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Mass Effect 3 |
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Studio: |
BioWare |
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Designer(s): |
Casey
Hudson / Preston Watamaniuk |
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Part of series: |
Mass
Effect |
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Release: |
March 6, 2012 |
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Main credits: |
Lead writer: Mac Walters Lead programmer: David Falkner Art director: Derek Watts |
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Useful links: |
Paragon
playthrough (41 hours 55 minutes) |
Renegade
playthrough (41 hours 10 mins.) |
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Basic Overview
Even if you never played the game, unless you are a total
and absolute stranger to video gaming, you probably have heard something
about the Mass
Effect 3 ending controversy, one of video game industry’s most famous
alleged fuck-ups that even has its own Wikipedia page. Since I myself was
taking a break from gaming around that time, I did not pick up my own copy of
the Mass Effect trilogy until
several years later, and never got to experience Mass Effect 3 in its original incarnation — without the Extended Ending and the Leviathan DLCs — which means that I
have to psychologically reconstruct the archetypal frustration of the
average fan in those early days of March 2012 by reading about the
differences between the original game release and the modified ending, or by
browsing old dust-covered gaming blogs and forums from around that time. But
on the whole, it is not too difficult to understand what all the hoopla was
about — and a mighty interesting hoopla it was, actually telling us quite a
bit about the human condition in the modern world. Again, even if you
couldn’t care less about video games in general or Mass Effect in particular, there is no denying that the stand-off
between the game designers and the fans, its reasons, nature, and
consequences were a big cultural
event at the time — and, a bit more arguably, that their reverberations are
still an influence on mass-produced art these days, for better or worse. In retrospect, it is certainly the controversy that
surrounds the ending of Mass Effect 3
which prevented it from ascending to the same pedestal as its predecessor. No
matter how many hours one pours into a video game, the two things that matter
most are the way it begins and the way it ends — and on both these counts, Mass Effect 2 had its successor
solidly beat. For sure, the opening to Mass
Effect 3 was impressive, but we knew
it would be impressive and in what ways it would be impressive, whereas the
«death» of Commander Shepard at the start of Mass Effect 2 sent out shockwaves. And while the grand finale of Mass Effect 2, with the success of
its tense-as-hell «suicide mission» depending on all the amount of hard work
you’d completed or failed to complete throughout the game, was (at least
emotionally) perceived by just about everybody as nearly flawless, the ending
of Mass Effect 3... oh well. No
wonder, then, that the third game in the series usually gets positive
mentions these days only as an integral part of the overall trilogy, and
pretty much never on its own, as a stand-alone title. Which, in my humble opinion, is thoroughly and utterly
unjust. Mass Effect 3 is certainly
flawed — as are all video games, no
exceptions whatsoever — and most definitely not above serious criticism, but
generally speaking, it does exactly the same thing that a part of the Mass Effect trilogy is expected to
do. That is, it carefully and lovingly preserves the «soul» of Mass Effect, honing it and cherishing
it even as the commercial, stylistic, and substantial requirements for
mass-oriented video games keep changing and skewing in a completely different
direction. And at the same time, it has its own identity that helps it stand
out and not simply look like a regurgitation of the same images, tropes, and
impressions we’d already lived through in the previous parts. To put it
short, the original Mass Effect
was all about world-building; Mass
Effect 2 focused on exploring the dark underbelly of the newly built
world and the psychological profiles of its characters; and finally, Mass Effect 3 «externalizes» all the
conflict, adding an epic dimension and turning the heroic bombast dial all
the way up to eleven. It is a line of development that is very similar to the overall arcs of
both The Lord Of The Rings and the
original Star Wars trilogy — but,
thanks to the original concept left over from Drew Karpyshyn and, curiously
enough, to the fact that it is set in the medium of video gaming rather than
literature or film, it totally works on its own without simply looking like
an unimaginative rip-off of previous artistic triumphs. The thing is, it would have been the easiest feat in the
world to tarnish the legacy of the game’s two first installments and come out
with a thoroughly embarrassing finale. By 2012, BioWare was nearing the end
of its glory days — with its being essentially swallowed up by the corporate
monstrosity of Electronic Arts, it was fast travelling down the path of every
typical independent gaming company cursed with too much commercial success,
and its games were accordingly getting bigger, flashier, and more soulless,
as the world would eventually feel with such disasters as Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. Corporate integration meant
the possibility of a bigger budget, but also the heavy hand of marketing
strategies — which, for one thing, imparted to the game designers that people
are much more likely to fall for shooters
than story-based RPGs, which meant,
accordingly, that the Mass Effect 3
team, want it or not, would have to allocate much more resources to improve
the game’s combat angle. Worse, by the early 2010s, it was all about team
work in the gaming community — so, of course, Mass Effect 3 had to include a multi-player mode, because how
could one hope to sell a million copies without the possibility to turn your
game into a Call Of Duty clone? Basically, with all the global developments in the world
of video gaming in general and inside BioWare in particular, Mass Effect 3 could have easily been
— should have been — a flaming
disaster, from start to finish. Even Drew Karpyshyn himself was no longer
around to supervise his original brainchild; he left BioWare one month prior
to the release of the game and, allegedly, was not involved at all in its
design or writing, leaving everything to Casey Hudson and Mac Walters, both
of them old-time veterans of the team but not the authors of the original
idea. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just turn the game
into a massive shoot-’em-up, with Commander Shepard and his arsenal of
supercharged Wunderwaffe wreaking
havoc on the poor Reapers, who wouldn’t even know what hit them in the first
place. Smash ’em up, get the girl of your choice, and cruise around the
galaxy for the rest of your days, vying with your competitors in multiplayer
mode over loot boxes in the Hades Gamma cluster, or wherever. So we all owe a great big thank you to the designers for not going that way — and even a
reluctant thank you to EA for not twisting the designers’ balls so as to
force them to go that way. In fact, the original plans for Mass Effect 3 were even more
ambitious than what we got to see: according to various information leaks, a
veritable ton of story-related
stuff had to end up on the cutting floor, as the writers diligently strived
to cleverly resolve each of the conflicts carried over from the previous
games but then had to make inevitable concessions so as to ship the game on
time. Unfortunately, those seams show — at least as long as you are not
caught up in the heat and flurry of the game too much — but, as a rule, they
can be forgiven. The major point stays true: Mass Effect 3 was a worthy and meaningful conclusion to the
trilogy, even if you are one of those who could never forgive the designers
that ending. It also had flaws — many more of them, perhaps, than its
predecessors, for a variety of reasons — but flaws are always great food for
thought, and the true bread-and-butter for any serious reviewer. |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline The
principal conflict line of Mass Effect
3 was perfectly clear to everybody who played the first two games in the
series even before the first trailers came out. In Mass Effect, Commander Shepard’s challenge was to stop a single
Reaper from taking over the Galactic Citadel in order to invite all of his
creepy cuttlefish friends to share in the feast. Mass Effect 2 unexpectedly added a secondary opponent — the
Collectors — and unpredictably (but very efficiently) switched our attention
to «smaller» things, such as settling the domestic issues of Commander
Shepard’s long queue of teammates. But it was clear that, sooner or later, we
would have to deal with a full-fledged Reaper invasion, one way or another,
and that this confrontation would have to take place on a scale far more
grandiose and epic than whatever we got to experience earlier. What’s one
Reaper, after all, compared to hundreds or thousands of the big guys, raining
death and destruction all over our monitors? As
if obvious common sense wasn’t enough, BioWare gave fans a more-than-clear
indication of what was to come in the form of the Arrival DLC, the last semi-separate adventure released for the
completion of Mass Effect 2, in
which Commander Shepard had to destroy a «compromised» mass relay by driving
an entire planet into it so as to delay the inevitable invasion of the enemy
(and sacrifice a whole lot of allegedly innocent Batarians in the process). Arrival was never a fan favorite: its
challenges were somewhat too monotonous, its difficulty seriously revved up
because of a lack of the usual companions for Shepard, and its ambitious
plotline had too many holes and jack-in-a-boxes to be taken with respect.
Still, it was only a small piece of DLC, and any mistakes it made could and
would have easily been rectified in the next proper game, right? As
it turns out, the next proper game would actually be heavily dependent on the
events of Arrival — not the most
auspicious of signs. At the start of Mass
Effect 3, we find Commander Shepard detained at the Alliance’s
headquarters in Vancouver where an inquiry has been initiated into his
actions (the classic hero-put-on-trial-for-saving-the-world
trope). Just as judgement is going to be passed on him (most likely, with the
planned outcome of demoting the hero to the status of Roger Wilco, Janitor
Second Class), the Reapers start their invasion of Earth — which, as it
seems, they have specially timed to coincide with the start of Commander
Shepard’s trial, so as to generously save the Alliance Defense Committee some
face... before pulverizing said face out of existence, that is. Everything
that is monumental / epic / breathtaking about Mass Effect 3, and everything that is clichéd /
cringeworthy / the stuff of facepalms is already ensconced in its opening
sequences. On one hand, you have the premonitions, the intensity, the
emotional punch, and a nicely thought out touch to «personalize» the horror
of the invasion by giving it the face of a little kid who shall, from then
on, occasionally return as the voice of Commander Shepard’s own conscience.
On the other hand, you also occasionally want to kick whoever wrote that
dialogue in the face — hard. "How do we stop them?" one of the
panicking counsellors asks Commander Shepard, probably hoping for a useful
piece of advice. "Stop them?"
the Commander retorts. "This isn’t
about strategy or tactics. This is about survival!" (because survival, of course, requires no
strategy or tactics). "What do we
do?" blurts out another counsellor, on the verge of total nervous
breakdown. "The only thing we can",
replies the Commander, putting on his finest friends-Romans-countrymen face,
"WE FIGHT OR WE DIE!" I
remember perfectly well how just about everything died inside me when I first
heard that WE FIGHT OR WE DIE,
which, somehow, had a more stupid and cheesy ring to it than any of the
occasional moments of generic pomp sprinkled across the first two games.
Perhaps it was because it felt like such a crowning culmination to the entire
opening scene, so poorly written that my initial impression was that of
BioWare really throwing in the
towel and putting the entire story on mindless autopilot. The danger of Mass Effect 3, story-wise and
emotion-wise, turning into the video game equivalent of a Michael Bay movie
was all too real. Whatever depth and complexity Mass Effect 2 might have added to the brave new universe of Mass Effect was being squandered away
under my very eyes. Now that the hype had really gone to the designers’ and
writers’ heads, they were probably thinking that they could get away with the
corniest tripe... all that was left was some dark shades and hasta la vista, baby! for Commander
Shepard as he prepared to tear Harbinger into pieces with his bare hands. Yet
fortunately for us, and fortunately on an almost miraculous level — because,
as a rule, video games show their spirit and essence right away at the very
start — Mass Effect 3 gets better
as it progresses. In general, much the same holds here as it did for Mass Effect 2: the main storyline
often feels contrived, sagging and occasionally crashing under its own
weight, while the side stories, delving into the fates of specific
characters, feel much more accomplished and much less influenced by stereotypical
Hollywood blockbuster motifs. Unfortunately, since this time the Reapers are
pretty much everywhere you go, the line between «main storyline» and «side
quests» is now much more blurred than it used to be in Mass Effect 2, meaning that the proverbial «cheese» and the
provisional «genius» are sometimes so tightly intertwined that my feels about
the game become a jumbled mess of admiration and frustration. Then again,
this is exactly the kind of feels I
also get from the likes of, say, The
Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy, so I suppose that, ultimately, the way
things roll for Mass Effect 3 is
pretty much the best possible way they could
roll, given the fact of how many different groups of target audiences the
final product had to satisfy, one way or another. Speaking
of The Lord Of The Rings, there is
a more than obvious parallel introduced here: with the unstoppable Reaper
onslaught that clearly cannot be suppressed even if all the forces in the
Galaxy unite against the enemy (which makes the "we fight or we die!" slogan even more stupid than it looks
outside of context), the Alliance has to put all of its trust into the
construction of a mysterious MacGuffin known as «The Crucible», a superweapon
designed by the extinct Protheans which, of course, they never had the time
to properly implement before being wiped out. In a convenient move, plans for
this weapon have been discovered by our good old friend Liara T’Soni during
her visit to the Prothean Archives on Mars — where, apparently, humans have
been too lazy to discover or decipher them over the previous one hundred
years. (I have always wondered why the writers could not come up with the
easiest and most logical idea of having Shepard recover those plans from the ruins
of the Collector Base — given that the Collectors had already been identified
as mutated Protheans, this would have been the perfect way to properly
integrate the main storyline of Mass
Effect 2 inside the overall trilogy. But the obvious answer is that, most
probably, the idea of the MacGuffin in question was not yet apparent to
anybody by the time the writing for Mass
Effect 2 was complete). Anyway,
allegedly «The Crucible» is some sort of superweapon capable of wreaking
havoc on The Reapers — nobody really knows how, why, or according to which
particular laws of thermodynamics, but since this is Art, not Hard Science,
nobody really needs to, as long as the blueprints themselves are clearly
legible. The main block of the story, therefore, centers around Commander
Shepard providing the necessary resources for the construction of the magic
gizmo, as well as rallying the forces of the Galaxy so as to extinguish their
petty conflicts and make them all work toward the final goal. And while doing
so, the Commander also has to wage ceaseless war on two fronts — not just the
Reapers, who, just like their spiritual influencers Morgoth and Sauron, keep
wiping out the Forces of Good one by one, but also the mysterious «Cerberus»,
that powerful Earth-based organization
led by the Illusive Man that, at one time, was instrumental in bringing the
Commander back to life, but now seems hellbent on thwarting each of the
Commander’s efforts to do good for the Galaxy. Instead, Cerberus seems to
promote a different agenda that advocates cooperation and even symbiosis with
the Reapers, rather than direct conflict with the ultimate goal of
destruction — an agenda that all but turns them into the main de-facto
antagonists of the game. This aspect of the story is usually the one that
attracts most of the criticism, and I can easily understand why and concur
with much of it. Even if we dispense with any sense of realism — «Cerberus»
seems to have more resources at their command than any potential alliance
between Vladimir Putin, Saudi sheiks, and Elon Musk put together — it is hard
to get rid of the idea that the «Cerberus threat» was essentially introduced
into the game, first and foremost, so as to provide the player with plenty of
humanoid shooting targets. In the original Mass Effect and Mass
Effect 2, human enemies were plentiful, but the Galaxy did not have a
common and obvious enemy back then and you could simply dress them up as
members of various criminal gangs and mercenary groups, snooping around the
Milky Way in search of easy prey. In Mass
Effect 3, fighting simple criminals and mercenaries no longer makes much
sense — in fact, quite a few times we see Commander Shepard trying to make
friends with criminals and mercenaries, rallying them to his side to fight
against the common enemy — but having no human gooks to pew-pew at might have
made the experience boring to Call Of
Duty fans, so «Cerberus» was advanced to the ranks of Human Enemy No. 1,
and equipped with a potentially unlimited supply of heavily armed bad guys
who try to stop you from whatever it is you’re doing, regardless of how much
sense it does. Why does Cerberus
take such a heavy interest in preventing the Commander from brokering peace
between the Krogan and Turians, for instance? The writers could have at least
bothered to let the Illusive Man explain his motives to us, rather than
having the poor fans waste time on message boards around the globe, coming up
with their own theories. And what’s up with the ridiculous idea of having
Cerberus stage a «coup» against the Citadel Council, for no specific purposes
and with such apparent ease that one is only left to wonder about how much
all that impressive security and all those armed defenses were worth in the
first place? Clearly, some particularly bright BioWare employee must have
come up with an idea like «hey, wouldn’t it be fun to have Commander Shepard
fight his way through a partial map of the Citadel itself? All that
techno-space taking up, uh, space and not a single opportunity to blow shit
up!» — and some unfortunate writers had to take up the challenge of creating
a convincing story about how a rogue para-military organization from Planet
Earth is almost able to neutralize the political, economical, and military
hub of the Universe in one swift stroke.
I do not want to go into too many specific details —
a thorough analysis of the many story-writing flaws of the game’s main quest
has been produced by Shamus Young,
already referred to several times in my previous review of Mass Effect 2 — but I do want to
stress the obvious: many, if not most,
of the cheesy, clichéd, illogical, or downright lazy bits of writing
in this department are due to the inevitable compromises the designers had to
make between the «adventure-like», «RPG-like», and «shooter» aspects of the
game. More than in any previous Mass
Effect title, more, in fact, than in any previous game that was developed
by BioWare, they wanted their final product to appeal to fans of all those
genres, and depending on which specific angle you are looking from, they both
spectacularly failed and admirably
succeeded at that task. The only thing that was handled reasonably well
within the Shepard — Reapers — Cerberus relationship triangle was the
evolution of the Illusive Man, and even that I might be exaggerating just
because of the excellent character portrayal by Martin Sheen. In both Mass Effect 2 and 3, Sheen as the Illusive Man
basically takes on the character of Tolkien’s Saruman — the classic case of
the «let’s-cooperate-with-evil-rather-than-confront-evil» mentality — but,
unlike Saruman, we get to spend a lot of time with the guy (especially in the
second game, where he and Shepard are working side by side) and see his gradual
transformation as his deep belief in his superior ways of thinking,
unaccompanied by the proper moral compass, eventually leads him to his own
downfall (a situation I have, alas, so often observed in practice with many
of my own formerly respectable countrymen, now reduced to the status of evil
clowns). The nice detail in this is that the BioWare writers did not make the
mistake of turning the Illusive Man into a simple clone of Saren from the
first part — he is an «intellectual upgrade» over the first villain: Saren’s
idea was to simply submit to the Reapers, acknowledging their superiority and
invincibility, whereas the Illusive Man promotes the agenda of using the
Reapers’ own technology to learn to control them and use them for humanity’s
own gain — and, of course, in the end both things inevitably reach the same
outcome (with the Illusive Man’s end intentionally mirroring Saren’s,
especially if you are a bona fide Paragon). I still wish the writers would
give Mr. Sheen less corny lines than "this isn’t about you or me, Shepard, it’s about things so much bigger
than all of us", but oh well, I guess Ray Bradbury was too busy
dying in 2012 to stick around with the BioWare team for literary advice. In any case, while the entire line of fighting out
Cerberus for the ability to construct «The Crucible» and find the even more
mysterious «Catalyst» to complete it is nowhere near a triumph of creative
philosophical writing, it is good to see that it takes up only one (albeit
sizeable) chunk of the story. Just as important for the Commander’s success
is his ability to help put to rest two crucial intergalactic conflicts, both
of which had been introduced in the earliest stages of Mass Effect, played a serious part in Mass Effect 2, and diligently waited to be resolved in the last
part of the game: the Krogan Genophage and the Quarian Exile. Both issues are
taken quite seriously, each of the two taking up an entire «Act» of the game
and forcing the player into making arguably the most challenging moral
conclusions in the entire trilogy. The resolution of the Krogan vs. Turian-Salarian
galactic conflict is, in fact, easily one of the most outstanding pieces of
«alternate story-telling» in the entire history of video gaming, at least,
based on my experience with the medium. First of all, from a purely technical
standpoint, the sheer number of possibilities (all of them artistically valid from some point of view) is
staggering. The fate of the entire Krogan nation here depends on the course
of your actions throughout all three games, starting with your ability /
willingness to save Wrex, the bounty hunter, from getting himself killed in Mass Effect and continuing with your
decision to save or destroy a vital piece of data in Mass Effect 2; additionally, the story rolls out fairly
differently depending on whether you have managed to keep your Salarian
scientist friend, Mordin Solus, alive at the end of the second game or not
(most people, of course, always save Mordin, since he is one of the coolest
characters in the game, but because of that, few people actually know that
his «understudy», Padok Wiks, who replaces him in Mass Effect 3 in case of the former’s death, is quite an
individual and intriguing personality in his own right).
Like so much popular art, of course (and not just popular art), the story of the Krogan
genophage and its cure places way too much importance on the feelings, words,
and actions of individual characters. In real life, we learn all too well —
and sometimes, alas, a little too late — that outstanding individual actions
often have more symbolic than genuine importance, and that outstanding
individuals have to appear «in the right place» «at the right time» in order
for their outstandishness to be of any service for the course of history. But
the intelligence, if not to say downright genius,
of the writing involved in the Krogan story is that there is a subtle touch
involved where the different individual characters themselves seem more like
symbols of different scenarios according to which history may have unrolled —
with our imagination completing the missing social and political details, of
course. In case you have not actually played the game or
have forgotten the gist of the story, I remind you that the «Krogan» are
essentially a race of sturdy reptiloids, having evolved in the particularly
harsh conditions of their native planet Tuchanka to become a nation of
professional warriors, with few interests other than fighting (either with
other races or with each other, when nobody else is available), feasting, or
reproducing (which, apparently, they used to do really well before the
genophage). Once their fierce nature, with the aid of modern technology,
transforms them into a formidable collective foe, Salarians and Turians
manage to infect them with an artificial genetic modification that
drastically curbs their fertility — a bioweapon that brings the race to
order, but inflicts a terrible curse upon all subsequent generations. Now that
some of the morally conscious Salarian scientists have finally devised a cure
for the genophage, do you, as Commander Shepard, wish to assist them in this
task, gaining an ally in the Krogan but putting the post-Reaper fate of the
world at risk, or to sabotage the results, not willing to take chances with
such an unpredictable breed of creatures? The game does not shy away from presenting the
player with the option to play out the most brutal solution possible — where
Commander Shepard essentially betrays everyone and ends up looking like
precisely the kind of nasty jerk that the Reapers would like to cleanse the
universe of — but, interestingly enough, it also gives you a scenario where
sabotaging the cure for the genophage looks like a bitter, but almost
inevitable solution; this happens if Wrex, the «voice of reason» for the
Krogan, is dead, and the Krogan are instead dominated by his gung-ho brother
Wreav, who does not even try to hide his desire for wreaking terrible revenge
on the Galaxy for their crippling of the Krogan race. Parallels with our own
world are more than obvious here — Westerners will want to draw analogies
between Krogan and oppressed third-world countries, while for the Russian
mindset, for instance, Krogan will be more akin to Chechens, the proverbial «bad
boys of the Caucasus» — and, as perusing the occasional reviews or forum
discussions or YouTube comments amply demonstrates, public sympathy always
tends to land on the side of the Krogan, even if the game pulls no punches
about it, and even Wrex explicitly acknowledges that the Krogan did bring all
their troubles upon themselves through their own recklessness and stupidity, rather than simply falling victim
to the technological superiority and moral treachery of other races. Absolutely each and every time I replay the
character arc of Wrex and Mordin, or that of their replacements, I cannot
help but admire how brilliantly everything has been handled. Everybody is
given the chance to speak out their position; every involved agent is a
personality rather than just a cliché-spewing stereotype; every
outcome is valid, showing the player how complex such situations usually are,
and how incredibly difficult it is to come up with a black-and-white solution
for any of them. You even get to discern the tiny seeds of nastiness within
the usually sympathetic Wrex, and the tiny bits of reason and humanity within
the usually fascistic Wreav. Throw in such non-trivial characters like the
rarely seen Padok Wiks, whose discussion on the subject of intelligent design
might almost make you want to start
doubting Darwinian theory, and «Eve», the last fertile female Krogan who acts
like the voice of empathy and reason among her testosterone-driven male
companions, and it is not difficult to understand why Act I of Mass Effect 3, centered on Krogan
issues, is not just the best-written part of the entire game — it might be
one of the best-written choice-based plots in the entire history of video
gaming, period. (Not to mention that it also contains the first and best of
the game’s tear-jerking moments, but we shall return to that later on, in the
«Atmosphere» section.) There is even a bone thrown in for all those whose
attention span is too short to keep on reveling in all the political intrigue
and moral dilemmas — at one point, further progress in dispensing the
genophage cure becomes impossible unless an immediate Reaper threat is
removed, and doing so necessitates enlisting the «services» of a giant
Thresher Maw (you used to hunt these things down all over the galaxy in Mass Effect, or run away from them
like crazy — this time, you get to actually be happy to see one as an ally,
albeit an involuntary one). The result is an epic fight of Wagnerian
proportions which feels genuine rather than corny, and, for the first time,
gives you an important clue that Mother Nature still holds the ultimate trump
card over both human and artificial
intellect, no matter how evolved. (An idea that goes all the way back to The War Of The Worlds at least, but H.
G. Wells emphasized the significance of the little things, like viruses or
bacteria — something that would not translate well to the cinematic scope of Mass Effect, I guess). Unfortunately,
the game does not bother to exploit this idea any further, taking us into a
completely different direction when it comes to solving the Reaper puzzle —
and yes, lack of proper semantic integration of the game’s different segments
is a problem, but what can you do
when you have so many different writers working semi-independently from each
other? It almost feels like a shame when the excellent plot
of Act I comes to an end and life immediately thrusts you back into the open
arms of Cerberus for the infamous «Citadel Coup» and your first encounter
with the caricaturesque Kai Leng. The good news is that this is a relatively
short segment, and most of Act II is going to be centered around the second
major conflict inherited from the previous two games — patching up the
differences between the exiled Quarians and their creations, the synthetic
Geth, where you have the more difficult option of brokering peace between the
two and acquiring both parties as your allies, or the easier one of siding
with one party while condemning the other to extinction. Again, much of this
depends on your previous actions (as well as your current Paragon / Renegade
score), but on the whole it is not too difficult to get a «perfect» outcome —
more of a question whether you want
to have a perfect outcome or whether you have become so pissed off yourself
at the Quarians or the Geth that it becomes more morally satisfying for you
to invest in a little virtual genocide. The storyline here is also quite strong, especially
when compared to the entire Cerberus part of the game, but does not quite reach the peaks of Act I. Where
the Krogan-Turian conflict made a great parable for our treatment of
nationalism, tribalism, social-darwinism etc. etc., the Quarian vs. Geth line
is a reiteration of the age-old «Man vs. Machine» trope ("Does this unit have a soul?")
that, by itself, hardly brings anything new to the table. The character of
Legion, your unexpected Geth friend who was already able to provide a solid
perspective on the Geth conscience and way of life in Mass Effect 2, is at the forefront here, and he continues to
make such a convincing case for his «species» that, by the time the final
resolution of Act II comes about, sacrificing the Geth over the Quarians
will, for most people, be an absolute no-go — even if Shepard still has to
fight his way through hordes of them over the course of the entire act,
Legion will be guiding his hand and presenting irrefutable evidence of the
Geth being innocent victims in the conflict. (For what it’s worth, there are
also rather striking parallels with the Israeli-Palestinian clash here,
although, technically, we find the «Israeli Quarians» still in a state of
exile from their promised land, occupied by the formerly oppressed
«Palestinian Geth»).
The weakest link in this story — if you judge it
from a general artistic standard, not a «relaxed» version of it applicable to
video games — is the resolution, where Commander Shepard is capable of
appearing as the ultimate mediator between the two warring forces and
convince them to shake hands just as they are ready to nuke each other into
oblivion. If only real history could be done this way — with a wise guy
telling the warring parties that they are both idiots and making them both
realize it — the world would clearly be in a much better state than it is
today. As it happens, most of these wise guys spend their time writing for
BioWare rather than influencing actual political leaders. But then again, let
us not forget that what we are dealing with is essentially a parable —
besides, it does require a bit of hard work for the Commander to rise to that
level of diplomacy, implying that peace cannot indeed be achieved with just a
snap of somebody’s finger. It should also be appreciated to what lengths the
writers of the Geth sideline went to present a mildly original take on the
topic of AI and its eventual possibility of rising to the heights of organic
life — a subject that might seem all too relevant in the 2020s, what with the
rise of chatbots and all, even if we’re actually still light years away from
the kind of genuine artificial intelligence as portrayed by Legion and his
friends. The concept of the Geth as neither a community of synthetic
individuals nor a stereotypical «hive mind» but rather something in between,
a collective will operating based on optimal «consensus» solutions (of a
Bayesian kind, I would guess!), not only represents a fresh strand of
thinking (although, granted, I am not too familiar with the science fiction
genre to claim it is completely original), but also provides convenient
justification for you, as Commander Shepard, to step in from time to time and
take the initiative when the «consensus» cannot be reached. The «epic hero» moment of Act II, with Shepard
single-handedly taking on the Reaper (well, technically he just needs to
paint the guy as a target for the Quarian fleet, but it’s still a one-on-one
fight) goes a bit too heavy on the «all pathos, little reason» side and is
not as well thought out as the Reaper vs. Thresher Maw epic fight of Act I,
but since this time around it is not a cutscene and you won’t have a good
opportunity to ponder on the absurdity of the situation in real time, it is
not that much of a problem. The resolution of the conflict, on the other hand,
is rife with dramatic possibilities of Shakesperian proportions (adjusted for
video game market consumption, naturally), and, again, represents Mass Effect writing at its peak. You can probably tell by this point that, with all
these «massive» problems to deal with, Mass
Effect 3 has little time to deal with any side assignments. You do get to
meet all of your companions from Mass
Effect 2 — provided they had not been lost in the Suicide Mission at the
end — but this time around, you do not get to solve too many of their
personal problems, and even those that can be solved are now tied in very
directly to the main storyline, such as the continuation of the story of
Miranda’s sister or the fate of Samara’s genetically cursed daughters. This
is fair and logical — under the circumstances, the time for aggressive
psychotherapy has clearly passed; however, it also means that the characters
in Mass Effect 3 only exist as
functions of their presentation in Mass
Effect 2, except, of course, for those who are new to the game, such as
your possible team member Lt. James Vega, the melancholical (and gay) shuttle
pilot Steve Cortez, and the perfectionist (and also gay) Comm Specialist
Samantha Traynor. You do not get to babysit those new guys, though, with the
possible exception of Cortez, whom you can optionally assist in getting over
the loss of his loved one (and, if you progressively feel like it, finding a
new romantic interest in yourself). Speaking of romantic interests, one area in which
the writers of Mass Effect 3
spared themselves no expense was the ongoing story of Commander Shepard’s
love life. Some of the messy solutions stem from technical issues, of
which arguably the most complicated one was the «fallout» from Mass Effect 2. At the end of that
game, almost any of your companions protecting you on the Suicide Mission
could have ended dead, even including such series veterans as Garrus and Tali;
this meant that none of them could return back to the Normandy as regular
squad members (although for Garrus and Tali an exception was made, since,
apparently, the designers believed that players would do anything possible to
protect their two most beloved friends), and, in fact, Shepard’s interaction
wih most of his old friends from Mass
Effect 2 is limited to occasional encounters. Hence, if you happened to
romance any of them in the previous game, tough luck — no romantic trysts
aboard the Normandy. Somebody like Miranda Lawson will be available for a thirty-second
«quickie» in a remote corner on the Citadel, and the romance with Thane, the
noble assassin, which was actually one of the high romantic points of Mass Effect 2, will be reduced to a
few moments of dry-humping — yes, precisely that — in a hospital waiting room
(!). Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), I would say that the best
romantic lines of Mass Effect 3
are the new ones — with Steve Cortez as male Shepard’s possible new gay
partner, and Samantha Traynor as female Shepard’s possible lesbian love
interest. Naturally, these characters and these romances were added, first
and foremost, for the sake of «representation» — by 2012, BioWare and EA were
taking that angle into account on a far more strict basis than they did back
in 2007 — but my take on that is that I do not mind «representation» as long
as it is well written, and although both Cortez and Traynor get a very
limited amount of screen time, it is used wisely: Steve gently walks us
through his personal tragedy of losing a loved one, and Samantha is just an
adorable nerdy gal driven more by a sincere desire to do good in the world
than by any sort of millennial narcissism. (Her own narciccism apparently amounts to dreaming of a house with a
white picket fence). On the whole, though, the aspect of love in the story development of Mass Effect 3 certainly pales in
comparison to that of death. There
is a whole lot of it in the game, and this time around, it is not going to be
mostly depersonalized death (of which there was a lot in the previous two
games, but very little of it affected us on a personal level), and it is not
going to be casual and transient death like the demise of your squad members
in the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect
2, but the game is really going
to savor its stuff, leading to some of the most memorable and, might I say,
poetically rendered character farewells in video game history (Mordin,
Thane), as well as some of the most tragically brutal demises in the same if
you take the wrong turns, or happen to delight in particularly abysmal
Renegade decisions (Wrex, Tali, Samara). The drama is not particularly deep
or terribly original, but I’d be the first to admit that it is absolutely
essential to the story. (Since it’s drama,
more on that below in the «Atmosphere» section). Both the romance aspect of Mass Effect 3 — largely because of the important role that
same-sex flirting and courting plays in them — and the morbid aspect of Mass Effect 3 — everybody loves
Mordin! — have been discussed to death in the gaming community, but the
repercussions of those aspects were really nothing compared to the
repercussions of the game’s ending and then, later on, those of the
accompanying DLC add-ons, such as Citadel.
Let us, therefore, take a couple of special detours here, before making any
final conclusions on the plot / story side of the game. Detour #1: The Ending
Of Mass Effect 3 As
I mentioned several times already, I was a latecomer to the Mass Effect magical seance, meaning
that back in 2012, I was not holding my breath for the final part of the
trilogy and never had a chance to experience the game in its original form,
without the Extended Ending DLC
produced as a result of the fan outrage. That said, the majority of the fans
were hardly all that satisfied with the Extended
Ending either, since all it did, essentially, was clarify a few plot
details and add a few extra emotional perks, without changing the most
offensive and disappointing parts of the Mass
Effect finale. Even today, the general consensus among critics and fans
alike remains that the resolution of Mass
Effect 3 is a spectacular failure, unlike, say, the resolution to The Witcher 3 (since The Witcher trilogy, in many
respects, is the epic fantasy RPG counterpart to the epic sci-fi RPG of Mass Effect, I request permission to
make use of that analogy from time to time) — and the few occasional
dissenters, whenever and wherever they arise, are usually quickly overwhelmed
and silenced. Personally,
I would define myself as a «semi-dissenter», feeling confident enough to go
against the voice-of-the-people on certain counts but admitting the fairness
of its criticism in others. Let us start from the simple idea, though, that
the main problem of how Mass Effect
ended had to do with the fact that nobody had any idea of how Mass Effect should have ended while thinking about how it should begin. When Drew Karpyshyn came up
with the linchpin of the game’s plot — the Reapers’ periodical purging of the
Galaxy — the main intrigue was, of course, in that nobody had the slightest
idea of who the Reapers were, where the Reapers came from, and why the
Reapers were doing what they were doing. They were just this terrifying,
transcendent, Cthulhu-like collective, totally beyond the grasp of pitifully
primitive organic intellect: "There
is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I
am beyond your comprehension", as Sovereign boasts to Shepard in the
first game. Clearly, in order to defeat the Reapers, one would have first
needed to understand the Reapers, and if Sovereign were to be believed at
all, understanding the Reapers was almost physically impossible. Mass Effect 2 did relatively little to shatter that
mystique, although, some might grumble, it had cheapened it a little with the
introduction of «Harbinger», the supreme Reaper, and his corny habit of
possessing the enslaved Collectors (ASSUMING
DIRECT CONTROL!) that was not particularly terrifying once you got over
the initial surprise. However, with the inevitable approaching of the final
denouement, it became inevitable that something
had to be done. The mystery had to be clarified in some way, or else you
would just have to allow all the good folks of the Galaxy to accept their
destiny and become Reaper fodder — and maybe H. P. Lovecraft could have been
fond of such a solution, but the millions of Mass Effect fans around the globe, impatiently waiting to be
allowed to tear the Reapers a new one, would not be very likely to appreciate
such artistic bravery. In fact, they’d be more likely to lynch Casey Hudson
and throw his lifeless body out of the top floor of EA headquarters, in
proper Renegade fashion. In
assorted interviews, Karpyshyn and other BioWare veterans relayed some of the
painful experience of trying to come up with the proper «Reaper Revelation»,
and we now know that several variants had been considered, including a dark
energy-related one that would directly tie into one of the unresolved loose
ends of Mass Effect 2 (the «dying
sun issue» of the planet Haestrom where the team had to rescue Tali from the
Geth). But for one reason or another (including really annoying ones such as
«content leaks» from the studio), all of the early ideas were ultimately
discarded. It is not entirely clear just exactly how much time did Casey
Hudson have to hone his final conception — but we do know that it was hatched
quite late into the development cycle of Mass
Effect 3, and that there was very little discussion about it, probably
more because of a general feel of «let’s finally get it over with!» rather
than any dictatorial behavior on Casey’s part.
Likewise,
the fundamental idea behind how that cycle could be broken also works — at
least, in theory. At the end, you are granted the power to accept one of
three possible solutions: «Destroy», leading to the total annihilation of
your enemy (as well as any other forms of synthetic life in the process) but
with the imminent risk of having the cycle later repeat itself in exactly the
same way as it did before; «Control», where Shepard transforms into some sort
of transcendental, omni-powerful entity to divert the actions of the Reapers
into a more constructive scenario; and «Synthesis», where the Commander
sacrifices himself or herself in order to help blend all life in the Universe
so that everybody is organic and synthetic at once and the principal cause
for conflict is removed by definition. All three solutions make sense, and
the fact that the game subtly nudges you in favor of the «green» Synthesis
solution also makes sense — it is the central button of the three, it is the
most difficult one to be able to unlock, and it is the only one that
seemingly helps living creatures to achieve the state of stable balance (even
at the cost of all of us flashing sickly green implants all over our bodies,
yucky-yuck). Admittedly,
there were two big problems with this scenario — although, might I add, both
of them were probably realized by players post-factum, already after having been buried by the
emotional waves of the ending, because realizing and voicing them would
require some cold-headed post-game analysis. One is the issue of the
so-called space magic: pretty much
everything that happens to Shepard upon meeting «The Catalyst» has no basis
whatsoever in «hard sci-fi science» and seems to have been rather randomly
pulled out of someone’s derrière.
How is it, for instance, that an instant synthesis between organic and
synthetic beings, triggered all over the galaxy, becomes possible, and how
exactly does it take Commander Shepard’s dissolution in a flash of white
light and a puddle of green goo to achieve that? Not that it isn’t a
viscerally powerful scene and all, but this is essentially a page torn out of
the New Testament (Shepard, the Chosen Messiah, sacrifices himself for the
salvation of the world), and you’d rather expect a turn like this from Final Fantasy than Mass Effect. Similar questions are to
be asked about the Control solution; only «Destroy», which does not do all
that much except, well, Destroy, feels realistic enough, if definitely not
too satisfactory. The
other problem is the already mentioned «cheaping» of the Reaper phenomenon:
once introduced as that unfathomable, incomprehensible, terrifying force that
transcends past, present, and future, at the end of the game they are reduced
to the role of blind, routine servants of «The Catalyst» — which, in turn,
was itself not transcendental at all, but a creation of the organic super-race
of the «Leviathans» (whose story is only revealed properly in the Leviathan DLC, not available in the
original release of the game and, consequently, causing even more confusion
among veteran fans). As many have pointed out, this essential transformation
of the Reapers into simple pawns of some bigger game pretty much annulled the
impact of Sovereign’s introduction in the first game. It’s as if yesterday
Cthulhu was Cthulhu, and today he’s bringing an order of pepperoni pizza to
your front door, extra sauce not included. Both
of these problems are problems,
there are no two ways about it. But at least the second one was probably
inevitable. How are you expected to introduce an invincible enemy in the
first part of a trilogy, when all the players already know for sure that the
enemy will be defeated at the end
of the third part? In a way, the blame lies on Drew Karpyshyn — for getting
himself into a fix with no easy way out right from the start, taking a big
bluff that would be impossible to pull off without reputation loss. If your
enemy is the real Cthulhu, there is
simply no way to win, period. The only way to win is to show that your enemy
is actually a bit of a phoney Cthulhu, which is what the Mass Effect 3 writers tried to do — clumsily and with unpleasant
elements of retconning, but in a way that made some sense, at least. The
«space magic» angle is worse, but I think that the main problem here was a
lack of time and resources. With more time to think things over and a bigger
budget, the Destroy / Control / Synthesis thing might have been handled
better, without offending so much all the bright nerdy intellectuals who’d
already defended their Reddit PhDs on the chemical constituency of Element
Zero and the electromagnetic interpretations of the mass effect phenomenon.
As it is, I do not find it difficult to let my own imagination fill in the
missing links, if I feel like wasting my time on any of that. But I don’t,
really; instead, I prefer to take the ending as a rather powerful metaphor —
one that might, perhaps, one day become really
powerful if any of our descendants actually live to see a true conflict
between natural and artificial intelligence become the main existential
problem of this world of ours, rather than much more ugly and less romantic
conflicts between a bunch of very, very
much organic assholes addicted to their disastrous power trips. (In this way,
although many of its smaller themes resonate very deeply with what is going
on today, I find, curiously, that the moral lessons of Mass Effect are somewhat less relevant for the current situation
than those of the far more campy and shallow Resident Evil franchise). In
the end, though, it was neither the reinvention of the Reapers nor the
proliferation of «space magic» that caused the outrage of Mass Effect fans throughout the
galaxy. While playing and replaying the game, I ended up reading quite a few
reviews, critical analyses, and fan meditations / discussions splattered all
across the Web, and what struck me as the most common denominator between all
of those was one major complaint which, in condensed form, reads simply: MY CHOICES DID NOT MATTER!! Meaning
that, first and foremost, the players felt themselves not so much confused, surprised, or irritated
over the ending as they felt betrayed
— and that, for sure, is easily the worst emotion one can ever experience
over anything, even something as ultimately insignificant as a video game. The
odd thing, for me, is that this was totally not the feeling I got. There were
quite a few moments scattered across the ending that I found cringeworthy —
but their density did not seem all that higher compared to the rest of the
game. Some ideas were poorly thought out, some things that were supposed to
make sense did not make sense until you started exerting your own imagination
to fill in the gaps, etc. etc., but that clear feeling of disillusionment,
disappointment, breach of confidence, betrayal, etc., that so many players
obviously experienced was not there. As much as I even tried to, I just couldn’t
see the ending of Mass Effect 3 as
that one bleak moment when the writers and designers of the game
intentionally spat their vile black spit inside my soul and trampled on it
with their insensitive, offensive six-inch heels. And it was particularly weird in that, up until
then, my emotional response to the game was very much similar to the majority
of the players — the game moved me in the same mysterious ways. So maybe,
unlike the majority of players, I preferred realistically romancing my human
companions rather than Tali or Garrus, and maybe I had no qualms about
bumping off occasional good guys in true Renegade spirit, but in general, I
laughed where they laughed and cried where they cried. How did we split? It
is absolutely true, as the fans were complaining, that the three different
endings weren’t really that
different: most of the ending cutscenes unfurled almost the same chain of
events, only run through three different color filters (red for Destroy, blue
for Control, green for Synthesis — even here, somewhat confusing since
throughout the game, Red stood for Renegade and Blue for Paragon actions,
whereas Destroy and Control solutions could both be easily selected by a
full-on Paragon or a full-on Renegade Shepard). But then, thinking about it,
there was even less diversity in the endings for both Mass Effect and Mass
Effect 2 — at best, a few final options that could slightly (only
slightly!) influence the events of the following games, such as saving or
abandoning the Citadel Council at the end of Mass Effect, or saving or destroying the Collector Base at the
end of Mass Effect 2 — and those
choices did not depend on the player’s actions throughout the game, either.
Yet there was never any outrage about either of those endings, even if they,
too, railroaded the player into a rather predictable, pre-set conclusion,
taking away the illusion of choice with nary a squeak from anybody. In
the end, while different people could certainly have their own different
reasons for actively disliking the ending, the sheer massiveness of the outrage could be explained by one thing only:
the ending of Mass Effect 3 gave
the majority of the fans a totally unpredictable
outcome — one that they were simply not ready for. As formidable an enemy as
the Reapers had been presented, most of the players booted up Mass Effect 3 with a clear,
well-determined goal: shoot up the baddies, power up the wonder-weapon, blow
’em all to hell, and ride off into the sunset, better still, back home to the
lovely Liara and half a dozen blue-skinned babies. You have other things in
mind? Fine, whatever, masturbate to your space voodoo or whatever you wish,
but we’ve worked way too hard for
our happy ending to be so arrogantly deprived of it at the last moment. That
this reasoning is at least close to the truth is easily corroborated by quite
a few objective statistical facts — such as, for instance, the fact that even
today, with the Legendary Edition
out, almost half of the players pick the «Destroy»
ending over «Control» and «Synthesis», for the simple reasons that (a) REAPERS MUST DIE! and (b) Shepard must live, even if it is only
subtly hinted at that he may be alive at the ending’s end. In reality,
«Destroy» is the most simplistic and the most unsatisfactory of all possible
outcomes — it basically means that the Commander limits himself to a
temporary solution rather than grasp the unique chance to put «An End, Once
And For All» to the billion-year old conflict — but hey, we did not romance
Liara / Tali / Garrus all this time just so they could build a memorial
shrine to our green / blue goo, right? Another, even more obvious hint at the
true nature of the situation is the existence and actual popularity of the
so-called «Happy Ending Mod» for PC players, whose name is pretty much
self-explanatory (the description for the latest version on Nexusmods.com is
as follows: «The primary focus of the
mod is to allow Commander Shepard to survive the final mission, as well as
provide satisfying closure to this incredible trilogy through tweaked
cutscenes, edited videos, new ending slides, and an overhauled memorial scene»
— yeah, right). I’m proud to say — yes, actually proud to say — that I never ever felt even the slightest
temptation to download and try it out (although I have tried out quite a few
other mods for the trilogy that actually enhanced it in a wide variety of
tiny ways). It’s
not that I fundamentally object against
the possibility of a proper «happy ending» for Mass Effect. This is, after all, a choice-based RPG, in which
multiple scenarios and outcomes are possible — are, in fact, obligatory — by
definition, and to add a save-everyone-and-go-home ending as an alternative
would be no biggie: I could cringe at it, others could be satisfied with it,
and we’d all have our cake and eat it. Such is the way that was, for
instance, chosen by the designers of The
Witcher 3, which had a «proper» bittersweet ending (Ciri and Geralt part
ways) and an alternate «happy» ending (Ciri and Geralt become partners). But
even with The Witcher 3, many
astute players have noticed that the «happy» ending feels somewhat more
forced and less logical than the «unhappy» ending — not to mention less
emotional — and this is because one thing that Mass Effect and The
Witcher have in common is their desire to rise above the average RPG
standard and amount to what might provisionally be called «video game High
Art»; and as we all know, «High Art» and «happy endings» rarely go hand in
hand in the first place. I’m sure some of us would love for Romeo and Juliet
to live happily ever after, or for Hamlet to marry Ophelia, but this is not
how things usually work on that artistic level — or, for that matter, in real
life. Another
hole in the «my choices did not matter!»
argument is that it fundamentally distorts the very idea of how choice works
in choice-based role-playing or adventure games. From a certain point of
view, the player’s choices always
matter — at the moment in which the player is making them — and they also never matter, because whatever you
choose, you are still selecting one of the paths pre-made, pre-programmed,
pre-tested for you by the game’s authors (in this way, adventure games and
RPGs seriously differ from strategy games like Civilization, where there is an infinity of possible outcomes,
even if they all fall into the same class). Let us not forget that
approximately 90% of the choices made by Mass
Effect players throughout the game do not go anywhere — they are simply there to help you get into character,
to feel more like a cynical badass or more like a knight-in-shining-armor
depending on your own spiritual constants and variables. Of the remaining 10%
that actually go somewhere (in that
your saved games store them and check on them later at least once), an
absolute majority tweaks the game in very minor ways. Finally, the importance
of the major choices is that they make you feel good (or bad) in the here and now, and if you refuse to
accept that, you’re already setting yourself up for almost certain
disappointment, which concerns not only Mass
Effect but the majority of choice-based games out there. A
good example here is the resolution of the Quarian vs. Geth conflict on
Rannoch. If you side with the synthetic Geth, or if you play the game well
enough to save both sides, the Geth become your allies in the global war with
the Reapers. However, later on, if you choose the «Destroy» ending in which
Shepard wipes out all artificial life in the galaxy, the Geth automatically
perish along with the Reapers. So what was the point of saving them in the
first place? The game just ignored your choice and negated your success in
proving that organic and synthetic life can peacefully co-exist in the
universe. When The Catalyst states to Shepard that destructive conflict
between organics and synthetics is "inevitable", in a know-it-all
tone that seems to allow no objection, surely the Commander should have been able to retort that
he just put an end to such a conflict, and demand that, uh, the «Destroy»
mechanism be modified so that only the asshole
synthetics should be vaporized, and the cute little Geth friends be left
alive and blinking?.. In
this situation, I totally agree that the omission of this option is a serious
flaw — one of the many such flaws — in the rushed writing of the ending. (And
by rushed, I certainly mean crappy
dialog like: [Shepard] "Who
designed the Crucible?" – [Catalyst / Star-Child] "You would not know them, and there is not
enough time to explain" — yes, because the game has to be shipped in
two weeks’ time). But I certainly would not agree that this is some sort of
blatant stumbling block that renders everything stupid and meaningless.
Everything could, in fact, be made much easier by the insertion of just a few
additional lines of dialog, e.g. [Shepard] "Inevitable? Haven’t we just proved to you that peace and
understanding between synthetics and organics is a reality, down there on
Rannoch?" — [Catalyst / Star-Child] "Irrelevant. Do not delude yourself with minor successes on the spur
of the moment. Your kind thinks, at best, in hundreds, maybe thousands of
years; my intelligence spawns billions. Temporary alliances between synthetic
and organic life have been many, yet in the end they still came back to the
same thing — assertion of mutual superiority through struggle for power,
death and destruction. Your limited mind is only capable of temporary
solutions; my intelligence and experience can offer you a rare chance of
achieving a permanent one." Hmm, this feels more convincing than Mac
Walters. This
is just one possible example of how the writing could have been better. The
concept could have been better elaborated, the plot holes could have been
more impressively covered up, and certainly the idea of the «war assets»
gathered by Shepard over the course of the game could have been better
exploited (as it happens, the difference between the Commander going inside
The Crucible virtually unprepared and him doing it while backed by the
strongest fleet possible is minimal, plot-wise). But that sort of criticism
is really applicable to almost any
video game ending; 100% satisfaction is really hard to come by when you’re
pining for your just rewards upon beating all the challenges. The major criticisms of the ending, though
— namely, that it (a) does not make any kind of sense whatsoever and (b) that
it betrays the players by intentionally ignoring all their choices — do not
hold water. All they do, really, is simply emphasize the greatness of the trilogy,
which made even the «average» player fall in love with it so much that their
unreasonable expectations for the ending caused them to crash and burn in one
of the most notorious crash-and-burn situations in the history of the medium. And
for all the flaws of the ending, it is hard not to admit the relative bravery of Hudson, Walters, and others
for their flat-out refusal to give the players a simplistic, watered-down,
feel-good finale. Even more than that, I actually welcome the fact that the players, right at that crucial moment,
find themselves relatively stripped of agency as Commander Shepard realizes
that he or she is not able to exercise absolute free will, but must obey a
pre-determined path (well, one out of three, to be precise). Were I to set a
proper «canon» ending for the game, I would probably have the Commander toy
with the «Destroy» solution for a brief while before wisely realizing that
destruction is not the proper path, and that even if the Reapers may be seen
as «evil» by our moral standards, that does not really make them any more
«evil» than any other destructive race of organic or synthetic entities.
Shepard then realizes that, despite all of his efforts and achievements, he
is still little more than a pawn in the overreaching hand of destiny — well,
maybe a Knight — intended to fulfill an important, but subservient function
in the tissue of the Universe... and, by initiating the Synthesis path,
humbly accepts that destiny. Of
course, the finale really makes a Christ-like figure out of Shepard (= out of
yourself), as he ascends The Crucible, beaten, battered, and bruised, to make
the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the Universe — the parallels are
almost trivial — and it is this Christ-like analogy that the writers were
pining for first and foremost, building the resolution of the Reaper conflict
around this Ultimate Sacrifice rather than the other way around. Most of the
players likely expected a finale close to the Grand Battle Victory
conclusions of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, rather than a sci-fi
take on the New Testament — and if I were to let my cynical bitterness
override my compassion, I’d probably suggest that the same players would much
rather prefer SNL’s Djesus
Uncrossed to the original ending of the Good Book. But hell no, I shouldn’t be letting my cynical
bitterness override my compassion. Or should I? My
prediction is that, if some video games are bound to go down in history after
all and the Mass Effect trilogy is
one of them, then history will eventually look far more kindly on the ending
of Mass Effect 3 than its veteran
fanbase. One major reason for this is that the game’s focus on the conflict
between natural and artificial intelligence might eventually turn out to be
more prophetic than it looks today, when the «AI bubble» triggered by
LLM-based chatbots, upon close analysis, turns out to be no closer to true artificial intelligence than an
abacus (the word «intelligence» instead means understanding, which no modern day computer system is capable
of). Sometime in the future the situation may change — though it would
require a complete reversal of today’s science economics, at the very least —
and then, perhaps, the future envisaged by the creators of Mass Effect will be far easier to
relate to, and the ending of Mass
Effect 3 far more terrifying to behold. The
other reason, far more probable in a short-term perspective, is that, as the
game gets older and its fanbase inevitably shrinks to those who play it for
its uniqueness rather than its technological innovation, a larger percentage
of the players might be forgiving the flaws and welcoming the feels. At
present, the ending probably comes across as particularly irritating to the
two opposites of the spectrum — the «video game jocks», who are basically
there to shoot up baddies and gather trophies and have no patience or
tolerance toward any Star Child bullshit, and the «video game nerds», a.k.a.
the real-life equivalents of Sheldon Cooper who get off on analyzing every
piece of sci-fi through the prism of their physics textbooks. In between are
all those who love Mass Effect for
its storyline more than they do for its weapon arsenal, but who are also more
willing to take Mass Effect as an
artistic metaphor than a realistic alternate universe — and, consequently, to
revel in its bittersweet ending without demanding a reasonable explanation to
the «space magic» of The Crucible. On
the whole, I must say that it’s probably a good thing that Shakespeare lived
in pre-Internet days. The outrage over the «no-good-ending» controversy of Mass Effect 3 ties in very well with
such things as statistics on The
Witcher 3, where most of the polls I have seen vastly favor the ending in
which Ciri becomes a Witcher with Geralt over the one in which she gets to
make the responsible, if
emotionally heartbreaking, decision of becoming Empress; or with a similar,
though on a much smaller scale, outrage over the finale of Life Is Strange, where the game
clearly hinted that the morally right and spiritually satisfactory way of
ending things was to let go of the hand of your best friend whose life you’d
been fighting for all through the game’s five episodes. What can I say?
People love their happy endings — not a lot has really changed since the days
of classic Hollywood — and artists will always have to defend their tragic
finales against popular demand. If you ask me, though, I’d say that «we need more tragic endings in video games
these days» is a slogan that makes much more sense than, say, «we need more strong female characters in
video games» or whatever else of the kind they keep pushing forward in
responsible gaming magazines these days. Because, honestly, we have a shitload of strong female characters.
But bittersweet endings that make you feel, think, and improve your own
character? Nowhere near true sufficiency. Detour #2: The DLCs Of
Mass Effect 3 Although
a discussion of the Mass Effect 3
ending and a subsequent discussion of its additional downloadable content
might look like two completely different issues, they are, in fact, not —
because most of those DLCs were either directly related to the ending, or
indirectly aimed at offering the offended fans a chance for an ultimate
reconciliation with BioWare. But first, a little backstory to remind
ourselves of the grounds for comparison. The
first Mass Effect game was
released back in 2007, when the concept of «downloadable content» was still
relatively fresh. «Expansion packs» for successful games, which you could
purchase physically in stores, had been around for quite some time, and
BioWare made good use of the format as early as with Baldur’s Gate, but DLCs — smaller packages of additional content
that could hardly even warrant a physical wrapping of their own — were only
beginning to get real traction, and thus Mass
Effect only had two of them: Bring
Down The Sky, a solid little stand-alone novella about a Batarian
terrorist threat, and Pinnacle Station,
a shooting training mission that was mostly of interest to those interested
in the combat angle of Mass Effect
and did not enjoy a warm response (in fact, it was not even included in the Legendary Edition remaster as the
developers claimed that they «lost» the original code; of course, this did
not stop the modders from actually «finding» it, once again proving that
everything coming out of corporate mouths is bullshit by definition. Not that
it should change anybody’s mind about the quality of Pinnacle Station, of course). By
2010, the situation had changed drastically: online game sales had surpassed
physical purchases, and small add-ons to commercially successful titles were
becoming a major source of profit, so Mass
Effect 2 already got the green light for a whole bunch of DLCs, some of
which were almost as highly acclaimed on their own as the base game itself (Lair Of The Shadow Broker) and some,
while not as popular with critics or fans, featured important components of
the story, such as The Arrival,
playing which was necessary to make the opening of Mass Effect 3 (with Shepard imprisoned) make any sense. Unlike
the DLCs of Mass Effect, these
ones were taken good care of so that they could be properly integrated into
the main game: for instance, new characters such as Kasumi Goto, the master
thief, or Zaeed Masani, the rugged mercenary, could not only become Shepard’s
potential squadmates on older missions, but even have additional dialog lines
written for them so as to offer you even more replay value.
Today,
now that all the DLCs have been dissolved within the Legendary Edition upgrade, the confusion over Javik is largely a
thing of the past, but back in 2012, it actually mattered; neither Mass Effect nor Mass Effect 2 ever gave the fans serious grounds to claim that
the studio loved money more than its characters, while Mass Effect 3 seemingly established such a precedent from the
get-go. Fortunately, in this case one could not at least complain about not
getting one’s money’s worth: while the basic plot twist of the discovery of
Javik’s pod was, like so many other things about the plot of Mass Effect 3, heavily contorted and illogical,
the character himself was awesome —
basically a walking, talking, metaphoric kick-in-the-gut for all the history
revisionists out there who like to imagine human past as a fragrant bed of
roses that wilted and decayed with the arisal of Western imperialism. Javik
throws a healthy Prothean wrench into any such idealism, shedding some light
on the «actual history» of his nation — who, as it turns out, were not so
much a race of benevolent, humanistic entities dedicated to spreading
Enlightenment throughout the galaxy but a militaristic, self-consciously
social-Darwinist organization of strict believers in the
survival-of-the-fittest theory. Throughout the game, Javik shows himself as a
courageous character, ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good and all,
but his ruthlessness and cynicism basically make him into the ultimate
sidekick for a full-on Renegade Shepard. If you are a fully idealistic,
goody-two-shoes kind of type, you might consider saving yourself some time
and avoiding that trip back to Eden Prime altogether, just to save yourself
some nerve cells... ...but,
of course, all the true Mass Effect
fans will readily embrace Javik’s colorfulness, as he is easily the most
frequently quotable character in the entire game; and how could he not be, if
his memorable lines range from "throw
him out the airlock!" (a running gag throughout the series) to the
almost Remarquian (not really, though) "stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if
honor matters". Much like Kurosawa’s Kikuchio, Javik is there for
both the laughs and the pain, and is always equally convincing, thanks to the
excellent talents of senior writer John Dombrow (who, as it happens, also
wrote most of the Krogan-related plotline for the first act of the game — all
the more impressive considering that he only joined the BioWare staff around
2010). So I guess, in retrospect, we can forgive EA their blatantly crass
move; as of 2024, it certainly feels far
more forgiveable than having to run Legendary
Edition through their crappy app each time I have a craving for Mass Effect coming on! The
second major piece of plot-related DLC, released about three months later,
constituted a rare case of unscheduled change of plans — it was the Extended Cut, already mentioned
earlier, that represented a compromise between BioWare and the angry fan
crowds and, honestly, was probably the best kind of compromise that could be
achieved at the time: refusing to change the ending as such, the team added
more closure, more explanatory dialog, more romantic moments between Shepard
and his potential love interests, and gallantly made it all available free of
charge. It did not really satisfy anybody who had problems with the ending in
the first place, but it was a solid step in the right direction, and a good
example for everybody on how to be able to listen to constructive criticism
without sacrificing one’s individual artistry. At the very least, I do not
think that anybody ever said that the Extended
Cut made the ending even worse
than it was before. (Also, it did introduce a very specific feature that
finally made amassing a large bunch of «War Assets» worthwhile — if you don’t
have enough of them, your love interest dies; if you do, he/she survives —
and now you finally have enough
incentive to keep on scanning all those planets like crazy!) Far
more debatable would be the addition of the Leviathan DLC. With this additional journey that is at the same
time a seriously different experience from the main game and a crucially relevant piece of the overall plot, Mass Effect writers truly pushed the
game into Lovecraftian territory. Suddenly, you are aware of a terror more
deep and mysterious than the Reapers themselves — it is really at this point
in the plot when all the past encounters with Sovereign and Harbinger start
to feel like seances of hyperbolic bragging, as the writers and designers go
all the way to make the Reapers look small against the perspective of their
actual creators. For this reason, the decision to release Leviathan as a DLC add-on has often
been criticized, and indeed, it does
look a lot like the team simply did not have enough time on their hands to
program in that entire development by shipping time. Had the Leviathan
revelation been included from the very start, it is possible that at least
the proverbial «nerds»’ reaction to the ending might have been a little
mollified, as we get to learn a huge lot about the Reapers’ backstory with a
super-ambitious plot twist that may be opening more questions than answering,
but at least these are questions that logically belong in the story and which
you may answer through your own imagination. Actually,
the only serious problem I have with Leviathan
is that its ambitiousness, morbid seriousness, and overall darkness almost
makes the ending with The Catalyst trivial by comparison. The visually and
atmospherically impressive underwater meeting between Shepard and the
Reapers’ creators should rightfully have belonged somewhere in between his
talk with the Star Child and his final sacrifice, as difficult as it might
have been to insert it in there plot-wise (technically, that is the way in which the original
players experienced these encounters, but these days, of course, with the
DLCs all integrated right inside the game, many people might want to run
through the Leviathan segment in
the middle of the game, which is not
a good option — if you are still new to Mass
Effect 3, take my advice and put it off until the very last moment
possible). In all other respects, it is a respectable achievement that adds
at least one extra emotional vibe to the universe of Mass Effect without compromising any of the previous ones.
Nowhere
near as many people remember Omega,
though, I guess, as they do the last, most unusual, and, in some ways, most
controversial DLC for the base game — Citadel,
released in March 2013 as a last symbolic farewell to Commander Shepard and
all of his friends. Reputation-wise, Citadel
quickly went on to be acclaimed as one of the best, if not the best, Mass Effect-related DLC of all time — I think that only Lair Of The Shadow Broker can compete
with it on this front — even if, both plot- and atmosphere-wise, it took a
turn into a completely different direction, one that not even the most
penetrating fans of the saga probably could have predicted from the series’
writers, and one that has fairly few, if any, direct analogies in the history
of video game franchises. One
of the main complaints about the ending of the game, as you remember, was the
lack of the proverbial «closure»: the players were never offered a chance to
learn about the fates of Shepard’s beloved companions after the Blue, Red,
and Green Debacle, or even to simply spend a bit more time with them in the
same manner that made it possible past the Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2 (the only game out of
three that was essentially open-ended, as you could still roam the galaxy and
complete uncompleted assignments after the main quest was over). Although Citadel still takes place before the final confrontation rather
than after it, the DLC was clearly
designed to remedy that specific issue — apart from the rather bizarre main
piece of «plot», it is all about
Shepard’s interaction with his current and former squadmates, and it does
play out like one long, detailed, in-depth goodbye to all those lovable
buddies who had always constituted Mass
Effect’s primary selling points. Pretty
much everybody who ever wrote about Citadel
was sure to drop the phrase «fan service»; but BioWare would not be BioWare
if it lowered itself to the practice of offering pure, predictable fan service. Instead of simply having the
characters do what they were supposed to do — Garrus being dashing and suave,
Tali being bashful and nerdy, Jack being rude and punchy, Miranda doing her
ice-queen-melting thing, etc. — the writers of Citadel decided to put an openly humorous touch on just about
everything, often veering into the direction of self-parodic spoof. The main
«storyline» of the DLC was the most openly ridiculous twist ever introduced
into the game (the Commander facing his own Doppelgänger — ironically,
that line of development brings to mind the conflict with Sarevok in Baldur’s Gate), and after it was
resolved, the Commander had open access to a large entertainment sector of
the Citadel that he probably never even suspected of previously existing. And
pretty much everything there is
played for fun — lambasting stereotypes about Shepard himself, his friends,
his surrounding NPCs, galactic politics, economy, and culture, and even the
perks and oddities of the game’s multiplayer community (!). I
am not going to say that Citadel
feels perfectly natural within the confines of Mass Effect 3. Curiously, it must have felt much better at the time of its original release, when the
absolute majority of players downloaded it after completing the game, then
played it separately by restoring one of their mid-game saves, as a sort of
small, separate, stand-alone Mass
Effect game (not that it is objectively small — in terms of available
story and arcade content, it is clearly the hugest piece of DLC in the entire
franchise, taking hours and hours to properly complete, especially
considering that it features some of the
toughest combat assignments in the history of Mass Effect). For everybody who was late to the party, like
myself, Citadel became a regular
part of the game, unlockable right after the end of Act I and the Cerberus
coup — and it felt way bizarre to
be able to veer between the classical tragedy of the main story and the
comedic punchlines of Citadel at
will. One second Commander Shepard is witnessing death, destruction, and
despair on an unimaginable scale; the next second, Commander Shepard is off
for drinks with one of his girlfriends at some posh casino or to test his
skills in an arcade game of skill — or, finally, to throw a classic college
dorm party for all of his friends, which may or may not even intend in
accidental sexual intercourse with a real-life Prothean, depending on the
amount of drinks consumed and the general status of your love life. This
contrast did weigh heavy on my own shoulders for a long time and even made me
question whether the humor of Citadel
(and some of it — not counting all the running gags, perhaps — is very high quality humor indeed) did
not blow up the serious themes of the main game in an almost irrepairable
way. I mean, it is definitely
difficult to take the Reaper threat seriously after something like this party
dialog: Javik (to Jack): You there. Tattooed human. I would like to
touch you. Jack: I’m not nearly drunk enough for that. Javik (to Steve Cortez): You then, shuttle pilot? How about you? Cortez: Um... Why’s Javik getting all touchy-feely? Jack: Hey, Collector-looking asshole, maybe go touch yourself? Javik: That does not happen until the end of the party. This
is Citadel for you, in a nutshell,
making all your favorite characters let their hair down like they never did
before and even uncovering all sorts of previously hidden or repressed
attributes in characters you might originally have found too flat or boring.
But it’s more than that — one minute, they were all a bunch of straight-faced
space cowboys on a mission to save the world, and then the next one they all
magically mutate into one of the casts of Saturday
Night Live (and a much funnier
one than any of those from at least the past decade, I’d add). Cool or cringey? Somehow,
this sharp contrast between the hilarious and the horrendous feels much more relevant to me these days,
in 2024, when you find yourself obligated to somehow balance between living
in the nightmare of nearby war (waged by your own country against your
neighbor with all the expected brutality of an aggressive invasion) and
incessant political repression (some of it already affecting your own friends
and colleagues), and having to cope with your daily duties. Lightweight
humor, under these conditions, is a crucial part of the recipe on how not to
lose your sanity — apparently, once you find out that you have permanently lost your capacity for
having fun and enjoying yourself, you’re pretty much done for. I mean, if
Anne Frank and her family were still capable of having parties and
lightweight recreation in their hideout, why shouldn’t Commander Shepard and
his friends be unable to host a party right before going off to storm
Cerberus headquarters? In that way, as you gradually adjust to the contrast, Citadel actually ceases to be simply a
parodic spoof and takes on a therapeutic function. One
might find it strange — a defect of the writing or a case of poor judgement
on the rationality level of human beings? — that life in Citadel goes on almost as if the impending Reaper threat did not
exist: people go out to restaurants, gamble away in casinos, vividly discuss
issues of shopping and grooming, even despite the fact that just a few miles
away, the cargo holds of the Citadel are bursting with loads of homeless
refugees, many of whom have just witnessed unimaginable horrors. Which, come
to think of it, is precisely the
picture I saw for myself in Prague and Vienna last summer, so who’s to blame
BioWare for telling it to our face exactly the way that it is? People will
still be enjoying themselves on the threshold of any potential apocalypse,
and there’s nothing you can do about that except taking it easy. Besides,
it gives BioWare writers a good chance to unleash all the remaining social
sarcasm they had to bottle up previously — now that Citadel has pretty much removed all the constraints of the action
taking place in a multi-racial galaxy in the distant future, they can throw
in as much jarringly relevant critique as possible. For instance, my favorite
mini-character in the Casino segment of the DLC is a young lady who goes by
the name of Aishwarya Ashland, whose presence is unforgettable if you have
had any experience of communicating with similar people in real life: Croupier: Round and round and round she goes... Aishwarya Ashland: What’s that supposed to mean? Is that, like, code for how wasted I
am? Croupier: Uh, no, ma’am... we just call the wheel «she». Aishwarya Ashland: That’s sexism! Wait, I mean objectivism. That’s sexism for inanimate
things. Shepard: ...Miss, where exactly WERE you educated? Aishwarya Ashland: Oh, online. You can take these courses, and it teaches you
responsibility, because YOU do the grading. (This
last line should hit particularly
close to home to anybody well familiar with the current state of the
education sector in just about any part of the world where the percentage of
Aishwarya Ashlands goes above the two-digit level... well, like I said, in
just about any part of the world, period.) Considering
that Citadel is pretty much all
about jokes — with just a couple notable exceptions — it never ceases to
amaze me just how many of them actually work, and how diverse the subject
matters are. Some are inside jokes that will only be funny to those who are
well familiar with the Trilogy (such as the ones sending up Shepard’s
trademark goodbye of "I have to go", or Shepard’s casual exchanges
with Wrex in the first game — "Wrex", "Shepard"). Some
slip in casual references to popular culture that will only be decipherable
by those in the know (e.g. Grunt the Krogan, working as a bouncer for the
final party and turning away unwanted guests with one-liners like "sorry, you’ve just lost the fight for your right to
party"). Some display a deep knowledge of gamer culture, culled
from observing player interaction in Mass
Effect 3’s multiplayer mode (not something I am too familiar with, but
even I can appreciate the humor of a clueless arms dealer trying to sell a
shotgun to an Adept biotic not suited to carrying around heavy weapons). Some
take a page out of Andy Kaufman’s textbook, such as the idea to have Shepard
execute 183 push-ups in a row in a bet with James Vega... for absolutely nothing at all. And some simply send
up character stereotypes... in pretty much the same way cynical gamers had
been sending them up for years themselves. In
fact, this is not so much «fan service» here as it is «fan echo»: in an
astute turn of creativity, BioWare takes all the jabs and criticisms of its
own production accumulated from online discussions and turns them on itself.
Like presidential candidates who not only appear on Saturday Night Live in the election cycle but even willingly
allow the show to let them make fun of their own foibles, BioWare writers
calculate correctly that if they not only allow fans to make fun of their
creations, but join in the action themselves, this will only ensure the
prolonged longevity and «waterproof-ness» of the characters themselves. So
Commander Shepard used to be ridiculed because of clumsy animators messing up
his dance moves in the first two games? Let’s make «Commander Shepard goes
out on the dance floor» a central motif of the Citadel Party and tear him a
new one, turning what used to be an embarrassing animation slip-up into a
comic victory of the I can’t dance, I
can’t sing variety. So you thought the catfights between Ice Queen
Miranda and Tough Bitch Jack in Mass
Effect 2 were overacted and clichéd? Let’s throw them another one
that will be so grossly absurd and over-the-top, it’ll be like a secret
message: «see, we realize all too well
ourselves that our games are soaked in hyperboles and clichés all the
time, but hey, how else do you expect us to make a living or anything?»
And even if it’s all planned and calculated, it’s just so inventive and
efficient that I cannot help but admire the creativity of the writers. In my
humble opinion, the only thing missing from this shenanigan is Commander
Shepard opening up the last and rowdiest segment of the party with one big
"WE DRINK OR WE DIE!"
Yet, at the end of the day, there is still one moment
in the Citadel DLC where pretty
much everybody capable of tearing up tears up — after the final party is over
and everybody returns to the Normandy for impending battle duty, when Shepard
takes one last pause to have a quick chat with either his romantic partner or
(in the absence of one) his closest friend inside the docking bay: "It’s been a (damn) good ride",
the partner remarks — "The best",
Shepard replies after a brief pause. Aside from this acting as bait for a
gazillion corny pathetic tribute videos on YouTube, it’s a genuinely
beautiful moment — and also, yes, a solid reminder that the game, with all of
its thrills, surprises, moral ambiguities, and tough decisions along the way,
means so much more than its ending, regardless of the attitude you prefer to
choose toward it. All in all, Citadel
delivers the goods on many levels — so much so that even the embarrassing
«Happy Ending» mod has predictably integrated it as a sequence that plays out
after the defeat of the Reapers,
which might seem logical at one time but now, to me, feels like it completely
misses the point of the DLC: how much more brave and dashing is it to allow
yourself to laugh impending death in the face than to simply commit to a life
of non-stop partying after Evil has been vanquished? There’s a good reason we
learn almost nothing (other than a short bunch of dry biographical facts in
the Appendices) about the subsequent lives of the characters in Lord Of The Rings after the defeat of
Sauron, other than they all lived
happily ever after and suchlike. No need to change the basic
psychological rules of the game for Mass
Effect, either. In conclusion, all of the games DLC’s, one way or
another, fit rather nicely inside the base game — a most important point
given that the life age of a «DLC» as an actual «DLC» is relatively short,
and sooner or later it is simply going to be packaged together with its
mother tree for eternity, as it did happen in the Legendary Edition where there is no longer any pronounced border
between the main game and the add-ons. From
Ashes and Leviathan should have
been components of the base game from the start anyway; Omega is a little outside the loop but it is non-intrusive, and
can easily be skipped if you do not particularly care for a tough, primarily
fight-oriented segment; and finally, Citadel
requires a bit of an open mind to sit comfortably right in the middle of the
game, but what’s wrong with one more stimulus to do some mind-opening? (Just
in case, remember that it is highly recommendable to throw the last party
right before the final mission run where you proceed to storm Cerberus’
headquarters — that way, you get to pick up every «unlocked» surviving member
of the team). One last important thing to be said about the
overall storyline of Mass Effect 3
is this: good or bad, it is finished.
The ending brings the story to such a finale that any «sequel» would have
been literally impossible — to ask «what comes next?» makes about as much
sense as to ask «what happens after Judgement Day?». It’s not even that the
three different endings, similar as they are in overall presentation, destroy
the notion of a «canon» route and set up a challenge that would be impossible
to override without spitting all over the players’ choices (again!!); it’s that the three different
endings all end in a moment of supernatural transcendence, whose consequences
are, by law of nature, unimaginable. It is impossible to suggest that the
writers did not realize it themselves — clearly, they opted for the ultimate
closure, deciding for themselves that the story of Commander Shepard and the universe as we «know» it would
be made complete here, and there would be no return. This is why, when Mass Effect Andromeda was finally released in 2017, what we saw
was thankfully not a proper «sequel», but rather a side-story whose main
concept skilfully avoided having to deal with the consequences of the
tri-colored ending by taking the action back to a pre-Reaper Invasion world,
with its concept of sleeper ships sent away to different galaxies in order to
escape the Reaper threat. As mediocre (at least, in overall comparison) as
that game was, story-wise, it at least avoided the temptation to trample
directly upon the legacy of the Trilogy. Alas, as of 2024, for lack of
original ideas — who even cares about original ideas in 2024, right? — a new Mass Effect game is currently in the
works, and rumors so far have been that it might actually be a sequel to the Trilogy, taking place in a
post-Reaper world. My sincere hopes are that it is not so, and that the game
might be just another «detour» of the Andromeda
variety; if I am wrong, my equally sincere wish, strengthened by all sorts of
prayers to the Enkindlers, is that it get stuck in development hell forever,
or at least until the inevitable dissolution of BioWare and/or Electronic
Arts. There’s only so much trauma I can handle in a world beset with the
evils of greed, corruption, war, idiocy, and Star Wars Episode 7. |
|||||
|
Action
At
the same time, BioWare also heard fan complaints about how Mass Effect 2 veered too far away from the RPG aspects of
the original game, meaning that players found themselves robbed of the right
to make a lot of choices — for instance, the gun and armor inventory were
greatly reduced, making the classic RPG fan delight of spending hours
comparing the various stats, parameters, and bonuses between different types
of weapons pretty much non-existent. Likewise, the number of different skills
available to Shepard and members of his team had also gone down to an absolute
minimum, and you could only upgrade each of them four times, with the number
of XP points necessary for each upgrade accumulating in geometric
progression. To many players, this seemed like no fun and a clear sign of Mass Effect «degrading» from its strategic
RPG roots into a purely adrenaline-based experience — not a crime, perhaps,
but just a wee bit disrespectful to the old guard, so to speak. Subsequently,
the action-related part of Mass Effect
3 becomes sort of a reasonable compromise between the older and newer
fans, and, much to my surprise, one that works almost ideally for my personal
taste. In fact, BioWare went even further here and offered the players (provided
they start a completely new game without importing a save file from Mass Effect 2) a selection of three
different modes from the very start — Action (where the conversations are
greatly reduced and answers are always provided automatically, making the
plot run much like in a Mortal Kombat
game), Story (where combat difficulty is reduced to minimum, so that players
can concentrate almost exclusively on the plot), and RPG (where all the
aspects are balanced); to me, this seems like a nice, but unnecessary
gesture, because even I, generally not an «action guy» in the least, think
that combat in Mass Effect is a very important part of the general
immersive experience, and that you cannot really properly get in the shoes of
Commander Shepard without a little sweat and blood (and, honestly, combat on
the lowest skill levels is a breeze in all three games). The
general ideology of the third game in the series did not change much from
earlier times: most of the challenges you experience come from defeating your
enemies in combat, with practically no «puzzle-like» tasks in sight
(occasionally you have to find an object or two to complete an assignment,
but that’s always childplay compared to fighting). The game also preserves
the pacing of Mass Effect 2, where
any typical mission was essentially a lengthy shoot-out, usually culminating
in a mini-boss fight or two, but strategically interrupted by bits of plot
where you could make some relatively important decisions along the way (to
earn Paragon or Renegade points, for instance); this way, action and story
find themselves in relative balance, with just a few exceptions (the Omega DLC pushes the whole thing way
too far into the combat zone — but then again, it was a DLC specifically targeted at action lovers who appreciate a
tough challenge, and it is really a superfluous appendage to the game that
nobody needs to complete). Speaking
of combat, the base mechanics of it did not change as much from Mass Effect 2 to 3 as they did from 1
to 2: the third game saw the
return of grenades as an efficient means of crowd control (that said, enemies
toss grenades just as well now, and these can sometimes one-shot you even at
lower difficulties, so beware!), and there’s a funny «combat roll» move now
that can help you speed up or avoid getting stunlocked and swarmed by
enemies, but I do not seem to recall any other major differences for Shepard
on his/her own. In terms of teamwork, though, one major change is the
introduction of a large number of Power Combos, where you are able to
awesomely explode your enemies in a variety of ways by combining your powers
with those of your squadmates — what this means is that no previous game in
the series has ever made your team members that much important to you. In the first game, they could be just
as much as a nuisance as support, being difficult to control (especially
since you could not map out team instructions as shortcuts) and often simply
ruining your line of sight with their chaotic running around. In the second
game, their behavior was much improved, their powers could be mapped out for
easy use, and occasionally could be combined with your own to explode enemies
mid-air (so-called «Warp detonations»). In Mass Effect 3, this latter mechanics is taken up a whole level,
and it’s not just some cool gimmick — in really tough and tense situations,
combos like that can become the only
way to survival and victory. Another
improvement concerns the guns, of which you now have a much bigger choice
than in Mass Effect 2, though
still smaller than in Mass Effect
— but to be fair, the huge variety of Shepard’s arsenal in the first game did
not really make that much of a
difference, as most of the guns looked relatively alike and the differences
in their stats were fairly cosmetic. Here, it is quite clear that a lot of
thought went into the diversification of the arsenal. Different sniper rifles
have different patterns of fire; some weird shotguns have a particularly
sadistic angle (like the Krogan-designed Graal Spike Thrower); some pistols
(like Scorpion) shoot proximity mines rather than regular bullets, etc. Best
of all, there’s just the right amount of all those modifications so you do
not feel completely overwhelmed by
the variety — and you can choose if you want to spend a lot of time putting
together the perfect weapon-and-armor combination for your next mission, or
if you just want to chuck it and rely on your finger skills all along (and
you can, though on the hardest levels of difficulty getting the essential
gear can certainly help you bring your enemies down much faster). In
terms of sheer combat difficulty, Mass
Effect 3 is probably the toughest game of all three — which is, after
all, no surprise, because what else did you expect from a full-out Reaper
assault on the galaxy? The game revels in creating new types of monstrosities
with their specific challenges — where the original Mass Effect more or less introduced all of its enemies in the
earliest stage of the game, so that by the end of it you were cutting through
them like butter, Mass Effect 3
raises its stakes gradually, taking a cue from the likes of Half-Life or maybe even Resident Evil (considering the rather
obvious element of «body horror»), with tougher and trickier opponents
impeding your progress as the game progresses: Cannibals, Marauders, Brutes,
and the genuine nightmare fuel of anybody playing on harder levels —
Banshees, who have a nasty habit of teleporting themselves right next to you
and then grabbing you helpless for an instant kill. Banshees do not appear
until about halfway into the game, though, which is very late by typical Mass
Effect standards. The
difficulty also increases with the transition from the base game to its DLCs,
more or less the same way as it was in both Mass Effect (where the Batarians of Bring Down The Sky posed a much tougher challenge than everybody
else) and Mass Effect 2 (where the
fighting sequences in Arrival and Lair Of The Shadow Broker probably
made you sweat far more intensely, with larger numbers of increasingly
aggressive enemies). In that respect, Omega,
with its new types of killer droids and mutated monsters, was at least
perfectly predictable — an add-on made specially for the fans of the game’s
combat system (the final fight with the Adjutants and the Cerberus gooks at
the same time is pure chaotic murder, requiring very tough self-coordination
on the part of the player); but I was far more surprised at the difficulty in
Citadel, contrasting rather sharply
with the overall humorous nature of the DLC — believe me, few things are more
humiliating than dying under intense crossfire from a bunch of armed
paramilitary crooks while your squadmates keep making incessant jokes at your
(and each other’s) expense. One minute you’re relaxing in the best sushi
restaurant on the Citadel, the next one you have to fight off a host of
super-tough enemies armed only with a lousy pistol (actually, one of the
toughest pistols in the game, but still, having to maneuver against heavy
infantry and snipers with limited
ammo and wearing a tuxedo instead of battle armor is perhaps the most
difficult challenge that the Mass
Effect universe can throw at you, ever). (To
be precise, the toughest fights of the game await you in the Citadel’s Armax
Arena, where Commander Shepard can choose to fight holographic equivalents of
pretty much all enemy types, from the simplest to the toughest ones — the
craziest ones are those where you have to fight multiple copies of yourself in all possible class
incarnations; you truly have not experienced Hell until you tried fighting a
couple of Vanguard Shepards, Infiltrator Shepards, and Sentinel Shepards at
the exact same time on Insanity level! Fortunately, all of that is completely
and utterly optional even in terms of the DLC itself; but it’s so infectious
that I didn’t stop myself until I found ways to cheese the battle’s outcome
in my favor). One
other interesting moment here, which one might not even realize unless one
stops to think about it, is that there are very few «boss fights» as such in
the game — except for the rather awkward one-on-one Reaper encounter on
Rannoch and one or two overpowered human opponents like Kai Leng, BioWare
programmers mainly send generic opponents your way. Admittedly, BioWare have
never cared all that much for unique type bosses in their games, but still, Mass Effect at least had Shepard and
friends fight a hyperactive huskified Saren at the end of the game, while Mass Effect 2 offered them a
grotesque monstrosity with an almost JRPG flavor to it. In comparison, the
final fight sequences in Mass Effect 3,
when Shepard has to break through the Reapers’ armies to reach the Crucible,
may be even more difficult — but they only include the enemies you are
already perfectly familiar with. This clearly intentional rejection of the
«boss fight» trope is somewhat comparable to the Monty Python rejection of
the «punchline», and I love it; somehow it adds a thin wisp of realism, so as
to speak, into the proceedings. Who knows, maybe some people expected Shepard
to really be able to wrestle a
mature Reaper with his bare hands — fortunately, the game gives you no such
nonsense. Two
more important innovations were probably introduced because of fan feedback.
One was the removal of the «hacking» mini-games that were so persistent in
the first two games whenever you needed to loot some locker or console.
Moderately fun at first, they quickly became tedious, and by the time the
third game came along the designers finally realised that repeating the same
puzzle over and over becomes mind-numbing torture rather than stimulating
challenge, so they wisely eliminated them altogether — finally, whenever Commander
Shepard needs some loot, he can simply grab
it, and this is good. You still have to search for all those datapads all
over the place, so it’s not like it all just falls right into your hands. Second
was a complete re-working of the planet scanning system introduced in Mass Effect 2; apparently, the idea of probing various planets for
useful minerals was appealing enough, but its realization, once again, soon
turned into grindy tedium. Now, instead of randomly bombarding planet surface
with your probes to extract stuff, you actually have to scan them for some
positive identification blip, after which you extract the relevant asset —
this time, usually not a generic mineral, but some particular resource that
you can add to your constantly growing list of «war assets». Not that it
still isn’t tedious, but at least this time around you get a unique or
near-unique result each time. All
of this just goes to show that the Mass
Effect 3 team was not merely milking the success of Mass Effect 2; the listed peculiarities of the game, separating
it from its predecessors, show that there was still true commitment to
perfecting and deepening the gaming experience. Whether it was driven first
and foremost by commercial considerations or artistic ones is difficult to say
(plus, when it comes to the action side of videogames, «commercial» and
«artistic» are pretty hard to reliably disentangle from one another), but one
thing is unquestionable: most players — myself included — found the game fun. It even becomes easier to forgive
the stupid plotline about Cerberus when you see how well it has been used to
provide the player with some of the best coordinated, most challenging AI
enemy teamwork of its time — fighting off a squad of Cerberus mooks and
centurions is no joke when you’re doing an Insanity run. It
is no wonder that Mass Effect 3’s
multiplayer mode, introduced because everything had to have a multiplayer
mode in 2012, was so well received and, to the best of my knowledge, still
retains a bit of interest, as the servers are still up and running as of 2024,
with a small but loyal community continuing to honor the memory of Commander
Shepard. As somebody who has never connected to a multiplayer server even
once in his life (I’m neither proud nor ashamed of the fact — it’s just that
I’m a sore individualist when it comes to playing), I certainly cannot
comment on the actual virtues of the multiplayer mode, but clearly it
wouldn’t be as popular if the combat system weren’t polished all the way.
That said, it is interesting that the multiplayer mode was not revived for
the Legendary Edition: apparently,
EA decided that spending fresh resources on a multiplayer option for an old
remastered game would not turn a serious profit — and they are probably
right. That
said, I suspect — and I can only suspect here, since I am absolutely
nowhere near close to Mr.-Shoot-’Em-All and my knowledge of action gaming in
the 2000s-2010s is extremely limited — that in most of its action-related
aspects Mass Effect 3 is strictly
a follower rather than an innovator. Having tried their hand at an original
combat mechanics (with cooldown times replacing ammo boxes, etc.) with the
first game and not finding a lot of fan support for it, they pretty much
reverted back to commonly adopted tactics with Mass Effect 2, and the third game only solidifies that approach.
This is why the «Action Mode» of the game makes particularly little sense: one simply does not play Mass Effect for the action — that
would be like watching Lord Of The
Rings just for the adrenaline of its combat scenes. Mass Effect is not Half-Life
and it certainly isn’t Call Of Duty;
it’s a game where you shoot your way through to the plot, not use the plot as
a technical device to lead you up to the shooting. |
|||||
|
Atmosphere
But as the Reapers do strike, all the here-and-now problems that humans and
non-humans alike create for each other on their incessant gold drives and
power trips fade into the background, as do the flamboyant reds-and-blacks of
Mass Effect 2, now replaced by
moodier blues-and-greens. Three emotional themes dominate the space of the
third game — Terror, as the Reapers unleash their wave of total destruction
that comes in multiple forms and flavors; Despair, as losses that cut closer
and closer to the heart pile up around you and doubt about the usefulness of
whatever you do remains a constant torment; and Epicness, as you get to feel
like a True Hero every now and then — or, maybe, not so much a True Hero as a
kind of «Conduit» for letting Destiny operate on the grandest scale ever
witnessed in a video game. Throw in a bunch of Humor (always good to have in
a situation like this) and a lot of Battle Adrenaline, and that’s Mass Effect 3 for you in a nutshell. Let’s start with Terror, which is appropriate
because that is what the game starts out with. How long do we have? — Not
long. — God help us all. Once
the Reapers make their move and the atmosphere moves from suspenseful
premonition to total destructive chaos, the game no longer provides that
feeling of deep existential dread which may have been lingering around over
the first two games: the Reaper threat becomes everyday reality, in which you
soon find out that both the Reapers’ mutated creations and even the Reapers
themselves are not immune to damage — it’s just that it is literally
impossible to kill ’em all, because no matter how many enemies you put down,
the game will simply spawn new ones for you until the very end. The majority
of the scenes dealing with the Reaper invasion falls under the definition of
«pandemonium» rather than «terror», and this is achieved pretty well —
BioWare designers know how to make you feel overwhelmed, with all sorts of
stuff crashing, burning, and exploding around you, enemies swarming around
from all directions, gunfire coming in with blinding, deafening, and
confusing potential, and very little sense of safety even when you’re in
cover. Actual terror,
though, is handled somewhat less adequately. Thus, from the likes of Steven
Spielberg and other expert filmmakers BioWare have certainly learned that in
order to be truly efficient, terror must be personified and individualized,
so they have this little kid character in the beginning whom Shepard comes
across a couple of times, then watches him as he tries to get away from the
destruction in a shuttle only to be blown to bits by the Reapers a few
seconds later. This feels overtly manipulative, but what’s worse is that we
did not really get to establish a proper relationship with the kid in advance
— there were, at most, a couple of brief sentence exchanges between him and
the Commander — and the impact of that death, per se, is nowhere near as hard
as it could be (although the music helps quite a bit). Ironically, the Reaper armies fare better when it
comes to generating horror rather
than terror. The designers must
have studied quite hard the likes of Resident
Evil and other survival-horror / body-horror franchises, coming up with
several types of particularly gruesome monsters created by the Reapers from
various galactic species in the process of «huskifying» their bodies — and
there is a particularly tense episode in the game, where Shepard investigates
the situation in a secluded Asari monastery that has been chosen by the Reapers
as the initial breeding ground for synthesizing Banshees, the game’s most
terrifying and dangerous enemy, which can really rival any first-rate
survival horror game. New players who come to this scene unprepared have
really got to make sure they have no serious cardiac issues beforehand. But one thing that really, really works this time around is BioWare’s ability to make you
fall in love with your precious little «safe space» — in this case, the
Normandy, of course. It is true that in the first two games, just as well,
the Normandy was the only location in the Galaxy where nothing wrong could
happen to you (unless the ship were abducted by the Collectors, and even that
happened while Shepard was temporarily on leave); but the Galaxy itself was
not completely going up in flames at the time either, and there were various
hubs around it — the Citadel, Illium, even the slums of Omega — where you
could feel relatively safe and relaxed as well. In Mass Effect 3, the Citadel remains as the only such hub, and even
that one is filled with chaos, anxiety, and panic. Contrastively, the
Normandy, plunged in the quiet, monotonous hum of its engines and in the
soothing half-light of its dimmed illumination, becomes the only remaining
place in the universe where you can lay your burden down, have a quiet chat
or two with your loyal companions, or even just retire to the solitude of
your cabin to fool around with a space hamster and meditate to the sight of
fish in your aquarium (provided you have not forgotten to feed them — a
typical complaint from players of Mass
Effect 2 that can, fortunately, be put to rest now if you have the cash
to purchase an automatic feeding machine from the markets on the Citadel). I’m a big fan of the «safe space» concept in RPGs
— the feeling of cozily cuddling down in a nice room where no filthy goblin
or vampire can get through to you is perhaps the single best sensation I get
from the whole experience, provided it’s done right — and no game in the
franchise works with it better than Mass
Effect 3. You get to decorate your cabin with all sorts of stuff salvaged
from the wreckage of the galaxy; you get to have quiet, reassuring,
psychologically healing conversations with your squadmates (in the previous
two games, they were usually too busy unloading their own problems on you,
but here it really feels like
they’re there for you, in earnest);
you just get to experience peace and quiet, so sharply contrasting with the
total ruination observed out of the Normandy’s illuminators. This is done so
well that even when there’s really nothing left to do, every now and then I
kept getting this feeling of being very
reluctant to leave the safety and (even somewhat Spartan) comfort of the ship
to leave for yet another hell-on-Earth mission of blood, sweat, toil, and
never-ending gunfire. That said, Mass
Effect 3 also offers a premium on grimness, despair, and depression.
Despite Shepard’s predictable tactical triumphs on the battlefield, both
against the Reapers and the back-stabbing Cerberus, the game reminds you,
over and over and over again, that this is a fight he/she ultimately cannot
win. Victories tend to be partial (such as when you only need to thin out the
enemy’s lines a little to help extract a friend from the battlefield) or
arrogantly negated by cutscenes (such as the mission on Thessia, where Kai
Leng is scripted to kick your ass no matter what you do); and even within the
relative safety of the Normandy, most of your companions will, at one time or
another, hold conversations with you in which they shall discuss finality,
mortality, and fatality (throw in babality if you’re romancing any one of
them, of course). In fact, the idea that winning
this fight is impossible — as opposing to, perhaps, subverting it or changing
the course of history in some other hitherto unknown way — is thrown around
so frequently that I am even surprised at how much people still keep craving
for that «happy ending». If you did not know there was not going to be a
happy ending from the game’s opening sequence, you There’s also plenty of death going around, of
course — not generic, faceless death of the «hey, news just in about another
billion casualties but who cares, right?» variety, but this time around,
death that hits very close to home.
In the first two games, most of the deaths around Shepard were those of
baddies, and where friends were concerned, these deaths could generally be
avoided — you could easily save Wrex in Mass
Effect, for instance, and it did not take a total genius to have all your
squadmates survive the Suicide Mission at the end of Mass Effect 2. Even very occasional inavoidable deaths of people
close to you were shocking exceptions that took place offscreen — most
notably, the Ashley-or-Kaiden choice on Virmire in the first game. And even
if you did screw up and left some
companions to die in the Collector Base, these deaths were quick, not
particularly emotional, and even somewhat clichéd, almost as if
telling you «don’t be such a doofus next time, dude, here’s a really silly
quick scene of a good friend kicking the bucket for you, now be a good lad
and reload an earlier save». Mass Effect
3, however, does not spare your feelings in this respect — instead, it
manipulates them for all they’re worth. Some of the deaths here can be
avoided, such as, for instance, Grunt’s, Tali’s, or Miranda’s, but judging by
the amount of soul inserted into those sequences, you’d almost think the
designers intended for them to be canon (Tali’s suicide after Shepard saves
the Geth at the expense of the Quarians is, for instance, breathtakingly
cinematic). Some minor characters encountered along the way are given just
enough screen time, dialog, and personality to endear themselves to you
before being sent off to die in a blaze of glory (Turian Lieutenant Tarquin
Victus, repentantly sacrificing himself for his own mistakes; Aria’s
love-and-hate partner Nyreen in the Omega
DLC; your own good friend and mentor Captain Anderson at the end of the game
— the list could go on). And at least two send-offs here are within their own
right to be included into the Golden Pantheon of Video Game Character Demises
— both have managed to genuinely move me to tears, even if you realize that
this is mostly done through professional craftsmanship rather than unique
inspiration. The more iconic of the two is the death of Mordin
Solus, who nobly sacrifices himself to atone for having contributed to the
Krogan genophage — the classic «repentant scientist» trope presented here in
the most heart-wrenching way possible: what makes the scene so emotionally
effective is Mordin’s generally unintentionally-humorous personality (if you
spent enough time chatting up the guy in Mass
Effect 2, he will be humming his rendition of Gilbert & Sullivan’s I am the very model of... right before
dying), integrated perfectly into the epic setting of his final feat. The
death itself is not even demanded by the plot, but it is demanded by the
moral code of the universe — so that I have not even seen too many of those «why oh why did Mordin have to die?»
questions around the Web; everybody seems to understand that he had to. I must say, though, that the most fantastic thing
about Mordin’s death scene is that it can be played out in two completely
different, yet equally meaningful, ways. The Paragon way of going about it,
as most people probably go in their playthroughs, is to have Mordin
administer the genophage cure to secure the future of the Krogan nation, then
happily go out in his blaze of glory — the epic Space Cowboy way of ending
things, a noble death worthy of Greek mythology and Norse saga. But if you
have second thoughts on letting the Krogan race get back on its feet again,
you can also sabotage the cure — and, when Mordin learns about it, shoot him
in the back to prevent him from restoring things back to normal. In this
case, he dies a dark, tragic death, on the very threshold of atonement and
salvation but lacking the chance to make the final crossing (literally so, as he metaphorically expires
on the threshold of his laboratory). The drawback is that this outcome makes
Shepard come across as a black-hearted Shakespearian villain rather than the
savior of the galaxy — and probably the
one episode in the game which makes players complain that by the time of Mass Effect 3, Renegade Shepard has
completed his descent into full-out psychopath territory (though if you ask
me, the ability of Renegade Shepard to bump off Shiala, the Rachni Queen, and Wrex in Mass Effect already put him/her on that path a long time ago —
it’s just that none of those characters, not even Wrex, were as dear to the
average player’s heart as Mordin The Adorable). But if you focus on Mordin rather than Shepard
for this issue, his chance to die like an Ascending Noble Hero or a Tragic
Loser Cursed By Fate in equally logical and believable fashion is just one of
those moments putting a serious-as-hell dent in Roger Ebert’s
«video-games-are-not-art-since-art-does-not-have-branching-paths» theory.
Both outcomes give me the feels, yet the feels are completely different
dependent on the outcome, with tearful
admiration as the dominant emotion for the Paragon route and ominous pity as the chief experience
for the Renegade path. (In my own Renegade playthrough, I reserved the
pitifully tragic ending for Padok Wiks, Mordin’s replacement, who has an
interesting personality of his own, but did not get to have a character arc
with as much backstory as Mordin, unfortunately, so the impact is always
lessened). The second tear-inducing scene concerns Thane,
the noble-and-tormented Drell assassin, who passes away after being fatally
wounded by the wretched Kai Leng while protecting you throughout the Cerberus
coup. He was probably originally scripted to die from a terminal illness,
with which he had been diagnosed even prior to his appearance in Mass Effect 2, but then the writers
decided it would be more heart-wrenching to have him go in one last blast of
glory. Again, it all has to do with how well the character was written,
animated, and voiced from the very beginning: useless to just watch a small
clip of Thane’s death on YouTube to get the whole impact. But the scene hits especially hard if, as female Shepard,
you had romanced Thane in the previous game — as I have written in my
previous review, Thane’s romance line was easily the best out of all possible
choices in Mass Effect 2, since it
was the only one based less on the idea of «I love you, but how am I going to
find the right hole?» and more on the idea of a spiritual connection between
two souls flawed and tormented in subtly similar ways. This connection — the
idea that Soldier Shepard has the same kind of moral burden on her heart as
Assassin Thane — is taken to its extreme in the final moments of the scene,
and while some might not realize that concisely, it is one of the major
factors contributing to how it never fails to bring out the tears. Shorter
and less notorious than Mordin’s epic farewell, perhaps, but psychologically
far more deep-reaching. (A third commonly listed tear-jerking scene is on
Rannoch, when Legion sacrifices his personality for the greater good of the
Geth conclave, but Legion’s robotic voice has always ruined that one for me —
or maybe I am not yet sufficiently advanced to show human feelings for an AI
entity. It’s a decent scene, but that entire story arc about the Geth gaining
true intelligence is just a little too
sci-fi for my tastes; the Classical and Biblical connotations of Mordin’s and
Thane’s lifelines give me far more of a gut punch. Some people do feel quite
different about this, and that’s perfectly all right). Finally, there’s the Epic flavor. This is the one
that is always the most difficult to get right, with decades of Hollywood,
Bollywood, and Yoshimi-battles-the-pink-robots daguerreotypes corrupting the
primal inspirational magic of the Hero Vibe; and, in fact, I already wrote
about how certain inane bits of dialog already threaten to turn the game into
a flaming disaster right from the start. However, it does get better, as the
game does its best to avoid corny pompous speeches and convey its sense of
the epic more through music and visuals — stuff like the grandiose battle
between the Reaper and the Thresher Maw, for instance, or the final «battle
for London» with its utter chaos, devastation, and massive scale, both on the
ground and in the airspace above Earth. While I do believe that the game is
at its best in its quiet moments, relatively few things about the loud ones
bring out heavy groans and facepalms. As for the game’s ending — well, I think
I already wrote enough about that in the previous sections. Perhaps, when it comes to Epic, special mention
should be made of the Leviathan
DLC. While its handling of the Reaper enigma remains very much open to
criticism (people who say it’s genius and people who say it’s retarded both
have valid points to make), it can hardly be denied that atmospherically, the
whole thing is constructed to near-perfection. Starting out like some modern
day Twilight Zone episode, with
circumstances investigated by Shepard gradually pointing out to levels of
mystery that go much deeper than the Reapers, the plot goes through elements
of uneasy suspense, then throws in a touch of the usual Reaper body horror,
and finally takes a big gamble with the epic conclusion — the last scene of
Shepard wading underwater in a giant robot body that still turns out to be minuscule next to the original Masters of
the Galaxy appearing before him in person. Shepard’s «hallucinatory»
underwater interaction with the Leviathan brings on memories of the original
encounter with Sovereign in Mass
Effect — of the «hero meets something way beyond his size, age, and
comprehension» variety — but this time around, the focus is ultimately on
unraveling rather than deepening the mystery, and the prevailing vibe quickly
shifts to cautious awe over raw terror. On an emotional level, it all
certainly works better than the actual ending, which explains the much warmer
reception that Leviathan had among
the fans. Finally, even if it could hardly be called an
«essential» part of the experience, there’s Humor — handled pretty damn well,
not too much of it and not too little; friendly humor, soothing humor, and
plenty of dark humor, of course. There’s the usual comic relief in the form
of Joker the Pilot (now usually served within his interactions with EDI the
co-pilot AI, whose appropriation of a robotic female shape lays down the
ground for the game’s weirdest romantic twist); Wrex and Mordin provide even
more entertainment; Conrad Verner, the bumbling fanboy mascot of the series,
returns to the Citadel for one final moment of inane glory; and even Ashley
«She’s So Racist» Williams can be a lot of tough-girl fun, especially when
she drinks her ass off and only Commander Shepard can save her from a
hangover more terrible than Reaper indoctrination. Of course, Javik the
Prothean still wins first place with his airlock jokes, provided you get his
DLC (or just the Legendary Edition). I truly appreciate the ratio of the humor: without any funny moments at all, the game
would psychologically suffocate the player with a never-ending barrage of
pathos and depression, but neither does it want to ever degrade into sheer
comedy — even when characters are
cracking jokes to the left and the right, they are usually relevant to the
situation and do just what they’re intended to do, a.k.a. provide
psychological relief from the nightmare. Maybe the game could do without a
few of the inside jokes and running gags ("I’m Garrus Vakarian and this is now my favorite spot on the Citadel!"
is a little too obvious), but then
again, people do love those, so who am I to grumble? The only time when humor overrides absolutely
everything else is with the Citadel
DLC, but as I wrote earlier, that was its very selling point — subvert the
lore and poke some friendly fun at your own past, fighting cheesy fire with
even more cheesy fire and reaping tons of profit. Citadel does have its serious, thoughtful, and tender moments
(Shepard holding a memorial service for Thane and then reading his last video
messages on the screen almost brings out the tears again), but mostly it’s
all for laughs, and though the absolute majority of the jokes will only be
dear to those who have memorized their Mass
Effect from A to Z, this does not make them any less exquisite. Finally, let us not The best news is that, with the romantic lines
already established, the emphasis in most of these interactions is not on
the, ahem, «technical» aspects of the business, but rather on using the romantic
relationship as a source of energy and inspiration for the infernal battles
ahead — there’s always a thin melancholic wisp around most of the romantic
scenes aboard the Normandy that creates just the right atmosphere. If you
want, you can still cringe, giggle, or shrug, but I wouldn’t think of these
reactions as «involuntarily obligatory» in the same way that it is, for
instance, impossible to take the Shepard / Miranda lovemaking scene in the
engine room in Mass Effect 2
seriously. In this aspect, Mass Effect
3 shows some maturity, and is inarguably the best game out of all three
when it comes to depicting romance. (Or breakup, for that matter — if Shepard
decides to go back to either Ashley or Liara and severs his relationship with
Miranda, there’s a nicely acted moment between the two that features Yvonne
Strahovski at her best). On the whole, it is plain to see that Mass Effect 3 fully delivers on the
«feels» — but also that these «feels» are light years away from where we
started, as should probably be the case for any successful trilogy set in an
original sci-fi or fantasy universe. By now, the focus is squarely on Big
Drama rather than on World-Building, and that is really how it should be,
because, in my humble opinion, world-building for its own sake is boring
(that’s the biggest problem with the likes of The Elder Scrolls, who always give us these huge and meticulously
elaborated universes which seem to be populated with faceless automatons) —
and while I absolutely agree with Shamus Young that focusing on drama tends
to have a negative impact on things like logic, reason, common sense, and
causation, the fact remains that not even Shakespeare is completely
guilt-free when it comes to this trade-off, much less the overpaid (or
perhaps underpaid?) writers at BioWare. And for what it’s worth, on the
atmospheric front Mass Effect 3
ticked off all the right checkboxes in my own soul: it made me care, it made
me cry, it made me laugh, it made me fear, it made me rage, and it made me,
once again, think on how much better the world could be if more of my friends
were like Shepard’s squadmates and less like, say, Councilor Udina. |
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Technical features |
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Graphics
This is actually a somewhat bigger issue than any non-ardent fan
of Mass Effect might imagine:
having virtually lived through the first two games with (as) the same
character, being forced to accept the new rendering rules for Mass Effect 3 could almost feel like
being forced to undergo obligatory plastic surgery (I remember spending quite
a bit of time looking for all sorts of graphical tweaks and hacks to return
«me» as I used to be, but, alas, to no avail — updated graphical engines are
no joke, and not even professional modders could do much with that). But in
the end you simply had to make peace with that. BioWare wanted you to believe
that technical progress was still marching on with giant strides, and what a
better way to do that than a complete (unnecessary) redesign of the character
construction kit? Oh well, at the very least there seems to have been near-perfect
continuity between the «stock» facial models for both Male Shepard (still
relying on the same old unshaven Mark Vanderloo mug) and for most of his
squadmates, as well as recurring characters from the previous two games. The
single biggest image change was reserved for Chief Ashley Williams — provided
you kept her alive on Virmire so that she could return to your side for the
final round — who, following her promotion to Lieutenant Commander,
apparently decided to accompany this by adopting a more expressly «feminine»
look, with longer hair and an extra layer of makeup (to better distract the
Reapers in hand-to-hand combat, I guess). Although I do not mind the visual
transformation as much as some of the more conservative (or, conversely, some
of the more «progressive») fans, it is
a little odd that Ashley was literally the only past character to undergo such
a change — they could have at least made Kaidan Alenko to bleach his hair or
something, in a compensatory-symmetric move — and it is hard to get rid of
the thought that this was a conscious move on BioWare’s part to raise the
«attractiveness» of Ashley, formerly branded as Space Racist No. 1, for the
predominantly male segment of the players. (Spoiler: it didn’t really work).
Personally, I always thought of Ashley as one of the most interestingly
designed and meticulously written characters in the series anyway — and what
hurt me more about her role in the game was not the facial redesign but the
fact that, apparently, a lot of her
dialog lines for Mass Effect 3
ended up on the cutting floor or bugged into non-existence, as would
eventually be revealed. As for the general visual aesthetics, Mass Effect 3 steps away from the overriding red-black-and-brown
colors of the previous game (which were intended to raise a feeling of
permanent «hidden danger») and returns to blue as the dominant color — in
fact, Deep Blue is pretty much everywhere you go, be it the Citadel,
Normandy, or any of the planets Shepard has to visit in this last round. The
only exception is the iniquity den of Omega, which preserves its traditional
red hue, but since it has now been turned into a direct war zone, the red
colors are dusky and tattered rather than flashing in all their infernal neon
glory as they used to during the station’s better days. Other than that, you
have blue skies, blue armor, blue uniforms, blue shields, blue Reapers, blue
asari — mixed with an occasional red such as the color of your own blood or
the devastating laser beams the Reapers shoot out of their blue hides. One might say that this brings the game closer to the original
palette of Mass Effect, where blue
was also the overriding color par
excellence, but the blue of Mass
Effect was generally lighter, warmer, and more welcoming — a sort of
«cozy hospital room blue», if you will — not to mention that one of the
biggest joys of the game was wheeling through all the different planetary
landscapes that ranged from the same icy wintery blue to lush prairie green
to deep volcanic red and beyond. In Mass
Effect 3, the blue is not so much welcoming as suffocating: you cannot
escape it anywhere, and ultimately it becomes symbolic of a sort of «deep
freeze death» where being blasted away in the red heat of Reaper fire might
actually feel welcome for a change. I’m not entirely sure of how I feel about
this; on one hand, the symbolism is powerful, but on the other, Mass Effect 3 is a huge, long game,
and having the same palette splashed over most of it can get wearisome. One
thing you are certainly not going
to remember Mass Effect 3 as is a
provider of starkly contrasting, memorable visual environments.
The problem with real spooky baddies in a shooter game is that
you can only get properly creeped out by those during cut scenes — once in
action, they’re going to be too small and you’re going to be too busy
shooting or running to allocate any mental resources to getting scared
shitless. (This is one of the benefits of classic Resident Evil’s survival horror mode, with the average zombie
being slow on the move and in full focus much of the time). However, «Reaper
horror» in the game is following you everywhere, not just
in combat, and there will be a lot of opportunities to get zoned out by
monstruously grotesque fusions of «meaty», lumpy organic matter with
cold’n’robotic blue implants. This style works so well and results in so much
first-rate ugliness that it actually has a negative impact on choosing the
«green ending» for the game — no matter how much BioWare designers try to
push you toward accepting the idea that the key to universal happiness is a
synthesis between organic and synthetic matter, how can you actually bring
yourself to getting those freaky implants after you just spent a hundred
hours fighting implant-choked killing machines? Most of these opportunities arrive with
cut scenes, and, predictably, the actual number of cut scenes for you to
witness now goes through the roof — almost every mission gets its fair share,
though I must say that the actual cinematics of Mass Effect 3 do not impress me nearly as much as they should. A
few of the vistas are quite unique and breathtaking, such as visions of the
Alliance fleets burning up in space around Earth, or the above-mentioned epic
fight between the Reaper and the Thresher Maw, but overall, while the
technical level was certainly outstanding for 2012, all those explosions and
stuff are fairly routine for the modern viewer. In general, I am much more
impressed by the care lavished on Shepard’s (and his friends’) facial
expressions — the sight of my Ruthless Renegade FemShep in close-up shedding
the only tears of her life while watching Thane’s recorded farewell video is a
far stronger emotional trigger than any of the action-oriented cut scenes. Overall, the best thing I can say about
the graphics is that they’re on the level — you don’t see too many people complaining about them
in the 2020s, which is a good sign — but it is not really through eye-candy
that the game achieves its goals. The visuals were tremendously important in
the first game, which was all about world-building, after all; by the last
part of the trilogy, no more spectacular visual introductions to the universe
of Mass Effect are necessary —
what matters is what you do, not
what you see, and this means that
voice acting is far more important for this game than pretty pictures. |
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Sound
About
four or five different composers were responsible for writing the score, with
Sam Hulick inheriting the bulk of the duties from his previous part-time
engagements; but the most famous newcomer, of course, was Clint Mansell, best
known at the time for his many soundtracks to Darren Aronofsky’s movies.
BioWare’s proposal to Clint was a stroke of genius — his «tiny-rays-of-light-lost-in-eternal-darkness»
style, so much responsible for the overall atmosphere of Aronofsky’s bleak
tales of human depravity, would be perfect for a game in which the idea of
good-triumphs-over-evil comes off as either impossible or circumstantially
irrelevant. That said, as far as I can tell, Mansell himself only wrote a
small part of the soundtrack; in the official soundtrack, he is credited only
as the sole composer of ‘Leaving Earth’ and as Hulick’s partner for ‘An End,
Once And For All’ (although the two pieces are atmospherically similar enough
to suggest that the main melody of the second theme is primarily Mansell’s
creation as well). Not
that this ain’t sufficient, because, in this writer’s humble opinion, ‘Leaving Earth’ is
easily the single greatest piece of music written in the 21st century — or,
to put it in more accurate and less provocative terms, there are no other
songs or instrumentals written in the past 25 years that manage to make more
of an emotional impact on yours truly. Barely two minutes long — so you
should hear it by all means even if you never played or intend to play the
game — it carries the full weight of an epic symphony, telling the tale of
the universe as we know it from start to finish: the darkness, the proverbial
tiny ray of light, the nightmares, the glorious rises and achievements, the
extinction and shutting down. Drawing part-time from the minimalists (the
piercing little piano theme) and part-time from the neo-classicists, ‘Leaving
Earth’ is equally relevant for the purposes of the game — those massive
distorted horn blares representing the battle calls of the Reapers — and for,
well, just about any purpose that has to do with the idea of inevitable
extinction. Over the entire trilogy, no single moment hits harder and harsher
than the final sustained note of the tune as the Mass Effect 3 logo materializes on the screen. Ironically,
I have seen many people expressing their admiration for the tune itself and
the accompanying cinematics by saying how their visceral reaction was sheer
anger, a raging desire to kick the Reapers’ asses into the next dimension.
This tells us a lot about basic human psychology — and also brings to mind
the classic trope of the young inexperienced gunslinger from a Western movie,
you know, the one who earns himself an early grave if his older and more
seasoned companion does not succeed in stopping him from some suicidal move.
‘Leaving Earth’ is not a bombastic call to arms; as a musical piece, it is a
lament, a philosophical rumination on the subject of fate and transience. It
does not exactly tell you to lay down your arms and surrender to the
inevitable — that is not what Commander Shepard is about, anyway — but it
does tell you, in no uncertain chords, that your own ray of light cannot turn
the general tide of events; it can, and should,
be there as part-time observer, part-time influencer, but sooner or later, it
will go out, and there’s nothing you can do about it in the long run, no
matter how much fuss you raise in the short one. It’s beautiful, tragic, and
indescribably authentic to the core — two minutes of music in which every
single note is imbued with layers of meaning. Unfortunately, as a piece of
«incidental» music for a video game, its recognizability shall always be
limited — even so, it’s still got millions of views on YouTube, as compared
to only hundreds of thousands for most of the other compositions on the OST,
and that’s gotta stand for something. A
similar, though much less harsh vibe, of sadness and acceptance permeates ‘An
End, Once And For All’, the theme that plays during Shepard’s final
sacrifice; two minutes of isolated piano playing (the same key of E minor, in
fact, quite a few chords are the same and ‘Leaving Earth’ itself is
occasionally re-quoted) followed by a rapid buildup — the buildup, representing
the universe-changing consequences of Shepard’s choice, is nowhere near as
interesting as the quiet piano melody, though, which once again sends out a
signal of... humility? I wanted to
write «our insignificance», but this is not really true: neither the game
itself nor the accompanying soundtrack really propagate the idea that nothing
we do ever matters — rather, it is the idea of teaching you to know when to
fight against overwhelming odds and when to accept fate because there is no
way you can always be stronger than
the tide. It’s the kind of musical theme that agrees particularly well with
Shepard’s blissful self-disintegration in the Synthesis ending, but, of
course, it also works fairly well on its own. Had somebody like Harold Budd
or Philip Glass released these compositions on their original LPs, they would
certainly have gained much larger prominence. The
third most memorable theme from the game is arguably ‘I Was Lost Without You’
— the main romantic piece to accompany the Commander’s love life — and since
it’s mostly Sam Hulick, without Mansell’s involvement, it does not quite
possess the same gut punch; also, its pseudo-orchestral final movement veers
on corny, perhaps intentionally so (in the game’s lore, it is supposed to be
the main theme of the trashy romantic soap opera on interracial love) but
still feeling a tad awkward when it accompanies the game’s most, ahem,
intimate scenes. Even so, it shares the atmosphere of reclusive melancholy
with Mansell’s themes, and cuts deeper than any of the «romantic» music
previously scored by Wall, Hulick, and others for the first two games. The
rest of the music ranges from occasional throwbacks to the original Mass Effect (such as the harsh,
jarring electronic pulses of ‘Mars’) to all sorts of bombastic-epic anthems
(‘A Future For The Krogan’, which almost feels influenced by all those Celtic
war motives from The Witcher; ‘The
Fleets Arrive’, smartly quoting from Mass
Effect’s opening theme to restore the feeling of excited hopefulness, if
only for a brief while); for the most part, these are perfunctory, and their
main function is to constantly remind you that you’re doing real badass,
heroic stuff — here I cannot help being reminded on how most of the backing
music for the big missions on Feros and Noveria in the first game had a
covert-and-dangerous feel to it instead, making you feel more like a
thief-in-the-night than the God of War incarnate. But that is precisely the
point of Mass Effect 3: it is a
game that constantly and relentlessly raises you up, only to brutally bring
you down and ruthlessly remind you of your true place in the fabric of the universe in the end. Unless
you’re ready to accept that, I think, you’re not really ready to experience the full impact of Mass Effect — or, for that matter,
understand why its designers chose to cooperate with the composer for Requiem For A Dream rather than The Lord Of The Rings. Concerning
the voice acting, relatively little needs to be said since Mass Effect 3 remained loyal to its
veterans and invited almost everybody back from their parts in the first two
games — with maybe just one or two exceptions. As usual, Mark Meer and
Jennifer Hale continue to shine as the respective MaleShep and FemShep, and
this time around, their jobs are actually harder, because in the third game
our Commander is given quite a bit of extra depth. He/she will have to deal
with friends (and, potentially, lovers) dying all around in packs; suffer
from nightmares; have second and third thoughts on important moral and
political choices; and, at the end of the game, essentially take on the
function and mission of a latter-day Jesus Christ — all in a day’s work for
BioWare’s voice veterans, who rise to the task admirably. Once again, my own
heart always gets stolen by Ms. Hale, who is capable of making even the most
psychopathic and misanthropic Renegade Shepard come across as a loveable
bastard; but even Meer, whose delivery on the whole had always been more
stiff and monotonous than Hale’s, gets to break out of his shell by the end of
the game, switching from the «never-forget-you’re-a-soldier, soldier!»
delivery to something more human and vulnerable. Special
honors go to the only significant replacement in the game — William Salyers,
who had to replace Michael Beattie as the unique voice of Mordin Solus; he
did such a fine job with this that not all the players were even quick to
notice the voice actor change. While Mordin does not exactly get any new
layers to his personality in the game — most of his moral pains and spiritual
torments had already taken place in Mass
Effect 2 — it is in this game that he gets his grand hero moment, and
Salyers preserves the same delicate balance between pathos, seriousness, and
unintentional humor as his predecessor, and keeping up at the same insane
tempo, too! God bless professional voice actors. Of
the (relatively few) fully new arrivals, a short word of support should
probably be dropped for Freddie Prinze Jr. as Lt. James Vega — his job was to
make us feel sympathetic for a presumably routine and boring muscle-crazy
jock in an Alliance uniform, and he does his best to present his character as
a human being with thoughts and feelings rather than just a heap of meat
(well, okay, as a heap of meat with thoughts and feelings); by the end of the
game, you might even agree to include him on the list of your intimate
friends (not too intimate, though —
you can only get intimate with James as a last resort in the Citadel DLC). Alix Wilton Reagan is
also quite adorable as Samantha Traynor; I suppose her mission was to
convincingly portray a lesbian character that all the nerdy non-lesbian
players could fall in love with, and based on my own example, I suppose she
carried it off splendidly. Samantha’s pre-written personality basically
consists of two aspects — her curve-busting intellect and her curve-heavy
sexual orientation — but Reagan can add the appropriate touches of shyness,
sentimentality, and «girlishness» that ultimately make Samantha more of a
human being than just a walking lesbian encyclopaedia. Arguably
the only vocal performance I would be tempted to write off as «overdone»
would be the reprisal of the role of Aria T’Loak by Carrie-Ann Moss: you’re
going to be hearing a lot of her
if/when you take on the Omega DLC,
and she somehow feels obliged to put that «tough iron bitch» imprint on
pretty much every single sentence. I do realize that this is probably the way
the character was written, but I’m sure that even real tough iron bitches in
real life do not utter every single
word as if suffering from an unending toothache or constipation. Actually, I
would say that Omega could have
offered Moss as Aria a chance to try to expand on her role and show us a
little bit of what really goes on underneath that impregnable barrier — but
neither the writers nor the actor seemed too interested, so that in the end
the iron lady basically stays the iron lady, even if a suitably smart
Renegade Shepard manages to finesse her a tiny bit. Then again, perhaps there
is something to be said for consistency — if we can respect AC/DC for
religiously staying away from romantic ballads, we could probably respect a
tough-as-nails Asari mafia boss for never disclosing any additional aspects
of her personality to any sorts of galactic riff-raff that she might come
across while putting her business back in order. On
the whole, though, it’s useless to spend a lot of attention on such minor
quibbles — this is a gigantic game with hours and hours of voice actor
performances, so every once in a while there is going to be a bit of a dud
here and there. The obvious general thing to note, of course, is that by now
most of these roles have become second nature to the artists, and some of
them, like Liara’s Ali Hillis or Garrus’ Brandon Keener, had already shown us
in Mass Effect 2 how they were
perfectly capable of leaving their «comfort zones» for something seriously
different (with Liara transforming from the «naive young scientist» trope to
the «confident badass» type, or Garrus shifting from the «reserved
subordinate» to the «familiar friend» image), so in the final part of the
trilogy they are not really expected to prove anything — they just jump into
character straight away and give us joy through their very presence, even when they’re handled irritatingly
crappy dialog on occasion. |
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Interface In
terms of basic game mechanics and controls, changes between Mass Effect 2 and 3 were nowhere near as drastic as
between the first and second parts of the trilogy (and today, with the Legendary Edition version completely
redesigning the combat interface for Mass
Effect, these changes feel even more cosmetic). It seems as if the
designers were pretty much convinced that they’d achieved near-perfection
with these things in Mass Effect 2,
and would only implement cosmetic changes so that they could have a pretext
to not be accused of staleness. For instance, the HUD now accompanies the
little pictures of your two active squad members with icons showing the
readiness status of their most relevant powers — and hey, it didn’t do that
in Mass Effect 2! That’s even more
revolutionary than all the amazing innovations between iPhone 15 and iPhone
16, don’t you know?
Another
visible onscreen change is the displayed number of grenades in Shepard’s
possession, but this time, the change is purely cosmetic. In the first game,
you could collect grenades as a regular type of ammo, and any class of
Commander Shepard could use them. For Mass
Effect 2, however, the ability to use grenades was redesigned as one of
the «powers» that could be unlocked for a specific class of hero, and then
you’d have yourself a technically unlimited supply of flashbangs, restricted
only by the time period of the cooldown upon power usage. Although one should
think that this, too, is a weird take on reality, it was actually retained in
Mass Effect 3, where only
soldier-class players can use grenades (other than enemies, of course — and
grenades are a huge annoyance in
this game, as they are not simple flashbangs that blind and disorient you,
but genuine killing machines, capable of one-shot ripping your hide apart on
higher difficulty levels). Unlocking
and upgrading of «powers» itself, too, has been somewhat redesigned. Shepard
is now allowed to level up more frequently than in the second game, and the
number of possible upgrades to each power is almost twice as high as in Mass Effect 2; moreover, for the
first time in the series you actually have the choice between different types
of upgrades for your powers — at a certain point, the tree begins to branch
out and you can decide to yourself whether, for instance, you want to
concentrate more on the defensive or offensive aspect of a certain biotic or
tech ability, etc. Naturally, this provides the player with more
opportunities to lay down complex or unique strategies of combat, though I
personally never spent too much time wrecking my brain over the right choice
to make (I think paying too much attention to the defensive aspects is boring
anyway; Commander Shepard should always go on the offensive, unless we’re
talking a pack of Banshees, of course). The resulting system is a classic
compromise case between the «extremes» of Mass Effect (where the character build-up strategy still retained
quite a few traces of the classic RPG spirit) and Mass Effect 2 (where the build-up was reduced to an absolute
minimum so as not to interfere with all the shooting), and I think it works
reasonably well. The
basic design of the HUD which, as before, you can still bring up any time to
pause combat, remains the same, and all the keyboard shortcuts have been
retained, meaning that I almost never even have to bother with the HUD at all
during combat sequences — all I have to do is map out my squadmates’ most
important powers to number keys, and then I can have fun with my enemies by
comboing them into oblivion, what with the capacity of setting up cool biotic
or tech explosions triggered by the joint actions of two squad members. Throw
in those nifty rolling moves that Shepard can now make to dodge enemy fire or
increase his speed; the enemies’ new-found penchant for deadly grenades,
meaning that it is no longer safe to continuously stay in the same cover
spot; the overall increased potential of enemy AI, as teams now have genuine
encircling strategies and stuff — and yes, Mass Effect 3 does everything that Mass Effect 2 did in the shoot-em-up department and more. No
wonder its multiplayer feature turned out to be quite popular and endured for
quite a long time (although in the end, as we all know, multiplayer modes
come and go, while the single-player mode remains forever — an inescapable
truth that was only too well confirmed by the removal of multiplayer mode in
the Legendary Edition). A
lot of work was done to enhance the cinematic, visually-awesome aspects of
combat; in addition to the aforementioned explosions, for instance, the
Vanguard class gets the brand new «Nova» attack where you can literally
trigger a brief biotic earthquake to devastate your enemies (a
well-publicized way of winning almost every fight is a combination of Charge
and Nova which literally turns Shepard into an unstoppable superforce of
nature); and then there’s the new Heavy Melee attack where you use your
omni-tool in close combat with flashy time-dilating effects in badass
close-ups. Sometimes the effects verge on looking ridiculous, but thankfully,
they never cross over into completely outrageous territory à la League Of Legends or Final Fantasy or something; in most
situations, Mass Effect 3
preserves the flair of gritty realism, hard as it is to maintain it when your
non-human opponents tend to morph further and further into fantastic
creatures out of some Harry Potter-like
universe. (The weirdest exception, as I already wrote, is the main
quest in the Citadel DLC, where
your biggest challenge is actually not to be overpowered by exceptionally
strong enemies, but to avoid being distracted by the incessant jokes and
taunts sputtered about by your sqaudmates.) Outside
of combat, the game’s mechanics have undergone even fewer changes. Regarding
Shepard’s dialog interactions with the people around him, the biggest and
most important of these is the removal of the middle («neutral») option on
the click wheel — in the first two games, you nearly always had the option of
a Paragon (top right), Renegade (bottom right) or Neutral (middle right)
response, but the latter is no longer a valid choice. This was a reasonable
decision, probably based on the observation that players rarely, if ever,
chose the Neutral option in the first place — because it neither gave you any
boost in reputation nor resulted in any alternate / additional interesting
dialog; it was, more or less, simply there
so as to attenuate more sharply the two opposite ends of the morality pole. I
do have to say, though, that the click wheel looks kinda lonely with that big
gaping hole in the right half. Perhaps a better — though admittedly more
challenging — alternative would have been to come up with some potential
«rewards» for choosing the Neutral answer, for instance, the ability to gain
more information on the subject from an occasional character who would
otherwise be too sensitive to either the goody-two-shoes or dirty-bastard
approaches. But I guess they had to cut down on something for a game as massive as this one — and don’t voice
actors get their salaries on a pay-per-line basis? Speaking
of Paragon and Renegade, the morality system of the game has also been
slightly revised with an extra parameter; now, in addition to the usual old
mechanism of scoring additional Paragon or Renegade points upon performing certain
actions, there is a new general Reputation bar filling up upon performing
certain other actions and directly
responsible for the availability of additional options in your future
interactions with important characters. I am not entirely sure that this
extra complexity was necessary; the difference between Reputation and
Morality confuses some players, and ultimately, I guess, the whole thing was
added so as not to lock you out too often out of the luxury of additional
choices — in the first two games, if you wobbled between Paragon and Renegade
decisions too often, you could have a poorly-filled bar for each by the time
you reached the appropriate checkpoint and thus, for instance, would be
unable to stimulate poor Saren into committing suicide. «Reputation» sort of
solves that problem (roughly speaking, to force Saren to kill himself you
either had to complete 20 Paragon activities or 20 Renegade activities, but now you could gain enough
Reputation by completing 10 Paragon and
10 Renegade activities). But some might object, stating that you do have to work quite specifically on
either your Paragon or Renegade skills/image in order to unlock Paragon /
Renegade options, and that the whole Reputation thing is just an easy cop-out
for players who don’t like to strategize their actions. Anyway, it’s hardly a
big deal. Navigation
between the different star systems in the Milky Way largely remains the same
as it used to — and a big thanks to BioWare for keeping their planetary
system fully consistent across all three parts of the trilogy — but in light
of the Reaper invasion, there is now an additional catch where you have to
probe various star systems for hidden goodies (such as fuel, which you now
need for navigation, or war assets, which you need to raise your chances of
success) at the risk of being spotted by Reapers, whereupon you should
quickly evacuate the premises; this turns into an additional mini-game of
cat-and-mouse which, like most of Mass
Effect’s mini-games, is fun for the first two or three times you try it
and then becomes annoying for the rest of the experience. As for the actual
planets, fortunately, you no longer have to scan them for resources — the
stupid turn-the-ball-around-and-fire mechanics that took away so much
precious time in Mass Effect 2 —
but unfortunately, you do have to
scan them for occasional goodies, which is even worse, because the goodies
are hidden away in some unnamed and unmarked sector of the scanned planet and
you cannot get to them other than by pure chance. Thus, you do not have to
grind your way through this nearly as much as you did in the previous game,
but there will still be grinding.
This is something that could have been handled more intelligently — for
instance, by actually solving some planet-related puzzle — but, again, the
studio could not afford a more intelligent solution in this case. Probably
the most welcome application of the less-is-more principle, though, came in
the form of the complete removal of the «decrypting» mini-games you had to go
through to pick up resources in the first two games. Somebody at BioWare
finally got it that these things were okay the first few times around, but
ultimately you got sick as heck from guiding your cursor through the same
moving circles of red bricks or from connecting the same pairs of circuits
over and over and over. In Mass Effect
3, when you want to pick up loot, you just pick it up, and when you want
to open a door with your omni-tool, you just open it. Two biggest human
inventions since fire!! Thank you, BioWare, for saving our brains the time
and energy so much better spent on more important tasks, like solving the
three-body problem or bringing peace to the Middle East. In
general, the one conclusion I feel inclined to make about Mass Effect 3’s general interface and
mechanics is that the third game is not at
all about true creative thinking and daring innovation. More accurately,
it is about looking back on the creative and daring experience of the first
two parts and applying rational critical analysis of what was good and what
was bad about them — with the ultimate goal of pleasing as many different
groups of fans as possible. This is a reasonable enough approach, but the
result is that the game offers few genuine surprises as far as the actual
gaming process is concerned — which is not so much of a criticism as merely a
statement of fact. It might,
however, be one of several subtle reasons for Mass Effect 3 not getting as much credit as its predecessors —
after all, game critics do like their games
to offer significant jolts in the, you know, gaming aspect, rather than merely wooing them with cinematic
cutscenes and intricate plots. Personally, I can forgive the stupid planet
scanning system for an emotional experience like being a witness to Thane’s
passing — but a lot of other people probably cannot, and might even
reasonably point out that if you want those kinds of emotional experiences,
read some Dickens or Dostoyevsky instead (and save yourself the trouble of
probing planetary surface as an added bonus). On the other hand, who has ever
seen an RPG without at least some
annoyingly tedious challenges? Getting through them is the proverbial Test of
Patience in the initiation rite of any wannabe gaming warrior. One
last remark about the general visual style of the interface: it marks a
decisive return to the blue-dominant palette of the first game (as opposed to
the somewhat more earthy-than-clinical browns-and-greens of Mass Effect 2), but, for some reason,
also with an emphasis on size — everything is quite a bit bigger here, with
big fat icons and click boxes and large, oversized fonts. Somehow my mind
keeps jumping back to the older days of BioWare — the busy isometric clutter
of Baldur’s Gate, for instance,
with its tiny icons and loads and loads of text in minuscule letters — and
reminding me just how much has changed in the meantime: truly and verily,
each new Mass Effect game was
poised more and more for «mass effect», i.e. oriented at being user-friendly
for as many users as possible, including those who have, like, problems
finding all those little things and boxes on their screen. I do believe they
went a little overboard here, as sometimes the way the game almost literally
takes your hand and walks you through its logistic challenges could almost
feel offensive to the veterans; yet on the other hand, I am glad that each part of the trilogy gets its own visual and
mechanical aesthetics — although, to be fair, only the original Mass Effect feels like it is fully
committed to the technophile-futuristic angle. But hey, that’s fine. For a
real Commander Shepard, the once exotic and unfamiliar Galaxy would start to
feel more and more like his ordinary home as time went by, and so does it
happen for us lowly players just as well. |
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Finally, it’s time to bring this
long-winded discussion to an end — but it’s pretty hard, if not downright
impossible, to separate the concluding thoughts on Mass Effect 3 from the concluding thoughts on the trilogy in
general. To stop myself from too much rambling, I’ll try to stratify and
formulate them as answers to three separate questions: (a) why does Mass Effect 3 get objectively less critical respect than Mass Effect 2?; (b) is there an actual basis for calling Mass Effect the greatest video game
franchise of all time, or is it merely a marketing ploy?; (c) is there an actual future for Mass Effect, or should it be relegated to museum status? [A] The most obvious answer would
be — why, because of the ending, of course. No matter how much effort
somebody like me could waste on justifying the ending and even admiring the
stubbornness of BioWare designers in defending it, it is clear that general
gamer consensus will never accept this monumental profanation of their
efforts, and that the battle cry of OUR
CHOICES DID NOT MATTER!! will continue to ring over the battlefield even after
the last veteran who had the (mis)fortune to play Mass Effect 3 over those fateful few early March weeks of 2012
has his ashes scattered in the wind, no longer capable of grumbling to his
grandsons about how badly this game sucked even after the Extended Cut came
out. But the main mistake of the
designers, in my mind, was not so much the ending as such (which, I
reiterate, constitutes more of a flawed execution of a daring idea than a
massive fuck-up in and out of itself) as the fact that they failed to
properly prepare their customers for this kind of ending. Too much, way too much of Mass Effect 3 gets people into a triumphant gung-ho kind of mood
— time and time again, Shepard and his brute force inflict so much pain on
the Reapers and their involuntary Cerberus allies that the player becomes
100% convinced that simple, steady, assured victory is just around the corner
and that the credits will gloriously play over family pictures of the Commander
with Liara and their blue kids and a picket fence (and you forgot the dog, as Broken
Sword’s Charles Cecil would say). Even the original Take Earth Back
cinematic trailer left not a shred of doubt about how it would all end —
Shepard pirouettes down on a Brute, smashes his ugly mug in with his mighty
omni-tool, and the world at large finally takes five. This is all highly symbolic of the
single largest problem that has existed with artistic creativity since the
dawn of time but has arguably never been blown so much out of proportion as
it is today — the never-ending battle of compromises between popular formula
and individual innovation. Of the three games in the series, the original Mass Effect was still more about the
latter than the former, but by the time Mass
Effect 3 came along, the franchise’s immense popularity necessitated that
it adopt the blockbuster paradigm, whether the designers liked it or not. And
more than any other part of the game, Mass
Effect 3 wobbles between the, let’s say, «organic BioWare spirit» and
«synthetic Electronic Arts algorithm». It wants to be this awesome,
jaw-dropping epic kick-ass spectacle one minute and a philosophical treatise
on the depths of human vanity the next one, to swamp you with completely
straightforward cinematic clichés over the course of one mission and
to try and invert them in bizarre ways in the very next one. It’s confused
and conflicted, and I love and hate it for it — but still, love more often
than hate, because it’s far better to experience artistic confusion than
steady, self-assured anti-artistic formula. In the end, though, I think that
the principal reason why Mass Effect 3 always gets overridden
by Mass Effect 2 on those best-of
lists is because it does not succeed in once more re-inventing the Mass Effect gameplay formula. The
simplest, and ultimately truest, answer is that people liked the original Mass Effect, but it was quite clunky
for them to play. Then Mass Effect 2
came along, with its improved HUD and its thermal clips and its re-branded AI
and its generally more linear approach, and the world (all except for grumpy
old-school isometric RPG veterans) rejoiced because the new and improved
formula worked so damn well. Then Mass
Effect 3 came along and all it could do was fix and tighten things up
without introducing any truly major changes — basically, people just got a
red-on-blue installment instead of a green-on-brown one, with a few tiny
bones thrown to veteran fans in the form of more weapon choices and stuff.
And without that particular
incentive — living out your sci-fi experience in a manner quite radically
different from the previous one — the game found itself more vulnerable on
all the other accounts as well. Even so, there are things that Mass Effect 3 does better than any
other part of the trilogy, and I don’t just mean the ability to explode all
your enemies in a shattering blast of blue energy rocking the very
foundations of the earth your biotic terror of a Vanguard stamps upon. For
one thing, no other Mass Effect
game brings you so many tears — as you witness digital characters that have
become your closest friends sacrifice their lives for you — or so many laughs, courtesy of its Citadel DLC but also many other small
things in the base game itself. No other Mass
Effect game makes you feel so empowered or morally conflicted when
resolving the crucial conflicts of the first two Acts. And no other Mass Effect game makes you ponder
your own place in the universe as frequently as this one, provided you can
occasionally detach yourself from all the adrenaline and immerse yourself
more in the quiet, solitary moments of the game, most of which, I think, are
actually written more carefully and thoughtfully than anything of the sort in
the first two parts. For those reasons and more, I am willing to allocate
exactly 33,333% of the love reserved for Mass
Effect to its third instalment, without trying to set up a complicated
scale to measure the correlation between its own good / bad points and those
of its predecessors. [B] Now for some famous last
words. I realize I am nowhere near close to the biggest expert on video games
(particularly if we mean any types
of video games rather than just plot-driven ones), and even if I were,
comparing Mass Effect with the
likes of Super Mario Bros. would
be a prime exercise in futility. But I do know a few things both about
lengthy, sprawling gaming franchises, stretching all the way from King’s Quest to Assassin’s Creed and beyond — and about games whose creators took
their efforts seriously, trying to elevate the medium toward heights
previously occupied by literature and cinema, from the mysteries of Gabriel Knight to the satire of Grand Theft Auto — and I can honestly
say that never in my sweet short life have I encountered a video game project
with a better balance between AMBITION and REALIZATION than the Mass Effect trilogy. Not «perfect» —
no video game that harbors even an ounce of artistic ambition will ever be
perfect, for reasons that are always beyond the designers’ control — but
«best possible under the circumstances». In fact, by all logical means, an
enterprise as huge as this one should have collapsed under its own
sophisticated framework. After all, even if you design something genuinely
monumental like the Elder Scrolls
universe, there are very few things that hamper you as creator — as long as
you set down the basic lore and swear a solemn oath to respect it, you’re all
set, and, indeed, everything within the world of The Elder Scrolls operates as a set of largely independent
vignettes, whose quality and impact only depend on the talents of those
particular writers and designers who are in charge at this particular moment.
But Mass Effect, through its three
huge installments, tells a single — a singular
— story, one that ultimately decides the fate of the entire Universe as we
(still don’t) know it and has to
dig a whole series of sometimes intersecting, sometimes mutually exclusive
corridors to get you all the way to that decision. Not only that, but it also
has to do that within the setting of a semi-realistic, semi-fantastic future
that has the mind of a serious science-fiction novel and the heart of an epic
big-hero-battles-dragon mythological narrative. You, the player, must believe that you find yourself at the
heart of humanity’s distant (or perhaps even not-so-distant) actual future
and at the same time be capable of acting like a Hercules or a Siegfried
rather than, God help us, a Jens Stoltenberg, or some random Eurocommissioner.
And that’s not to mention that you also must have fun all the way through. And shoot. And strategize. And enjoy the
visuals and the music. There are games that do all this
on smaller scales, sure — The Witcher
trilogy, for instance, which, as I already said, often finds itself compared
to Mass Effect because (a) it is
also a trilogy, (b) it is largely concurrent with Mass Effect chronologically, (c) some would say it does for the
world of video game fantasy the same things that Mass Effect did for the world of video game sci-fi. But The Witcher is far more streamlined
and limited: you do not get to create your own character, you do not get to
be the middleman — more like a helpless observer — in actions that truly shift the balance of powers
around you, and ultimately it’s all about the little man (albeit quite a
charismatic and talented little man) surviving and getting on in a mad, mad,
mad world around him. This, along with a healthy dose of cynicism, actually
helps The Witcher largely avoid all
the ridiculous pitfalls of Mass Effect
(nothing in The Witcher even begins
approaching the cringe factor of WE
FIGHT OR WE DIE!!), but the bigger the gamble, the higher the risks — and
the potential profits. In its crucial moments, Mass Effect wins over my heart, and this means the gamble was a
success after all. As a game, first and foremost, Mass
Effect will never be on the level of a top-notch shooter like Half-Life, and it does not even try
to reach the level of classic RPG sophistication for which early BioWare was
so famous. To excel at Mass Effect,
you neither need the quickest of reflexes nor the sharpest of brains: its
combat mechanics are easy to master and its puzzles are largely solvable by a
5-year old. Occasionally, when replaying certain missions, I find myself
almost offended at how little actual challenge the game offers — surely a
couple actual adventure game-style puzzles, or a couple bosses who fight on
the level of Dark Souls enemies
wouldn’t hurt to raise the stakes a bit? But then I remind myself that
everything ultimately comes in the form of trade-offs: any extra efforts
BioWare would have spent on making Mass
Effect more of an actual game than an «immersive multimedia experience»
would most likely lead to their cutting down on the story, the branching, the
atmosphere, the characters, everything that makes this RPG universe so much
more alive and vibrant than pretty much any other RPG universe that came
before it. Yes, many have criticized Mass Effect for dumbing down the CRPG
aesthetics in the interests of the Average Joe, and they all have good reason
and perfect justification to do that (heck, I have even read angry rants
about how Baldur’s Gate 2 was
already a disgusting commercial sellout after the designer perfection of the
original Baldur’s Gate — what’s to
be said of products from the 21st century, as we move into the world of
high-end production and dazzling cinematics?). But the spirit of that
criticism is the same one that lives in those who criticize people for
preferring Lord Of The Rings to Beowulf, or the Beatles to Thelonious
Monk — «challenge» and «sophistication» are admirable and respectable
parameters, but far from the only ones that matter. Mass Effect intentionally lowers its difficulty — and in doing
so, opens the «nerdy» universe of CRPGs for the mass consumer, but it does so
with taste and respect, making the trilogy into a perfect compromise for
everybody except for the most stubborn-headed snobs out there. In the end, if you have never
played Mass Effect and are simply
wondering what all the hype is about — and
have followed my ramblings long enough to get to this point — let me confirm,
cross-me-heart-and-hope-to-die, that not only is the hype all too well
deserved, but you can actually play
Mass Effect «beyond the hype». In
other words, the game has plenty of unexpected twists for the player to
admire without necessarily subscribing to herd mentality. Contrary to rumors,
you are not forced to play your
Shepard exclusively as a Paragon; you do not
have to necessarily romance quirky aliens like Liara, Garrus, or Tali for the
honorable sakes of interracial diversity; you do not have to be a master combatant; the only thing you do need is play all three games in
their sequential order rather than going straight ahead for Mass Effect 2 like all those damn
best-of lists are telling you to. Sometimes, in fact, all I want to do is
just stand next to an advertising pillar on the Citadel and listen to the
Elcor actor reciting lines from Hamlet
and think «yeah, this one might just be worth a happy ending after all».
There are plenty of hidden layers in this game that I haven’t even touched
upon, despite being unable to stop myself from writing. [C] As for the future... well, I
do not know exactly how much future there is for Mass Effect, but it was nice to see, with the publishing of the Legendary Edition remasters, that it
still has plenty of the present — young gamers continue to embrace the title
whole-heartedly like it’s 2007 all over again; a few graphics-related
quibbles aside, the trilogy has not really aged a day in ten years, which is
still a pretty solid test for this kind of medium. (The only Big Artistic
Compromise that the designers had to make so as to survive in the New
Progressive Era was to remove the infamous close-up shots of Miranda’s
buttcheeks during her conversations with the Commander — a fairly small price
to pay, I’d say, for the right to retain the crown, made even smaller by the
fact that loyal traditionalists, so I have heard, have already come up with
an efficient mod to restore those alluring curves right back where they
belonged in Mass Effect 2. «Perfect in every way», right?). The
availability of all three games joined together in a single, restored and
remastered, digital package means that nobody will any longer be tempted to
play the games in the wrong order; that everybody will have equal access to
all the DLCs, recognizing them as legitimate parts of the gaming experience;
that the Extended Cut to Mass Effect 3’s
ending will preemptively soften the blow for those still unhappy with the
ending; and that the removal of Mass
Effect 3’s Multiplayer mode will influence people to remember the game
more for its epic story than its beauty as a 3rd person shooter. So it’s all
good, except for the nasty EA app that goes along with the package and
watches your every move (but I guess most modern gamers have already made
peace with Big Brother anyway). As for the more substantial
things... well, I still have to force myself to play Mass Effect Andromeda one of these days, a game that, based on
all the trailers, clips, and gameplay footage I have seen so far, feels more
like a not-too-well-executed piece of second-rate fan fiction set in the Mass Effect universe. The best thing
I can say about the whole thing, released back in 2017 and largely forgotten
since then, is that it at least respected the ambiguous lack of a «canon
ending» to Shepard’s story enough to make its writers think of a twist that
allowed to set the story in an «alternate» Mass Effect universe, so that we would be able to play out a
different tale with all of our favorite races without having to know whether
our Commander pressed the red, blue, or green button in the end. Other than
that, it was just a different game — no better or worse than the majority of
average titles coming out every year — but it could not add anything to the
Tale of Commander Shepard, and it did not. It was meant as either a loving
gift to those who could not get enough asari sex, or as a cash grab for those
who were too alarmed at the drop-off rate on Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer servers, or both. It served its
purpose and it went away. More alarming are
the news of an alleged «Mass Effect 5»
in the works that have circulated since 2020 and still have not died down as
of 2024, even though precious little has been leaked ever since the release
of the official teaser
trailer. While a very small part of me aligns with the segment of the
fanbase that is dying for a proper sequel, the reasonable part of me reminds that a proper sequel to Mass Effect would not only be
impossible — the lack of a «canon» ending prevents such a possibility in the
technical sense, unless a lot of the usual retconning is involved — but it would
also be very, very undesirable.
Much like with Star Wars, the story
Has Been Told; it has been graced with a purpose, an inner logic, a
resolution, a start, a middle, and an end. Trying to imagine another round of
dark future for Commander Shepard would be even more of a retarded idea than
imagining the same for Luke Skywalker. Who would we be fighting this time?
The Arch-Reapers? The Super Enhanced Collectors? The great-grandson of the
Illusive Man who has managed to clone Kai Leng so as to take his revenge on
the Alliance? The Leviathans coming to take back Earth? (hey, actually that might work for a minute or two). Of course, there is no need to get
panicky. It is perfectly possible that BioWare, or even Electronic Arts, will
finally commit some kind of commercial suicide before the new game is
finished; or, more likely, will just let it marinate in development hell for
a couple more years before pulling the plug. Even if it does get finished, though, the release of a crappy, useless
sequel will only go so far as to tarnish the reputation of the original — for
a couple of years at most, before everybody forgets about it as they did with
Andromeda. And in the best case
scenario (which I would assess at about, say, 10% probability), if the game
gets completed and turns out to be not a direct sequel, but something less
predictable, more imaginative and purposeful, well, it’ll simply be a
separate story that will have to be evaluated on its own terms. In all honesty, what I would really crave is not a sequel, or a
prequel, but rather something like a revised and expanded version of the
original trilogy — which is why the Legendary
Edition, even if it never promised anything of the kind, has been a bit
of a disappointment in the end. As far as we know, a lot of dialog for the
games ended up on the cutting floor; a lot of ideas that could have made
parts of the story make more sense were left out due to time and budget
constraints; and most of the writers, artists, and voice actors working on
the game are still alive and could reconvene aboard the Normandy on pretty
short notice. From an artistic point, something like an Expanded Ultra-Legendary Edition, brushed up along those lines,
would have been wonderful (the equivalent of a proper «director’s cut» for a
classic movie); unfortunately, this is never going to happen because modern
video game studios, particularly big ones, simply do not work that way. Even the way they remain, though —
imperfect in so many ways, ridden with plotholes, stuffed with tedious bits
of grinding, occasionally clunky and glitchy — all three games, taken
together, remain a monumental achievement that is highly unlikely to meet its
match anytime soon, simply because that time window has closed (in fact, it
is quite probable that, had Karpyshyn and Co. pitched their proposal just a
couple years later, it would have already been too late) and it would likely
require a complete restructuring of the current big game industry to produce
something that would combine the same kind of quality with the same insane
amount of ambition. The last significant gaming franchise to try out
something of the sort was probably the Horizon
series, launched back in 2017 with Horizon
Zero Dawn, but for all the gorgeous looks and pieces of actual soul
(mostly courtesy of the super-talented Ashly Burch voicing the main
character) in that series, it honestly does not even begin to approach the
world-building breadth or the emotional depth of Mass Effect, focusing much more on visual flash, progressive
values, and the same «algorithmic» approach that lies like a blight on 99% of
today’s popular artistry (as in, «people like dinosaurs» + «people like
robots» + «people like blowing up stuff» > «make a game about hunting and
blowing up giant robotic dinosaur machines» > PROFIT). It’s simply that games are no longer made today in the
same spirit; like I already said, it’s almost a miracle that the Mass Effect trilogy could even be
completed with only some very mild betrayal of the principles it originally
stood for back in 2007.
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