{"id":17224,"date":"2012-09-17T15:09:27","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T20:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17224"},"modified":"2012-09-17T18:40:06","modified_gmt":"2012-09-17T23:40:06","slug":"mass-effect-ep2-screw-the-rules-i-have-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=17224","title":{"rendered":"Mass Effect EP2: Screw the Rules, I Have Plot!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The second episode of our very first season, wherein our hero dithers about the Citadel for a half hour, yelling hyperbole and non-sequiturs at everyone he sees. Also features our very first complete failure-state bug, requiring a full reload.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qfWIVeVWOgw\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=qfWIVeVWOgw'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s so odd, going back to this game and seeing all the things that were abandoned. Shepard was the one that interfaced with the Prothean beacon. That&#8217;s what made him special. That was the hook for his character, to justify keeping him at the center of the conflict. That&#8217;s a pretty useful trick on the part of the writer. The game even established at the end that only Shepard could understand Prothean VI. Boom! Magical pass to make sure that if anything is going on with the Reapers, artifacts, ancient ruins, or Prothean devices, anywhere in the galaxy, Shepard can plausibly be the one people send for. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s barely mentioned in the second game. (And they only do so to glue the collectors onto the end of his nightmare vision as part of a clumsy retcon.) It&#8217;s not even mentioned in the third game. <\/p>\n<p>There are a a lot of elements like this, where old ideas are abandoned and new ones are shoehorned in. <\/p>\n<p>On a related note <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurogamer.net\/articles\/2012-08-20-the-writer-who-left-bioware-eurogamer-interviews-drew-karpyshyn\" title=\"The writer who left BioWare: Eurogamer interviews Drew Karpyshyn\">Drew Karpyshyn, former BioWare writer and one of the creators of the Mass Effect universe, was interviewed by Eurogamer<\/a>. Maybe you like his work, maybe not. But either ways it&#8217;s an interesting look at what he contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The second episode of our very first season, wherein our hero dithers about the Citadel for a half hour, yelling hyperbole and non-sequiturs at everyone he sees. Also features our very first complete failure-state bug, requiring a full reload. Link (YouTube) It&#8217;s so odd, going back to this game and seeing all the things that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[71,208],"class_list":["post-17224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-mass-effect","tag-spoiler-warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}