Mass Ado About Nothing
Over the course of a delightfully lazy weekend, I managed to finally wrap up the final chapter in BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Now, because it seems that one can’t so much as utter the words “Mass Effect Three” without inciting torrents of invective aimed squarely at the game’s conclusion, I’ll give the internet collective a moment to finish their grumbling before I begin.
Yes, ME3 had an awful ending that seemed to disregard every single heart-wrenching ethical decision you had made over the entire series. No, that’s not what we’ll be discussing. I think enough has been said about how truly bizarre and unsatisfying the coda was, to the point that project director Casey Hudson is no doubt self-flagellating at this very moment while overseeing Mass Effect’s upcoming “Oops, the last two minutes of ME3 were really just the first two minutes of ‘Lost,’ but here’s the real ending” DLC. I think it’d be more productive to look back at the series and examine what it’s done so well, and in some cases, what it’s managed to do that no other game has yet to achieve.
Now, in my experience, there are two opposite ends of the video game spectrum. On the one hand, there are the video games that really stress the “game” aspect of the medium. These titles derive satisfaction more directly through actual gameplay. Their allure comes from the relationship between what’s happening on-screen, and how that causes your brain to communicate with your fingers. Your fingers then manipulate the controller in order to affect what’s on-screen, which your brain interprets in order to tell your fingers what to do…and so on.
This is a type of positive feedback loop, and our brains simply can’t get enough of it. In fact, the earliest video games fell into this category. Space Invaders, Missile Command and Asteroids are all games in which the primary draw was the gameplay itself. One could change the sprites of the aliens in Space Invaders to something far more abstract, like simple shapes, and the appeal would still be there. The conceit of protecting Earth from a horde of intergalactic assailants was merely window dressing, nice but ultimately inconsequential. Nobody ever played a game of Ms. Pac-Man because they were dying to find out whether she ends up tying the knot.
On the other side of said spectrum are titles that function more as interactive fiction. In these, the focus is on narrative and character development, which the players are tasked with influencing as they see fit. Games like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire are recent examples of mainstream interactive fiction (IF), and while I enjoyed both titles immensely, it certainly wasn’t because of what they had me doing with my thumbs. The gameplay wasn’t really the main attraction, but the chance to become fully immersed in a well-told story, and influence it from within. Unlike Space Invaders, changing any of L.A. Noire’s characters to abstract shapes would obviously undermine the entire experience.
This brings us to the concept of player agency, which is defined as “the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the (game’s) world whose effects relate to the player’s intention.” The key words here are “player’s intention.” As involving as L.A. Noire’s narrative was, I never felt that I was Cole Phelps. I just felt that I was along for the ride. I could help tell him when people were bullshitting him, but his wants, his intentions, were running the show. When certain critical narrative bombs were dropped, the player was never asked weigh in. Our reactions to events weren’t important, it was how Cole felt about what had transpired that dictated how the story unfolded.
This is the case with most games whose focus is on storytelling. The player is not the protagonist, the player is simply the protagonist’s co-pilot. Of course, this is due to the staggering amount of writing and plotting one would have to undertake in order to offer true player agency.
Enter BioWare. Ever since Baldur’s Gate, the Canadian developer has made player agency a defining aspect in their game design, but it was the Mass Effect series that allowed them to really take the concept and run with it. Granted, the choices in BioWare’s titles are always binary. You can only let the game know that you’d either like to “help the old lady across the street,” or “violently murder and eat the old lady while making her grandchildren watch.” Sure, you’re only given two extremes to pick from, but at least the developer’s had the inclination to ask.
But in Mass Effect, there were countless decisions you were tasked to make that fell into a muddled grey area. Killing the Rachni Queen in the first game could be seen as a douche move out of context, but what about the Rachni War? This is a species that has incited an intergalactic conflict before…can they be trusted to be left to their own devices? Would the greater good of the galaxy be served by wiping out their kind? I often found myself pausing the game in order to mull over my decisions, and BioWare did a wonderful job of molding the game’s narrative (nay, the game’s universe) to my particular brand of ethics. Furthermore, they managed to roll your decisions into the following game in the series, truly creating a sense that, not only did the world of Mass Effect exist, but that the player’s intentions were shaping all of the life within it.
What’s even more impressive is that, unlike its IF contemporaries, ME3 finally managed to include gameplay that was genuinely engaging. While the first two games in the series had merely serviceable cover-based shooting mechanics, ME3 really swung the doors open, and allowed for truly different ways to tackle combat.
I went through the saga as a Vanguard. In the first two titles, being a Vanguard just meant using Shockwave as a means of crowd control when I wasn’t firing my heavy pistol. Biotic Charge (BC) wasn’t terribly useful, as ME and ME2 had little tolerance for engaging the enemy outside of cover. You would use BC to cross a large distance and smash directly into an enemy’s face, but then you were just, kind of…in an enemy’s face. They (and their comrades) tend to blow holes through anyone that gets right in their face.
ME3, however, completely changed the play mechanics of the Vanguard class with a few simple additions. On top of a few modifications to BC, now there was a heavy melee attack, and a little move called Nova. Through the choices made when leveling these moves up, it was possible to have your shields recharge every time you used BC. Using this in conjunction with Nova (a powerful move that used up all of your shields), it was possible to simply zoom around a room, smashing into enemies using BC, popping off a heavy melee attack to kill them, and then use Nova to damage/kill anyone around you. This would leave you without shields, though you’d need only to target another enemy with BC and you were right back where you started. Suddenly, combat became less like Mass Effect and more like Vanquish.
After a while, I stopped carrying a firearm completely, and dealt with every enemy up close and personal. This newly discovered play style is something that makes ME3’s combat even more frantic and intense than it already is. Even as I write this, my right thumb is gearing up for my next Galaxy at War session. The underlying gameplay of ME3 is downright addictive, conjuring up the same feedback loops most interactive fiction can only dream of delivering.
In my eyes, BioWare finally pulled it off. Mass Effect 3 was able to deliver a piece of interactive fiction that integrated a strong sense of player agency with gameplay that’s as engaging and habit-forming as the best the industry has to offer.
Again, yes, the ending was piping hot poop, straight from the butt. Yes, the last ten minutes completely threw out three entire game’s worth of ethical dilemmas in favor of finding out what your Shepard’s favorite color of laser was. I realize that everyone’s qualm with the ending wasn’t so much about how puzzlingly awful it was so much as it was about every player getting the same stupid ending, regardless of how you chose to play the game. In Mass Effect, player agency was what brought players into the franchise. I can understand that people were pissed when the conclusion disregarded everything that made your personal campaign unique. It was totally lame.
But my question is this: Can a game’s final ten minutes really negate the hundred-hours that preceded it?
“Can a game’s final ten minutes really negate the hundred-hours that preceded it?”
Answer: Yes, yes it can. Well it did for me at least. I wanted to see fraking Elcor Heavy Tanks rolling along with me as I assaulted that heavenly beam of light. I wanted to see fraking Asari Commandos and Spectres firing glittering c-beams as we made a mad dash towards the proverbial Tannhauser Gate. I wanted to roll into the Citadel and have to fight tooth and nail through both Cerberus and Reapers with Ashely and Aria by my side (falling over continuously as is their want but still by my side). I wanted to finally get to the control panel a bloodied mess (though not in the way that was presented). I don’t mind the confrontation between Anderson, myself and the Illusive man. I didn’t even mind the button not working and having to find another way to activate the crucible (one can only do so much with trope).
What I did mind was that before all of this I was reduced to a bloody ruin and had only the starting pistol with which to fend off the enemy. All that hoarding and scraping by so that I could unload all my credits at the end in an upgrade frenzy was all for naught. I was then ushered along rails – they should have just put a whistle on my head and pasted a sign on my back that read ‘The Little Engine that Could’.
I think the biggest reason that I can say ‘yes’ to your question is that, with the current ending, all the 100+ hours invested didn’t really matter. You are given 3 options none of which matched the pattern (at least moralistically) that had been established throughout the three games. They matched the basic good, bad, neutral choices but I would argue that link is tenuous at best. My Shep had just gotten the Geth and Quarians to come to a somewhat harmonious peace. There is no way she would have stood for “Kill Synth”, “Control Synth” or “Merge with Synth” as her only options. I could only see those as options for a brand spanking new Shep created just for ME3, but not a grizzled veteran that had fought off both Saren and Harbinger for the right of sentient races to self determine.
I have to agree with that final point.
Throughout the galaxy, countless civilizations have evolved and joined the galactic political theater thanks to a higher species reaching out and lifting them up as peers. The Geth, at the ened of ME2, had proven to me that they are not a 100% evil species and had members that were very much worth granting independent agency.
So I took it upon myself as Captain Humanity to welcome our first uplifted species into the glactic theater: Artificial Intelligence.
My decision to be this way was only reinforced by the introduction of EDI with a body. I had to side against Tali, my Shep’s only love (until Liara was available again), in favor of allowing the Geth to live when the Quarians insisted on eradicating the lot of them.
And then my final three options were presented: Marry, Fuck, or Kill. There was no way to eliminate the reapers while also saving the Geth.
I wasn’t happy about that. Supremely unhappy, even. But it wasn’t enough for me to write off the other hundred-hours I put into it, and the hundred-hours more I’ll be sinking into Multiplayer.
Of course the ending was crap, but I’m not so sure that it ruined the game for you. I challenge you to at least skim through the following three pages, and then come back and tell me that you didn’t get at least a little bit of the warm and fuzzies in the process:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Awesome/MassEffect?from=Awesome.MassEffect3
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Heartwarming/MassEffect?from=Heartwarming.MassEffect3
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Funny/MassEffect?from=Funny.MassEffect3
“A Renegade Interrupt involves Shepard approaching Han’Gerrel, the quarian admiral who was gung ho about starting a war with the geth in ME 2, was one of the ones who pushed for the war with the geth to start now, in the middle of the Reaper invasion, and then opened fire on the geth ship where Shepard was on a mission to and destroying it just before Shepard could escape, and punching him in the gut for his reckless endangerment of Shepard, demanding he get the hell off the ship. ”
I have to admit – my Shep was pretty much pure Paragon except for moments like these.
It didn’t ruin it for me, not really. At first… well, I wasn’t furious per se, just really angry that the ending only seemed to have about five minutes’ thought put into it. But I loved the gameplay – of all three incarnations – and that alone is worth the time spent. I’m addicted to the multiplayer, which surprised me considering I originally believed that it would get boring fast with no PVP, But the ending hasn’t really ruined it for me, it’s just like a bad itch that annoys me. It’s there and annoying, but bearable. The gameplay is great, many of the sidequests are good storywise, if a little short, but the game is still worth playing in spite of the shaggy dog we get at the end.
Yeah I hear that; I’m absolutely loving the multiplayer. Bioware has struck at my greatest weakpoint: earning Stuff.
I have only just started playing Mass Effect. The first one, mind you. I’m terrible at it – having never ever played a first person shooter type of game. But I am already having a great deal of fun with the game. I am willing suffer through the insanity of combat to get the nuggets of story.
Honestly, I’m looking forward to the other games in the series now, as much because I want to poke around the universe for myself and form my own opinions.
Being a veteran of D&D (I started playing before 2nd Edition came out), I’m also used to very harsh endings and “nose ring” endings. Sure they tick people off. I’ll reserve judgment on what I think about ME3’s ending until I get there. But I’ve seen some endings that totally seemed counter to player intention, and yet still worked for the narrative.
“I am willing suffer through the insanity of combat to get the nuggets of story.”
I’m not anymore. I’ve learned that no videogame story is good enough to waste a hundred hours punching buttons for. Game combat and buying stuff has zero interest for me. I’m giving up video games for good, until some game developer gives me a “no combat” or “minimal combat” skill level.
Combat is used to pad a game that has 3 hours of story into a 100 hour experience to justify the game’s price. Guess what, 3 hours of story reached through 3 hours of combat is worth a lot more money to me than 3 hours of story and 97 hours of combat.
Can an ending ruin hours and hours of gameplay? Absolutely. How? Because the main problem I have with the ending is that now the hours and hours of gameplay may as well have been spent earning pix in Recettear for all the good it did the world of Mass Effect. If I had started fresh in ME3, horded my resources by killing of widows and orphans in order to take back the citadel on the backs of slaves, I could still have the same choices, with the exact same endings.
“But my question is this: Can a game’s final ten minutes really negate the hundred-hours that preceded it?”
I think a fair response would be to question the purpose of the ending.
I remember playing back in the NES days, when I would work to finish a game “to see the ending”. Now, a few decades later, I can see how silly that is. The endings of NES games are almost overwhelmingly tripe. They could all have just as well been black screens that read “Conglatulation! A Winner is You!” The purpose would have been served. It would have been more intelligent of me to state that I wanted to see the final enemy/level, and if I was able to overcome it. That, after all, was the purpose and focus of the game, and many excellent games came of it.
Fast forward to the late 90’s. Storytelling in games has come a long way, giving birth to endings worth seeing. “Seeing the ending” is now a valid reason to play a game through, though the focus on the gameplay hasn’t much changed. A gripping narrative might convince you to slog though muck to get at it, but it might not. Two of my all-time game favorites come from this period: Panzer Dragoon Saga and Guardian Heroes.
PDS is a “standard” RPG (except that it blends in shooter elements), and I mention it because the ending sticks in my craw. It’s a rather short game which helps keep the narrative interesting and moving. The ending serves up a helping of cheese that could ruin it all, but it fails to for a few reasons. We get to see what happens to the other main character, and if we cut out the bit of 4th wall cheese, the ending still works. We have to draw our own conclusions about what happened.
Guardian Heroes is very much a game to focus on the gameplay, but dabbles in allowing the player to dictate the game. Ultimately, the player is sill a hero and does heroic things, but gets to decide what those heroic things should be. The choices crunch to a singularity about half way through, negating the path taken earlier as only one of different scenery. But after that point, 5 choices are given that will yield more choices still, and the player will face off against one of 5 different end bosses in very different circumstances. Not much narrative can really make it into a game that can be finished in about an hour, thus the journey is very much the reason to play. Like in the NES days of old, the ending cannot sour the game because it’s only tacked on anyway.
Coming forward to today, and ME3. I haven’t ever played, and may never play, Mass Effect. There’s so many good games that some have to be left behind and that one may have that happen to it. So I have to base my thoughts on how it’s been described here and elsewhere. I can imagine the joy of shaping a story, a la GH. And having a narrative and characters I care about bring me along to that final moment, riding a game that’s worth playing between the story moments only to have it come to that singularity at the end.
The ending is not just a destination for this game, but a culmination. The journey has been a blast, but it was supposed to lead somewhere. You’ve fought your way here, in your own way, and you want the returns for your investment. You don’t want to get something that could well state “and now which of these three endings would you like tacked onto your game?”
If that doesn’t ruin it for you, good for you. If it does, thankfully there are many other games out there.
“Can a game’s final ten minutes really negate the hundred-hours that preceded it?”
I think the normal answer would be a flat NO.
But Mass effect 3’s is definitely an exception to the rule. It single handedly makes it all pointless. (to me anyway)
“Can a game’s final ten minutes really negate the hundred-hours that preceded it?”
Well, I’m maybe a little bit out of the discussion in the first place. I found the ending to be lame, but nothing I would call “bad”. Just not *great*.
And really, I think that speaks most to the power of the hours of gameplay behind it, and how we shouldn’t just whine and throw Mass effect into the trash. The ending wasn’t great. But you know what? Almost any other game, and no one would have said a damned thing. The *ONLY REASON* this is such a huge deal is specifically because every hour leading up to it was so incredibly great.
I’m apparently one of the few people out there who doesn’t see the ending as being particularly out of sync. I see the arc of the series as this:
Mass Effect: A human becomes a hero.
Mass Effect 2: A hero becomes a myth.
Mass Effect 3: A myth kills a human.
The human Shepard died when they sent her away from Earth to rally the rest of the galaxy. We spent the rest of the game carefully peeling away the dead bits, until only ‘the Shepard’ remained. Because it was *fun*.
So I don’t really mind the final bit; to me, it was a rather graphic representation of the way that I had been throwing my player-character into the fire on a regular basis for the sheer literal Hell of it.
You know, I honestly really get that. Throughout the third game I routinely felt “How could a person even possibly begin to do that”. Obviously physicially, because Shepard is over the top a badass, but also emotionally too. Like, how do you step in front of Reapers (Ultimate Death Machines) *multiple times* and still in some way value your life?
And that’s the thing, Shepard didn’t. Shepard had already given up his/her life to save the galaxy ages ago. The ending was just finally giving him rest.
That’s why I don’t mind the ending – the *entire game* is the dramatic over the top ending. You literally go around and solve every “big” problem in the galaxy. So no, you don’t get to see what happens – but what you did the entire game was basically ensure that it will be good, whatever it is.
Think of all the hours of preceding gameplay as building a gigantic Gothic Arch and the last 10 minutes as placing the keystone.
I was extremely skeptical of the backlash against the ending until I finally got there myself, and when I did I found myself agreeing with the people I’d dismissed as whiners. I’m used to the 2001 mindfuck ending, but as others have stated, the issue wasn’t the character death or the ambiguity, it was the fact that all that shit we did had negligible effect on the ending.
Somewhat ironically, I was moved to finally start playing Mass Effect I because of watching some videos full of spoilers on YouTube, and concluding that, aside from the obviously terrible ending to ME3, the game was chock full of brilliant content.
It has struck me that, far more than most games, the Mass Effect series has been emphasizing the importance of its conclusion. Seriously, that’s explicitly part of the advertising for all three games, in large print, right underneath the name of the game. I was actually astonished that we see the Reapers clearly less than a minute after the game starts in Mass Effect I, and it’s established immediately that the basic structure of the story is that you are preparing for the ultimate confrontation with the Reapers. I’ve never seen any creative work with such a strong emphasis on the importance of its ending.
Just before I’d started Mass Effect I, I was playing Borderlands, which was good fun, and nominally has a story, but it’s not really something you play for the story.
More of an interesting contrast is Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls series has a pretty deep backstory, but in the foreground, there’s only one character, which is the PC. The NPCs are completely wooden and uninteresting. The PC can go where she wants, do what she wants, and it’s amazing. But you know that you’re the only thing that’s really alive in the entire world. You’re a lonely Nietzchean superman.
ME is quite dramatically different. There isn’t the sense of freedom of space, or the feeling of control over your environment, that you have in Skyrim. Most of the time, it’s clear that you’re on a linear map, and you start at one end and work your way to the other. However, the NPCs have stories, the quests are stories, and you actually keep going because you’re wrapped up in stories about these characters that you quickly care about. You’re motivated by the desire to help them.
I do notice that, much as in other Bioware games I’ve played, the “moral choices” are very clear-cut and obvious.
One thing that I found pleasantly surprising: I usually really like the idea of “support” characters in roleplaying, narrative terms, but I’ve almost always found them tedious and unsatisfying to play. I’m finding, though, that I’m having a lot of fun playing a Sentinel — the list of possible actions is comprehensible, the effects are tangible, and I can do them at a reasonable frequency, so I feel like I’m actually leading my team and controlling the battlespace, and it’s fun.
The ending was so terrible because it was just Gamble and Hudson’s work, they didn’t run it by the writing team, and they threw out Drew’s original ending for the series, which was:
“What I do know is the there was a different ending written out for the Mass Effect series, the short version of which is that the Big Reveal in ME3 is that the Mass Effect itself — the magical black-box technology that allows interstellar travel and powers a ton of other things from weapons to expensive toothbrushes — is causing a constant increase in dark energy in the galaxy, and that’s causing all kinds of bad things (like the accelerated death of stars).
The Mass Effect — you know, the thing from which the name of the series is derived — is the secret behind the Big Reveal. Who would have thought?
So, in the end of the game-as-envisioned, you’re given a choice of saving the galaxy by sacrificing the human race (making humanity into a biomechanical, synthetic-life, communal-intelligence “Reaper” that can stop the Dark Energy decay), or telling the Reapers to screw themselves and trying to fix the problem on your own (with a handful of centuries left before the Dark Energy thing snowballs and grows out of control on its own).”
This is a very long article that I’m about to link to, be warned. It uses a LOTR analogy to show just why the endings were so terrible: http://doycetesterman.com/index.php/2012/03/mass-effect-tolkein-and-your-bullshit-artistic-process/
I didn’t like it.
I agree that it did not follow the rest of the “gameplay” of decision making and the outcome of “My Shepard” Paragon btw.
It only makes sense if as the Indoctrination Theory fans says it is a mindfuck….or a trip in a hyperspacial “Matrix” perhaps? So to the Reapers Shepard is a Neo?