I’m not working with Cerberus.” These events demand a personal reaction because they’re personal, but we don’t get one. Paradoxically, it makes Shepard seem like more of a brick than before.

So now the game has gone all the way and decided to ram some character down your throat. YOU LOVE THIS CHILD. YOU ARE UPSET ABOUT HIS DEMISE. Its possible that the biggest problem with star child isn’t the kid himself, but Shepard, who wasn’t designed to support this sort of inner turmoil.

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.

The talk about Deadspace was a reference to this: EA Says Dead Space 3 Has To Sell 5 Million To Survive. As a thoughtful commentator I would like to invite the captains of this particular industry to go out of business as soon as possible. How stupid do you have to be to continue to spend more and more, to make games that can’t possibly hope to meet their ever-increasing sales projections? I had many gripes with Dead Space 2, and none of them had anything to do with how much was spent on the game. In fact, my own wishlist of changes (getting rid of the quicktime-event driven spectacle, cutting way back on the total number of encounters, and cutting back on the NPC conversations) would have made it cheaper.

So now Mumbles has explained to me that I liked Jack and forgot. Actually, looking back: I loved her loyalty mission, but I still think her boobstraps were juvenile pandering. In any case, I’m wondering if my idea holds true: I have been thinking that the ME1 cast were far and away the most popular companions, but maybe ME2 wins in that department. (If not, it’s not for lack of trying. If you go for all the DLC then ME2 Shepard has enough people to form a baseball team.)

It’s true that I argue that BioWare might have used shared models to save money, and I even offer an example of how I used a similar technique myself. To rebut my own argument, I’ll point out that I was ONE GUY with a budget of weeks.

When Mumbles and Chris start singing “We’ve got dead chick”, they’re singing to the tune of Ice Hair, which you should not listen to under any circumstances.

Here is Digital Gumballs, the blog where Mrs. Mumbles and Mr. Gumballs write about videogames. This is the post about girlfriend mode, which you are encouraged to discuss over there and not here because… basically because I see where that thread is going and I don’t want to get on that particular ride right now.

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.