T w e n t y S i d e d

At the three minute mark, I just have to say that particular cutscene failure is completely idiotic. You’re using the turret, and then suddenly you’re standing in FRONT of the turret, doing nothing and taking no action. Then you fall down like a derp. So you’re standing in a place that makes no sense and suddenly incompetent. This really is cutscene making according to the Resident Evil playbook of blatant and infuriating cutscene shenanigans.

Writers: You have command of the very fabric of reality and every other character that inhabits it. You can create objects off-screen and insert characters with whatever motivations you like. You can make walls crumble, things explode, ships crash, and anything else you need to put the player where the story demands. If you can’t make a single cutscene work without contriving a sequence where my character has their pants fall down and they trip head-first into a vat of Brute urine, then you really are shameful hacks. This happens again and again in this game, where I fail not because the enemy has a good plan, but because “Whoops I tripped”.

And it will get so much worse.

And speaking of Brutes, how many games DO have an enemy named Brute? I’m curious, so let’s crowdsource this. Chris or Randy mentioned Tribes. I was just playing Saints Row: The Third, and I’m pretty sure the Oleg clones are called Brute. In Borderlands, Bruisers are called Brutes on the second playthrough.

Okay, so list as many games with foes specifically named Brute. Go!

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.

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.