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"Lots of people have complained about Mass Effect.
I'm going to look at the story side of things, and point to the good
stuff (yes, there was some) as well as the bad stuff. This is also
relevant to how Bioware is pitching their games. So I'll talk about the
plot, the characters, the dialogue, the setting, and the choices & consequences and
other immersion bits.
Obviously, spoilers abound.
The setting
The Mass effect universe is unashamedly space opera. It is much
shorter to list how it doesn't wholly follow the tropes - sans these,
assume a star trek analogue and you're there: all the main alien races
are humanoid (wholly unnecessary as you don't need human actors), space
ships (full sound in a vacuum, naturally), and, of course, magic
substance (element zero) that lets you break those pesky laws of
physics and give you force powers.
Two major exceptions. Instead of humans running the galaxy with the
other species as bit-parts, Humans are still asserting themselves.
Secondly, the game bluffs on the 'mysterious lost alien race' whom you
inherited all the useful tech - mid game, you find out the believed
history is false. The real narrative arc is of alien civilizations
being systematically murdered every 10s of thousands of years by this
super advanced machine race which made all the tech just to sucker them
all in.
These are good subversions, but they aren't pulled off properly.
Humans are still 'special', and one of the endings of the game lets you
put them wholly in charge. Either way, it is they who end up winning
the day while the other aliens just get owned by the bad guys. The
reveal of the real big bad (the 'Reapers') does set them up as nasty
villains ("slaughtering all life in the galaxy? peh. We've done that
repeatedly for millions of years.") No explanation is ever offered for
why they bother doing this, though - Bioware hides behind alien inscrutability
("you can't possibly understand, beyond your comprehension etc. etc.")
Maybe sequels will satisfy this, but I don't hold my breath for this
explanation being any good. Especially given the plot induced stupidity
they labour under (see later.)
On the bright side, the world-building is good at giving a vaguely plausible veneer to the universe.
Spectres
One thing that deserves a rant are the SPECTREs (Special whatever
and Tactical Reconassaince, or whatever the backronym was.) Another
part of Bioware's formula is having a leet crew of kewl people who have
absolute power to protect the established order by any means necessary
(see the Grey Wardens). This trope is rammed into the game with barely
any justification. Intelligence services? Sure. Black ops? Sure. But
mankind has never done this 'special dudes who are cool and answer to
no one' as the best way of doing these things. Why would wider alien
community (of multiple species) agree to this sort of thing?
They could (and should) be excised painlessly from the plot. Make Saren
(the main bad guy) some other sort of rogue agent, and let Shepherd
pursue him in a non-spectre capacity (perhaps the Human alliance just
disobeys the council and lets Shepherd hunt him down 'off the record',
or the council co-opts them into their intelligence apparatus). The
only purpose of the SPECTREs seems to be to be implausible.
The plot
The Bioware formula is well known. There's an intro scenario, a hub with a series of fetch quests, and a dramatic finale.
On the bright side, Bioware have passed beyond the flagrant plot
coupon stage of the 'hub portion' (cf. Star maps in KOTOR). Sadly, they
do little better in ME: this time, it's people with tidbits of information
you're after. Also, when you're going off to the world, the actual 'plot
coupon' bit is tacked on.
One example: you go to Feros to investigate a colony being attacked by
Geth (another machine race which serve as enemy cannon fodder) so you
save the colony, find out they are getting mind controlled by some
plant, kill the plant, and one of its thralls happened to be able to
give you the 'cipher', which means your brain can now read what the
proteans said. But this latter bit you had no idea about until you
landed (which raises the question of why the Geth attacked it except to
signal "Hey! Look over here!") Similar problems apply to Noveria -
Benezia's (the bad guy's number 2) only use to the player's quest is
that she just happens to have some useful coordinates. The problem is
there's no powerful reason for the characters to have these plot
coupons besides designer imperative: congratulations, you've finished
this otherwise wholly-unrelated quest regarding the world, here's a
plot coupon to poke you along the main quest in compensation. Would it
really have been hard for the designers to give a less contrived puzzle
for you to piece together?
Urgency
Bioware can't plot urgency. They've filled Mass effect with pretty
pointless side quests despite repeatedly emphasizing how 'every second
counts or all life will die etc. etc.' Maybe you might be tempted to
take a few moments to stop an asteroid hitting a planet, but running
fed-ex, doing odd jobs for the human military? No chance. It isn't the
case you need to go around hunting for leads: the game (and meta-game)
lead you by the nose through the plot: go to the four plot-vital worlds
to hit the finale segment. It's like if fallout said: "the water-chip
is in Necropolis, go fetch" - it deprives the character of any motive
to investigate the side-material (not that it's worth it - it's almost
wholly going into one of three internal environments and killing all
the bad guys to grab a plot coupon or frob a plot device). Mass Effect
seems to want to play sandbox, but gives the player entirely
inappropriate objectives.
Just in time, no matter the time
But if you decide to dick around and let the galaxy fend for itself
while you go mail some fed-ex, no ill results happen. This gets pretty
fishy after a while.
The very start of the game is good timing (you just happen to
arrive to the first planet just after Saren so are in time to foil his
nefarious plans). And this continues. No matter how much time you waste, you always arrive just in time to snatch affairs from the jaws of
disaster. You arrive on Feros just as the colony is on its last legs
to save it, on Virmire just in time to help the team there, on Therum
just in time to help Liara. Even after you have done all the hub
material and you now know that Saren is now racing off to Ilos to start
the Doom-Mcguffin and end life as we know it, you can still bugger
around the galaxy map for as long as you like. No matter how long you
take, you always arrive a few moments after Saren. When chasing after
him, you can take 10 minutes to chat to a Prothean exposition bot, and
still when you come back you have a 40 second timer to drive into a
mass relay. It's just taking the ******.
The Characters
The usual formulas apply as per bioware games. The gritty mercenary
whose race has fallen on hard times, the pretty boy, the strong female,
the wierd culture one, and the naive blue girl. If you've played KOTOR,
you'll see little new here.
Again, Bioware does try and prod the envelope. Garrus is functional and
works, and Ashley almost works out as a less-than-wholly sympathetic
character given her bigotry towards alien species ('I can't tell the aliens
and the animals apart, here' is a nice line.) Making the female romance
character significantly flawed and even unpleasant would be a brave
move, as well as riffing off a not-trivial theme as whether humans
should consider other sentient life that isn't them as worthy of equal
moral consideration.
But Bioware chickens out on both counts. The alien vs. human issue
amounts to the council being idiots and making the alien-friendly
choice stupid (should you risk your only chance of stopping the
doomsday McGuffin to save the alien councillors?) And they chicken out
of making Ashley properly bigoted - she gets on fine with your alien
crew-members, and she distances herself from the galactic human
equivalent of the KKK - and besides, she's only like that because of
daddy issues. This post-hoc airbrushing squandered a good opportunity.
Outside the party members, Bioware manages to write some good
characters, generally when they aren't trying too hard. One of my
favourites was Matsuo, the security chief on Noveria - an ex-marine who
went private, she's straightforward, jaded, and entirely convincing.
More central to the plot: Anderson and Udina also work (although the
latter is a little too much unnecessary jerk as opposed to slick
politico).
However, Bioware horribly fails at the villains. The reapers have
been covered, but the actual bad guys who are trying to bring them back
are Saren (a rogue SPECTRE) and Benezia. Bioware just aborts on
actually characterising these two - they are simply introduced as the
villains of the story in the first act, and they don't progress beyond
that. Bioware tries to add depth later, but they don't do so plausibly.
They attempt to paint Saren as a reluctant villain to give him a
motivation, but then he just looks stupid ("the Reapers will need us
given their self-sufficient omnipotence. I for one, welcome our
ruthless machine overlords!"). And it turns out Benezia was under mind control
so isn't really to blame. Big deal. It says a lot I felt far more
emotionally invested when Udina stabbed me in the back for the sake of
humanity.
You simply never feel anything towards Saren. He never does anything to
screw you over. He never earns your respect by plausibly outwitting or
outgunning you. Sure, the plot might make him slip through your
fingers, but he is always more an obstacle than an antagonist. He sets
up a scheme, and you take it down - never does he ever take the
initiative against you, and, despite the vast forces at his command, he
never seems to be in control. Even Darth Malak sent some weak jedi and
a bounty hunter after you. This is partly pacing, but it doesn't help
he never gets beyond villain generica.
Dialogue
Bioware tries to 'write pretty', but it fails. It avoids
naturalistic or hyper-real dialogue (unsurprising, for a space opera)
and goes for a canned Joss Wheldon-esque pithiness and epic fare.
Unfortunately, it can't do this. The dialogue is almost uniformly dire,
with rare diamonds in the rough.
The speeches are the best exhibit, from the ridiculous (Kirrahe's 'hold
the line' one on Virmire) to chunderous (Shepherd's rallying the troops
before they go on the hub) to the frankly embarrassing (Spectre
admission). It verges on bathos to have the cinematography and the
'epic hush' music (the soundtrack is all pulsing synth ostinatos,
surging strings and leitmotif - very well done) going all out behind
this banal dialogue. It says a lot when the best cinematic moments are
those in which no one is speaking.
Best example is the climatic confrontation at the end of the game when
the primary protagonist and primary antagonist clash with the fate of
the galaxy at stake. Luke vs. Vader this ain't:
[It's only one route through the dialogue, but trust me, the others
aren't any better - there aren't many routes anyway, but more later.]
Seriously, what is that? The dialogue varies from failing at epic to
being passably functional when talking about your fetch quests.
The speech actors deserve purple hearts for carrying dialogue so
bad. Particular props to Jennifer Hale and (to a lesser extent) Mark
Meer, as some of the rubbish they had to spout would have overloaded
any sane persons cringe gland.
Immersion
Mass effect is already infamous for the dialogue wheel options which all
say the same thing ("Yes" "Okay then" "If you insist"). These have been
defended under the pretence of tone which, providing you aren't a rabid
anti-larper, is fine.
However, it is worse than that. Often, the three options on the
wheel will lead you to say exactly the same thing. You can usually tell
if what your character says just so happens to incorporate elements of
all three responses. One example in the first council audience is the
'You've already made your decision - I'm not going to waste my breath'
- you get that no matter what option you pick. This is just
inexcusable.
It isn't only Shepard which suffers from redundancy. Your party
interjections and party banter are the same. No matter which two party
members you have with you, there are the same interjections and the
same banter (sometimes word for word copies). So you don't really have
Ashley, Kaidan, Tali, Wrex, Liara and Garrus. You have party member 1
and party member 2. The illusion of interactivity and depth here is
tissue thin.
Game conceits: breaking too many crutches
The hamster wheel effect of level scaling is a case of two wrongs
making a right - I'm already an accomplished military officer, I
shouldn't be going up orders of magnitude. What is harder to swallow is
why the merchants stuff upgrades by vast amount for no good reason.
There's many other oversights and mistakes. Like how the Mako can
only take three people (which usually crutches for Bioware's party size
limitation) cept once when it is needed to ferry an NPC back to base
when it takes four. Or how the Mako makes all enemy armour obsolete by
having hitscan weapons while all their significant anti tank
projectiles go at a snails pace allowing you to dodge them in flight
(!!!!). Or how it takes dozens of bullets to kill anyone (even without
shields) unless it's a cutscene.
The good side of the new ****
One of the benefits of next gen graphics is people can ramp up the
cinematics of the game. The camera work in Mass Effect is pretty damn
good. It also allows little somatic touches. See this:
This illustrates several things before (observe how the functional
dialogue nosedives later on, the fake dialogue choice 'the Geth believe
the Reapers are Gods etc.' line gets played whatever option you pick,
etc.) But look at 3:00 onwards: Anderson and Shepherd look towards each
other, he nods with a little smile, she nods in turn and takes a step
forward. It's a little touch that suggests a lot, and it simply
couldn't be done effectively with last gen engines.
Another example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-SAguHgcLw
This also works. See Kaiden's barely perceptible shake of the head and
turning towards the wreckage when Anderson asks 'where's the
commander?' Now, the dialogue is still a bit chunderous and it's
shamelessly operatic and overblown, but that it's now possible to have
in-engine cinematic set-pieces like this is incredible. We can make
videogame characters act.
Conclusions
You could make a lot of complaints about the gameplay, how it
co-opts skinner-box esque MMO mechanics, how the Mako and planet
sections are ridiculous, how it plays like a bad TPS. It got sold on
being a story driven RPG. So what, in sum, is the story about the
story?
It's a mix. It does more than a few things right: the setting is
competently put together and at times genuinely interesting, whoever
did the cutscenes has a flair for telling touches, and some of the
characterization works.
But for every highpoint there are more than a few bum notes, and a lot
of time the story is just treading water. For every telling somatic
touch there's a lot of silly collar-grabbing and fist-into-palm for
emphasis. For every functional character there's a lot of caricature
and frankly appalling dialogue to wade through. For every interesting
plot element there are oceans of sci-fi generica to drown in.
There are three reasons for this: the first is blockbuster
conservativism, which is reasonable even if I don't like it. The second
is that they are still making a computer game, and so they have to
hammer the story around it.
The third is amateurishness. Whether there's an artform (or
entertainment) peculiar to computer games I'm unsure, but Bioware is
definitely driving their stories to ape Hollywood cinema. If they're
serious about it, then they should look to getting proper scriptwriters
and cinematographers in to do it. Given the vast budgets of games like
this, money spent on writers with real sci-fi or cinema credits or
similar 'creative types' seems money well spent. I can't imagine a
script of an average mass effect cutscene surviving a director or
publisher's scrutiny. I definitely can't imagine the plot surviving it
either. No offense to Karpyshyn, but if Bioware want to do 'interactive
cinema', their lead writer should've done more than write movie-tie in
novels and are looking for an agent to market their screenplays."
Here is the original thread: http://www.rpgcodex....der=asc&start=0
Modifié par NicklasBertelsen, 03 avril 2010 - 04:11 .
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