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Neruz posted:Honestly I'm pretty sure Ardat-Yakshi are supposed to be Succubus\Vampire analogues because as we have already established the artists at Bioware are all horny sixteen year old males who are both simultaneously aroused and terrified by women and they just had to go there with their blue skinned space babes. The fact that they end up being unfortunately similar in concept to the same nonsense spouted by people who are afraid of 'the gay menace' is just that, unfortunate but not indicative of any statement about homosexuality.
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Aug 7, 2014 17:42
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Arglebargle III posted:It isn't until ME3 that they reveal there are a whole demographic of these people and that they're all in jail. To the writers' credit here, the player gets some limited opportunity to point how hosed up this is to the Asari. If it was treated as unproblematic, then it would be more than a little troubling. The Monasteries are mentioned in ME2, but only in the codex. This has confused a lot of people, especially since Samara says before her loyalty mission that "I have three daughters. There are three Ardat-Yakshi at large today. It is as it sounds". (Anyone got the exact line handy? I'm not sure about my paraphrasing but I'm pretty sure she implies that all the Adrat-Yakshi in existence are her daughters).
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Aug 7, 2014 17:56
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I'm not the biggest affectionato of classical science fiction in general, so I have a bit of a question. I can see the argument that certain species are sometimes constructed as an avatar towards some real-life equivalent, with species-vs-speices as an upscale of what would normally be culture-vs-culture, even if it is just a subculture. Is this type of thing common in science fiction at large, or is it more a result of anthropomorphism on the player/reader's part? For example, official sources cite that the Turians in Mass Effect were based as a modern projection of a Roman Empire had it not transformed or fallen. I found this interesting, since had I not known that I would've found the Turians to be a quite original concept when compared to the other alien races.
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Aug 7, 2014 18:25
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Morroque posted:I'm not the biggest affectionato of classical science fiction in general, so I have a bit of a question. I can see the argument that certain species are sometimes constructed as an avatar towards some real-life equivalent, with species-vs-speices as an upscale of what would normally be culture-vs-culture, even if it is just a subculture. Is this type of thing common in science fiction at large, or is it more a result of anthropomorphism on the player/reader's part? Really kinda depends on the author. A lot of popular sci-fi (Star Trek, Star Wars) just has cliche's define their race. The Proud Warrior Race dudes, the Holier Than Thou, the Perfect Advanced Pacifists That Need Human Ingenuity to Save them, etc.
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Aug 7, 2014 18:30
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Morroque posted:I'm not the biggest affectionato of classical science fiction in general, so I have a bit of a question. I can see the argument that certain species are sometimes constructed as an avatar towards some real-life equivalent, with species-vs-speices as an upscale of what would normally be culture-vs-culture, even if it is just a subculture. Is this type of thing common in science fiction at large, or is it more a result of anthropomorphism on the player/reader's part? It's pretty common, to the point that the idea of a 'hat' for a race to wear is a common trope. I hate the term hat cause it's loaded with TvTropes baggage but it's a good way to describe races. So Turians (and Romulans, shocker) are Romans, the Federation is the epitome of Greek ideals, Krogan (and Klingons) are stereotypical Spartan blood/honor warrior races, Asari (and Eldar) are mystical Oracle of Delphi psionic races, and so on. A Curvy Goonette fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 18:31
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A Curvy Goonette posted:So Turians (and Romulans, shocker) are Romans, the Federation is the epitome of Greek ideals, Krogan (and Klingons) are stereotypical Spartan blood/honor warrior races, Asari (and Eldar) are mystical Oracle of Delphi psionic races, and so on. We see the future through the rear-view mirror...?
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Aug 7, 2014 18:45
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Neruz posted:I have never heard of a homosexual person who sucks the life force out of everyone they have sex with. Uhhh dude have you heard of AIDS? I know we pretty much agree about this silly thing but this is such a thing for you to say. I mean sure it's not instant-acting but for about 20 years it was as close to life-force sucking sex vampire death as you can get without magic. It's still a death sentence, now you just have the chance of living long enough for something more normal to kill you. This is heading into derail territory so you might not want to give this a lengthy response.
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Aug 7, 2014 19:03
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Morroque posted:For example, official sources cite that the Turians in Mass Effect were based as a modern projection of a Roman Empire had it not transformed or fallen. I found this interesting, since had I not known that I would've found the Turians to be a quite original concept when compared to the other alien races. Aliens can wear hats but the best ones tend to accumulate their own idiosyncrasies over time. I think the Turians are a good example; they might have started out in a writer's mind as wearing a Roman hat but in the process of writing they became bird fascists with a sympathetic streak and a meritocracy that is distinctly inhuman. Would you have known they were based on Rome if no one had told you?
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Aug 7, 2014 19:18
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Sombrerotron posted:In all fairness, in the minds of many religiously-inclined people, homosexuals appear to be both functionally and spiritually equivalent to folkloristic figures like succubi and vampires. Now that is depressing.
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Aug 7, 2014 19:18
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Morroque posted:I'm not the biggest affectionato of classical science fiction in general, so I have a bit of a question. I can see the argument that certain species are sometimes constructed as an avatar towards some real-life equivalent, with species-vs-speices as an upscale of what would normally be culture-vs-culture, even if it is just a subculture. Is this type of thing common in science fiction at large, or is it more a result of anthropomorphism on the player/reader's part? I think a lot of it is necessary for a commercial product (hence why I find some of the complaints quite silly). Science-fiction characters tend to just be bits of human things glued together in new and exciting ways, and if you're not careful can just come across as obvious projection behind the guise of writing an alien *flies off to MY REPUBLICAN DAD planet, where everything is broken and everyone is an rear end in a top hat*. And that's basically just because, initially, it's extremely hard to conceptualise life outside of existing human understandings and then secondly, it's even harder to get the audience to engage with a conversation between a non-emoting hippo and a religious jellyfish, unless played for laughs (and both of those are still earth things wearings hats). There's some stuff Wittgenstein discussed about how if lions could speak English, we still couldn't understand them. I won't go into that, because it's far too pretentious for a thread about a bad video game, but it's something that impacts the game particularly if you're going to start talking about EDI, Legion and the Geth and in how Legion is written between ME2 and ME3. If you're going to write these characters as a new form of life, you can't just then end up giving them the Data character where they're basically a two-year-old constantly asking why the sun is yellow and why dogs do poos. But, of course, the reason that happens is because it's incredibly difficult to write a story from the perspective of an entirely alien life-form, such as an android, or a woman. To be honest, though, I actually always saw the Turians as more of a classical British Empire type. They do the stiff upper lip brilliantly (which is another thing that works for Garrus' character), the haughty air, and the insistence on military superiority. They're basically just missing King George moustaches. FullLeatherJacket fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 19:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Aliens can wear hats but the best ones tend to accumulate their own idiosyncrasies over time. I think the Turians are a good example; they might have started out in a writer's mind as wearing a Roman hat but in the process of writing they became bird fascists with a sympathetic streak and a meritocracy that is distinctly inhuman. Would you have known they were based on Rome if no one had told you? This is definitely what I like about the Turians, but also the thing about them that confuses me most. Part of it is mystery; we don't get the chance to see any specifically Turian settlement up close in person throughout the Mass Effect games. All we see of Palaven is its moon, and the hint that it is usually very hot there with mentions from Garrus about Virmire and how Turian civilians always wear thick clothing when in multi-species areas. (Tolerant of, but not used to cold.) Aside from that, there aren't really very many indicators of Turian culture and we can only go off of what we are told. We kinda have to fill in the gaps on our own. That said, the Turians are definitely monocultural. To be born of the Turian species is to be a member of and embody the nation which Turians have founded. Garrus has an interesting line in the second game, where he admits he doesn't think he's a very good Turian. It's an interesting line because it points to the larger culture which Garrus is from and how he couldn't live up to the standards required of him, forcing him to find new standards to live by, even if he does so in defeat. It really summarizes the central conflict at the heart of his character. ... but if you dwell on it a little, the line is a strange one. We might know what Garrus means when he says it, but if I were to say "I don't think I'm a very good human," what could that possibly mean? To be human could mean any number of contradictory things. Meanwhile, if I were to replace "human" in that phrase with "Canadian" or "Brazilian", that would make a lot more sense and be roughly equivalent to what Garrus meant. A species as a nation seems to be the understanding Mass Effect is operating on.
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Aug 7, 2014 20:06
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FullLeatherJacket posted:I think a lot of it is necessary for a commercial product (hence why I find some of the complaints quite silly). Science-fiction characters tend to just be bits of human things glued together in new and exciting ways, and if you're not careful can just come across as obvious projection behind the guise of writing an alien *flies off to MY REPUBLICAN DAD planet, where everything is broken and everyone is an rear end in a top hat*. And that's basically just because, initially, it's extremely hard to conceptualise life outside of existing human understandings and then secondly, it's even harder to get the audience to engage with a conversation between a non-emoting hippo and a religious jellyfish, unless played for laughs (and both of those are still earth things wearings hats).
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Aug 7, 2014 20:20
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Yeah but you'd know what a friend meant if he turned to you and, taking off his hat with Death's Head pin, said "I don't think I'm a very good Nazi." The game's pretty good about reminding the player that it's the Asari Republics. Making the Turian species all member of a monolithic state is something they at least did on purpose instead of through negligence. And to their credit the characterization seems right. The Turians appear to have the superhuman reserve and integrity to run a massive meritocracy without it turning into a "meritocracy" like it would with humans. Even the Turian villains are composed and principled. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 20:28
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I should go.
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 20:36
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Arglebargle III posted:Even the Turian villains are composed and principled. I offer a rebuttal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrgNgnkvrA0 (Though there's actually a reason for this, it's too good an opportunity to pass up)
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Aug 7, 2014 21:22
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I still find it funny that that is the first thing you see Saren do (besides shoot Nihlus) and it just always seemed so silly to me
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Aug 7, 2014 21:33
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Rargh! Urgh! Arrgh!
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Aug 7, 2014 21:33
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I wonder how voice actors feel when the director tells them to scream dramatically. Is it ever not silly?
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Aug 7, 2014 21:40
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BioMe posted:I wonder how voice actors feel when the director tells them to scream dramatically. Is it ever not silly?
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Aug 7, 2014 21:49
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BioMe posted:I wonder how voice actors feel when the director tells them to scream dramatically. Is it ever not silly? I'm sure it feels silly from time to time, but direction is there to keep it focused without feeling overbearing. "You're on the cusp of promotion, but you're up against a 3-Hole puncher. You two are alone in a room, and no one can hear you. Murder the 3-Hole puncher, go batshit." "Rargh! Urgh! Arrgh!"
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Aug 7, 2014 21:53
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Sombrerotron posted:Not only that, it's generally not really feasible to flesh out an alien civilisation on the scale of an entire planet - or multiple planets, even. Just consider how incredibly diverse human civilisation is, with its multitude of peoples, cultures, and languages. It's more practical to write most aliens as if they're weird-looking people from a weird country on earth, than as if they're individuals from civilisations as diverse as all of humanity's. By creating a single dominant culture for any given species, it's also much easier to explore a particular topic through that species. Same thing with planets, really (cf. the archetypical desert, ocean, snow, and lava planets). Some people have also put forward the hypothesis that due to how expensive and resource intensive it is to start and maintain a significant space-based economy that the population of a planet must neccessarily be almost entirely united together behind a single governing entity in order to effectively do so; thus any spacefaring aliens might actually be less diverse than non-spacefaring ones purely because there aren't enough resources to support multiple nations on a single planet and have them all got to space as well. Of course this shouldn't apply in the ME series because space travel is super cheap thanks to the fact that the Reapers built all the infrastructure for free, but 
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Aug 7, 2014 22:19
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Sorry to interrupt, but apparently Casey Hudson has just left Bioware. http://blog.bioware.com/2014/08/07/casey-hudsons-departure-from-biowareea/
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Aug 8, 2014 00:03
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Did he print his resignation letter on Red paper, Green paper, or Blue paper? (I hate the fact that this thread is making me actually want to dig through the closet, find my Mass Effect 3 disc, and finally sit down to play more than just the MP portion.)
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Aug 8, 2014 03:17
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EricFate posted:(I hate the fact that this thread is making me actually want to dig through the closet, find my Mass Effect 3 disc, and finally sit down to play more than just the MP portion.) Well, that's the whole point of the thread, isn't it? To resell everyone on the game.
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Aug 8, 2014 03:41
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Montegoraon posted:Well, that's the whole point of the thread, isn't it? To resell everyone on the game. If it helps towards that goal, this is a reminder that ME3 is one of the few games that lets you turn invisible, run up to an unsuspecting mook, and then blow his brains out with a shotgun. Lt. Danger mentioned the whole weapon weight/cooldown thing earlier, but I don't think he really captured just how many fun options that opened up.
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Aug 8, 2014 04:33
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My favourite thing about Saren is that Shepard and Anderson declare him guilty and chase him halfway across space from a single farmer's testimony of "some Turian murdered another Turian". If you cut out the scenes that Shepard never saw, it becomes perfectly clear Anderson just has it in for the guy. Probably hosed up his own Spectre mission all those years ago, and has been blaming poor Saren ever since. Lt. Danger, can you talk over the dialogue less in future videos? I'm trying to watch a video game here. Red Bones fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 08:24
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Actually, Saren hosed Anderson over and tried to kill him. IIRC, the two of them went on a mission to a fuel refinery type place. I think they either had to kill or extract one person. There was a town surrounding the refinery where most of the workers lived. Saren went off on his own and blew up the factory. Then in a his word vs. Andersons he got away with it. Anderson already knew how bad Saren was. The dock worker on Eden Prime had no reason to lie. And anyway, how would he even know who Saren was without hearing the name?
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Aug 8, 2014 08:53
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Let's talk about Setting, because I think Mass Effect uses it really well. In fact, I think Mass Effect goes back to the setting well so often and does it so well that it covers up some of the first game's flaws. Mass Effect 2 spends less time with setting (as you'd expect I guess) but it's done very competently. ME2's areas are generally more limited but visually interesting and build a more fragmented but still believable game world. Mass Effect 3's setting work, on the other hand, is pretty bad. Areas tend towards small, simple, and even generic; a huge blow in my opinion to a series that traded so heavily on a well-built setting in its first installment. I don't know if it's because the game is rushed or what, but let's compare and contrast the settings across the three games. This is partly about art, partly about gameplay, and partly about the "feel" or "use" of space. Lt. Danger did a good job talking about how the games' use of space has changed over the titles, and I agree with him (obviously) that it's not for the better. Mass Effect -- Mass Effect's settings are lovingly constructed and developed over the course of the game. Areas are almost universally large and open. You'll notice in the original game that many, if not most, spaces are designed as much to be explored as they are to facilitate the player. This is not an accident, Mass Effect will subtly and not-so-subtly urge the player to explore the setting, and give him/her tools to do so. Mass Effect employs a number of level design tricks to make its areas feel large and real, and to make the player engage with the environment. Mass Effect's settings are often integral to the work (it couldn't exist in the same form without some zones) and thematically charged; the Citadel gets more development over the course of the game than quite a few characters. The Presidium is the best example of this. The Presidium is exposition as only a video game can do it. The design of its space, the many alien characters within, and the constant tinkle of fountains and murmur of voices gives a better sense of space than any establishing shot or paragraph of exposition. It may seem like you never actually do anything with its wide-open bridges and courts, but you'll actually spend an hour or more just exploring it, meeting the aliens and finding out what there is to do here. Chucking that into the "not gameplay" category in my opinion is a mistake. When Kaidan tells you how impressed he is at the Citadel's size and cosmopolitan bustle, you don't have to even glance at the skybox he's looking at to agree with him. You've already lived that on the Presidium. Mass Effect also builds multi-purpose areas. The council chambers, citadel wards, (admittedly lousy) nightclub, even the bemoaned elevators, they're all going to be the setting for both the series' trademark conversation gameplay and shooting play. This may not seem important, but it contributes to a lived-in feeling that RPG settings, with their timeless characters standing in one place for weeks, can sorely lack. Hub zones can feel sterile when they aren't imbued with even the illusion of something happening. Walking through an area where you had a firefight or even punched a reporter contributes to the illusion that this is a real space in which things happen, even if as a player you know that you could go on vacation and come back a week later to everything exactly as it was. Even if this effect doesn't sound convincing to you, building areas in this way is critical for the moment when the game blows up the Presidium and has you shoot your way up the steps of the Council Chamber. In order for hub areas to receive any development, they have to be designed so that things can happen in them. It may seem minor but it's also a critical design choice because of what it enables you to do with setting. Now let's talk about development, because the Citadel is also the perfect example. It's the setting for the first act and the climactic battle, and that climax wouldn't work nearly as well if it didn't engage with and develop the setting. The Citadel is a metaphor for galactic civilization and it's important that it's pretty drat impressive. No skybox could convey that; they had to build a big citadel and put you in it for a long while. They don't just tell you that the Citadel is the heart of galactic strength, the Presidium and council chamber with its topiary, fountains and sleek future-marble aesthetic make that abundantly clear in the hours that you spend within them. So when the climax plays out in a burning and exploding Presidium, when you leap out of the Citadel tower and fight your way up the side, literally at right-angles to the established power structure, *subtext* with a Lovecraftian menace engulfing the seat of civilization, it means something! How many people didn't go "holy poo poo!" when the citadel tower exterior fight got started? That effect doesn't come from the visuals, it comes from Mass Effect's steady work at making the Citadel a real place of real importance for the player over the previous hours. Finally, let's talk about sense of place generally, since we need to get off the Citadel and finish out talking about the first game. Mass Effect does an excellent job of giving the player a sense of where they are throughout, and a sense that these places are large and, for lack of a better word, real. Now you might scoff and say "immersion is for the weak/nerd/unenlightened" but come on, places that feel both fantastical and real are a staple of good space opera. Back when ME came out you could say, "of course we go to Lava Planet, this is Mass Effect!" confident of what ME was. After all, it spent so much time telling you. (If you haven't realized yet, I loved the first entry in this series.) Before we talk about the places themselves, I want to point out that most of these places appear in ME's second act, which is a loose mystery plot. This is important because it makes exploring the setting explicitly part of the player's mission, continuing Mass Effect's strong links between the setting and the player's conscious experience. Mass Effect spent oodles of effort on its setting, and then consciously pointed the player at it, and even gave him/her tools to explore. This is just good design, good alignment of art, gameplay and story, good use of resources, good job all around. So, a brief overview of how Mass Effect built these mission areas. First, outdoor areas and travel. Mass Effect spent a lot of time in outdoor areas, and it worked very hard to convince the player that these outdoor areas were not simply tunnels with a skybox. It did this through a whole bag of tricks, including contiguous indoor areas, multiple levels, landscapes that block line of sight, and forcing the player to travel long distances. The first bits are all pretty standard industry stuff, but Mass Effect was obsessed with making the player travel compared to other Unreal III titles. In every location players are taking trams, elevators, or most often driving your space car. And it works. Lava Planet, Ice Planet, Rust Planet, Vermire, Ilos, even New Eden before you get Space Car all force you to travel long distances through their simulated environments. During these linear trips (on New Eden you're even on a train) you get treated to distance scenery, detailed skyboxes and foreground environmental objects. It's a very simple trick to establish a sense of space, and it works very well on the players' monkey brains. Can you imagine if you simply teleported from the corporate office on Novaria to the abandoned research lab? Or if Rust Planet lacked its precarious skyway? It would be greatly diminished. (This is largely how ME2 does its settings, but it has its own redeeming qualities.) Lava Planet might not even be remembered as Lava Planet in players' minds without its ten minutes of simple driving around gameplay, it might be known as "that place with the ruins and Liara" yet with that little trick, sense of place is still there years later. A simple trick, and not even particularly intensive in art assets, gives these places the sense that they are large and real. It also has the added benefit of just making you stay in Mass Effect's simulated environments longer, and players tend to notice more when you make them look at something for a longer time. (Duh.) But I'm getting hung up on the outdoor areas. Mass Effect also does a good job of varying up indoor areas. People might be surprised to hear that given the criticism leveled at the original for reusing prefab building assets, but that was almost entirely a side-quest issue. Lava Planet's interiors are unmistakeably a dig site and ruins, Rust Planet's interiors are maze-like and highly vertical, Novaria's interiors are surprisingly varied as you'll visit a corporate office center, a ruined laboratory, a windswept roof, a reactor chamber, and finally an underground bunker. Vermire is probably the most varied area in the game, and Ilos is an unforgettably creepy area with a graveyard-like exterior and a cyclopian tomb interior. This isn't just me waxing rhapsodic here either. Varying internal areas again helps to create a sense of real space. It also helps with gameplay. You won't find a zone in Mass Effect that doesn't have at least one transition in style, won't find a zone that doesn't use vertical space. In short, you won't find a place that's boring to explore. And that's very important because again, Mass Effect really really wants you to explore its setting. I hope this gives you a sense of what Mass Effect was doing with its setting. They certainly knew what they were doing! From pre-release marketing to the Council Chamber collapsing on you after the climactic battle, Mass Effect knew that its setting was one of the most important elements of the game, and went to great pains to get the player to believe in, engage with, and explore the setting. I think it says a lot that the most iconic moments of Mass Effect usually couldn't be moved to a different area, the setting is as important as the characters in many respects. What they did with the Citadel in Mass Effect, the way that it was practically a character in the story with its own arc, as far as I know will never be seen again in this series. Mass Effect 2 is going to step back from setting as an important story element even as it continues its deft use of art and makes its own mark on level design. Mass Effect 3 is, in my opinion, going to completely poo poo the bed as far as setting is concerned. Now, to the compare and contrast part. I hope you're still with me! This is getting far longer than I realized, but ME2 and ME3 should be shorter to get through. As we go through those games I'm going to compare and contrast with what I've said about Mass Effect. I will save those for other posts though, since this is already a lot to get through. Some images to give you a sense of scale:   The Presidium in Mass Effect. It is big. It forces you to explore the environment by making you walk a long way to do anything. You would have to literally close your eyes to not notice and appreciate the Presidium. There's even a guided tour. Because the bridges are the lowest accessible part of the area, there is always something to look at both above and below you. Even a player who never looks up will get an eyeful of scenery on this map. This takes a lot more time and effort than a look trigger. I would say it's a lot more effective at conveying place. As I said, there's no way to adequately represent this area in another medium. It's much too large to convey the player's sense of it in an image; images that do get all of it don't convey its sense of scale as the player navigates its sprawling lower level with everything else looming above and images from the lower level only get a small part of the zone.   This is the outdoor travel trick. The first images is Feros as you probably remember it. The second is a representative image of Feros interiors. It's not a terrible interior; it's intended to be claustrophobic and decaying, but it would be an oppressive and impenetrable maze with no sense of place at all. It needs that first image, and it needs the player to visit that wide-open space and spend time in it between trips to the mazelike skyscrapers, for the place to be comprehended and remembered. Without the skyway Feros would be unmemorable. Compare to the high-rise assault in Mass Effect 2, in which the building itself is competently constructed but utterly forgettable. The skyway is just a road inside a skybox, and you only spend maybe 15 minutes on it in the whole game, but it anchors Feros spatially and conceptually for the player. The images don't really do it justice since you can't explore a space like in images or even video like you can in a game. I would upload more but I'm having trouble with my VPN and uploads. Ice Planet and Lava Planet are similarly dependent on the outdoor sequences for setting exposition. There are cutscenes with traditional establishing shots, but their expository power is fleeting compared to just putting the player somewhere and making him navigate that area for a few minutes. As we'll see in ME2.
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Aug 8, 2014 08:53
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Red Bones posted:Lt. Danger, can you talk over the dialogue less in future videos? I'm trying to watch a video game here. No, sorry about that. This LP is really kinda aimed at people who have already played ME3. I seriously considered just summarising the entire game in the synopsis so everyone would know what was coming. Sometimes I need to talk when other people are talking! Think of it like a DVD commentary. Arglebargle III posted:Setting Thanks for this, really insightful. Couple of points I want to highlight as particularly interesting: quote:Mass Effect's settings are lovingly constructed and developed over the course of the game. Areas are almost universally large and open. You'll notice in the original game that many, if not most, spaces are designed as much to be explored as they are to facilitate the player. quote:The Citadel is a metaphor for galactic civilization quote:Lava Planet, Ice Planet, Rust Planet, Vermire, Ilos, even New Eden before you get Space Car all force you to travel long distances through their simulated environments. During these linear trips (on New Eden you're even on a train) you get treated to distance scenery, detailed skyboxes and foreground environmental objects. It's a very simple trick to establish a sense of space, and it works very well on the players' monkey brains. quote:Ilos is an unforgettably creepy area with a graveyard-like exterior and a cyclopian tomb interior Upcoming video is gonna show just how well last point this works - long-time players should instantly understand a location's purpose and origins shown very briefly because of solid art design from ME1.
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Aug 8, 2014 09:44
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Waltzing Along posted:Then in a his word vs. Andersons he got away with it. Anderson already knew how bad Saren was. The dock worker on Eden Prime had no reason to lie. And anyway, how would he even know who Saren was without hearing the name? Ah, checking it I realise I've got it wrong. I thought you heard about it from those people hiding in that little locked shed nearby, rather than someone hiding within earshot. Re: environment chat, I found the ME1 citadel to be if not too large, then too badly laid out. Those bridges in the presidium are interesting the first time you cross them, but having the two collections of NPCs in the presidium seperated by a long walk you have to take over and over in the course of multiple sidequests is not great map design, in my opinion. I ended up relying on the quick travel system to get anywhere after my initial look around, which doesn't seem like a good thing in a game that is very big into exploration. The other thing that always bothered me a little about the citadel is that you can see from the countless views you get of it that it's essentially a single enormous city, but you get to see relatively little of it in the games, and they never quite seem to feel like that kind of environment. Reusing urban assets to make some sidequests in other parts of the citadel, or splitting up the locations in the citadel you visit with some tram rides or even just putting in bridges/balconies overlooking busy streets below would have done a lot to improve that. The ME2 citadel is really funny because they obviously reacted to complaints it was too hard to get around in the first game, but made the bulk of it four almost identical floors seperated by staircases that are pretty much identical to those two presidium bridges in terms of putting long, boring walks between areas.
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Aug 8, 2014 10:31
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Let's continue on to Mass Effect 2's treatment of its settings. ME2 uses setting in service to gameplay and characters, rather than as an integral element of the game like it was in Mass Effect. Gameplay is "tighter" and there are more characters, and this means that settings are more numerous and smaller in general. ME2's art direction is still pretty drat good so these areas are still visually interesting. Level design is still competent, so ME2's areas are fun to play a third-person shooter in. However, no setting receives any development and exploration is no longer rewarding or even really possible for the player. ME2 jettisoned a lot of the RPG baggage from ME, and when it came out that was fairly controversial. Some people really missed buying guns, dressing up their teammates, and even doing boring side quests full of reused assets. But when ME2 jettisoned a lot of RPG convention, it had effects on setting and level design that might not be immediately obvious as effects of a game design philosophy. The first effect is the reduction of hub areas. With very little to buy, quests that revolve around one character at a time, and a sharp reduction in sidequesting, hubs just have less to do. There's no need for NPCs hanging around to sell the player stuff, offer information, or ask for help. With ME2's emphasis on "tighter" design and less stuff to do, hub areas get pretty savagely curtailed in ME2 in terms of space. You'll notice that many hub areas in ME2 (and ME3) are balconies of some kind, trading large explorable areas for a small, utilitarian area dominated by a large skybox. Lt. Danger already mentioned this. Both designs are, of course, just illusions of real place, but Mass Effect 2 literally trades down to a 2-dimensional illusion of space in the form of the skybox/matte painting. Mass Effect 2's hub areas aren't just worse than Mass Effect's, they are often downright bad. Tuchanka is the worst hub, and it's not hard to see it even without making any comparisons to the earlier title. It's cramped, dreary, and it's not really clear what the space is or was before the bombs fell. There are only a handful of characters, nothing to explore, a couple of tepid minigames, and there's even an invisible wall at one end of the zone. Asari Libertarian Planet and Citadel Wards both suffer from balcony-skybox syndrome. Omega is the best hub in the game, and unsurprisingly it's also got the most going on with the multilevel dance club, market that's reminiscent of the previous game, and random NPCs hanging out. Its mission areas are the best too, mostly down to art design. Unsurprisingly, of the 4 hubs it's also the one that requires the most walking around and has the largest interactable areas. The next effect is mission areas. Mass Effect 2 has a lot of characters for us to go collect, lots of shooting galleries for us to play through, and not much patience for anything else. Indeed, it may have been created under the assumption that players didn't have much time for anything else. Less downtime and more setpieces to get through mean that areas have to be mostly self-contained. Mass Effect 2 doesn't have time to put in the effort the original spent on maintaining the illusion that mission areas represent large contiguous real places that Shepard adventures within. Establishing a sense of space is no longer a priority, the bag of tricks are left out, and so ME2's locations don't have a sense of being part of a larger, navigable, contiguous space. Art direction can go some distance in covering for this, for example in Omega. You may only rarely have a sense of where you are within the asteroid, but the art effectively communicates that the player is still in Omega and yet in a different part than he was before. Honorable mention goes to the removal of Space Car, which I think is a real shame. I went over how effective Space Car was at establishing place with a limited use of art assets and time. Space Car is replaced with Space Helicopter, Normandy's shuttle, which whisks the player from place to place. Except it doesn't and that's where the problem lies here. The player isn't actually moving; this is all an illusion, and the shuttle offers pretty much none of the tools that Space Car did to maintain that illusion. In fact, it's pretty much a non-entity. Aside from providing an excuse for aerial establishing shots, it plays no role. You might as well teleport to your destination. Space Car is dead, and I think you could make a good argument that Tuchanka died with it. The Tuchanka hub and mission zones would make a lot more sense with Space Car around. Jumping tracks for a second here, this is where we can start to get into discussion of why Mass Effect 2 (or 3) was disappointing. When you compare the games, you realize that not only are they different (not necessarily bad) they have differences that might never have been intended or expected, and which probably won't be appreciated. Let's take the Citadel Wards as a case study. The Citadel Wards were perhaps the most requested new area for Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect did a good job on the Citadel, but the effort clearly went into the Presidium and the original's Citadel Wards were disappointing. Players wanted to see the glittering cities that had previously only existed in skybox and cinematics, and the designers were probably equally interested in giving it to them. But Mass Effect 2's shift in design focus meant that, when it unveiled the Citadel Wards, players were universally disappointed. Something got lost in translation. Here's what happened: the Citadel Wards don't exist in ME2 like the Presidium did in ME. The Citadel Wards, as presented in ME2, are some kind of mall. Ostensibly some of the missions also take place on the Citadel Wards. But they don't, at least not the way the game presents them. Thane's loyalty mission takes place in some kind of penthouse on a skyscraper on the Citadel Wards, but you'd hardly know it from the way the game presents it to you. From the player's perspective, you teleport there. You don't even have to access the area by going to the "wards" mall, you can get there by accessing a console anywhere in the Citadel. You could argue about whether this is bad design or not, but it's very much not what Mass Effect would have done, and very much not how Mass Effect would have built the Citadel Wards. Mass Effect would have delved into its bag of tricks, forced the player to drive Space Car or take a tram, blurred the distinction between hub and mission area, and most importantly turned the player loose in an open area designed to give the impression (however false) that this zone is Citadel Wards, and missions coming off it are in adjacent areas. ME2 didn't do that. In fact I'm having trouble remembering which parts took place on the Citadel Wards and which parts took place on Asari Libertarian Planet. Okay, back to setting. So to recap, ME2 uses a tighter hub/mission structure and more self-contained areas to service gameplay and character. We can see this on the Citadel, on Asari Libertarian Planet, and on Omega, probably my favorite location. Now let's go on to what this means for level design and then the engagement with setting in general. On level design, ME2 does good work. Levels tend to be on the small side and linear, with a reward at the end, but use cover and vertical space well. They tend to be enclosed spaces but often have spectacular skyboxes. And that's really all they are, and all the were built to be: they're shooting galleries with a reward at one end, a bunch of badguys in the middle, and some cool wallpaper. Junkyard Planet, Jungle Planet, Nightmare Lab, Space Jail, Space Quarry, they're all interesting ideas for levels and they're all executed pretty well. In fact, I think these one-off settings are probably done better than any of the hub-spoke areas in the game; contrast Junkyard Planet with Tuchanka's boring hub and relatively empty mission zones, or Asari Libertarian Planet's thoroughly interchangeable industrial zones with Space Quarry's strikingly lit, hard-edged worksite. I think this speaks to the turn away from the Hub-Mission structure in general in ME2, and perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that it's at its best when allowed to go do its own thing. And I think it did attempt to do its own thing with setting: use it to give character exposition. The places where you find characters or woo them into not dying says a lot about them. On Omega, Garrus is beat up and grittier in this beat up and grittier space station, and Mordin seems to have been drawn to a place not unlike Tuchanka on a crusade to right ills. On Asari Libertarian Planet, Miranda and Samara are dealing with the dirty secrets of high society. It shouldn't be a surprise that you find Grunt on probably the second-worst planet in the galaxy, and then take him home to the worst planet. Jack's maximum security prison and nightmare lab visit are an especially obvious bit of characterization by proxy. Yet I'm not sure if all of this succeeds as setting. The player could be forgiven for feeling beaten over the head with each character's story, even without tying the setting to the person. Meanwhile there are issues with setting and area design going on that I've enumerated everywhere else. Setting might have worked better in service of character if they'd simply put more effort into setting. After all, does Tuchanka really say "bombed-out wasteland" more than it says "garage with desert access?" How much effort would it have taken to create a drivable Tuchanka, and how much would Grunt and Wrex have benefited from that Tuchanka? And finally, is blowing up these settings really the best way to serve the associated character? Make your own count of how many places explode during or after Shepard's exit in Mass Effect 2. That's a good segue into Mass Effect 2's engagement with and development of setting, because nothing epitomizes Mass Effect 2's approach to setting better than blowing them all up as the characters zoom away. In other words, Mass Effect 2 doesn't develop settings, it uses them to develop characters, or it uses them not at all. Omega, the Citadel, and Asari Libertarian Planet barely notice Shepard's attention in this game. The one-off locations on the other hand almost invariably experience some sort of apocalypse. Shepard typically blows up settings that have in some way offended one of the crew. It's a crude but serviceable metaphor for overcoming past traumas, but in my opinion it gets old pretty fast. I mentioned earlier in the thread that Mass Effect 2's climax could have taken place anywhere, and I stand by that. The setting is just not important this time out; the game is essentially about a cast of characters with a suspiciously similar set of emotional problems. Where exactly those characters get to demonstrate that they can work as a team and prove they have surpassed those problems doesn't really matter. And the game's treatment of the Collector Base shows it. What does the Collector Base look like? I doubt you remember the establishing shot, because what I see is a brown hallways. And that's pretty much what the collector base is: it's a series of brown hallways. There's a lot for the characters to be doing within those hallways, and the whole climactic sequence is pretty neat. But did it have to be in the Collector Base? No, because the Collector Base is so unimportant to the proceedings that it's a brown hallway. This is the climactic area of the game, and you haven't visited it before, so there's no real opportunity for development. It's the bad-guy base for those guys who clocked Shepard, blow it up so that Shepard can work through his emotional trauma. In conclusion, Mass Effect 2 is not nearly as interested in setting as Mass Effect. There are more characters, there's more focus on gameplay, and that's where ME2's efforts went. This is after all a 3d game, and in the same series, so ME2 does have spaces. But the illusion of space is cheaper and easier, literally. When players go to areas that are reminiscent of the original game, the effect is usually disappointment, and not without reason. The game uses setting to give character exposition, rather than setting exposition, but I'm not sure how effective it is. When Mass Effect 2 is allowed to abandon illusions of space and narrow in on the characters and what they want, this is where the settings shine. Space Quarry is a perfect example: a long, narrow, simple area with fantastic art direction and a skybox that not only decorates but enhances. Tali is on the other end, Shepard wants to get to Tali, and off we go guns blazing! The environment not only provides a smart multilevel environment rich in cover and fire lanes but throws a twist on gameplay with the deadly alien sun. I'd say Space Quarry is Mass Effect 2's setting work at its best; simple, attractive, serving gameplay. Some pictures:  The Collector Base. Even the establishing shot is brown. Note that you'd never guess it's a cylinder from actually navigating inside it.  This isn't a photoshop, the Collector Base really is that hideous. Not that it was supposed to be pretty.  Illium is a balcony...  And a skybox.  This image sort of shows the linearity of Haestrom. The map is a quarry, but it's also essentially a balcony. There's a sheer cliff on the right and the skybox on the left.
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Aug 8, 2014 13:38
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Don't agree so much with this one. I'm not an exploration-orientated player, so smaller and tighter hubs are actually something I prefer.Arglebargle III posted:Thane's loyalty mission takes place in some kind of penthouse on a skyscraper on the Citadel Wards, but you'd hardly know it from the way the game presents it to you. Are you sure? There's a generic city loading screen based on the Towers level from Thane's recruitment, are you thinking of that? 'Cause I remember Thane's loyalty being in a C-Sec office and the rafters of Zakera Ward's seedy covered streets. quote:does Tuchanka really say "bombed-out wasteland" Yes. Again, though, I'm happy with what we can see in the background of the hub and missions there. Being able to drive around might be nice and immersive, but it doesn't push my buttons. quote:Make your own count of how many places explode during or after Shepard's exit in Mass Effect 2. 8 out of 31? 6 out of 27 if you don't include DLC. quote:Mass Effect 2 doesn't develop settings, it uses them to develop characters, or it uses them not at all. Omega, the Citadel, and Asari Libertarian Planet barely notice Shepard's attention in this game. I'd actually argue these settings are incredibly important and aren't necessarily underdeveloped because they're tighter and don't bother with explorative gameplay. quote:I doubt you remember the establishing shot, It's the first shot of the game, isn't it? "Press START to continue". I always liked that. I think the oppressively-brown colour scheme is key. The final level is in a sense the source of the stuff you've been dealing with throughout the game - it's not only the home of the Collectors and their colony attacks, it's also where all the red-brown-orange crap is coming from that permeates the colour palette of all the other locations in the game. Omega is orange. Tuchanka is orange. Even Illium, the blue planet of the blue asari that you visit in the middle of the blue, blue night, is this reddish-purple colour. Your uniform is orange. Your UI is orange. Everything's orange. The whole universe undergoes a red shift away from the white-blue Paragon crispness of the first game, and it's no coincidence that ME2 is also the game where you start working for terrorists, teaming up with criminals and outcasts, hanging out on Pirate Citadel and doing missions all over the merc-infested rear end end of the galaxy. ME2 is Renegade time. And then you shoot the big yellow tanks and the glowing orange Vulnerable Spots and when you wake up back on Earth, everything's blue again. Pretty interesting stuff regardless!
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Aug 8, 2014 16:31
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oops
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 18:25
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I hated Tuchanka in ME2. The place just didn't make sense. For what was supposed to be the planets seat of power, it looked more like a base camp in a blown up city. I get that Tuchanka is supposed to be screwed up, but the way it is presented would make sense if there were only a hundred Krogan wandering around. It just didn't work. I was fine with Illium, though. Yeah, it really was no different than the wards but they aren't really that different anyway.
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Aug 8, 2014 18:30
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Lt. Danger posted:Don't agree so much with this one. I'm not an exploration-orientated player, so smaller and tighter hubs are actually something I prefer. Well I suppose there's a lot of value judgement wrapped up in that post, but would you agree on the reasons why the hubs ended up stripped down? quote:I'd actually argue these settings are incredibly important and aren't necessarily underdeveloped because they're tighter and don't bother with explorative gameplay. I'd like to see this then, because development is more than just fleshing-out. Places generally don't change in Mass Effect 2. You tend to leave places as you found them or blow them up. I'd also like to hear the argument for these places being important. Illium, aka Asari Libertarian Planet, is interchangeable with Citadel Wards. Tuchanka is a neat idea for a planet, but the location we visit is unremarkable and I can't remember why we needed to go to Tuchanka particularly anyway. The Collector Base I've already said why it's unimportant twice. Omega is interesting as a dark mirror to the Citadel and it's the best of the bunch, but I don't see the place itself as important to the stories told there; they could easily be parceled out to other locations. Contrast with Mass Effect's events on Ilos or the Citadel finale, which wouldn't work, wouldn't make any sense really, removed to another location. But I think Mass Effect 2's locations that aren't pretending to be anything more than a setpiece, a set to be discarded after its episode has been played out, are actually its best locations. Jack's prison is a great example because it's literally floating in a void and explodes after we leave. It's unimportant in itself, but it conveys who Jack is quite well and its a serviceable setting for a rock-em sock-em gun battle. Illusion of space doesn't matter, it's floating in a void. Creating a sense of place is irrelevant, we're not only not going to visit again we're going to blow it up. It's the perfect Mass Effect 2 setting. I'm not criticizing Mass Effect 2's colors and I've already praised its art direction. When I went to get images of the Collector Base I was genuinely surprised at how brown and gross it is. Thane's loyalty mission is a little confusing in geography, since you start out in the rafters of the mall and end up in a big glass-walled room with police choppers level with the windows, so its presumably high up. I'm also not exactly dinging Mass Effect 2 any points for blowing up locations. In fact a lot of the locations they blow up are better, in my opinion, than the hub areas. The level design is better when it can apply its "better and tighter" formula to areas that are supposed to be one use only.
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Aug 8, 2014 18:34
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Arglebargle III posted:Well I suppose there's a lot of value judgement wrapped up in that post, but would you agree on the reasons why the hubs ended up stripped down? Sort of. It's a different design philosophy to ME1, and I imagine Bioware adopted it because the majority of players didn't react well to the design in ME1. There's probably a middle ground where you get the best of both worlds (like you say, Omega is closer to that than Tuchanka is). Again, to me it's no great loss, but to somebody who gets more out of exploration and physical space as a gameplay tool in itself, it would be disappointing. quote:I'd also like to hear the argument for these places being important. Illium, aka Asari Libertarian Planet, is interchangeable with Citadel Wards. Tuchanka is a neat idea for a planet, but the location we visit is unremarkable and I can't remember why we needed to go to Tuchanka particularly anyway. The Collector Base I've already said why it's unimportant twice. Omega is interesting as a dark mirror to the Citadel and it's the best of the bunch, but I don't see the place itself as important to the stories told there; they could easily be parceled out to other locations. Contrast with Mass Effect's events on Ilos or the Citadel finale, which wouldn't work, wouldn't make any sense really, removed to another location. Again, I'm not so invested in these spaces as concepts in themselves, so I don't hugely mind if they only exist as adjunct to the development of other ideas. In brief, Illium and the Wards are similar but are divided by their class status - Illium is the home of bankers and corporate executives, the Wards the home of crooked cops and street rats. Both develop ideas of moral and legal corruption in otherwise civilised space (Illium is quite specifically a slam against the previously 'perfect' race, the asari) but from different directions. Tuchanka is showing the krogan plight in a way you could only hear about from Wrex in the first game, both negative (the krogan did this to themselves) and positive (even in the ashes, the krogan strive with their experimental breeding plans and trappings of society). The Collector Base is a nightmare realm, an impossible space sustained by the power of the gods, surrounded by the ancient dead, a horrific, messy fusion of organic and artificial architecture, and the metaphorical source of evil in the game. I don't feel like ME2 even needs to do so much legwork in establishing spaces - that, in a sense, was what ME1 was for. Now that the galaxy has been established, ME2 is free to focus on the really interesting stuff. quote:Thane's loyalty mission is a little confusing in geography, since you start out in the rafters of the mall and end up in a big glass-walled room with police choppers level with the windows, so its presumably high up. Okay, I just don't particularly see the importance. At this point we're zeroed in on Thane and his son.
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Aug 8, 2014 19:01
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Red Bones posted:Re: environment chat, I found the ME1 citadel to be if not too large, then too badly laid out. Those bridges in the presidium are interesting the first time you cross them, but having the two collections of NPCs in the presidium seperated by a long walk you have to take over and over in the course of multiple sidequests is not great map design, in my opinion. Honestly, players are terrible at knowing what they want. You have a fast travel system for a reason. Yes, walking across the Presidium can get tedious in hour 10, but I'm not sure many players have the insight to sit back and wonder whether hour 3 and hour 20 make it worth the walk. ME2's Citadel is a weird solution. The obvious alternative to the sprawling Presidium is ME3's Citadel, where the level designers basically threw up their hands and jammed everything together with a bare minimum of tricks to make you think Liara and EDI aren't ten feet apart when they actually are. ME3 tries to do action in its Citadel environments and we'll see how compelling it is compared to ME's take on the same thing. But you can walk to the aquarium store real fast! Lt. Danger posted:Sort of. It's a different design philosophy to ME1, and I imagine Bioware adopted it because the majority of players didn't react well to the design in ME1. Yeah, and ME2 gets away with it scot free a lot of the time. The one-off zones where they're explicitly not doing setting legwork are really good. I've said that there are elements I like about ME2's settings several times. Citadel Wards and Tuchanka deserve to get singled out for disappointment though because those were places players explicitly wanted to explore. I covered that in the big post. Players played ME and wanted to go explore Tuchanka and the rest of the Citadel in much the way they just had in ME. ME2 said "okay!" and then went and made a game that wasn't about exploration any more. So it's little surprise that Citadel Wards and Tuchanka come off particularly badly. I will insist here that removing the driving sections was a bad choice. They are cheap and quick, and the tools were already built. I believe you can still console spawn the Mako in ME2. I don't actually care if the driving section is "neat and immersive," I'm not super excited about the possibility of driving around on Tuchanka. It's the connection between the hubs and the sense of space that is so sorely missing there. I could actually go on at a little more length about how ME2's Tuchanka is badly designed; but it's mostly just my complaints about the hub interior extended to all the interior areas. Are you really going to tell me that 20 minutes of driving around in a 20 hour game is not worth the bump it would give to the players' experience of Tuchanka or Citadel Wards? Remember, it's not the driving gameplay it's the illusion generated by plopping the player in an environment and making navigate it for five minutes. It's the video game version of an establishing shot; you could call it a waste of time just like a director could call an establishing shot a waste of time, but it informs everything else that's going on. Oh and Tuchanka hub is literally a garage. You just don't have a car anymore. You did have a car, but now you don't. You "drive" to every location on Tuchanka, but it's really just a quick shot of rolling cars disguising a loading screen. It's not hard to see why the driving sequence's deletion might be frustrating there. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 19:06
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I'm actually gonna out myself as an impatient baby and say no, 20 minutes of driving wouldn't be worth it. The various Hammerhead driving bits were still pretty boring, even in Project Overlord.
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Aug 8, 2014 19:26
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Arglebargle III posted:Honestly, players are terrible at knowing what they want. You have a fast travel system for a reason. Uh, maybe it's me but this feels pretty contradictory of you. You acknowledge there's a reason for a fast travel system but then criticize players for not knowing what they want? I'd say it's proof positive they do know: less walking around a big, badly laid out, mostly empty hub. After my first time playing ME1, the Citadel was nothing more than an exercise in returning as infrequently as possible to slam in as many quest completions as possible and then to leave as soon as possible to anywhere else. This does not feel like the hallmark of successful design to me. There are two issues: Size (sense of place, etc) and layout. I argue the ME1 citadel layout is poo poo, especially the Presidium. It was big, it had place, no disagreement there - but it could have had those and a not-poo poo layout. I think Bioware realized they couldn't really figure out how to do it justice or make it worth the return on investment it'd take to do it justice in 2 and 3: It's no surprise to me Bioware tightened things up on the Citadel - a lot - in the sequel and tightened it up even more in 3. e: I'll agree Tuchanka was disappointing and a Noveria to Peak 15-esque drive could have - in theory - done a lot for fleshing out the Krogan homeworld, but you didn't think Thane's recruitment owned and I don't even know what's up with that. I think a lot of your positive comments about Tali's recruitment apply to Thane's as well so I'm not sure why you don't. Psion fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 19:26
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I honestly, genuinely miss the Mako with its outrageous physics. While ME1 did somewhat overdo the Mako segments and they wore thin with too much repetition in managed doses they were pretty entertaining.
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Aug 8, 2014 19:28
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