Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

Tali may be biased. Shepard, however, never calls out what she says as biased; the closest is that one dialogue choice where you could either say that quarians deserved to get killed for trying to kill all the geth (paragon), or that the quarians should have expected the geth to fight back (renegade). More importantly, nowhere does the codex contradict what she says as biased. Her statements of fact - that the geth nearly wiped out the quarians, and that they kill everyone who go into the Veil - are actually supported by the codex.

For the kind of "everything you knew was a lie" trope to work, there must be some way you could have gone back, review the details, and have that epiphany moment. There is no connection between "sequel being good" and "sequel challenges something something audience thought was true the first time around".

Spec Ops: The Line works because there were many many opportunities for you to go back and see that yes, Walker did in fact go crazy. Borrasca works because there are many details that take on a second meaning as you realize just what the town of Drisking's dark secret is. Darth Vader is Luke's father works because of the classic "from a certain point of view" trope.

"Well of course the geth are these nice people who just want to be left alone and still love their Creators" doesn't work because while Tali might have personal biases, what she actually says does not appear to be bias, but facts that someone without those biases would also agree with. The geth's portrayal as such does not reconcile with geth killing 99% of the quarian population and no one going into the Perseus Veil ever coming back. It is not a challenge to what we believed coming out of 1 and why we believed it - they still killed 99% of the quarians, and they still kill everyone going into the Veil. I would argue that this solidly paints the geth as victims in the narrative, and that the lack of mention of the 99% in 2 isn't meant to be a counterbalance to paint the geth as amoral, so much as an attempt to hope you would forget about it because the Mass Effect 2 writing team want to write a story about robots just need to be loved and understood.

The Codex is also an Unreliable Expositor, though - it claims that Sovereign was a geth ship, for one thing, and that Reapers are a myth.

Not saying your bits are false because of that - just that the Codex isn't necessarily hard evidence.

Edited by KarkatTheDalek on Mar 21st 2019 at 6:45:49 AM

Hmm.

Does the ME 1 codex contain any bits to give us reason to question its validity?

It's description of space battles is at complete odds with what happens in the sovereign fight but you can excuse it under the fact that a battle true to the codex would be boring as hell to watch.

The Codex is told from in-universe perspectives and should not be taken at face value. First example off the top of my head is the entry of Cerberus in ME 2 which references what is publicly known whilst never mentioning anything Shepard or the player knows about them at the point in time when the entry is unlocked. And as noted the Codex in 1 claims that Soverign is potentially constructed by the Geth or Protheans and is crewed by Geth and Krogan, and that Mass Relays were constructed by the Protheans.

It wasn't as obvious in the first one because we had the same mistaken assumptions, but yeah, it was definitely still wrong. It wasn't ret-conned into being in-universe only in 2.

Reapers have been sighted in our Earth...

I know you feel this, Whiteboard Marker

I feel having no particular option to smack down that particular pompous crustacean DIRECTLY was a failing. If we'd had a chance to absolutely CANE harbinger that could've been more satisfying - even with the final disclosure.

Instead we had the noble Marauder Shields...

Harbinger should had been a climatic boss, but we are talking about something roughly 2000 times the size of the Reaper destroyers that were taken down in the course of the game.

(A Destroyer is 150 meters tall, a Capital ship is 2 km tall; a Capital ship is therefore roughly 13 times larger in lineal dimensions. That means, mass-wise, and mass grows the same way volume does, they are 13x13x13 = 2197 times as massive; probably slighty less, as capital ships aren't as compact as destroyers)

But yeah, killing Harbinger over London would had been neat.

but guys! that be too video gamey!

That be like the endings being a set of colored buttons you just choose to push!◊

wait a minute

I mean...

I kind of wonder if Mass Effect just really needed SOME space combat.

Repeating Saren felt like... repeating Saren. Rannoch and Tuchunka's Reapers were really cool but couldn't be replicated directly again. And, when your antagonists are GIANT EVIL SPACESHIPS! I... don't really know how else to engage them except with a space ship of our own.

Or maybe they could have given a sequence in the Normandy as we route fleets to certain locations, give commands of our own, and direct the battle? Really give the title COMMANDER Shepard a reason to be there?

I think that Expanded Galaxy Mod we talked about earlier lets you do that.

It's weird how Bioware games always seem to fudge that last bit. Origins managed it to a point, with the armies appearing at different stages of the fight; plus all the 1 HP Darkspawn which made it feel like you were wading through a whole Army - it felt epic.

Inquisition didn't execute it at all well - just randomly IN THE GLADES with a tonne of Orlesians, but no sense of build up.

I think they can't design "strategic" games - look at how Inquisition was advertised originally with the whole "Burn the ships, treat the wounded" stuff; none of which actually made it in.

Instead they go for the Hero player doing everything and most else is just set dressing. Which ironically TAKES AWAY the sense of accomplishment.

I think it's a fallacy of "Player Empowerment is Key" and then assuming all that is is the player does EVERYTHING. No, player empowerment can come from seeing the results of their actions, not just the DA 2 "You press a button and something cool happens!"

I wonder how much this has to do with the mentality of devs and understanding what is "cool" or meaningful; I don't want to paint them as immature (They're people, they have their own interior lives that are rich etc etc) but it seems as a collective... they don't get it in translation to the end product.

I don't feel like trudging through Linked In to find patterns of when people who used to work for Bio Ware's writing team left the company, so I'll leave it to conjecture, but I do believe that at some point between Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2/Dragon Age Origins, there was a noticeable shift in emphasis towards (let's see if I can convey this without being too condescending)...a very visual kind of "cool" based on evoking certain feelings that comes off as being hokey rather than actually being cool.

Somebody thought "assemble your team of badasses and Do The Thing Against All Odds" was cool, so most of your Mass Effect 2 teammates are these badassful badasses who badass. Somebody also thought 1m2f threesomes are cool, so you can have a threesome with Isabella in Dragon Age. Somebody also thought the idea of Shepard being so badass that Harbinger calling you out by name would be really cool, so Harbinger spends the game sending flunkies at you and asserting that THIS HURTS YOU.

Both Wrex and Zaeed (it literally took me like 30 seconds to remember his name) are seasoned ex-mercenary captains with a mountain of corpses to their name and zero fucks left to give.

Except if you strip away "badass mercenary" from Wrex's personality, there's still something there.

If you strip away "badass mercenary" from Zaeed, there's...a CGI model of a human with a gun and that's about it.

In my 20-page writeup, I note this to be a problem for most of Mass Effect 2's party members. They're not really characters, they're archetypes; you don't have a team consisting of Miranda, Jack, Thane, and Samara but a team consisting of Femme Fatale, Broken Bird Psychic, Assassin Dude, and Tall Leggy Warrior Lady.

Re:Codex - I distinctly asked for examples where the ME 1 codex was not accurate because the topic at hand was differences in tone/theme/sensibility between 1 and 2. In any case, biases do not carry over to statements of fact. What biases are present that cause us to doubt that the geth killed 99% of the quarian population and also kill everyone who enters their space? Those are meant to be obstacles to surmount, not background detail that we skip over because we want Legion and Tali to be friends.

If that's what you take out of Thane and Samara, well, I don't think I'd be giving your conclusions too much attention.

Same. Thane and Samara are great. If that's all you boil them down to, of course they feel like archetypes.

I'd also point out that, if you compare Zaeed to Wrex, of course Zaeed comes off thinner. He was a DLC character for starters and him and Kasumi both didn't get much screen time.

I'd say Kasumi is far more well rounded than Zaeed, but neither got particularly fleshed out outside of the context of their DL Cs.

I’m sorry. You wrote TWENTY PAGES about this? And all you could come up with was overly simplistic “archetypes?”

Mass Effect has a boatload of problems across all three games but 2's character writing definitely isn't among them. It's the only saving grace of ME 2, a game where literally nothing happens.

I'm with Rodimus on that one - and I'd go further and say it's so good it pulls the rest of the game up with how good it is. The suicide mission is one of my favorite video game moments and it boils down to the theme that goes with it and the feeling of culmination of all those chracter moments.

Yeah realtalk: I wish there were no Reaper plot and the series was more about character narrative than galactic extinction.

Edited by RodimusMinor on Mar 25th 2019 at 7:25:24 AM

Eh, I like both, But i get where detractors of the 2nd and 3rd game comes from - They'd be more at home in a setting that wasn't the one of mass effect 1 that was about stopping space ctuhullu. if you don't liek both, you'll end up disappointed either by me1, or by what comes after.

Mass Effect 2 was actually my least favorite of the trilogy. While I like some of the new teammates and the development of the old ones, I found some of the others too one note. I also found the overly humanistic tone irritating and I greatly disliked what was done with Cerberus, (they were originally just a small group of sidequest villianous mad scientists with only a couple hidden outposts but were changed into a prohuman N.G.O. Superpower terrorist organization) and Harbinger was a step down from Sovereign. Then there's what was done with the ammo system.

×8 Wait, twenty pages, where?

Edited by Kaiseror on Mar 25th 2019 at 7:57:58 AM

Hmmmm...

So, odd suggestion. Could the series have done better with ME 1 and its theme about Reapers been isolated to JUST that game (with the defeat of Soverign deemed a defeat of the Reapers "for now") and the series to be opened up to other new mysteries, characters, and ideas to explore?

I could have seen dealing with the reaper being a lifetime's work. Gearing up to make a fleet capable of taking down the reapers could have taken this long. It would have felt right. The cool thing with ME 1 was that the reapers were still a threat, but on an unspecified deadline, so you had all the space you wanted to make smaller scale games in that verse working to the greater goal in the long run, and then end with something not too far from the refusal ending where either an older sheppard or someone inheriting his legacy ending the threat. And part of the games could have been about building up that successor, and so on.

But that's thoroughly incompatible with what the series was supposed to be, aka a standard three-games trilogy. The second they went with that idea, mass effect 2 as we got it was out of place.

Edited by Yumil on Mar 26th 2019 at 10:18:12 AM