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I think it's worth mentioning that nobody having any idea what to do or even really what's going on gives a kind of fever dream quality to the game. I experienced it as a series of barely-connected setpieces held together by a scientist who would literally tell you the percentage of the game (crucible) you had completed, before heading into the deus-ex-machina ending. The Mars mission followed by Palaven is a great example of this weird disjointed quality to the game. You have to go pick up Liara; there's no other reason to go to Mars. Conveniently she's being attacked by people who are trying to erase all knowledge of the Reapers' one weakness. But then Shepard proceeds to ping-pong off to his original mission with the data in tow. That data will become the centerpiece of the story and also be almost entirely off-camera for the rest of the game while Shepard runs around accomplishing... what exactly? He has to defend the council for some reason and the Citadel gets attacked, but even when he loses in unchangeable cutscenes those results don't seem to matter. The Crucible number goes up, and when it's at 100% you unlock the ending. I agree with WillieTOMG, the game (on the narrative level) is just a hot mess. I also agree that this game's narrative difficulties stem in large part from Mass Effect 2 comprehensively refusing to carry any water setting up ME3. The damp-squib introduction of the Reapers is an almost unavoidable consequence of the need to jump-start the Reaper story again after 20 hours of neglect. After all they couldn't simply have ME3 be about preventing the Reapers' return again -- that was ME1 -- nor did they have the time for them to arrive and then be defeated, so the only option is for them to show up without a proper introduction. The Crucible may be an ugly and obvious storytelling crutch, but something like that is a necessary consequence of the Reapers arriving with no setup, unless you want to deflate their menace by letting them succumb to a conventional military defeat. Finally, I think we should avoid conflating criticism in the general sense with film criticism specifically. Lt. Danger brought up the film criticism axiom that one must engage the work as it is rather than the work as you think it should be. Film criticism (especially to those interested in symbolism) tends to be about analyzing the thematic elements of film though, not criticism in the broader sense. Frankly I don't think much of that axiom in the first place, and in the case of Mass Effect 3 which had well-known writing and production difficulties it seems more like a tactic to shut down criticism than a guide to enable it.
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Aug 4, 2014 16:43
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I think you are responding to the right part of my post, because this is where we disagree. I think we are talking about two different things. The analysis you are talking about seems to be primarily interested in finding out what Mass Effect 3 is about.* The criticism you say is masturbatory is interested in dissecting why Mass Effect 3 (and to a lesser extent 2) were disappointing from a player's perspective compared to Mass Effect 1. I think you do a disservice to both by conflating the two endeavors. It is correct to say that understanding the meaning of something can't be accomplished by talking about what you wish had happened. It is however wrong to apply that same rule to the endeavor of discovering why it was disappointing. They are simply two different types of question. When you tell someone flatly that they've got the wrong answers, as you did earlier in the thread, without recognizing that they're considering a different question, you just create animosity and further muddle both conversations. Lt. Danger posted:the reason Earth is poorly written because of the extensive rewrite from the originally-planned trial scene, which probably wasn't fully polished in time for release. Isn't even this extra-textual knowledge disallowed by your own maxim though? If random people aren't allowed to chime in with how they thought it should have been done, why are the authors' own ideas on how they might have done it better allowable? I understand that analysis becomes much cleaner and easier when "critics" don't allow hypotheticals into the discussion (except when they do, see above) but I think it tends to lead to bad analysis. Specifically, I think it tends to lead people into being too generous. When we can only judge something on its own terms, we tend to lose the ability to measure anything and end up with platitudinous statements about how -INSERT TITLE- succeeds in being what it is. The type of analysis you're doing really defies value judgements. If you're asking what Mass Effect 3 was about, what it meant, the answer doesn't really have a value component. Which is why whenever people try to tack them on to this sort of discourse it ends up being wishy-washy and meaningless. *In the context of postmodern death of the author I consider this type of analysis to be the more masturbatory of the two intellectual exercises. Asking why Mass Effect 3 was unfulfilling to play can at least have some bearing on both the making and appreciation of video games. Treating it as if it was all a bunch of nerds saying "I would have done X" is just strawmanning, there are plenty of people willing to dial down and look at faults in the crafstmanship on a writers' level. In contrast, asking what Mass Effect 3 meant when you know full well that the ending was thought up at the last minute by two people in a locked room AND that your analysis is only valid for your personal experience seems... well, like intellectual masturbation.
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Aug 4, 2014 19:44
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Lt. Danger posted:For example, because you think ME2 should have been about the Reapers, you think that's responsible for the weak beginning. I'd suggest something a lot simpler: the weak beginning is due to vague writing and messy visual direction, and improves as the prologue moves on to the superior Mars and Menae areas - and the reason Earth is poorly written because of the extensive rewrite from the originally-planned trial scene, which probably wasn't fully polished in time for release. I think the Reapers' introduction in ME3 is placed under severe limitations by ME2's lack of setup and by narrative necessity in ME3. They have very little wiggle room to introduce the Reapers in an already demanding opening act. Could they have done a better job of introducing them? Sure, but they had time and narrative necessities working against them. They could hardly introduce the Reapers in the middle of the story, and you pointed the reason the trial had to be jettisoned in the first place was problematic pacing. So the writing and visual direction are a problem, sure. Good. Fine. The work can have issues that are endogenous rather than exogenous! But I don't see why you feel you have to deny the existence of exogenous constraints in the final act of a trilogy! quote:For that matter, you miss out on the clue that if the Reapers can be relegated to a background element for an entire game, then maybe they aren't all that important in the way you think they are. On the last bit, I'd take issue with the idea that we're now playing tricks with the idea of possibilities and hypotheticals. Can the Reapers be relegated to a background element? If we're not considering hypotheticals, how could they NOT be relegated to the background, because they were! The whole premise of the idea is flawed. Of course the Reapers CAN be relegated to the background for the entire game, just like Jack CAN not wear a shirt for the entire game or Kaidan CAN be the most boring party member in the series. SHOULD they be any of these things? It's impossible to even have that discussion if you continue to conflate the question of what Mass Effect 3 means and whether Mass Effect 3 was good or bad. Like I said, you end up with platitudinous statements like this one when you attempt to attach value judgements to value-neutral analysis. The Reapers were left out for a whole game, so the Reapers are a plot element that can be left out for a whole game. It's almost circular logic, and it would be if you were attempting to make a value statement about the story instead of analyzing the story on its own merits. So, to reiterate again, you really need to separate these two lines of questioning or things get muddled. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Aug 4, 2014 |
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Aug 4, 2014 20:03
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I think prescriptivist trilogy structure might have a place, and that place might be AAA space opera productions that are so consciously modeled as a love letter to classic 60s and 70s space opera that it debuted with non optional film grain.
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Aug 5, 2014 05:24
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Could you toggle it off on the Xbox 360? I remember looking through a book of curvy white spaceship illustrations with understated greebles as a child, which Mass Effect appears to be consciously imitating. I do not however remember the name of the illustrator nor do I have the images. Does anyone know who I'm talking about? I swear it looks just like Mass Effect's future.
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Aug 5, 2014 06:06
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Lt. Danger posted:I think sometimes people get all TVTropes-y and become caught up on identifying narrative tools (Chekov's Gun, rising action, 'payoff'), and it can become difficult to remember that the tools exist for a purpose - to help us understand how stories work, not to define how stories should be. Actually I think these tools are primarily used to write stories, not to help understand them.
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Aug 5, 2014 08:01
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Neruz posted:If you do not want your thing to be hosed it should not be visibly on fire from space, okay? Are... are you saying Palaven was asking for it?! RAPE CULTURE!!!!
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Aug 5, 2014 11:26
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Lt. Danger posted:Mass Effect is a horror story. The universe is filled with terrifying inhuman monsters, including hives of xenocidal insect-beasts, collectives of mysterious silent killer robots with flashlight heads, and of course the entire galaxy is the plaything of the Reapers, the impossibly-old mechanical Cthulhu monsters from beyond the edge of the galaxy. Mass effect technology means that entire planets are at risk of absolute annihilation from near-FTL asteroid impact, and that power is in the hands of anyone with a big enough rocket engine. Unfortunately Bioware really dropped the ball on this one; parts of the game are written for laughs or tears, not anguished dread. These sections are just awful at being Mass Effect, and really drag the rest of the game down. Nice effort, but genre isn't structure. I don't think anyone has criticized Mass Effect for not being a space opera. Witness the lack of people complaining about the elements of body horror or hard scifi that exist in the games. They do criticize it for being a space opera with a meandering second act and an unsatisfying conclusion. I don't think anyone would be mad had they decided to make Mass Effect a 5 act story either.
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Aug 5, 2014 15:38
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Eh, people bring up Empire so much it's become a bit warped. Empire sets up Jedi by throwing the Rebels out on their asses, upping the personal stakes for Luke, developing Vader as a character, introducing the Emperor as the big villain. The main conflict may fade into the background but it's only because the focus is on the foreground characters, not because the background tableau has hosed off to check out the catering table. Critically Empire sets up a desperate scenario for the heroes, even if it largely happens in the background. While they succeed in avoiding total disaster, the film ends with the Rebel fleet out on their asses and Han missing. Only Luke really comes out as a winner and the importance of his growth in Empire won't be apparent until Jedi. It's funny but people don't seem to notice in Star Wars that both sequels are basically recapitulations of the first act. In Hope the heroes try to stop the Empire from destroying the rebel base, confront Vader, and succeed. In Empire they do the same thing but fail at both of them and most of the film is dealing with the fallout from those failures across two confrontations. In Jedi they go and do the same thing again with a bit of a twist in that the rebels have a shot at ending the whole thing this time, and succeed. It's more complicated than that because previous failures set up Luke to grow and try something new this time and Star Wars is a good story, but it really is a similar plot each time with a win, lose, win outcome. Shepard, in contrast, never actually fails. ME3 consciously recapitulates a lot of ME, especially in the ending. You're even looking for Prothean artifacts for most of the game. But has Shepard changed much? Is what he went through in ME2 even very relevant to the plot of one and three? The agonizing boredom of the conflict with the vermire survivor suggests otherwise. I'm not saying he must recapitulate the first act and fail in the second act but it's worth a thought. I mean, on a purely structural basis, Shepard's goal is to prevent the arrival of the Reapers, and ME3 seems to have trouble juggling a proper opening and the arrival of the Reapers, which can't feasibly be pushed deeper into ME3. A failure for Shepard at the end of ME2, a failure to stop the Reapers from returning, would at least dovetail with some structural convenience for ME3. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 16:06
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On a totally different topic, I'm a little confused by the references to the incident with the Batarian relay. Was the plan to let the player decide the events which the vast majority of players didn't see? When I was playing the game, I was surprised that such a major event had happened off-screen.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:24
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FullLeatherJacket posted:It's part of the Arrival DLC for ME2, which basically means that 90% of people won't have played it. I'm aware of that; it still feels like a weird decision. It would work to open a new story, but with a character we've spent 40 hours inhabiting it's jarring for him to be asked a question which I, the player, don't know anything about. If it was about something I reasonably would not have experienced like Shepard's life before the events of Mass Effect it would be one thing, but the event in question is one that I would assume the player would be familiar with. And indeed, it is something within the scope of player experience. Not only would I expect to have been present for those events, my expectation is correct. So they're not even intentionally throwing me for a loop. They're doing it accidentally. The player is justifiably surprised and a bit miffed that he/she is being blindsided. It may have been part of why they threw out the trial. quote:That's really beside the point, I feel. Not everything is about Shepard, and my point about ESB with respect to ME2 is that the interaction between the characters in both is more important to the third act than what happens between or to the major sides to the galactic conflict. I'm having a hard time seeing how any character interactions from ME2 have an impact on ME3. Could you enumerate them for me? The lack of true branching story is a serious technical limitation, but you can't blame them any more than you could blame Cristopher Nolan for Heath Ledger's death. There are just real-world limitations to continuity in certain mediums. So I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad, I just don't recall any character interactions that really matter to the plot. Sure it would be a bummer if a favorite character were to die! That brings up another question: did anything in ME2 matter for ME3's plot? And I don't just mean the little choices the player is allowed to make, I mean in terms of the script that's 100% in Bioware's hands. ME had some really plot-basic stuff like Shepard becoming aware of the Reapers that arguably couldn't be excised. If ME2 just was never made, how much of an impact would it have on ME3?
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Aug 5, 2014 17:03
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ME had a three act structure as well, don't forget that a TON of stuff on the Citadel was mandatory after New Eden and that Virmire to the end credits is locked down. ME2's ending was legitimately bad because it has very little bearing on ME2's own story, to say nothing of its irrelevance to the trilogy. The vast majority of ME2 is about characters. You could go to the Collector base, or any final location, for literally any reason, the climax is the team fighting together. The Collectors and Harbinger and the skeleton monster are so irrelevant, except as targets, that they might as well be a bunch of Batarians and a horny space squid. You're right in saying the Final Mission part leading your team was the good part, because that WAS the ending to ME2. That's the climax to which the whole story has been leading, because the whole story has been about these characters. The final boss feels flat because it's not important at all. And they made it visually and conceptually ridiculous on top of that. If you counted the references to Sovereign and the references to the Collector Base in ME3 I don't wonder which one would come up more often.
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Aug 6, 2014 07:16
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Oh I forgot to mention that ME2's final boss was mechanically bad as well. You're confined to a small platform, physically separated from the boss. You avoid his telegraphed doom attacks and pop out and do a little more damage to the bullet sponge between them. You can't interact with the boss any other way or even move beyond a couple predetermined points of cover. Saren's boss fight from ME may not have been great, but at least it was frenetic and encouraged constant use of the shooting, squad command and power use skills the player mastered throughout the game. The ME2 boss fight pretty much jettisons every combat innovation that made ME2's fights better than ME, except for the need to always be in cover which makes the fight worse, not better.
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Aug 6, 2014 10:28
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We're jumping the gun a bit here, but I think one of the charitable things Lt. Danger is likely to say about the ending is that it had potential, but was so rushed that they never had time to develop that potential. A lot of ME3 shows signs that they ran out of time when you go back over it, but the ending was so incredibly rushed that it was immediately obvious even before the player put down the controller in shock as the credits rolled. They didn't even have time to generate three proper cutscenes for the ending, much less integrate their (belated) ideas for the ending into the story. The idea of a final conversation, rather than a boss fight, with the Reapers hashing out the big-picture problems with the universe has a lot of potential in my opinion. It's just that it doesn't fit, and the reason it doesn't fit is that they came up with the ending at the last minute. On this point I expect to be sympathetic with Lt. Danger that Casey Hudson's idea of what Mass Effect 3 is about, as expressed in the ending, is interesting and valuable. The sheer production reality of coming up with those ideas at the last minute make Mass Effect 3 muddled and disjointed about that message, and critically leaves those ideas undeveloped both as they reach the player and as they appear suddenly near the end of the narrative. It's small wonder that their first big paid DLC explores exactly the ending-related issues shoehorned in late in the writing process. This is just speculation but, for example, if they'd had more time to figure it out I would imagine that the Crucible and its associated Prothean mystery would have been less about technology fetch quests (who's doing paint-by-numbers storytelling here?) and more about revealing the Reapers' motivation and the big picture synthetic-organic-stagnation-annihilation problem along with the purpose of the Crucible. That way the ending wouldn't seem to be the ending to a different game which, again, due to production realities isn't far from the truth. How true is it that they lost their writer after Mass Effect? There's a ton of exciting stuff that Sovereign lets slip in his chilling first appearance that just doesn't get any development. Or when it does get development moves in boring and uninspired directions. Like "each of us is a nation" developing into tubes full of people-goop being inexplicably turned into Reapers, instead of for example interacting with any stored knowledge or personalities that might have been interesting and made the Reapers a little more complicated than I've ventured way off topic now though so I'll just stop. ME3's ending had a lot of potential, I just wish they'd made a game to go with it! Interesting thought experiment -- if you played the ending first, and then the rest of the game, would you be mad about the ending or about the rest of the game for being wrong and bad? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 13:11
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I don't agree with the idea of Garrus as loyal dog to Shepard/Player's master. I was actually really hoping to be able to play as Garrus at some point in the series. For me he was often a bit of a player surrogate, since Shepard can't spontaneously give opinions. Garrus is able to go, "No, gently caress you, gently caress this, we have a mission to accomplish," to the more annoying NPCs without having to be given a dialog wheel prompt. He seems to say what the player is thinking too often for this to be a total accident. To me Garrus was pretty much Shepard's brother-by-another-species. He would have been able to seamlessly take over had Shepard died. Even in his first appearance when he's less confident, he's presented more as a natural ally than a natural subordinate. His situation is an obvious parallel for Shepard's. The point about Shepard being asked to judge him should be seen in the light of Mass Effect's first act, where your dialog choices are as much about defining Shepard as they are about effecting change in the game world. I can't overstate how much I wish Garrus had been a playable character or even had his own game. The game may set him up as your Number One but he seems virtually identical to Shepard in skillset and leadership quality. If they had released Mass Effect: Archangel or something where Garrus is the player character I would have bought it in a heartbeat. I don't think I would have been as excited about getting in the driver's seat, so to speak, with any other character. Making Joker the only other PC of the series was such a tease. 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 17:13
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Neruz posted:Garrus is popular because he is well-written and snarky and nerds love well-written snarky characters because they like to imagine that is how they would sound if they were a super awesome space knight. I think this is a pretty unfair. The player can react naturally to a scene without having delusions of being a "super-awesome space knight." The player is genre-aware, and knows that, for example, Shepard and Garrus are going to wreck whatever NPCs are standing in their way, the villain is a jerk and/or doofus, sidequest givers aren't as important as they think they are, and that comic relief characters exist to be comic relief. Garrus gets to voice these certainties. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 17:28
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I would be willing to bet Garrus talks directly to other NPCs more often than other party members. Inside the first minute of the video he gets confrontational with Wreave. Now, maybe everyone would have a line there just to maintain the conversation's continuity, but I think Garrus does take a more confrontational tone with NPCs more often than other party members and that makes him similar to the PC in yet another way.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:01
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Neruz posted:power fantasy This is something that gets thrown around all the time, at science fiction especially. Could you explain how Garrus is a power fantasy, and how he could serve his role in the story without being a power fantasy? Or are we supposed to only consume fiction in which the protagonists are equal to or weaker than the reader? What if I'm in Afghanistan with the special forces and play Mass Effect 3 on my xbox 360 in my downtime. Is Garrus a power fantasy then?
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Aug 6, 2014 18:04
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Wait, did Lt. Danger do that LP of the weird Russian game about a bizarre dream world? I thought I recognized his voice. To avoid quadruple-posting, I really hope you have the Leviathan DLC and are going to play through it, because without it the game has much less of the theme you're interested in. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 18:15
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oops
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 18:41
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Montegoraon posted:The tldr of it is, you can't think of descriptions like power fantasy as inherently negative. They are what they are, and all tropes may be used well or poorly. So tell me this Neruz posted:Garrus is popular because he is well-written and snarky and nerds love well-written snarky characters because they like to imagine that is how they would sound if they were a super awesome space knight. doesn't come across as contemptuous.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:43
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^^^^ ayagree Watching the video I'm again reminded of how unconnected the Crucible is to Shepard's actions. Shepard brings it up apropos of nothing. It's not related to what Shepard just did except in that both things are related to the war. Then after about 60 seconds of Crucible-looking-at, the game goes right back to the totally unrelated plot. Joker's fourth-wall breaking is amusing. The heroes' plans are meaningless, the actual resolution is much closer to "time travel or teaching the Reapers to love" and Padok Wik is not-Mordin as far as most players are concerned.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:59
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Morinth represents the gay menace. This is actually pretty hard to escape, hilarious and unintentional as it may be.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:30
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Guys, our first introduction to Morinth is talking to a tearful mother about how bad dyke Morinth stole her good little straight girl and turned her gay and hosed her to death with space AIDS. I agree it's unintentional but the parallels to moral panic, homosexuality, predatory sexuality directed at the young and impressionable, socially transgressive behavior in general, and AIDS are all there. Morinth reads like a hysterical caricature of a San Francisco lesbian. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 05:40
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It's not wrong to have gay feelings, but it is wrong to knowingly infect a partner with HIV! I'm sure that during the Gay Plague there were plenty of people who were totally on board with the gay sex until the part where they magically died.
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 10:09
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Lt. Danger posted:treating stories as crafted objects, rather than 'ideas that just happen to storytellers', is so important. This is why it's so important to separate the questions "what is this?" and "is this well-made?"
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Aug 7, 2014 11:16
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FullLeatherJacket posted:This would be fine if it was just a case of highlighting a funny way something could be read and then throwing it away and moving on. I think that's all this is. Did anyone say it was more than that? Morinth is an accidental recreation of an offensive stereotype. It's funny because the writers obviously didn't intend it and yet blundered straight into it. If you think it's a stretch though, just wait until we get to the And they're addicted to sex and magnetically attractive to everyone and... it's just... how did they not... worse and worse... 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 12:00
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Well, you have to remember that not long ago, conflating homosexuality with pedophilia and sex crime was normal. There are still people who would respond to "well Ardat-Yakshi really are like that!" with "Gays really are like that too!" I think I've laid out why it's not at all grasping at straws. I would say it's unintentional. I can't imagine Bioware would knowingly okay what looks very much like a lifelong prison for the deviant, dangerous sex-criminals-by-birth, whose only representative member is a remorseless, clubbing, drugging, omnisexual predator! Remember, these are recent stereotypes about homosexuals, made objectively true in Mass Effect by the writers. Writers who created these not-at-all-1980s-gay-stereotyples and then immediately turned around and put them all in jail for life. I'm not offended, I think it's hilarious. The Volus as Jews I would say are actually a case of stretching. The Volus are space merchants. Their only attribute that you could connect to jews, or even anti-jewish propaganda, is their merchant-ness and their living apart, but they aren't even really separated off in the game world anyway. You basically have to go "merchant=jew, nailed it!" to slap the Space Jew label on the Volus. It fits about as well as it fits, for example, the Ferengi from Star Trek, which is to say not very well. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 15:37
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Montegoraon posted:Okay, so maybe Morinth can be seen as a gay panic type of character, since apparently a lot of people do. But it's irrelevant. That kind of thing is problematic if you make your only gay character a serial killer, or your only black character a gangster, or your only hispanic character a drug runner. But in Mass Effect there's an entire species of omnisexual characters, some of whom are promiscuous, some of whom are soldiers like you'd see in any other species, some of them are part-monk part-Punisher. And in ME3 there are homo- or bisexual characters outside that species, and it can be presumed that there are the appropriate number more beyond them for whom it just never gets brought up. Out of all of those, one of them just happens to be a serial killer. Well, gay/bi/omnisexual people are as likely to be serial killers as anyone else. Morinth isn't the only such character, so I can't agree that Bioware shouldn't have written her, or should have written her in a different way, just because in a different context where she was the only character with her orientation it would have been offensive. Again, nobody's saying the writers are trying to present some sort of thinly veiled gay panic propaganda. If Morinth were the only bi character it would be legitimately troubling, but as it is she's a bit on the nose and makes you laugh when you realize what they did. I think the writers basically got some wires tangled with the blue alien space babes, the vamp, and the AIDS allegory. If they ever noticed that they'd mixed up some things that they might not have wanted to mix it must have been too late to fix. 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. Still, the parallels between "the AY spectrum" as Liara puts it and AIDS couldn't be more obvious. Giving a space AIDS allegory to the blue space babes makes sense, but they might not have noticed they were giving it to the bisexual blue space babes. Giving the vamp to the blue space babes also makes sense, but they might not have noticed they were giving her to the bisexual space AIDS-having blue space babes. And Morinth happened.
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Aug 7, 2014 16:43
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 meant that players wanting the big hub to be smaller don't know what they're asking for; there's a tradeoff involved that the level designers have thought about but the players haven't. The fast travel system is there to keep the Citadel manageable and big at the same time. I don't doubt that there are Mass Effect players who have complained about having to walk around the big Presidium and then turned around and complained that the sequels never did anything as epic as the burning Citadel end game. You can't design a zone to be small, focused, epic, and multipurpose. Oops, new page. Of course I agree that barren height-map planets are no big loss. And Mass Effect could always have had more NPCs. Do you really think ME2 has more going on in its hubs? Or is it just that they're smaller and denser? Omega certainly has more going on than any of Mass Effect's mid-game hub zones, but that's because it's filling in for the Citadel. Mass Effect 2's Citadel is quite a bit smaller than Mass Effect's. DE's not a great comparison because its movement mechanics are so drastically different from ME's. DE can get away with hiding things and even hiding entire paths because the player has the tools to find them. If ME put DE-style rewards for exploration in, the player would either never find it or find it very easily. I'm not sure I understand the connection between exploring and finding hidden/completionist items. I also don't think there are actually any hubs in any of the ME games that consist primarily of corridors. The hubs are Citadel, Zhu's Hope on Feros (open air), the corporate HQ on Novaria (another very large room), and a mini-hub on the Vermire beach. Later games tend to place hubs on balconies, but they still aren't corridors. Oh man, I just realized that Zhu's Hope, Novaria HQ, and the Vermire beach are actually all balcony/skybox layouts. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 19:39
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Sombrerotron posted:That would kind of defeat the purpose of making the whole thing so big, I think. And even if you could just quickly leg it everywhere, you'd still be legging it through a whole lot of functionally empty space and empty corridors. Presidium was never supposed to be have a lived-in feeling, it was supposed to be a park and an expression of power. Making it functionally "full" might have actually detracted from the space. If I had time and money to improve Mass Effect, Citadel Wards would be where I'd spend it. That's where the functionally busy space was supposed to be thematically, and it was pretty disappointing in execution.
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Aug 8, 2014 20:05
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