That Mass Effect ending

It's been a difficult task avoiding spoilers for Mass Effect 3 while the rows about how it ended raged on, especially when I was fairly late picking up a copy. I knew it was something that I was going to be interested in though, so I've been using Google Reader to keep track of articles about it. I also had around a hundred pages of game forum posts to catch up on, some of which have provided much more eloquent criticism than I have found in other articles. There was plenty I could write about the game in general but the more I read it seemed like the ending was the clearly the biggest talking point. Since I'm a relative newcomer and have not been invested in the series for 5 years, I hope I can take a more impartial viewpoint than most.

Like many who finished the game after disappointment over its ending became headline news, my personal reaction to the ending was initially positive as I was expecting something terrible. I felt the game had been hinting quite clearly at what Shepard's fate would be, so I could accept that there was no way out for her. The last choice felt pretty tough (I went for "Control") and though I did question just why Joker had been piloting the ship away from the battle, I was just happy to see Garrus emerge from the wreckage at the end. That he was alive felt enough for me, I had no desire for an epilogue detailing their future exploits. The crew getting a fresh start on an unknown planet (Eden Prime? Virmire?) seemed quite fitting and also reminded me of the end of the recent Battlestar Galactica series.

As time went on and I started to read other people's comments on it, I couldn't help but start to understand their disappointment. There are many issues that stand out, some of which can possibly be explained away but it all adds up to a picture that doesn't seem like it was fully thought out. On top of that there was also the fact that your final choice didn't really make any difference to the outcome, just changing the colour of explosions and some other minor details. The thought that 'ignorance is bliss' definitely passed through my mind as more and more problems were pointed out. One of the first things I found out was that I wasn't even offered the third option of "Synthesis". The final choices are determined by your effective military strength but I was sure that the bar representing it was very near maximum for me, I haven't gone back to check the exact numbers. I was ready to blame the fact that I didn't play any multiplayer missions to increase my 'galactic readiness' but it turns out that it is possible without it.

Given that I wasn't even aware that it was possible to save a whole race that was lost in my playthrough, I definitely could have done better. Using this military strength stat to determine your ending choices did not really make any sense though, it's a step further from the vague reasoning that has your loyal team members survive the end of Mass Effect 2. I feel like a very simple change could have been to rename this counter so that you were building 'galactic unity' and then use that to persuade the catalyst that there is potential for synthetic and organic life to work together, citing the Geth and EDI as examples. If there was to be a 'true paragon ending' to the whole series then surely convincing the reapers to break their cycle and leave the mass relays intact would have been it. That said, I have come around to the idea that losing the mass relays might not mean utter disaster and that it fits in well with the overall theme of not relying on technology that we don't fully understand.

I've been mostly thinking about small changes that could be made because the fact of the matter is that the ending is out there now and I think it will be near impossible to completely change it. That's why I haven't really touched on the whole indoctrination theory, even though there are some pretty convincing videos on the subject. As well as it being an unprecedented situation for a game not to contain the full ending on disc, it seems like there would need to be a lot added to deal with this theory, probably including new player controlled sections or choices. I can accept that indoctrination may have originally been part of the plan but I would guess that it was dropped and would now be too much work to put in. The promised DLC to elaborate on what happened next doesn't actually seem to be what players are craving - more true choices and for your choices up to that point to really affect how the ending plays out. That and probably the complete ret-conning of the Normandy's escape scene.

A lot of people have talked about the process of understanding the ending as being similar to the steps normally associated with grief. No matter whether you do go through these steps, to me I think the last step of acceptance is the most important and we have to accept the ending, flawed as it might be. While there are plenty of holes that can be poked in it, I think that its intention was to give an emotional ending to the series rather than a logical one. Your final choice may not have that much effect on what happens next but I would imagine that most put a fair amount of thought into which option they picked - based on the decisions they had made up until that point. None of the options seem perfect but you have to make the best of a bad situation. If I had not taken the Geth's side so many times throughout the series then I might not have had as many reservations about choosing the "Destroy" option (I also thought that I might well be sentencing anyone on board a spaceship to death). I have seen arguments supporting the choice of all of the options, which made sense to an individual and/or their character but to say that one of the options is clearly the true ending seems to miss the point.

So while there may have been some depressing days along the way as I thought through the flaws of the ending, it hasn't soured me against the franchise as a whole. In fact I've dived into the series from the beginning again to create a male character that is totally my own. Aimee Shepard's story was an interesting shared experience with my wife designing the character and making most of the dialogue decisions (with Kinect working pretty well in allowing her to take control of ME3's cutscenes without passing the joypad). I might know that my new character's journey is heading to roughly the same place as the last one but I'm sure it will be for very different reasons, with the aim of following a different character instead of deliberately trying to change what happens.

Mass Effect and video game storytelling

I've been wondering how to go about writing a first post for this blog, one idea was to give a summary of the games I played last year but the more I thought about it the longer and more boring I realised it would be. So for various reasons I decided to concentrate on one game series I caught up with last year - Mass Effect.

This was a series I'd ignored for a long time - partially because I didn't have a very good impression of what it was actually about and partially because most of my gaming time had been spent labouring under the impression that I might eventually get good at fighting games (more on that another time maybe). All I'd seen of it was 'Generic Bald Space Marine' shoots things in space, which didn't really interest me (I'm sure some of you are making belm faces at me right now for how wrong I was). Eventually I heard more about the character customisation options, the conversation system and the fact that you could carry your character through to the next game, which grabbed my interest if only for the fact that I'd never heard of the cross game character thing being done before.

When I finally picked up both games I think I may have sprinted through the first game a little too fast - I'd heard a lot of people say to just play the first one to create a character and transfer them through to the second one as that was the much better game. In the end I liked a lot of things from both games though and found myself missing some of the stuff from ME1 that was more streamlined in ME2 (not the scrolling through every item you've ever acquired when selling them though). I generally enjoyed the storyline, which seemed pretty good by most games standards but that brings me onto my main reason for writing this. I was reading an article by Film Crit Hulk yesterday on why we should stop it with the hero journey shit and about half way through it mentions Mass Effect as a bad example of using the same basic stories and characters over and over again. This being my first Bioware game I obviously hadn't picked up on the similarity to their other games but there's no denying the fact that it follows a very similar structure to dozens of other stories. It wasn't something that bothered me while playing the game but it's interesting to look at after the fact and try to understand what I did like about the story.

Before reading the article on the heroes journey, I read another of his called The myth of 3 act structure (yes I am doing my homework Hulk). Specifically the idea that the end of an 'act' is characterised by decisions being made that you cannot be undone, which move the story forward. Aside from the gunplay in missions, this really struck me as being the main idea of the Mass Effect series, there are plenty of decisions that you are forced to make and they aren't just wishy-washy things that don't really affect the rest of the game. First and foremost you have your character, which in my case was designed in partnership with my wife and came out something like the following image I think.

A good deal of time was spent tweaking bone structure etc. and we were also thinking about her backstory choice and what her character would be like. We picked the option of being famous for having to make a tough decision to sacrifice people for the greater good, which made me mostly stick to the pragmatic best decisions possible despite the cost (most of the time anyway, my wife would quite often comment that I hadn't chosen the best dialogue option for her character). It really hit home when your last decisions really affected the landscape of the second game - it makes me want to go and see how things could have turned out differently but I think that will come after I've played ME3 and our Aimee Shepard's story  is complete. I think that identification of the character as 'ours' is what overrides any feeling that the story is too derivative, because you've taken a significant role in shaping the story so it obviously seems unique to you. Funnily enough I hear that the third game will have an 'Action' mode where most of the conversation options are taken out of your hands, it'd be interesting to see whether this results in you playing a completely bland character devoid of personality or if it will auto-direct conversations a certain way.

It's also an amazing undertaking from a technical standpoint and I can see how it must be hard to write/design ME3, taking into account every possibility from all the previous games. So much must have gone into it that would never be seen by someone taking a specific path. I particularly liked the fact that I could just leave certain conversation choices unfollowed, anything that seemed to stray towards traditional goody goody hero stuff or taking the moral high ground I would tend to avoid when in a lot of games you would just have to sit through the hero taking the holier than thou approach. I guess this is not something unique to Mass Effect but having never really played any other western RPGs this is the first thing to make me aware of it. I can see now why people talk about playing Dungeons and Dragons as good practice for writing stories as you're thinking about a character different from yourself and how they would react in situations. So while games should definitely strive to create better, more interesting stories I find it hard to criticize this too much when the moments that you helped create are what stick with you.