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To be honest, if you're approaching ME3 as a game on its own merits, as presumably most people watching an LP who haven't played it are, I don't think it's a bad game at all. The real problem it has is the same one that Command & Conquer 4 had, where it just feels like somebody made a completely different game and slapped a few labels on it (for C&C4, that was actually the case, though). You get the sense that EA decided after the first two games did well that they were going to put a huge amount of money behind marketing this, but that they needed ME3 to have "mass market appeal", which basically means stomping out any of the bits that made the first two games different and instead making something far more analogous to a Gears Of War-style title where you run through linear rubble environments shooting zombies with a bunch of cool mil-tech. There's no issue with that as a game, but for people who'd been waiting however long to finish the story, they obviously weren't best pleased.
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Jul 20, 2014 22:04
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Alavaria posted:An interesting way to characterize that sort of gameplay. Oh yeah, that's not particularly changed since the first game. Don't get me wrong, the combat is not hugely different to what it was in ME2, the difference is that it's now largely a game where the plot exists to drive the combat instead of the other way around, with a lot of the stuff that happened in the first two games getting handwaved away in the process.
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Jul 20, 2014 23:15
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Endorph posted:Also, words have already been said about this, but I really hate how Cerberus is used in ME3. They basically exist solely as an enemy for you to shoot when the game can't justify tossing reapers at you, and it kind of sucks compared to how they were almost interesting antagonists in 2. This, and this was one of the things related to my point about the plot not going any further than it needs to in order for you to have a game where you get to shoot stuff. In ME2, Cerberus are a fairly off-radar quasi-terrorist group that throw a vast chunk of the Illusive Man's personal fortune into rebuilding you and your ship as their one grand project. It's, like, twelve dudes plus Shepard's crew. Somehow, in the six months between then and now, Cerberus has accumulated an army of literally thousands of heavy troops (who are husks but also still shout generic bad guy dialogue), dropships, mechs, several large industrial bases, and a robot who thinks she's people. And they all hate you and anyone you've ever been friends with and want to kill you for reasons that are really never genuinely explained. It's a bit moon-on-a-stick, but I would have loved to have an RPG-style game element where it actually gave you a choice between the Alliance objectives and Cerberus objectives, and it actually affected the way the game plays out and the ultimate results you get. Instead they just exist as an arbitrary combat roadblock between you and all the poo poo you're supposed to be doing, even, in a lot of cases, when there's no real benefit to them to even show up at the same place you are.
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Jul 24, 2014 21:56
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FoolyCharged posted:The big problem with making a big split path choice like that is that it's a LOT of development money thrown into a gimmick that most people won't see as the average user will beat the game once, if that. I think the only games that have split the game like that that come to mind for me would be the withcher 2, and fate of atlantis. Alpha Protocol gets a side mention for reacting to lots of small scale choices, but the game was tiny to compensate for that. Yeah, I wouldn't suggest it would be practical to have a game on this scale that effectively splits in two and gives you separate Cerberus missions, but you could easily do choices between two objectives in the same level, with Anderson in one ear talking about saving the galaxy and the Illusive Man in the other ear talking about saving humanity. And that wouldn't be an unreasonable theme to build on, considering how often it comes up in the first two games. A lot of it is just about giving the player the illusion of agency and the illusion of choice, which really falls down in this game compared to the first two. By way of example, in something like New Vegas, it's not fundamentally key to the core game whether you choose to fight for the Legion or the NCR, you still end up in the same places doing the same things, but it feels specifically as if you're choosing to do it rather than being shuttled between shooting galleries for plot reasons that don't really hold up to particular scrutiny.
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Jul 26, 2014 11:51
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A Curvy Goonette posted:Is it possible you're all giving the writers too much credit when it comes to the council? It could be that they were just created to be simple strawman politicians who act as nothing more than a plot obstacle to the action-based solutions of the player. Plus that the reasons the Spectres operate as they do are mostly a construction that explains away why you're able to be a character who is primarily a naval officer but answer to no real chain of command beyond, "we'd sure like it if you'd go to the moon and kill robots, Shepard, but we understand if you've got a bunch of cryo ammo mods to sell at the Citadel first"
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Jul 30, 2014 19:41
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Willie Tomg posted:Are we in the "good" part of the game yet? Because so far our two introductions to the galaxy destroying menace hyped for the last two games has been I think I described it in a previous post as "a zombie-shooter set in a range of differently-coloured rubble environments", or something to that effect, and it's one of my big issues with the game. Mass Effect 1, cut-and-paste dungeons and balance issues aside, really gave the player the idea of exploring a huge, open universe where all of the plot locations you visit feel unique and interesting. Mass Effect 2 cut down the physical size of the explorable universe, but you instead had a lot of focus on new character interactions, and the locations you visit still feel significant and relevant to developing the plot. Mass Effect 3 has neither. For saying that the game was built with the intention of having you finally visit Palaven and Thessia and all these great and ancient homeworlds that are discussed in the first two games, you never get the sense that you're actually somewhere interesting or memorable, which they try to hide with an occasional 'Press B to look at the skybox' pop-up. Plus, instead of introducing new characters as in ME2, you instead get pretty much every character from the first two games coming back for no real reason in sidequests, which makes the universe feel tiny. It creates the sense where it's neither fish nor fowl, where ME3 doesn't do particularly well as a space exploration game, and it does pretty horribly at creating the impression of being part of a great and all-consuming war. So instead you're just being told repeatedly in cutscenes how bad things are and how pointless it all is before being ordered off on a glorified fetch-quest, which all again goes back to the player's sense of agency and ability to actually influence the story being told.
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Aug 2, 2014 12:57
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Lt. Danger posted:Here's a meaty topic: women. What do we think about the depiction of women in games? I call out Jack and Miranda in the video, but see the link above for a different perspective. Yeah, the whole subject pretty much invites ten pages of inane bickering, and a lot of that is that there's now this brand of "video game feminism" which begins with, "fe fi fo fum, someone somewhere is having fun". I mean, yes, you could put everyone in the game into three inches of football armour and that would be more realistic conceptually, but at some point you have to admit that you're just taking a hammer to the idea of people having nice things in their messianic James Bond space opera. That's not to say that I don't have the same issues with EDI that you do. Jack and Miranda didn't feel like major problems, because their character design fit the actual concepts for the characters. Miranda was written as this femme fatale character that's effectively the Illusive Man's primary agent. She feels very much like she's modelled on someone like Emma Peel, and she only really looks underdressed compared to Shepard and because of the amount of rear end-cam. Jack, on the other hand, wears a completely ridiculous costume in ME2, but it's somewhat necessary to show off the idea that she's got the full body tattoo. She doesn't ever really get the same, "we spent four days designing her butt, put it in all the cutscenes" treatment that Miranda does. EDI, and the whole romance plotline that follows, feels incredibly forced and bland in comparison. None of which is helped by the writing for the whole bit turning Joker into Sid James, to the extent that you feel he should be leaning out of the cockpit window yelling, "ayyy baby, let me tongue that exhaust port" at passing ships. The body she's given doesn't particularly fit the character and the game makes a weird effort of pointing at it and winking at you, as if it's public knowledge that you have a fetish for chrome space mannequins. It's weird, it's jarring, it's awkward, and it's one of about twenty things in the game that feels like it was written in a silo with no reference to anything else going on.
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Aug 3, 2014 11:52
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Soricidus posted:Where "people" is defined as "a vocal minority consisting almost entirely of men" and "nice things" is defined as "gratuitous T&A all the time". Miranda is overdone, of course she is, but if the alternative suggestion is returning to ME1-style 'multicoloured combat onesies', then I don't think that does the game or the characterisation any favours at all. That seems like a sop to a genuinely tiny, genuinely loud minority, half of whom won't actually play the game, that someone might be objectifying a fictional woman and that it must be put a stop to immediately under the guise of "realism". If nothing else, that's not good business sense for Bioware. Note for balance that ME2 also includes Thane Krios, who I've never been able to see as anything other than a Mills & Boon transplant. He's absolutely written with the fangirls in mind. Breathy voice, visible pecs, assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold, slowly dying of an incurable disease, who'll launch into a soliloquy at the drop of a hat about his dead wife and retard son (so deep, so mysterious) and whose complex emotional problems can only be resolved with the vigorous application of your dusty vagine. But at some point it's a work of fiction and fantasy, and one which includes a race of space hippos that exclusively speak in a deadpan monotone doing a performance of Hamlet. Maybe if it plays to the audience a little, it's not too big a deal.
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Aug 3, 2014 14:56
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Willie Tomg posted:The same group of posters spitballing for pages and pages about the specific force disposition of a spacefleet of colossal immortal cybernetic cuttlefish with death lasers in the opening moves of an apocalyptic galactic war is invited to talk about the measurable sexualization of women over the course of a series' run and goes "welp, its a made up fantasy reality nothing about it has to make sense, dudes will be dudes right?" I would suggest that there's a difference between complaining that something isn't internally consistent or that it fails to accomplish what it sets out to achieve, and standing up and saying, "well, if space wizards did exist, they certainly wouldn't wear that". You can allow for the fact that James Bond never files any paperwork while still thinking it's absurd for him to sneak up on a bad guy by hiding behind an invisible car. Hence why there's a complaint about EDI where there wasn't particularly with Jack or Miranda. The art design should fit with the character that's being portrayed, as a minimum. Everything beyond that becomes increasingly silly posturing. Lt. Danger posted:That's almost definitely non intentional, but it's still bad, just like how female Shepards had to make do with a generic facemorph until ME3. And who knows if that was only because Marketing thought it'd be a good idea? Changing the female model for ME3 actually annoyed me. You had a FemShep for the first two games that looked about appropriate for the age she was supposed to be, which meant that it was time for the art team to step up and repackage her as nineteen and Irish for all the FemShep boxart that they were going to make. You also got to vote on Facebook as to what colour her hair should be, which meant that we could quite easily have got this as default Shepard. The actual in-game version isn't quite as blatant, but she's still younger looking having died and been court-martialed than she was in ME1.
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Aug 3, 2014 23:34
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Willie Tomg posted:Q: How do you kill a vampire? This is where the concept of internal consistency comes into play. Spiderman can climb walls and Harry Potter can fly on a broomstick. If Harry Potter suddenly starts climbing the walls, you've hosed up somewhere, even if both characters are entirely fictional. quote:Womens bodies exist. Miranda is literally modeled after Yvonne Strahovski. Bioware consciously took things that exist IRL and showed them certain, selective ways which can be read certain ways. If we're going to discuss the meaning and relevance of the Mass Effect series, I think we can safely say that it's found just about anywhere except Miranda's backside. It's not that it's not worthy of discussion, but it becomes posturing to frame it as being an issue of "realism" instead of an excuse to get rid of things that they don't necessarily like politically. I'm not going to cheerlead for Bioware and a lot of their approach to character interaction, but it seems a particularly joyless and puritanical approach to demand that every character in the game be strapped into gundam suits lest someone in the audience be titillated in a culturally unhelpful way, and I don't see that Bioware are under an obligation to write characters for their games on that basis. You're writing a game that's supposed to be something that people play for fun so they can vicariously be a secret agent flying around space and solving mysteries. Of course that's going to involve a certain level of making a product that the audience will actually enjoy and want to buy, instead of just remaking The World At War but with spaceships.
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Aug 4, 2014 01:35
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Willie Tomg posted:I don't particularly care about realism, or good taste or political anything for the sake of this discussion, I'm trying to keep this particularly derail-prone topic trained on a practical aesthetic storytelling argument. The universe of Mass Effect is unrealistic and melodramatic as hell and that owns. The entire series the Reapers have been kept vague, their threat level the precise level of Plot. Of course they're going to fulfill that same role in the final game. Their entire purpose narratively and mechanically is to give you a sense of urgency wherever you're going, whatever you're doing. Of course they're going to be inconsistent in what they do and what they're doing in different places, they have absolutely no established set of power or anything. That's trying to put a number on Bioware attempting to communicate a mood of "WE'RE hosed! FUUUUUUUCCKKKKKED!!" The story is the important part, and communicating the mood of that greatest part of that and the level design will reflect that and gently caress good sense and realism it doesn't matter. This seems to be pushing toward the idea that a game (or any form of story) must pitch its tent in one of two camps, either "gritty realism" or "wacky hijinks". I'd suggest that almost all works of fiction meet somewhere in the middle, and it's why we talk about "artistic licence". I would tend to agree with you if a lot of the complaints earlier had been really petty things about the nature of ammo cooldown or why only tech characters can have invisibility cloaks, when surely that would be tech that a real army would roll out to everyone on the battlefield. The answer is "because it's a video game not a documentary, go outside". However, the main complaints that people seemed to have were about the narrative itself, and the fact that, for example, they can't decide if something that's visibly on fire (from space!) is hosed or not hosed. Soricidus posted:I agree! As does everybody in this thread, so far as I can see! But you're doing a great job beating the poo poo out of that argument you have a peculiar obsession with despite nobody having brought it up. I think I've said earlier, I don't particularly disagree. Bioware could definitely have done certain things more intelligently (in quite a lot of ways), but it does feel like one of those complaints that's ultimately quite pedantic and insignificant to the story being told, and one that ultimately doesn't particularly improve a notion of realism by putting her in neon purple armour (apparently camouflage is not an important military concept in the future). The original point of discussion, though, was about the depiction and character design of women in the game in general. And if you're having that conversation you really do have to recognise that there's a vocal group out there that would be more than happy to see characters like Miranda and Jack shitcanned entirely on the grounds that any sexualisation, real or imagined, in a video game (or any medium) is inherently bad, but who are almost never honest about their motivations for doing so. If that's not a group that you belong to (let's hope), then my point was never directed at you in the first place. If you're going to take objection to me saying that "Thing X is bad", you can't then later claim that "nobody is arguing for Thing X, you're strawmanning" when I point out why it's bad.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:35
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Lt. Danger posted:How can it be bad at being the third part of the trilogy? It either is or isn't the third part of the trilogy. Since it's called "Mass Effect 3", I feel confident saying that it is. To be honest, I don't think you can necessarily approach it from that angle unless you're willing to allow someone to go away and write Die Hard 3 as from the pen of Samuel Beckett. What, you were expecting explosions in this movie? That's a little presumptuous, don't you think? I think you're right to say that a lot of what's in question is to do with what defines the Mass Effect trilogy in the first place. Mass Effect 2, though, deliberately left a lot of things open with the intention that there would always be a Mass Effect 3, and that Mass Effect 3 would then resolve all of these outstanding elements. By way of analogy, if the third Star Wars movie has to jump ten yards to the right of where the second film left off, that's not so much an artistic decision as it is just shoddy writing, since you always knew you were making a third movie and promoted it as such. I don't think that Mass Effect makes real pretentions towards being a horror game or to telling a hard-sci plot. I was going to elaborate on this earlier, but if there's one thing I'd say defined the first two games, I'd say that they're mystery games. Both plots are driven by this idea of having an unfolding mystery that only you, Commander Shepard, are able and willing to go and investigate, and then only at the end are you put in a position where you've discovered the secret and have to go stop A Bad Thing Happening. In many ways, the plot structure of ME2 is therefore almost identical to ME1. The problem is that they then have to actually resolve the overriding issue with the Reapers, and it falls down hard. The idea of having a secret Prothean weapon is not actually a bad one, but that should be the game. Make that the mystery and have Shepard go chase it while the war happens in the background. Instead, it's basically shouted at you directly after the tutorial, and then becomes a number that goes up offscreen while the player goes through something akin to a James Vega-simulator, where you meet a bunch of space babies and they tell you to go on errands for them. I don't think you particularly need to introduce the plot elements for ME3 as part of ME2, but you do need to have a consistent narrative flow between them. In hindsight, it would probably make a lot more sense for there to be a 5-10 year gap between ME2 and ME3 and for Arrival to be a game on its own that actually sets the scene for the final game.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:30
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Arglebargle III posted: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? It's part of the Arrival DLC for ME2, which basically means that 90% of people won't have played it.
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Aug 5, 2014 16:32
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Lt. Danger posted:
I'd take issue with the characterization of Mordin in the video. He's not Mengele, at any point. Mordin's approach is that of the pragmatist, it's almost his one defining feature. It somewhat confuses matters, to be fair, that across the series there seems to be some back-and-forth in terms of the plot as to whether the genophage is a slow-burn genocide or simply a form of population control. It's suggested at some points that it wasn't meant as a genocide but that the Krogan can't arrange proper breeding practices to maintain a stable population (Wrex, ME1); but Wreav suggests in the video that they do have a breeding plan and are still dying off; yet Mordin explains in ME2 how he recoded the genophage while with STG to stabilise a population that had started to increase again due to evolved immunity. It's a hot mess and maybe it's not something they actually needed to resolve as part of ME3. Without wanting to spoil anything from the Tuchanka arc, though, the same "pragmatism vs objective morality" questions will ultimately be put the player. Without the genophage, there becomes a real threat that the Krogan population will quickly exceed a level where the rest of the galaxy would be able to protect themselves against Krogan aggression. The story that's told with Mordin in that regard ultimately ends with him making some form of decision on the basis, again, of pragmatism. In many ways, he's actually one of the most consistently written characters across ME2 and ME3. With Eve, I think I've already staked out my ground in terms of video game feminism ("an awful thing for awful people"), so I'm probably not going to introduce anything revolutionary on the topic, but I think you have to reach a lot to see her as symbolic of anything other than the requirements of the character that she's forced to be. She's written as something of a counterfoil to Wrex and Wreav. In order for her to be not completely overawed by the intensity of those two characters, you have to make her very strong and intense but in a completely different way, hence the final character that we're presented with. Similarly, I think the way she's dressed has most to do with the idea of the character designers sitting down for lunch and desperately trying to create a toadmonster-thing that is visibly feminine from a human perspective, without it just being Wrex with lipstick and a beauty spot. Presumably they then got to dessert and decided, "gently caress it, just put her in a niqab and we'll go get high and watch hockey". Garrus is quite complex by contrast, because I think if you'd introduced him at this point in the story, he'd be another Vega or Cortez and largely get relegated to the background. As you mentioned in a previous video, if he's a self-insert character, then Vega has roughly the same purpose and was explicitly designed as such. Garrus is a consistently friendly face across all three games, with no underlying agenda, and I think people warm to him on that basis. Where most of the characters you're introduced to are portrayed as having complex moral backgrounds, Garrus is written as the classic good guy character, his revenge arc in ME2 aside. He doesn't fight with Shepard because he's waiting for a favour, or because he owes one, he fights with Shepard because *somebody* has to save the universe from the bad guys. Hence why when Shepard dies, he basically does the exact same thing on Omega. I don't think that would mesh if you want to then reduce him to Birdface Waylon Smithers.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:07
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BioMe posted:Well, this is a thread where people cite tvtropes as an argument. Seriously, if "there's no message, ignore anything that looks like an allegory" is the intended interpretation then the writer should be ashamed. If it's the interpretation you make you should be ashamed. If you tell people to stop thinking you should be doubly ashamed. 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. The problem is that there's stuff in this thread that starts to swing into, "well, if you look at it like this, then the conflict between the Geth and the Quarians is a metaphor for the Boer War, and I can't believe Bioware allowed it to stay in the game". Which seems to just be masturbatory self-indulgence for people who want to pretend that they're Roger Ebert and that video games work the same way as movies. Are people suggesting that Bioware should be aware of your own personal hang-ups and avoid putting things that could tangentially reference them in the stories they write? Lt. Danger posted:This is one of the reasons that treating stories as crafted objects, rather than 'ideas that just happen to storytellers', is so important. Mass Effect as a trilogy runs to something like 120-150 hours of content though, compared to a movie trilogy which has no more than nine. You've got a team of ~15 writers putting together their own individual segments pretty much independently. I genuinely don't think it's realistic in that format to exclude any content that doesn't serve the overall principles of the story. Like I say, I think that's people wanting to apply the metrics they've seen cinema reviewers use and ending up trying to bash a round peg through a square hole.
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Aug 7, 2014 11:04
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BioMe posted:Ah yes, the obscure subject of homosexuality. Also if they directly referenced the Boer War during the Geth/Quarian plot then it would be a pretty good interpretation of it, yeah. I'd be more willing to hear out the argument if Morinth was the only character in the series that's bisexual or homosexual, same as I'd be more willing to hear out arguments about the position of women in the game if Bioware hadn't gone to significant expense in allowing for the player-character to be a (bisexual) woman in the first place. Arglebargle III posted: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. Well, there seems to be some suggestion that Bioware has an obligation to not put things into their games that if you squint hard enough to see a sailboat and take out of all context, might be seen as offensive to somebody somewhere. It seems a very silly way to approach things and opens the door to a litany of perceived grievances that don't actually touch on whether the game is good or bad either as a story or simply as a game.
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Aug 7, 2014 12:57
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BioMe posted:So does the "everyone get along" message invalidate any grievances about the greedy space Jews or vice versa? Like who decides which way it goes? I'm not even sure in this context who the Space Jews are supposed to be. I do think there are some characters in science fiction that are basically just stereotypes wearing a hat (Jar-Jar Binks), but suggesting that a race of bisexual aliens producing a bisexual serial killer is something worthy of lengthy debate on that basis seems to be grasping at straws to be upset by. The real problem with Morinth is just that she's really boring for what she's supposed to be written as, and Samara is almost entirely more interesting on every level. Of course, that's a subjective decision, but everything is in that regard and that goes on to a deeper conversation. At what point do we decide something is racist? Is it when one nutter with a victim complex says it is? Or is it when you have a consensus, and what then of minority opinions?
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Aug 7, 2014 14:51
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The Ferengi? Yes. The Volus? I don't see the sailboat on that one.
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Aug 7, 2014 15:36
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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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Morroque posted:But if I could turn the premise on its head, I'm left to wonder... If the Crucible is the one true method of solving the conflicts at the heart of the matter, then why was it the ending remained so reviled upon first viewing? Could it have come down to bad messaging? What prevents that idea from being truly realized? Is it the sheer scope of the story? Gameplay included, it's quite a long way from our current point all the way back to the later half of the first game, where we first find the thing that provides the context as to "why" the crucible. Or is it just that the final draft of the game didn't have the wherewithal to actually put the ideas into words and into action? I mentioned earlier that I didn't think the fundamental concept for the Crucible is unworkable, but the execution is awful. The idea is flung at the player at the start of the game, apropos of nothing, where it's been sat in a Prothean archive on Mars for 200 years. Mars. The planet next to Earth. Which Javik claims the Protheans abandoned as soon as the Reapers invaded, yet which houses the only known blueprints for their doomsday device but apparently makes no mention of the Reaper invasion itself. It then sits in the background with Hackett giving nonsensical updates ("we don't know how it works, but we know it's super big") while Shepard goes off to solve a bunch of 1000-year-old problems that don't actually need fixing right now and which ultimately have no bearing on the material outcome of the game. I'm avoiding spoiling any of the ending or the significant plot points for any of the six people on the internet who haven't yet seen it, but suffice it to say that none of this is ever paid off and that the Crucible will be less well explained by the end than it is already. The idea would have worked a lot better if it had been something directly revealed to the player, either by Javik or by ShepVision, where you then have to go off and find the missing pieces of this superweapon while Hackett gets on the vidcom to passive-aggressively complain that you're not at the front shooting wildly at all these cuttlefish. That's effectively the structure of the first two games, and does a lot better at not making the player feel like they're just a passenger while the story happens around them. Now, I'd then want the final level to be where you have to actually get on board Harbinger to trigger the weapon and blah blah blah Independence Day blah blah blah armchair game design, but you could at least then have achieved everything discussed in the video and still had a proper payoff at the end.
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Aug 10, 2014 13:28
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I tried to read the whole fanfiction thing, but my eyes just glazed over and I started wondering aloud whether these people should have been beaten more by their parents. And I say this as someone who is still willing to write multiple-paragraph posts complaining about Mass Effect two years after the fact. I do actually think the Rachni level is one of the best levels in the game, which is not to say that it's brilliant, but it has a unique design and the enemies have a legitimate reason to be there beyond just the need for there to be something to dismember between yourself and whatever arbitrary thing you're supposed to be doing. The problem comes, as you mention in the video, if you killed the last Rachni in existence in ME1, then the mission plays out exactly the same as it does here. For a game that originally promoted itself on the idea of choice, this is not good, and again it's that question of player agency (I promise to post the words "player agency" at least a dozen more times before the end of this LP). Moreover, the choice you make here ultimately won't matter to the game, other than giving you different allocations of points for your Love-Tester Machine Score Of Death. Remember that in ME2 they deliberately shoehorn in a conversation where the Rachni queen, if you've saved her, talks about "burning the darkness clean", which would have been interesting if they'd ever actually gone anywhere with it. In terms of them doing things as a homage, that's certainly true, although I tend to wonder how much of that is just because sci-fi (especially AAA-title sci-fi) is pretty derivative as a genre. I think you can point to 99% of the content in the game and highlight how it's been done somewhere else before, and while a good chunk of that is a conscious decision on the part of the writers, some of it is likely entirely coincidental. Which really references back to the earlier discussion about how difficult it is to write unique characters in sci-fi and how a lot of it is just variations on broad themes. This as well as the factor that when you make a game like this, and you need it to ship a million copies to not be a failure (or however many the actual break-even was), you again have to frame it in terms of things that a broad audience will immediately understand and be able to interact with, which cuts down a lot of the scope for anything really complex or inventive. FullLeatherJacket fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 21:26
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double nine posted:Shamus young's got a big column up on ME3 and why the discussion just. won't. stop. Obviously it's a matter of individual taste, and there are certainly people (maybe including myself) who preferred Mass Effect 1 over everything that came after, but it doesn't really account for the anger about ME3 when you consider just how well-received ME2 was. I particularly remember an awkward moment at some gaming convention right after ME3 came out when the Bioware team asked the audience which of the trilogy they preferred (at an event ostensibly to discuss ME3) and two-thirds of the audience raised their hands for ME2. And almost all of the significant changes that happened in the trilogy happened between the first and second games. I think there's a conversation that we'll have further down the line about video games not being movies which in turn aren't books, but I'm actually watching through the Shamus Young playthrough that was linked earlier in the thread, and for as much as I want to talk about player agency, I do feel that if Bioware really wanted to do something where you're shuttling the player through a very strict story with complex sci-fi themes, it could actually have been good. A big change, but good. The problem is that it's done really badly, and with lovely, nonsensical plot. If you decide you really want to make John Madden's International Diplomacy Simulator, you can't then have it just be "press X to talk smack about the French ambassador" because it turns out you only really know how to make NFL games, and that's basically what happens here. About another eight hours further into the game than we are now, I noticed one single line of renegade dialogue where Shepard actually chews someone out for being a self-serving rear end in a top hat (I'll point it out in, like, six weeks), and it became really conspicuous how little Shepard actually does that in a meaningful way throughout the entire game. Shepard is deliberately written to emote very, very little, even when Jennifer Hale is doing the voice (and she does it moreso than Mark Meer). This works within the framework of a choose-your-own-adventure story, but if you want to write a story about how Shepard has gone full-PTSD while the galaxy slowly falls apart, then he or she should be running around blowing up fuel depots while screaming, "THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD", not doing an impression of an Elcor for 90% of the time. Ironically, I think this is another one of those "player agency" issues. Everyone in this game has Aria T'Loak syndrome. You've saved the galaxy. Twice. You're basically Steve Austin with a spaceship. Yet in order to advance the plot, half of them spend their entire lives doing stupid bullshit and then talking down to you about it. The game then gives you the options of *smile and nod politely* or *smile and nod while making a face*. Occasionally you get a call from one of your buddies from the first two games, who hasn't spoken to you in six months but wonders if you could come over and help them move a couch. Also, Cerberus will be there and try to steal the couch for no reason. None of it feels like it's supposed to. The emotions are all wrong and the actual story elements aren't properly explored because they're not given enough time or depth because they're trying to do too many things at once. I think that's why there's still the big discussion about it. They went in expecting payoffs to these huge 100-hour story arcs, and it ends up just being "Dr. Sam Sheppard Never Returned Home. Buy DLC." instead of a real climax or conclusion. ArchangeI posted:I wouldn't mind a "save the world"-plot in a series that had previously run "save the galaxy"-plots. Set in a small, new colony on a planet the size of Earth with maybe 1 million people living on it. Tensions with native life/interference by mega corporations running an indentured servants scheme with colonists/amoral scientists manipulating survey records to get people to settle on the planet because of reasons, whatever. Something that wouldn't even matter to the galaxy at large, but matters every much to the people there. I always had this idea in my head of a prequel where you play as a young Zaeed on some dystopic planet in the Terminus systems, full of Blade Runner bits and film noir cliches. Recruit a team of mercs, chase after dames, run down corridors while looking at skyboxes, that sort of stuff. Wouldn't work in practice for about a dozen reasons, not least that Zaeed's voice actor passed away shortly after ME3, but they could definitely make some expanded-universe stuff out of that for me to completely not read.
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Aug 16, 2014 23:07
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I think you're at risk of presenting a false dichotomy here. It starts to suggest that the only avenues available are autistic obsession with technical detail, or doing this. That actually becomes quite pretentious and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, particularly when it's applied to things that clearly don't work in that way. Koyaanisqatsi isn't Super Mario Brothers (just ask Bob Hoskins) and treating it as if it is just has that desperate air of, "gently caress you dad, video games are just like Shakespeare or Van Gogh". The vast majority of fictional works ever created, though, work on the basis of having the viewer identify with and cheer on the characters involved. Video games go one step further and actually give the player some control over the character, which defines the medium in an entirely different way to having the person watching simply being a passive observer. To suggest that this is ultimately irrelevant to the the overall goal of the format is to almost entirely miss the point of video games, and leads me to wonder if it wouldn't be easier just to flog the Xbox and go read a Yukio Mishima novel instead. If I was reviewing Dredd, I wouldn't do so in the same way that I'd review Citizen Kane, and that doesn't make Dredd inherently a bad film or that it's particularly low-brow to enjoy the film for what it is. While there are certainly underlying concepts within that universe that could be explored (fascism, poverty), it's basically an action film where stuff gets blown up in slow motion and you want Dredd to kill the bad guys. It doesn't work if they all stop at the end and have a Sophie's World conversation where they all start to recognise themselves as fictional characters. It's not actually cleverer to do it that way, and I doubt that Orson Welles intended Citizen Kane to be approached in that manner, either. You're still supposed to care at the end, not just to use it as the intellectual equivalent of the soggy biscuit game.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:41
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Sombrerotron posted:Do you think that such analysis is inherently pointless, or that certain creative expressions do merit it? And if some do, how do you identify them? At the risk of inviting adult conversation into the thread, it really goes back to the idea discussed earlier about "death of the author". You can only analyse something in terms of either what it is or what it tries to be. You can analyse a cheese sandwich in as much as you can look at the bread and you can look at the cheese and take them apart. It's not a metaphor for the French Revolution. Pretending it is is just completely self-serving and masturbatory, and largely relies on you ignoring the obvious intent of a work (it's a loving sandwich, you said you were hungry) in favour of assigning things arbitrary purposes that can't be disputed because everything is now utterly subjective. As I alluded to, the desire to shoehorn things that clearly don't fit into this framework seems just to be a clinging attempt to validate the medium against some artificial standard, as if talking about the underlying meaning of Sonic The Hedgehog like it was Ionesco's Rhinoceros justifies the time you spent on it, because "it's a fun game about a blue hedgehog that's gotta go fast" is not a good enough reason to enjoy something. My problem is not critically deconstructing Mass Effect. The problem comes when you start chasing after ghosts and assigning complex meanings to things that are likely just there because there was a hole. You can't look at a bunch of people who go on their own forums and write things like "gigglesquee" and spent hours and days writing a never-nude fetish lesbian while allowing their main plot to essentially be something that happens offscreen and gets indicated by a loving bar graph, and then turn around and tell me that actually they didn't want to write a character-driven game and instead it's a rich, tailored narrative about the nature of robotics. That might well have been better, but that's not to say that's what it is.
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Aug 18, 2014 20:43
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Sombrerotron posted:Whatever is there can have meaning, regardless of the author's intentions. Also, it is quite possible for people to legitimately interpret the same material in very different ways. That's where literary analysis comes in. So in the case of ME3, you can get something like the Indoctrination Theory - which I rather like, because it is well-argued on the basis of many elements present within the game, and adds depth to the game's narrative. That it's not "canon" is beside the point. Whether by design or not, a work of fiction can be one of multiple things, depending on how you look at it. Think of someone saying "I'm not racist, some of my best friends are black!" Its literal meaning is clear, but does it correspond to how people interpret that statement? Does that interpretation depend on whether or not the speaker actually believes they are not racist? If the answer to both questions is "no," then I believe that adequately demonstrates that the meaning and value of any expression of the human mind is not determined solely by its author's views on that expression. And if we can accept that premise, I also believe that any literary analysis is valid and worth consideration if it's well-developed and capable of giving its audience a different perspective on the work it concerns. Don't get me wrong, I've no intention of saying that critical analysis is solely bound to the author's intentions, I mean, I'm sure Adam Sandler genuinely intends to make movies that are funny and good. I think I said in my post that you can absolutely analyse something for what it is rather than what it intends to be. My issue is more with the "zebras instead of horses" thing. Particularly when it's done that smug self-satisfied way where you explain to everyone how much cleverer you are than them because you're the only one that realised that Grown-Ups 2 was actually a satire on the slow death of the movie industry through the gradual slippage of the lowest commmon denominator, and not just Adam Sandler needing to keep himself in coke and whores for another 12 months.
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Aug 19, 2014 19:35
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I don't actually buy the stuff with ME2 and "my gay dad", at least not as a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. Again, it's a question of horses not zebras. You've got a situation where Bioware have had to come up with twelve missions relating to each of the potential party members, all of which have to have some actual emotional significance or growth potential for these characters. You can't just get Zaeed drunk on his birthday and then have a contest to see who can piss the highest up the wall without splashing back on themselves, like normal people would bond, they have to have some traumatic backstory that Shepard can fix with the strategic application of a pew pew laser gun. Writing Cliches 101 suggests that traumatic backstory should normally either be "my gay dad", "my gay son", or "I became a titty monk because of my gay vampire daughter". Hence why it is what it is. It would make a lot more sense as a deliberate thematic choice if it actually went anywhere or was applicable to Shepard in any way. It's much easier to assume that Bioware only know how to write four different stories and cover the rest by changing the thing the planet is made out of.
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Aug 20, 2014 23:30
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In regard to the video: I don't think that it's particularly controversial to say that Cerberus are emphasized in the game because they're a more fun enemy to fight than the Reaper forces are. In fact, I think one of the first things I said in this thread was that the plot had increasingly become something that existed to drive combat situations rather than the other way around. This very much happens here. Having already invaded the Salarian homeworld and overrun a special forces base, Cerberus now not only dumps hundreds of mercs on the Krogan homeworld unchallenged, but is fully aware of the exact location of a Turian bomb that is so top secret that neither a senior Turian military advisor, a Council Spectre, or the actual Shadow Broker have any knowledge of, and responds by bringing in hundreds of tonnes of strip-mining equipment to dig it out. Despite this being close enough to a major Krogan population centre that the detonation would decimate their society, literally nobody has noticed this enormous operation by an alien terrorist group until the point Shepard arrives. This isn't just contrived, it's ludicrous beyond the point of believability and appallingly stupid writing for a game of this scope and budget. I don't disagree at all that there needs to be more to the game than just shooting various colours of husks, but taking the approach of, "gently caress it, that'll do" deserves to be called out for what it is and lends credence to the "anything intelligent in this game is entirely unintentional" theory. I wasn't going to go into the Geth until they showed up later, but note that they naturally get the same treatment. There's a whole mission in ME2 where you go and either reprogram or destroy all Reaper-loyal Geth. ME3 goes, "gently caress it, that'll do" and has you fight a whole bunch of Reaper Geth anyway. Hooray Bioware. In terms of the gameplay, you also alluded in the video to the fact that ME3 is pretty much the first time that the "waves of enemies" mechanic gets used, particularly with the Reapers. This again is actually quite a big jump from ME2 and has a bigger effect on the game than first impression would indicate. From a combat gameplay perspective, it's probably better, or at least more challenging, but in ME2 you had enemies that all spawned just before you entered their particular area. That meant that you had a dynamic where you were moving through space clearing out enemies (particularly if you played as a Vanguard), or where you were trying to control space within a large open area. ME3 instead has bulletsponges coming at you while you're stationary, which again gives that very claustrophobic, repetitive feel of slogging through generic enemies on generic planets. My controversial opinion here is going to be that in the end, despite the changes, I felt ME2's combat was just more fun. Regarding the second half of the video, though, I'd also agree that the series isn't about the Reapers. It's about Shepard. In the same way that the Odyssey is about Odysseus and not the Cyclops. And, like you say, the majority of that (for both Shepard and Odysseus) is not about the character themselves, but in the idea of exploration of a mythic world and of resolving these great mysteries. In all honesty, you could actually have made this game and not mentioned the Reapers at all. Mass Effect 3 could have been Shepard vs Cerberus, and as long as it had never been sold as anything else and you'd not had the build-up in ME2 and Arrival, it would likely have worked better than what we ultimately got. The problem is not that Shepard isn't on the front line fighting Reapers, it was discussed earlier why that doesn't particularly work. The actual issue is that Shepard in this game is no longer the central character that drives the plot forward. He or she instead becomes a character who is forced into largely irrelevant situations by the demands of others. Again, a lot of these stories could still have been told while making Shepard's actions an active means of defeating the Reapers with just a little more application of intelligent writing. Nor is the argument necessarily that ME2 should have been about Reapers. The argument is that Bioware leaves off from ME2 with numerous issues unresolved, and a branching plot nightmare of Schrodinger's NPCs. They then try and resolve the Reaper war and the Illusive Man and the genophage and the Quarian/Geth conflict and what happened to Jacob and Kelly and Conrad and it all just turns into plot holes, ret-cons and hot sick. If these are the key elements of the game, then they deserve more than to be resolved within thirty minutes and never mentioned again. If needs be, make an ME3 that resolves all of this and removes the branches and then start fresh with your ME4 story that is purely about defeating the Reapers.
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Aug 21, 2014 20:17
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Another thing you've overlooked is that in many ways, the concept of Cerberus is the "child" of the plot narrative. In this episode, they attempt to "murder" their "father" by invading the central hub of the entire galaxy and setting about assassinating the President. This is almost tangibly the point in the game where the plot seems to deconstruct itself into a largely meaningless series of events. I said earlier that the "daddy issues" theme of ME2 was likely unintentional and a consequence of needing to write backstories for these characters that would allow them a way to create an emotionally meaningful challenge for Shepard to overcome (contrast this to Garrus' uniquely boring mission where you say boring things to a man and then he gets shot), and I stand by this. It's very easy to ascribe purpose to something after the fact (see: Jesus' crucifixion), but I don't get the sense from ME2 that it was a game made where they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do in ME3. With Kai Leng, though, he's just bad. Palpably bad. I agree with the sense that he's not supposed to be cool, he's supposed to be written as a ridiculous rear end in a top hat, but if you wanted to play it for comedy, have Shepard walk up and declare, "Kai Leng, this is not acceptable" and then shoot him in the foot. The way it's actually done is instead the continued battering of player agency. "Hey, see this loving idiot here? The guy who thinks he's going to defeat a team of crack soldiers and professional assassins with loving Hanzo steel? It turns out he's much better and smarter than you because you're actually Tommy loving Westphall and your special power is not putting your socks on inside out. Feel free to fight through a ten-minute-long segment where you kill waves of his buddies in order to get to a cutscene where it's demonstrated that you're actually a cretin who can't shoot for poo poo." FullLeatherJacket fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 23:24
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Xander77 posted:No comments on Udina's big moment? I think I hinted above that it's one of the many instances of ME3 taking something that was complex in the previous installments and... to be as fair as possible... simplifying it a great deal. I think it's another victim of the "resolve everything" approach that suggests that you need closure on the fact that Udina was slightly unpopular in the second game, so it's important that we engineer a way for the player to shoot him in the face, and we don't really have a story and we can only give it 30 minutes, so it's just going to be a series of bullshit things that don't make sense and if we throw them together in sequence quickly enough people won't catch on. The reason Lt. Danger could essentially talk over this entire section is that it ultimately has no reason to be there. It's not fun, it's not in any way interesting, it's adding more contrivance to the already growing Cerberus contrivance fire, and all it actually accomplishes is to introduce Ninja X-Pac as a poorly-constructed character that doesn't fit the story at all, as well as to give you a chance to shoot a relatively minor character from the first two games. You could take this entire part out of the game, and it'd pretty much be better for it.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:54
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Lt. Danger posted:I wanted to talk about Aria as well at this point but couldn't find a way to work it in. Aria's pretty unpopular with a lot of people, and I've never fully understood why - people claim she's a pet character of Mac Walters, which I can buy, but I don't see what about this makes her so offensive. She's got a very minor part in a series that's much bigger than her - if anything, she's underutilised as the anti-Council, though I suppose TIM has that job really. Still, if people have criticisms, this is the time to air them! Again, this is one of those player agency issues (in a game ostensibly built on the idea of player agency as a USP). When you first meet Aria in ME2, she goes on a long and quite pompous speech where she talks about how cool and important she is and tells you, "don't gently caress with Aria". And the only option the game gives you is to nod along politely and acquiesce to whatever nonsense she's going on about. This is in comparison to the Council or the Illusive Man, both of which give you a lot of dialogue opportunities to insult them, mock them and cut them off mid-transmission, if you choose to do so. Other than that, she's not particularly a bad character, but the fact that she's written to be untouchable puts people's backs up and gives the impression that the writers wanted her to be cooler than she actually is. In terms of the video, I think I mentioned before in the thread about how all of these little things that have been thrown in as callbacks do distract from the overall tone of the game and make it quite weird and jarring. So we jump back and forth between "everyone I've ever known is dead or dying" and "Shepard and Kaiden play a game of Elevator Squash against some really WASPy Hanar". Which is a problem if you want players to be onboard for the first one as being something more than being a background setting for Shepard's heroism. Of course, that was the case for the first two games. A lot of the charm of ME1 and ME2 are the silly Buffy The Husk Slayer bits where you take time out from your busy galaxy-saving schedule to bully the weaker races, mack on your co-workers, and to channel Daria Morgendorffer at major diplomatic functions. While the game certainly goes dark in places (See: leaving Ashley to be nuked; Kelly Chambers getting liquidated), it doesn't actually change Shepard's demeanour in any noticeable way. It therefore gives a certain impression to the player that this is the cost of doing war, and that Shepard is intrinsically cynical and hard-edged as a result. Hence when you introduce the mechanic of "BLOO HOO HOO A KID DIED" people start to complain that it's not in keeping with the Shepard that they play. If ME3 wanted to tell that story in a different way, Bioware really needed to put all of their eggs in that basket and focus on telling a coherent story with a coherent emotional narrative and an ending based on that. Whether that would have worked commercially, I don't know, but it would have avoided the problems they ultimately had.
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Sep 20, 2014 10:17
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I rolled my eyes pretty heavily the first time "women in Mass Effect" was brought up in the thread, and I'm going to do so again, but rollier and heavilier. There was a discussion earlier in the thread about the limitations of sci-fi writing, and that seemed to disappear from view in regard to this update. The Asari are a couple of tropes welded together in a slightly odd way, and essentially act no differently to a group of humans with those same traits. As are pretty much every race in the history of the genre, due to the constraints of time and imagination, at least until you reach Asimov stories about blob aliens that form geometric shapes and intersect with each other. To suggest and complain then that people may come to the game and take away deep and complex meanings about Blue Space Vaginas just feels like talisweat.jpg but for people that want to try and convince their dads that video games are just the same as films (they're not) and aren't just escapist fun (they are). And if that's the metric, this certainly isn't the game to apply it to. I mean, is the history of all hitherto existing Salarian society the history of class struggles? I don't know, the guy who designed them probably stopped halfway through a coke binge, wrote down "science lizard" on a post-it and then went back to what he was doing. The game is not written in such a way that the races are particularly more than individual one-line jokes. Trying to then psychoanalyze these is just pure navel-gazing, and I say that as someone who's already written the equivalent of a small novel about this game and why it was bad and disappointed me. If I haven't alienated everyone yet, the question that sprang to mind when watching the video is that a few updates ago, you were very vocal and disapproving of Bioware pandering to a certain section of the audience, perhaps at the expense of the story itself. Yet, in this update, you seem to suggest very strongly that it's incumbent upon Bioware to be aware of LGBT issues and incorporate them into the game, up to and including giving Shepherd the option to be gay as a window. In what way is that not pandering in exactly the same fashion?
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Sep 29, 2014 01:57
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2house2fly posted:Representing all sexualities equally is not pandering to any one sexuality. And as Mass Effect does not represent all sexualities equally it's even more not-pandering. It's entirely pandering when it's in response to people bloo-hooing on the Bioware forums and the various social media hellscapes that the writers didn't bolt on an opportunity for male Shep to get his homoeroticism on, and that it's somehow an obligation on them to add this in for the <1% of the fanbase that would care in any way. It's not done for the benefit of the gameplay or the narrative, it's done purely as an indulgence for a tiny minority of people with nothing better to complain about, and maybe some good PR. Which is fine, if that's what Bioware want to do, but you can't applaud that behaviour and then criticize them for spending yet more time writing a whole bunch of dialogue about how exactly you gently caress a Teenage Mutant Gypsy Chicken without giving her lupus. Lt. Danger posted:
I had to double-check that you'd edited that quote and I wasn't just babbling nonsense, but yes, I may have to fall back on my traditional football forum position of, "counterpoint: it doesn't count when I do it, on the basis that I'm right". But seriously, I wouldn't want to suggest that you can't criticize ideas of class or race in schlock pop-media (one of my favourite things is actually this Mark Kermode review that involves him singing the Internationale halfway through), but I think there's a clear delineation between something that provides a negative message in and of itself, and something where you can find a message to be annoyed by if you go looking for one, often on the basis of where something isn't rather than where something is. The nature of any kind of escapist heroic narrative, particularly when used for video games, is going to leave a lot of stuff behind. A lot of the races and the plot devices, particularly the governing structures, are built in such a way as to do only what they need to do to drive the core plot and the game element of the game, with the expectation that nobody is particularly going to ask what lady Turians look like, any more than they're going to ask how a Volus do a poop. To look at those gaps as if they're significant in and of themselves seems to be somewhat missing the wood for the trees and misjudges what is necessary or reasonable for the genre and the format.
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Sep 29, 2014 20:48
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Yes, I get that it's lovely when you're part of a group that represents 1.5% of the population and therefore most media is not going to be about people like you. Particularly if, I guess, you can't really enjoy being a cool space marine unless you get to be a cool space marine in
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Sep 29, 2014 23:12
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I never played Overlord myself, so that's the first time I've seen that interaction. I want to stand up and applaud it for being so poorly written. In terms of entitlement, though, I feel the need to reference professional wrestling. You're going to have to stick with me on this one. For people who've never taken an interest in it, for the last decade or so, WWE has been in a very weird position. They now not only have an audience that all know the product is a performance, they also have an audience that believes as a result that the product should therefore be written to cater to their wishes (and there's a big discussion to be had about whether the live audience wants the same thing as the wider television audience they're trying to attract). This means you have the bizarre situation where for ten years, WWE's biggest "good guy" is a man, John Cena, who gets booed out of every arena he visits but is pushed in the main because he sells a lot of merchandise and has mainstream credibility. There's been an increasingly large gulf between what WWE wants to push and the live crowds they have. This whole fan "problem" reached a head at the beginning of 2014, where the live crowd at a pay-per-view event realised that the guy they wanted to see pushed wasn't going to be involved, and it immediately turned into angry "gently caress you and gently caress your lovely product" heckling. In the end, it became the case that a month or two later they had to throw out and re-write their entire plans for their biggest show of the year in order to accommodate not upsetting the fanbase when they realised that this one incident could potentially spiral into something that could make or break the company. I mention this because it feels almost exactly like the situation with ME3, and it resulted in the same conversation about "fan entitlement". And it comes with the same caveats. Their original plans could maybe have worked, but certain details leaked at the last minute which forced them into a bad re-write, and the bad writing magnified the issue ten times over. I could sit here and say that I was sympathetic to both McMahon and Hudson regarding their creative endeavours, but for the most part they made their own beds. I know you talked in the video about people believing in advertising, but if you're going to market a product by saying that the fans are the centre of what you do, Bioware can't then retreat behind a cover of "gently caress you, it's art". That's the problem for a franchise that makes a point of putting in the chance to bone Kaiden because six people on the Bioware forums wanted it. That's the problem if you point to the crowd for thirty years and talk about giving them "what they want". You can't have your cake and eat it too. I remember at the time of the ME3 controversy, there was a lot of suggestion that the "entitlement" claims were more a circling of the wagons, and I think there's a fair bit of merit to that. There was an oft-repeated line of "75 perfect scores" that got brought out, and I think even without the ending, no impartial critic should be giving this game 10/10. It comes off as a case where the love-in has been exposed, they've overplayed their hand, and the obvious response is to call the people who complained "ingrates" and hypothesise about the nature of art. But the ending is pretty much indefensible. I would love for you to play through the original ending without comment just so people in the thread who haven't played the game can see how many issues they can pick out on first viewing. It says a lot that the two gigabyte Extended Cut patch makes no significant plot changes, it simply exists to rectify plot holes and mistakes in a sequence that lasts less than ten minutes. It's hard to say if there would have been more of a pro-Bioware argument if the EC version was the one originally released, but I would still definitely say that it doesn't work. I've discussed the problem before, and this video highlights it. ME3 feels in its entirety like a game that is building to a payoff. Dicking around with Jacob while other people fight Reapers is not a payoff. It's 40 hours of dicking around killing time and resolving petty issues from the first two games until you get the chance to go to last level, which is (spoiler) teeth-grindingly dull, followed by some stuff that isn't actually new or interesting and doesn't pass all but the most cursory of sense-checks. If this is a video game as art, then it's an egregious failure, and they'd legitimately have been better served having the ending be a big fat monster you can shoot with a gun until it dies. FullLeatherJacket fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Oct 12, 2014 |
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Oct 12, 2014 03:01
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Lt. Danger posted:"strawman" One of these is not like the others. I mean, yes, I'm definitely in the camp that the "BUT TALI CAN'T EAT PEOPLE FOOD" crowd is basically just manifest autism, but when the ending is as unclear as it already is you may as well add it to the gigantic pile of plot holes, particularly when it gives the strong impression that you've just spent 40 hours playing King Canute's Sandcastle Simulator. I get the sense that you're going to do the zebras thing again, where you make the argument that having the ending be a bleak, inconclusive, tone-shifted exposition dump was actually a design choice, maybe harking back to the ending of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's at that point that I will highlight that in my first (only) playthrough of this game, one of the main characters apparently dies, only to be later be alive again on an entirely different planet. Which happened to a lot of people. What you should be taking from this is not that Garrus Vakarian is an allegory of the risen Christ, it's that the writing of the ending was given so little consideration that they didn't bother to put flags in to show that people were no longer alive, and later had to put an incredibly stupid retcon into the extended version to justify it. This is Sonic 2006 levels of "there was an attempt". I think there's also a question of whether or not an ending is tonally appropriate. You can absolutely have a sad ending to a heroic epic, but the Odyssey does not and can not end with Odysseus and Telemachus having a slap-fight in a field about the nature of being Greek. You can write a Mass Effect ending where Shepard and Liara go off to the Terminus Systems to raise blue babies, but Shepard can't cope with civilian life and eventually becomes a fat and violent drunk, later being found dead in a spacetruck from a self-inflicted gunshot. It'd be entirely inappropriate for the previous 120 hours of the game, but I'm sure you could get an Oscar for it if you hired Mickey Rourke to play Shepard. To be fair, a lot of the game up to this point already doesn't mesh tonally (see "A KID DIED" vs "FUNNY SPACE MIDGET BITS") and feels like Buffy The Vampire Slayer investigating the Armenian Holocaust, but even then, the ending juts off completely on its own accord, matches nothing that was done before it, doesn't particularly suit the medium at all, and is just a conflagration of multiple things being done entirely wrong on multiple levels. And is programmed like someone did it in the bath and didn't want to get all pruney. Other than that, you know, it's alright.
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Oct 14, 2014 20:00
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Lt. Danger posted:I think the 'retcon' was always implicit in the original cut. Like I said, there's definitely scope to try and tease out what's a legitimate artistic choice and what's a cock-up regarding the ending. I don't think it's in any way implicit that Joker flies the Normandy into a live-fire zone, parks it in front of Harbinger for several minutes while everyone bellyaches, and then all the NPCs up and fly away from the one and only battle to save the galaxy for no real reason. On the basis that this entire sequence of events makes no pissing sense whatsoever. It's the retconniest of retcons but is added purely so you have a narrative basis for things that happen in the original ending and appear to have just been pulled from a hat. Really, for a AAA-title, this is shockingly bad. Not "could have been improved" bad, but "should never have been released in this state" bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy to wait for you to actually discuss the ending before I start making GBS threads on it in earnest. And I won't say that the ending couldn't have been done correctly in principle. You do have to point out, though, the comments Casey Hudson made before the game was released about what he wanted to do with the ending before you say that all the hype was fan-made. And yes, I have played through several games released by Peter Molyneux's Haus Of Grandiose Lies, but at least then you got the impression that he aimed for the unrealistic and then made a variety of games with fart and poop mechanics. I don't think that if Bioware had the choice over again that this is the ending they would have made. It's not a swing and a miss, it's just a pure bodge-job.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:57
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So, remember earlier when I said that the whole Cerberus plot arc was just a series of contrivances bundled together so that you have things to arbitrarily shoot at? The Geth didn't want to be outdone, so we've now got an even stupider, even more contrived reason for you to dick about doing stuff that isn't fighting Reapers. Shepard is somehow informed that the key to winning the war is not the state-of-the-art Turian battle fleet but is instead a bunch of 300-year-old obsolete hillbilly garbage named after dick jokes. Having arrived, the leaders of said hillbillies meet on Shepard's ship for no reason and have an argument in front of an alien stranger as to whether it was a cool and good idea to launch a war they can't win during an existential threat to the entire galaxy. It's at this point you realise how little agency the player character is actually given in the game, since any rational Space Murderer would already be turning the ship around and leaving the idiots to do idiot things. Instead you go directly along with the idiots' plan, because it's needed for a later plot point. They then respond by trying to kill you, with the paragon option is to do nothing, and the renegade option to punch the Admiral once and then go on following his plan (because this is still needed for a later plot point). All of this should be seen in the context that there's literally a full mission in ME2 where you go onto a Geth ship and liberate the Geth from Reaper domination. This is ignored completely here... because that would make it slightly harder to do the plot point they want to do later. Which again speaks to the idea that Bioware clearly didn't have the idea while they were making ME2 that they'd end up here, showing an irrelevant war between two irrelevant factions at the edge of the galaxy and trying to pretend that Shepard is heavily emotionally invested in the outcome, despite the endgame strongly implying that whatever happens here is of no real consequence either way.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:00
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FoolyCharged posted:To be fair, I think they do address it briefly by having Shepard go, "What the hell guys, I already fixed this poo poo." The repetition of past mistakes kind of works with the premise that Shepard is really fighting the galaxy and the status quo rather than the reapers. I can't really hate on ME for having people make the same dumb mistakes over and over again either when you can just look at our history. NATO and the Warsaw pact happened within a lifetime of WWI after all. I would say this would be a pretty interesting way to approach it, if they'd taken the time to explore it as a plot point. Instead, it becomes glaringly obvious from the way that they gloss over it that you're supposed to forget that you may have ended the second game having reprogrammed the geth and being best buds with the Illusive Man, but none of those things are considered relevant to this game. In truth, a lot of this arc would be far, far better if they'd simply been able to give the story the time, depth and exploration it deserves instead of trying to explain, illustrate and resolve a multi-generational conflict in the space of ~3 hours purely for the sake of not leaving anything in the game universe open. The idea of the Quarian fleet is similar. It's not that you couldn't make an argument as to why Shepard would want it, but it shouldn't be up to the player to fill in the gaps between ME1/ME2, where every reference to the migrant fleet is as a floating junkyard and the status-quo for 300 years has been that the Quarians can't outmatch the Geth conventionally, and ME3, where the migrant fleet is important enough to get yourself blown up for and the Geth have to accept help from the Reapers in order to not be obliterated within hours. The whole thing comes off as lazily written and not in keeping with the narrative of the first two games, even before you start to look at the idea of the Geth in ME2 against the ideas that come up later in this ME3 arc.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:05
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Lt. Danger posted:Are you sure about this? I think you're misremembering a lot of the previous games. I'm generalising a bit there to make a point, to be fair, but there's a lot of these things that are poorly explained at best, and totally hamfisted at worst. But again, I don't think it would be that bad if this arc then had a lot of depth and subtlety to it, even to the extent of some of the moral choices you make in the first two games. In terms of the geth fleet, though, I'm particularly thinking of the whole 'Qwib Qwib' exchange (and the accompanying dick jokes), which basically relies on the idea that a Fleet Admiral is flying around in a second-hand ship bought from a race presumably not important enough to be playable. And he's going to use that to blow up the Geth Cube, or whatever the gently caress it is. Plus that Tali spends the entirety of the first game gawping at your ship and the fact that not everything smells of red diesel and WD-40. You have to assume that their poo poo ain't great. Of course, to be honest, a lot of this runs the risk of just sliding into an argument about game lore, and there's still too much cocaine unsnorted in the world for me to consider taking that up as a hobby, but it was really this point of the game onwards that I have to say that I lost any kind of connection to the plot. Mecha Cerberus I could have passed over the first time round, but when you get here and you're not allowed to just shoot the entire Quarian admiralty and commandeer their fleet (or at least scream and throw chairs around the war room) it becomes really obvious that you're just doing poo poo for the sake of having it there to do.
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Nov 5, 2014 20:32
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tadashi posted:Why would they let him tell them what to do with their fleet or not throw him out an airlock if he did that? I don't understand how negotiating with a sovereign group is just doing poo poo? All five of the Quarian Admirality Board are just hanging out squabbling and making decisions in the war room on the Normandy, with no escort or any form of military protection (because coding a whole actual new room to do this in, like in ME2, would take time and effort). I'm not seriously suggesting that there should be an option to kill them all, dress Liara up as Admiral Xan and hijack Quarian politics for yourself, but you'd think someone on the Normandy would at least take action to prevent someone ordering their fleet to fire on the commander of the ship they're currently flying on. The admirals really are just there as sock puppets, to put across four one-dimensional views and nothing more. As background characters in ME2, that's fine. As a key plot driver in ME3, they're just clownish.
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Nov 6, 2014 01:13
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