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.

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.