On Mass Effect 3: A Broken Narrative

I discussed before how Bioware failed to live up to the expectations they fostered for Mass Effect 3. That failure has played a part in the controversy surrounding the game's finale, but it's by no means the only part of the problem. The largest contributor to the outcry, as you might expect , the ending itself. The ending, only the last fifteen minutes or so of the game, contains a large number of inconsistencies and other narrative problems [N.B. Spoilers abound in the link and the rest of this post], lovingly collected for your pleasure by the fans.  These issues are so numerous that fans combined them with a mountain of circumstantial evidence from the rest of the game to conclude that maybe Commander Shepard was in fact dreaming while unconscious or "indoctrinated" by the Reapers.

To be honest, inconsistencies like these aren't exactly rare in video game narratives (or in narratives in general). Mass Effect 2 had a number of them all to itself, and the same could be said of many other games. With any narrative work, the audience suspends disbelief so that these things don't get in the way of their enjoyment; however, if a writer isn't careful, his narrative may end up breaking this suspension of disbelief, intentionally or not. When that happens, the audience often finds it very easy to pick apart the entire work, viewing things as problematic that they may not have noticed at all otherwise. In a nutshell, that's what lead to the massive Google document on the inconsistencies I linked above.

Many of the problems in Mass Effect 3's ending are minor and don't explicitly endanger the narrative. For example, while it's pretty odd that Admiral Anderson says he follows the Commander up to the Citadel (the setting for the game's last few scenes) when he's clearly ahead of Shepard on the path and seems to have gotten there before her according to some of the following dialogue, the throwaway line about rooms shifting is enough to allow the audience to wave it off. These minor issues, however, have some pretty big friends, all of which break from the narrative substantial ways. These larger inconsistencies ultimately create the impression that Mass Effect 3's ending was written for some sort of alternate reality Mass Effect series that had different emphases and themes. This Bizarro World Mass Effect (let's call it Massive Effect) would, in accordance with the ending of Mass Effect 3, have an emphasis on uniformity as the answer; a focus on the galaxy rather than the individuals within it; and have the tension between organic and synthetic life as its central conflict. By contrast, Mass Effect as we received featuresan underlying method of unifying the diverse to overcome a common enemy or threat; a focus on individuals and their lives, from family problems and love to matters of revenge and personal hatreds; and a central conflict in which "small" beings struggle against the impossible and win.

The differences between Massive Effect and Mass Effect are easily seen in their disparate approaches to the theme of diversity. In the "best" ending to Massive Effect, we're given the opportunity to create a new form of life that synthesizes organics and synthetics into a new hybrid form of life that eliminates by necessity the conflict between the two of them. This synthesis option neatly ties up the organics/synthetics problem that the ending presents as paramount (which I'll discuss in more detail below), but it's a jarring break in Mass Effect's treatment of difference up until this point.

Throughout the series, Commander Shepard assembles a rag-tag team of humans and aliens of varying species to combat a threat that's greater than all of them. Their differing backgrounds, unique perspectives, and areas of expertise all prove valuable to the mission at hand. In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Shepard brings aliens aboard human-centric vessels that are initially hostile to alien life. Through victory, she then proves that the hostility is unwarranted. On the smaller scale, this idea of working together in spite of difference is displayed in the resolving of loyalty conflicts between squadmates in Mass Effect 2. Examples continue of the strength to be found in unity despite diversity in Mass Effect 3, with Shepard doing the same thing on a galactic scale, bringing together numerous diverse fleets and research crews for the final battle with the Reapers. The downloadable Prothean squadmate, Javik, even comments near the game's end that it is the acceptance of diversity within the galactic fleet that has made victory against the Reapers attainable, as opposed to the situation in his cycle, where every race, under the empire, was essentially Prothean in outlook and strategy.

Positioning synthesis as the best ending (by having it only available in a mostly complete playthrough or with lots of multiplayer to boost your "score" in single-player) puts it at an odd place with regard to this long-running theme of the series. Up until that point, the solution has always been for diverse individuals (or races) to work together despite their differences (and indeed, often to succeed because of those differences), not to abandon those differences in favor of making everyone the same. This break in the narrative doesn't in and of itself a narrative problem, but it certainly causes a thematic one, which leads to an overall decrease in narrative cohesion.

Just as the ending to Massive Effect performs a weird about-face on diversity, it also abandons one of the greatest strengths and focus of the Mass Effect series: its characters. Over the course of three games, the Commander works with a menagerie of team mates, many of which become loyal friends and some of which are potential romantic interests. We learn about their histories, their peoples, their problems, and their dreams. We reunite them with lost family heirlooms, help them get revenge, save their families, represent them in court, and a number of other things that are entirely personal and only tangentially related to the greater cosmic threat of the Reapers. We do these things because the characters are well written, interesting, and the sorts of characters that really come alive in a narrative. Such characters are somewhat rare in fiction, but not in Mass Effect as a whole. Beyond your squadmates, there are bit-part characters that are just as memorable as the ones with all the screen time, from an annoying, sensationalist reporter to a battle-hardened (and totally awesome) quarian lieutenant.
Admittedly, the characters didn't come fully into the spotlight until Mass Effect 2 (which has a kind of Ocean's Eleven vibe), but even then, half the joy of the characters was meeting old favorites from the original Mass Effect. Because the audience has come to care so much about these characters, they could have (and I think, should have) been a centerpiece of the game's conclusion. There are any number of character-related plot-lines that are ultimately left unresolved in the ending to Massive Effect, ranging from whether Tali'Zorah vas Normandy gets to build her house on the quarian homeworld or whether Urdnot Wrex can truly manage to unite and control the bloodthristy krogan in light of the curing of their sterility plague.

Instead of rewarding our dedication to and love of these characters, Massive Effect presents us with an ending that has massive consequences for the galaxy at large, but the impact of which on our friends and favorites can only be speculated upon. Indeed, with the majority of the galactic fleet potentially stranded in Earth's solar system after the final battle, we can reasonably wonder if Tali'Zorah can even make it home to build her new house or if Wrex will ever make it back to his homeworld to lead his people to greatness. Your crew is (maybe?) stranded on some unknown garden world with apparently no way home, and with various species requiring differing types of food to survive, there's no telling who would be able to live and thrive on such a mystery world. At the end of Massive Effect, we've saved the galaxy, but we may have doomed our friends to painful (or at the very least, lonely) deaths. This again breaks from the strong character focus of Mass Effect as a whole, placing Massive Effect in Bizarro World as an alternate story that somehow got mangled with the one that had been so successful going back to 2007.

The last split between Massive Effect and Mass Effect that I want to address, that of their differing central conflicts, has been the subject of a lot of ridicule. The Catalyst in Massive Effect reveals that the purpose of the Reapers is to protect organic life from being wiped out by synthetic life, which is a somewhat circular argument, since the Reapers are largely synthetic themselves. The break in the narrative from Mass Effect comes in two parts here. Firstly, while the geth are painted as synthetics bent on destroying organics in the original Mass Effect, we learn that they do so largely because of the influence of the Reapers themselves. Additionally, through interaction with Legion (an advanced geth that becomes a squad member) in Mass Effect 2, we learn that the geth have a history of only attacking organics in self defense (as they did in the Morning War with their quarian creators, after which they let the quarians retreat without wiping them out). In Mass Effect 3, we're even given the opportunity to reconcile the story's main organic/synthetic conflict between the quarians and the geth, achieving unity despite diversity (which I dealt with above as well). While the example of the quarians and the geth does not by itself disprove the Catalyst's assertion that synthetics will always wipe out organic life eventually, the assertion is thematically at odds with the game's own narrative, which suggests that organics and synthetics do not, in fact, have to be at odds with one another.

Secondly, the games have never been primarily about the above conflict. The geth in Mass Effect were mostly unimportant servants of the actual threat, the Reapers themselves. From our first real interaction with a Reaper through our last one before Mass Effect 3, the Reapers are painted as a cosmic, unknowable force of evil, "beyond [our] comprehension." To them, the races of the galaxy are no more than "dust struggling against cosmic winds." The central conflict of the series has been between the Reapers and life throughout the galaxy: ants struggling against giants. In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Shepard and crew do seemingly impossible things in the fight against the inevitable: first destroying a Reaper and then entering uncharted space at the center of the galaxy to stop a second attempt by the Reapers to harvest life less directly. The theme itself is carried forward into Mass Effect 3, in that uniting the races against the Reapers seems impossible, but Commander Shepard does so (and spectacularly so in "perfect" playthroughs). This theme, and the conflict that goes along with it, are largely abandoned in the ending in favor of the secondary organics/synthetics conflict, which was resolved to narrative satisfaction several missions prior to the game's ending (with the geth/quarian conflict being its primary representation, it is also the vehicle for its resolution in a narrative sense). This sudden shift, from defeating the Reapers to resolving the apparently inherent conflict between organic and synthetic life (which the narrative has prior to this point shown to be a suspect assumption) takes the wind out of the game's narrative sails.

Ultimately, that's what you would expect if a narrative had an ending so different in theme and structure from everything before it. Mass Effect and my hypothetical Massive Effect are two different narratives with different themes and strengths, and they should have never been blended together into one story. The ending of Mass Effect 3, as a result, breaks the narrative of Mass Effect as a whole, and unfortunately, the schism is so great that the "clarification" that Bioware has suggested we will receive in Extended Cut DLC has very little chance of actually repairing any of the damage. But hey, Mass Effect was always a series about doing the impossible...maybe there's at least a glimmer of hope yet.

We'll see when the DLC is released later this summer.

Hints on Class Design in 5th Edition

I’m going to make a slight detour in my series on Mass Effect 3 to talk about the first truly interesting tidbit to come out of Wizards of the Coast’s weekly “Legends & Lore” column regarding 5th Edition (or, as they’re strangely calling it, “D&D Next”). Just today, Mike Mearls gave us the first in what will hopefully be a run of articles on general class design. This first article discusses broadly the design goals for the cleric in the next edition. What you’ll find in the article probably won’t feel very interesting at first. Clerics will be healing, using divine magic, representing their gods, and perhaps wearing heavy armor. If you’re familiar with clerics at all, all of that’s been the case for around thirty years now. We do, though, get a few interesting tidbits, and I'd like to speculate wildly about what those tidbits mean for the new edition's class design as a whole--if the world needs more of anything, that thing is lots of speculation from everyone (What, you think I forgot about it?).

The first of these tidbits has to do with divine magic as a whole, which could have some implications for the druid, as well (all quotes are, unless otherwise noted, drawn from the "Legends & Lore" article linked above):

Divine spells are rarely naked displays of power meant to smite and blast the cleric's enemies. Instead, the cleric's magic lends strength, support, and durability to both the cleric and his or her allies. Spells such as bless, cure light wounds, and neutralize poison are iconic divine spells. They lend aid to the cleric's allies and help reverse the efforts of the cleric's enemies. A cleric might help overcome an ogre berserker by healing the party's fighter, allowing the fighter to survive long enough to deal a deadly attack.

For veterans of D&D, this probably seems pretty familiar. The prevailing wisdom regarding clerics has always painted them as support characters, but there's actually been a shift in what clerics actually do (or at least, what they're best at) recently. And no, that shift didn't actually start with 4th Edition. 3rd Edition did a lot of weird things with the clerics because no one liked playing them. In 3rd Edition, clerics were solid blasters at many levels with the right domains and spell choices. Higher level spells like storm of vengeance and miracle were far from the subtle, indirect things we were used to clerics focusing on, and you could now play a cleric that did all of that stuff without having to be a specialty priest (that is, a priest your party hates because you don't heal them).

4th Edition continued the trend, blending healing with flashy damaging effects and the like as part of the standard kit of the Leader Role. The role itself was heavily influenced by the crusader class from 3rd Edition's Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords, which is perhaps appropriate, given that Gygax's original inspiration for the cleric were romanticized crusaders.

Now, by and large, in 3rd Edition, most cleric spells were still subtle, but with game improvements like spontaneous healing, you didn't have to sacrifice the flashy spells to keep the subtle ones in stock. Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game continued the trend by essentially allowing clerics to heal without using spells at all, and indeed, with proper character choices, also handle things like poison and disease without them, too.

With my best speculating hat on, I wonder if specifically calling out the subtle effects that in some ways fell by the wayside means we'll be seeing something more like the cleric of old than the cleric of the last decade or so. Pre-release material for the cleric in 4th Edition highlighted the exact opposite, emphasizing the fact that you could heal while doing cool things, instead of having to waste your actions on them. That's a notable shift, I think. By way of association, this seems to suggest that the druid (assuming it makes it into the Player's Handbook) will have a spell list a lot like the one it has to day, as their spell list is still largely rather subtle, excepting the thematic spells like chain lightning and ice storm.

Next on the list, we have clerics reflecting the gods they worship:

A cleric of the god of shadows should have different abilities than a cleric of the god of storms. On an adventure, they should have different approaches that are supported by divine gifts given to them by the gods. We should expect a cleric of the god of shadows to excel at hiding—even in heavy armor—while a cleric of the storm god can call down thunder and lightning.

Of the Editions of Yore, AD&D 2nd Edition went the farthest with this concept, giving specialty priests spell lists made up only of spells appropriate for their deities. No doubt this led to a lot of strife at the table, though, as no matter what, people seem to expect clerics to be walking life batteries. A cleric of the thunder god that doesn't even have raise dead on his spell list isn't useful to a large number of adventuring groups. 3rd Edition attempted to solve that problem through Domains, which provided a small thematic list of spells, but these spells were so few in number they were often eclipsed by the frankly gargantuan general cleric spell list. As a result, most clerics ended up feeling a lot like each other, regardless of their domains.

I'm actually not too familiar with the way clerics and their gods were handled in 4th Edition, but it does seem at the least that the developers want a cleric's choice of god to have a far greater influence on his or her abilities than it did in 3rd Edition. If done properly, this may make clerics far more interesting to play, but historically, nobody's really succeeded at that yet (in D&D and its successor, anyway). Beyond all that, if clerics have too many cool things, they may end up being too powerful, which was a major problem in 3rd Edition, which gave a lot of new toys out in an attempt to make people play the healer.

If I had to hazard a guess, we're going to see something like additional domain abilities as a cleric gains levels, as we find in Pathfinder for the cleric, and also the divine oracle's mysteries. Whether or not we'll see a compartmentalized spell list I can't say from this with any confidence. I can imagine, though, a base cleric list of those subtle, iconic cleric spells mentioned above, fleshed out by spells in thematic keeping with one's deity. Considering I've tried to do that on my own (and gave up in the face of the task's immensity), I wouldn't mind seeing something like that in a new edition.

Last, and definitely actually foremost, for me, though, is this bit:

Keep in mind that these goals are guiding principles for the typical expression of a class. One of the concepts we've embraced is the idea of creating starting points, but then allowing a lot of room to maneuver for players who want to tinker with mechanics or who prefer to craft their character's story first, then find mechanics to match that story second. As I mentioned at our PAX East seminar, our battle cry is "Don't get in the way." The basic idea behind that approach is that we create a starting point, but then give players the options and tools to modify their characters as they see fit.

One of my personal problems with 4th Edition was that the strictly codified class roles and class builds and power selections got in the way of my character concepts. I'm the sort of player that likes to take a relatively flexible base and try a lot of different things with it over time. Every time I play a character of a class I've tackled before I like to explore a fighting style I haven't tried before, or focus on non-combat skills, or whatever else. Because 4th Edition wanted a set of finely tuned classes for balance, you didn't actually get a lot of options in determining how your character fought--most classes had two basic fighting styles (say, the ranger's archery or two-weapon fighting) and if you wanted a ranger with a two-handed sword, you'd probably have to play a barbarian, even if you didn't want to be an angry savage.

For me, that lack of player option really limited the potential I saw in the game, though I know it worked really well for a lot of other people. Personally, if the above bit about not getting in the way isn't just "PR speak," I'll be far more willing to check out 5th Edition when the time comes. If 4th Edition had released with a more open class system that allowed for a lot of experimentation and a wealth of options for every class, I probably could have overlooked many of the other problems I had with it. As it is, I switched to Pathfinder some time ago and haven't looked back, but a small part of me has always pined for D&D itself.

These little tidbits are the first thing that have me really thinking Wizards might have a shot at winning me back.

On Mass Effect 3: The Hype Machine and its Pitfalls

Previously, I discussed, in very broad strokes, the situation surrounding Mass Effect 3 and the fan-powered uprising against Bioware and EA sparked by the game's conclusion. Here, I'll be detailing the picture of the game Bioware painted in interviews with the press leading up to the game's release (as well as some of the promotional marketing material), and how the final game didn't live up to that original picture. Some (and perhaps many) fans of the game feel that they were mislead about the game they purchased, and this has played a significant part in the backlash against Mass Effect 3 and Bioware as a developer.

This post will contain spoilers for all three Mass Effect games.

The Mass Effect trilogy was groundbreaking not just for Bioware, but for gaming as a whole, as the idea of personal choices having consequences and results spanning an entire trilogy was something new in an industry lately at risk for stagnation. The series, with its various "decision points," and carrying those decisions forward to each game, has been in some ways a grand experiment in game design, and as such, Mass Effect 3, the final stage of that experiment, was perhaps the most anticipated title to ever come out of Bioware. Expectations follow naturally from all that anticipation, and after Mass Effect 2, Bioware had a monumental task ahead of them in rising to meet all that anticipation and expectation.

In terms of engaging the customer base, much of Bioware's work was already done by the first two games in the series. Judging by sales figures for the first two games, somewhere around two million fans were waiting to carry their personally crafted Commander Shepard into Mass Effect 3 to see how the story would conclude. Both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 offered the player a number of key decision points that could have unforeseen consequences as the series drew to a close. In Mass Effect, on the planet Virmire, you're given a chance to talk down the krogan battlemaster Wrex, who disagrees with destroying a laboratory that may hold the key to curing the genophage, a fertility plague infecting his people. Alternatively, you can shoot him and end it there. Later, faced with the impending nuke detonation, you have to make a choice to save one of two crew members: Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams or Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko. In another scenario, you're forced to decide between destroying the last queen of the rachni, an insectoid race that once threatened the galaxy, or allowing them a second chance. In Mass Effect 2, you're tasked with gaining the loyalty of your squad before tackling a seemingly impossible suicide mission, and non-loyal crew members have a high chance of not making it out alive. Along the way, you might re-write Reaper-worshipping geth heretics or destroy them, and you have to decide whether questionable research into the nature of the krogan genophage is worth saving.

These examples are only some of the major decision points in the two games. Along the way in each, you interact with a number of non-player characters, and your interactions with them are tracked by the game and determine whether or not they appear in later games in the series. You also have the opportunity to pursue romance in each game, and this comes with its own decision points: your potential partners from the first game are present only in supporting roles in the second, but you have an entire set of new "fish in the sea." Do you abandon your former partner for a newfound fling or do you remain true to them throughout the second game?

Even in Mass Effect 2, the results of your choices in the first game could be seen, such as when Wrex becomes a clan leader among the krogan if he survives your confrontation at Virmire. You meet the survivor of Ashley and Kaiden briefly. When fans felt Liara (one of the most popular romance options in the first game) had too minor of a role in Mass Effect 2 was lacking, Bioware produced a massive downloadable mission expanding on her character, and, if you choose, on your relationship with her as well. Naturally, seeing decisions from the first game carry over into the second game left fans clamoring to find out how the decisions they'd made would carry on into Mass Effect 3. In terms of creating a strong selling point for Mass Effect 3, Bioware's work was done once Mass Effect 2 was on store shelves.

Their real task, then, was delivering on the implicit promise that Mass Effect was really the fan's story, since scarcely any two play throughs would be exactly the same. Fans were somewhat apprehensive after Mass Effect 2 (as the general plot of the game remains the same, regardless of your choices) and following the release of Dragon Age II, which was viewed by many as a lackluster title. Bioware knew what they had to do to quell the fears of these devoted fans: they needed to convince the fans that their story was going to come to a magnificent conclusion, and that it was truly going to be their story.

For fans worried that choices in Mass Effect didn't have a huge impact on Mass Effect 2, Bioware sent the message that many things would have an even greater impact on Mass Effect 3. Following that, in numerous interviews in the year or so prior to Mass Effect 3's release, Bioware representatives hammered that point home: this was your story, and the ending you got would be different from the one your friend got. The fans had no need to worry, as Bioware knew exactly what they were doing. Mass Effect 3 was going to deliver, and deliver magnificently. The game was in good hands.

Except that it wasn't. Rather, it seems like those hands got all buttered up and dropped the game when it came to the conclusion. For whatever reason, the conclusion to Mass Effect 3 (and indeed, the series as a whole) failed to live up to their statements in interviews. Fans were angry. "Hundreds of hours" invested in the series, they said, were wasted. "Their choices never mattered," they complained. Was the fan dissatisfaction warranted? Had Bioware promised more than they were able to deliver? The best way to answer those questions (since Bioware has been pretty tight-lipped since the whole controversy exploded) is to take a look at those interviews, find out what they said about the game, and whether the game was what they said it would be.

Almost one year ago, in a video interview with GameInformer, Casey Hudson (executive producer for the franchise) had this to say:

“For people who are invested in these characters and the back-story of the universe and everything, all of these things come to a resolution in Mass Effect 3. And they are resolved in a way that's very different based on what you would do in those situations.”

Assuming that, in context, Hudson was referring to the game as a whole, Mass Effect 3 lived up to this statement admirably. Long-standing plot-lines, such as the problem of the krogan genophage are resolved in masterful sequences of gameplay and narrative. Key decisions from the previous games come in to play, and if, for instance, Wrex is dead in your story, his replacement is a vengeful warmonger, giving your decision on whether to cure the genophage or clandestinely sabotage the cure vastly different context than if Wrex survived all the way back in Mass Effect.

But there's one plot-line that doesn't get this kind of resolution, and that's the one that has to do with the Reapers (you know, the primary antagonists). Throughout Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, they're depicted as unknowable, Lovecraftian forces of evil and destruction. They taunt you with their unfathomable motives (through Sovereign in the first game and Harbinger in the second). The goals and purpose of the Reapers was one of the series' greatest mysteries, and Mass Effect 3 attempts to shed some light on that mystery.

In the game's conclusion, you are introduced to an entity called the Catalyst, who explains the Reapers and their motivations in only a few lines of expository dialogue. Commander Shepard asks the Catalyst if it knows how to stop the Reapers, after which the following exchange occurs:

CATALYST: "Perhaps. I control the Reapers. They are my solution."
SHEPARD: "Solution? To what?"
CATALYST: "Chaos. The created will always rebel against their creators. But we found a way to stop that from happening, a way to restore order for the next cycle."
SHEPARD: "By wiping out organic life?"
CATALYST: "No. We harvest advanced civilizations, leaving the younger ones alone. Just as we left your people alive the last time we were here."
SHEPARD: "But you killed the rest..."
CATALYST: "We helped them ascend, so they could make way for new life, storing the old life in Reaper form."
SHEPARD: "I think we'd rather keep our own form."
CATALYST: "No, you can't. Without us to stop it, synthetics would destroy all organics. We've created the cycle so that never happens. That's the solution."

The problem is that there's nothing unfathomable in this at all, and this provides an unsatisfying resolution to the mystery of the Reapers. In five simple, short, and straight-forward lines of dialogue, the Catalyst explains to Shepard (and the player) that the Reapers are a "solution" to the problem of a technological singularity, in which artificial life can outpace and threaten organic life. This presents a whole range of problems, as it stands, as other interactions with the Reapers tell us they view organic life as a "an accident" and they don't seem to be motivated by anything resembling preservation instincts (other than self-preservation, anyway). For those fans deeply invested in the lore of the setting and in trying to solve the mystery of the Reapers, this whole explanation is ultimately empty.


Now, this post is already far longer than I thought it would be originally, so I'm only going to provide one further quote (this one also from Casey Hudson) as an example of how Bioware didn't live up to the hype with which they surrounded their game. In another interview with GameInformer given only two months before the game's release, Hudson responds to a question wondering whether the same complexity found in Mass Effect 2's ending would be found in Mass Effect 3:

"Yeah, and I’d say much more so, because we have the ability to build the endings out in a way that we don’t have to worry about eventually tying them back together somewhere. This story arc is coming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lot more different. At this point we’re taking into account so many decisions that you’ve made as a player and reflecting a lot of that stuff. It’s not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C.

It’s more like there are some really obvious things that are different and then lots and lots of smaller things, lots of things about who lives and who dies, civilizations that rose and fell, all the way down to individual characters. That becomes the state of where you left your galaxy. The endings have a lot more sophistication and variety in them. It would be interesting to see if somebody could put together a chart for that. Even with Mass Effect 2’s..." [the interviewer cuts him off here]

 Here, we see the implicit promise that all of the branching paths from the first two games result in a wide variety of endings for Mass Effect 3 and the ending for the trilogy as a whole. Because Mass Effect 2's ending gave you a great degree of control over how you tackled the final mission (by assigning squad mates to various tasks) culminating in who survives the final mission (influenced by crew member loyalty, how much you've upgraded your ship, and what assignments you give out), fans had a template through which they interpreted this statement.

The ending delivered in the game, however, doesn't coincide with Hudson's statement here at all. Shepard, after his conversation with the Catalyst (excerpted above) is presented with a choice on how to defeat the Reapers. Depending on your war assets score (essentially, how much of the galactic fleet you've gathered for the final assault on Earth), you're presented with up to three choices on how to use the anti-Reaper Crucible to win the battle. Your choice, flavored again by your total number of war assets, results in the game playing a a single cutscene with seven variations. Most noticeably, your choice determines the color of the explosion that fires from the Crucible to defeat the Reapers. Depending on your total war assets, the explosion may or may not destroy Earth as collateral damage.

After this cutscene, another plays that shows your pilot, Joker, flying your ship away from the battle and becoming stranded on a garden-like world. The Mass Relays (ancient devices that make instantaneous space travel possible) are all destroyed, potentially stranding much of the galactic fleet Earth's solar system. Galactic civilization, which depends on the Mass Relays for trade and transit, will likely collapse, and that's before taking into account all of the damage the Reapers did to the galaxy during the war that plays out throughout Mass Effect 3.

Hudson is right in that you do, in the course of the game, decide the fates of three major civilizations, but these decisions that you make have no bearing on the ultimate state of the galaxy after the game's ending. No matter what choices you make throughout all three games, the ending to the game is largely the same. Galactic civilization has crumbled, and the game's epilogue scene (depicting a grandfather telling a grandson the legend of "The Shepard") indicates that it takes as least as long as it does for the story to become a legend for galactic civilization to rebuild.

Hudson had to, at this point, have known the game's ending. Normally, games take six to eight weeks to become certified and ready for distribution, so Mass Effect 3 had to have been complete by January (roughly) if it was to make it onto store shelves in time for the March 6th 2012 release date. In an attempt to maintain hype for the game, he (perhaps unwittingly) mislead the fans into thinking they were going to get something very different from what the game actually delivered.

There are numerous other interviews and quotes from folks who worked on the game, like the lead writer, Mac Walters, and Mike Gamble, the associate producer. A handful of them are collected here on the GameFAQs message boards for Mass Effect 3 (PC version). All of them indicated that the game would take far more into account regarding all the branch points leading up to the conclusion than it actually did, and this played no small part in fostering the fan anger that lead to the entire fan movement to "Retake" Mass Effect.

There's no doubt that Bioware was attempting to do something massive with Mass Effect 3. Trying to account for so many decisions across three whole games in the game's conclusion was like standing before the sheer cliff face of Mount Improbable. Ultimately, they weren't able to deliver as well as they probably hoped in this regard. Where they truly failed, though, and sowed the seeds for this massive fan backlash against them, was in all these little quotes and sound bites that led the fans to believe Bioware had actually succeeded at their monumental task.

In the end, they probably would have been better off letting the hype machine of the two previous games do its work. Their comments on the game, contributions to the hype machine itself, did little more than add fuel to the fire when the bomb inevitably went off. Coming soon, I'll be taking a detailed look at the ending itself, which is really where most of the kindling for that fire came from before eventually tackling Bioware's response to the fan outcry, which made the whole thing explode like a "freak gasoline fight accident."

On Mass Effect 3: An Introduction to the Outrage

Mass Effect 3 released just one month ago to wild critical acclaim, including receiving 75 perfect review scores from across the spectrum of video games media. By all accounts, its release has been wildly successful--initial sales reports indicate that it approached or exceeded sales of each of the prior games in the series from day one sales alone. Yet, user review scores on sites like Amazon and Metacritic are nearly the polar opposite of those from facets of the professional gaming media. Amazon itself has cut the price of the game to $49.99, and various Amazon partners are selling the game for around $40 (and it's been posted for as low as $30) only one month after release, something largely unprecedented for a release of such magnitude. Other retailers, such as GameStop, have put in place similar price reductions on the game. [Update: April 10, 2012 - GameStop's price drop has been reverted, and the price at Amazon has risen slightly.]

There's no need to rhetorically ask what happened. If you're reading this, you probably know enough about games--or you know someone who does, and won't be quiet about it--to know that many fans of the Mass Effect series and its developer Bioware had a visceral, negative reaction to the game's finale. The fan reaction, often compared to the response to the endings of television series like Lost or The Sopranos, has spawned one of the largest video game-related online protests in recent memory. Petitions have been signed and polls have been taken. Donations have been made to worthy charities by fans hoping to channel their frustration with a once beloved company into something positive. Fans have started letter campaigns, created alternate fan endings, and even, in one delicious means of protest, sent cupcakes frosted to symbolize the game's ending to Bioware's offices in Edmonton.

There's so much that can be said about the entire phenomenon that no single post could say everything without pushing reader patience "to infinity and beyond." Three main factors contribute to the disappointment for a majority of fans: the perception that Bioware mislead or lied to fans regarding the nature of the game's ending during the pre-release period; the ending itself, which is incredibly ambiguous, ignores long-established character motivations, personalities, and development, and abandons key themes of the trilogy; and Bioware's largely dismissive response to the disenfranchised fans. Each of these topics deserves a lot of thought, and in posts to come, they'll each be covered in turn.

Bioware has announced an "Extended Cut" download to be released this summer, which is their saving throw versus angry video game mobs. Whether or not they'll be able to adequately address all of the issues surrounding the ending in a way as to quell the rebellion of so many loyal fans remains to be seen. Until then, it remains worth talking about, as the extent of the controversy is pretty new for the video game industry as a whole.

Mass Effect: A Review in Retrospect

As a longtime fan of Bioware games, I played and enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins, their spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series on the Playstation 3; however, I didn’t have the opportunity to experience their other “next-generation” franchise, Mass Effect, due to my lack of an Xbox 360 or a competent gaming PC. That changed in 2011, when Bioware released a Playstation 3 port of Mass Effect 2. I devoured the game and waited anxiously for the release of Mass Effect 3, which was to follow later that year (and the release of which was later delayed until just one month ago, March of 2012).

I completed Mass Effect 3 a few days after launch, and was soon a frequent visitor to the Mass Effect 3 forums on the Bioware Social Network. As disappointed in the ending as I personally was, I also soon learned that my experience of Mass Effect 3 was ultimately incomplete. I had still never played the original Mass Effect. My Playstation 3 copy of Mass Effect 2 introduced me to some of the original game’s content, and indeed, allowed me to make some of that game’s key decisions, even if I had to make those decisions in what amounted to a vacuum of no narrative context. But this vacuum colored my perceptions. A character I assumed was expendable turned out to be one of the series’ most beloved. Other favorites I had never met because a fifteen minute “interactive comic” couldn’t dream of covering them all.

But all was not lost. During the early weeks of the backlash against Mass Effect 3, Amazon offered a deal: downloadable versions of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 for the low bundle price of $11.99. With several hundred dollars of life support funneled into my aging desktop, the old girl seemed ready. Still hopeful that Bioware’s recent missteps could become learning experiences and not prophecies of impending doom, I couldn’t pass up the chance to experience Mass Effect from the ground up as Bioware no doubt intended. I’ve now completed the first stage of my re-entry into the Mass Effect universe, and it’s certainly been thought provoking so far.

The above preamble seeks that this review is around five years too late to be relevant in the traditional sense. But Mass Effect, as you might expect, serves as a wonderful place to begin for any examination of the series as a whole, and turning a critical eye to Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 can aid in understanding the level of fan investment necessary to allow the perhaps unprecedented nature of the backlash against Mass Effect 3. Beyond that, starting at the beginning is the only way to truly appreciate the ways in which Bioware strengthened as a developer as the series progressed, but also those areas in which they fumbled.

Since this review is a retrospective, I’m not going to spend any time providing a synopsis of the story or setting the stage for someone new to the game. Five years after the game’s release, I imagine Mass Effect has become familiar enough to gamers by and large that I don’t need to tell you much about how awesome Commander Shepard is. I will offer one small disclaimer: I have nearly always played the Mass Effect games with a female Commander Shepard and so may occasionally use feminine pronouns when referring to the series protagonist (when I use them at all). This habit of mine isn’t meant to suggest that female Shepard is better than a male Shepard (except, of course, for the fact that “FemShep” rocks “BroShep” every day of the week, and twice on Sunday). Those things having been said, we can move on to the nuts and bolts of this review: my thoughts on Mass Effect’s gameplay, systems, and narrative.

GAMEPLAY
Mass Effect’s gameplay can safely be divided into three parts: combat, commuting, and conversation (alliteration intentional because I wanted a reason to write “alliteration.”). The last of these has a huge part to play in the game’s narrative delivery, and so I’ll discuss it in more detail below. The former two represent something of a departure from Bioware’s more traditional combat and navigation systems, and their first humble steps off the edge of the map did indeed introduce them to a monster or two.

Combat in Mass Effect is hardly revolutionary, and indeed, it probably shouldn’t be, since the game was attempting to marry two generally separate types of gameplay: third-person action shooting with traditional “role-playing,” (which for decades have had tedious menu-based combat or occasionally “point-and-click” varieties of the same). Bioware made a conscious decision to stick to a relatively simple combat system, presumably intending that the real meat of the game was in its narrative strength. Given their inexperience with involved, action-oriented combat systems, this may have been a choice made out of necessity, but it was probably a wise one.

What little Mass Effect’s combat attempts to do, it does poorly. Hit detection is somewhat awkward: you may occasionally think you’ve missed an enemy only to see him drop dead or hit him square in the eyes only to find his health bar unshaken. Enemies can sometimes see and hit you perfectly before you’re able to detect them (most especially in the game’s vehicle combat). On top of this, the game’s controls are designed in such a way as to add another enemy to your fire fight. The act of taking cover is tied to movement keys and it is often difficult to determine whether a given movement will cause Commander Shepard to shift along the wall, or jump of cover into enemy fire as if she had a death wish. The Commander’s death wish is most apparent when trying to peak around cover, as the game offers no visual cues to the player as to whether the Commander is actually doing so. You may occasionally nudge to one side or the other, thinking you’re not close enough to actually fire only to realize that you’re quite close enough to get fired at. The game’s difficulty is also fairly steep, requiring a careful and thoughtful approach to many firefights, even on lower difficulty levels. This would normally be welcome (especially as it’s something of the standard for Bioware games prior to Mass Effect—although perhaps less so for those after it), but the frustrating controls sometimes shift the focus of conquering a difficult battle from your tactical expertise to how well the controls decided to work for you at that moment.

Similar pitfalls plague the game’s “commuting” sections, in which you pilot a planetary surface rover that clearly took a page or two from the book of some of the early Mars rovers. Your vehicle—the Mako—handles like a refrigerator on wheels (I can’t for the life of me remember where I first heard that, but it’s applicable here) and also seems to regularly defy the laws of physics if you happen to hit a piece of terrain at the wrong angle. You also get the pleasure of using the Mako’s onboard weaponry in a combat system even less polished than that of the third-person shooting segments. The best way to complete one of the game’s vehicle sections involves a lot of quick-saving, as a poor performance in one vehicle firefight can leave you ill-equipped to handle the next, mainly because the vehicle’s shields regenerate incredibly slowly.

This is quite a shame, really, as exploring alien worlds (and even on at least one opportunity, a place not quite so alien: Earth’s moon) is something that’s easy to get lost in and does a lot to enhance the epic feel of the game’s narrative. Some of that appeal is lost, though, when you realize your last save prior to a failure was ten minutes ago and you have to replay the entire section, one frustrating and immersion-breaking firefight after another.

So far, I haven’t had a lot of nice things to say about Mass Effect. Truth be told, I won’t have many nice things to say for the next section, either. But I promise, I do have good things to say—we just have to get there first. Mass Effect was good enough that I feel compelled to end on a high note, and that means we have to tackle the next section before we can get to the game’s strongest traits.

SYSTEMS
Like its archaic-by-today’s-standards combat, the game’s systems, from character progression to inventory really show their age five years down the road. Character progression is in many ways standard: each time you gain enough experience to “go up a level,” you earn a few points to distribute amongst a number of different skills, ranging from general toughness and weapon expertise to hacking skills and how you want to develop your social graces. For Mass Effect, though, the system isn’t implemented with a lot of finesse. Each skill has ten or so levels, and each character has ten or so separate skills. At each level, you typically gain two points to spend on any of these skills. At face value, the system is designed in such a way as to make you decide which skills to develop at the cost of others. For a first-time player, however, it isn’t directly apparent how valuable each skill will be in the game at large, and furthermore, it can be somewhat easy to end up with characters that are too focused on the “non-combat” skills to allow them to feel successful at the game’s sometimes frustrating combat. While the leveling system isn’t non-functional, it may have benefited from separate “combat” and “non-combat” skill trees (like, say, another of Bioware’s titles, Dragon Age: Origins) to reduce the potential for player traps.

The advancement system works well enough, though. The same can’t be said for the game’s inventory system. As you explore the galaxy, you’ll undoubtedly find any number of guns and grenades and suits of armor and weapon upgrade parts and specialized types of ammunition and so on. Mass Effect borrows a lot from role-playing games that came before it in this regard, and expansive inventory systems can offer a lot of ways to customize your characters. But if they aren’t accompanied by a well-designed management system, their vastness can quickly overwhelm the player. Such is the case with Mass Effect. You accumulate so many items that you quickly have far more than you could ever reasonably have a use for, leaving you to either convert the extras into “omni-gel” (an all-purpose tool for hacking and other tasks) or to sell them. As a result, you’ll spend untold amounts of time selecting one item and then selecting “convert,” and doing it over and over and over and over. For some reason, there’s no ability to select all or convert large swaths of items at once (although there is an option to take every item in a container with a single choice). Don’t be coy and think you can just let the junk accumulate, either, as the game limits your inventory to 150 items, and you at least want to be able to get the upgrades out of all the junk. As a result, far too much of your playtime is spent getting rid of junk, which detracts greatly from the overall experience.

Where Mass Effect’s combat and travel display Bioware’s inexperience with action-oriented gameplay, the game’s advancement and inventory systems shine an uncomfortable light on their ill-advised adherence to archaic design of the role-playing genre (though they did attempt to move forward in both of these regards in the sequels). Despite these negative aspects of the game, it still demonstrates a lot of strength in what has always been one of Bioware’s greatest strengths as a developer: the portrayal of narrative.

NARRATIVE
I’m not going to bore you too much with the specific details of Mass Effect’s narrative. By now, it’s probably relatively common knowledge that Commander Shepard discovers and fights against the enigmatic and unimaginably powerful Reapers, sentient machines bent on wiping out all life in the galaxy. For most of Mass Effect, you don’t actually know that’s what you’re up to, though: the game’s purpose in the trilogy (and, indeed, Mass Effect was always imagined as a trilogy, at least in broad strokes) is to reveal the ultimate antagonist of the series. The core of the narrative is executed with the care that many have come to expect from Bioware. The plot follows a fairly standard arc, but it is well-crafted and is seated upon a rich, detailed universe that brims with all the passion of artists hard at work.

Mass Effect lays the groundwork for what would become defining elements of the series: well-written characters, a well-crafted (if somewhat standard) story, tasteful juxtaposition of dark and light elements in the story, and perhaps most importantly, the “dialogue wheel,” and the Paragon/Renegade “morality” system (though morality is honestly a bit of a misnomer here, as Paragon and Renegade choices are far more about attitude than they are about whether Commander Shepard is good or evil). All of these combine to create a narrative experience truly unlike any other in video game history. Even Bioware’s struggle at times to reach the bar set by Mass Effect (and the series as a whole). This begins and ends, ultimately, with the characters that breathe life into the world, both your squad mates and Commander Shepard herself.

Because the series was conceived of as a trilogy, the writers were given much more liberty to introduce characters with their future development in mind. Many of the characters seem naïve or shallow at first, but as the game progresses they grow, and begin to question previous assumptions or use Shepard’s example to justify a new path in life. As the series as a whole progresses, the characters grow in endearing, interesting, and wonderful ways that only retrospect can truly make clear. If you aren’t torn about which of Ashley or Kaiden to sacrifice during a mission on Virmire, don’t find the optimism of Tali’Zorah adorable, or enjoy watching Garrus come to realize he can’t stand to deal with the bureaucracy and red tape of “by the book” law enforcement, you may not have been talking to the characters enough. Seriously, talk to them. Bioware put far more effort into the characters and their dialogue and their stories than they seem to have with the game’s other aspects, and that may be just because they always intended the characters to be the focus over those other things.

That focus is most clear perhaps in the character of Commander Shepard herself. Through the dialogue wheel, you decide how you interact with these characters—whether you care about them or not, whether you’ll fall in love with them, or whether you’ll shoot them for disagreeing with you. Your decisions matter, and they give you a different experience, and indeed, a different main character, each time you play Mass Effect. The overall thrust of the story may remain the same, but the difference is in the details—quite literally so. All the while, you’re developing Commander Shepard, via the “attitude” system in the same way that the other character s change as the game goes on. That Bioware was able to competently weave a compelling narrative while at the same time giving the player the ability to invest in that narrative through personal choice and some degree of narrative control is a testament to the strength of team that wrote Mass Effect.

CONCLUSION
The game’s narrative strengths make it worth playing at least once for anyone looking to take the leap into Mass Effect’s grand universe. While the gameplay definitely shows its age, if you’re patient with it, you’ll find your future journeys in the world much richer for sticking through with the original game (as I’m finding right now while re-playing Mass Effect 2 on PC). After that initial playthrough, though, it might be worth it to pick up the Mass Effect: Genesis downloadable content for Mass Effect 2, which lets you make several of the first game’s key decisions without having to slog through its archaic gameplay.

Mass Effect is available for both PC and Xbox 360, generally for $20 or less.