Hi guys, second post here.
So reading your comments, I get a lot of 'Done properly it can be great' and 'but then since when does hollywood ever do game-to-movie conversions properly?'
well that's the subtext of all the 'GtMs are crap' comments.
I'm a fan of various shows, some of which have parts that could make good games. For instance, I'm a fan of Battlestar Galatica, and the space combat could make for a good game, but then, unluckily for me and that fan base, we only get flash-based games that suck. I am also a bit of a fan of Star Trek, and when Voyager and Enterprise were new shows, I was very much into the franchise. And while Star Trek hasn't made many decent show-to-game jumps, it has had a few. Star Trek Armada II and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force were two of the best trek games I've ever played, an RTS and a FPS. And the sequel to Elite Force included a small bit of RPG elements - choosing dialogue options.
Elite Force is perhaps one of the games that wasn't made to the genre it should have been - that of the RPG like Mass Effect, but was damn good anyway. Command a squad, a lot of story to it, and if you don't rescue your unit commander, he's not in the rest of the game. Go one step further and you have a good RPG, but it's an FPS, and not even a Squad-based one, it's all on you. So it wouldn't make a good transition to an episode of Voyager. or two-parter, as the case would be if the story, whole-sale, was brought over.
Mass Effect, however, is different. Yes yes different franchise, and I've meandered a little, but it's for the point I'm making.
There are clearly places where choice - both in action and in dialogue - can depart from one another. There is character development, and consequences to your actions.
So my point. there are 2, really. The first - when was the last time that a film with a LOT of story carried more than your average film character development?
Let's look at... Iron Man. The Robert-Downey one, the first one at that.
Start's off as a womaniser. Gets kidnapped, builds a mechasuit, looses a friend who saved his life, builds a prototype mechasuit mark 2 that can fly and generally has a lot of fun with it, he's not matured much. Boom, finds out his company's weapons are being sold to the enemies of the US, and has a fight with a tank then tries avoiding one with 2 F-22s, finds out it's the man who looked after the company since his daddy died, and then those two have a big fight.
Going from womaniser to mature responsible bloke? Not really, the film did not get to show his change from immature genius to responsible genius, not to any great degree.
And that film had, what, 3 main characters? Tony, Pepper and Obediah.
So a film based on Mass Effect, with it's cast of how many? Shepard and Saren, those are a given. But then you've got his squad - Kaidan and Ashley, Garrus, Wrex, Tali and Liara. Where will their development fit in?
Not just that, but it's a film, and running times for films vary quite a bit. Avatar, Titanic, Lord of the Rings Fellow Towers of the King - 1 film that was longer than usual and 4 films that were ridiculously long. One didn't have many characters to develop, and the next was mainly Jack! Rose! Rose! Jack! crap, a Chick's disaster film, really, sorry if I'm sounding sexist, but how many guys watched it more than once? And my sister watched it like, 6 times.
the last 3, all Lord of the Rings, was a BooktoFilm purists' dream, as I've heard it said once.
and shock and horror - I've never read the books, so I wouldn't know. What I do know, is that those 3 were very good films.
Excellent.
But too frickin long.
So a 'Purist' Mass Effect film, one to each game... would vary in running time. The first, the shortest of the trilogy, would still be quite lengthy to get all the development and even just some scenes to poke fun at the Mako physics.
Can it all be packed into an hour and a half? not if you want to get the pacing down properly.
So... Where does that leave us?
Well, you might have thought It was a throw-away comment, that I didn't have a reason to say it aside from that it was true enough, but what I said about Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force... "So it wouldn't make a good transition to an episode of Voyager. or
two-parter, as the case would be if the story, whole-sale, was brought
over."
that's where that lot comes in.
Mass Effect... would make for a good series. And done right, you don't even need to watch each episode in order! Hah!
I mean, the pilot two parter: Eden Prime/Citadel
Then the three main locations each get a two-parter.
It doesn't necessarily have to follow the games religously, as usually the reasons for the way it is in the game is because it's a game. by this I mean, Therum has to be a long drive then a short cave section getting to Liara. It could be more, epic, in scale, and not just a boring drive with occasional geth armatures attacking.
Obviously, the inclusion of Liara would mean you should really watch the Therum episode(s) after the pilot. But after that? Noveria or Feros first. And there could be various "stand-alone" episodes set between them.
So say basing 'Season 1' on the first game - 2-episode pilot, 1 episode therum (or 2 for an 'extended therum mission'), 2 episode noveria, 2 episode feros, 2 episode Virmire, then 1 episode of ilos/citadel. Lets say an even 10 episodes.
40 mins each, with 2 more filler episodes minimum: 8 hours.
Given that the game can be played completionist in 10 hours or something like that... Plenty of time, no?
Season 2 can be even longer. TV Series aren't locked to a set number of episodes equally across each season, whereas if you do a movie that's 2 hours long, then chances are the publishers aren't going to let you make the next film 3 hours.
but there is precedant for an extra-long episode of a tv show if the story needs it.
Stargate SG-1: episode 'Threads'.
Battlestar Galactica: Miniseries. I'm also sure that there was another episode in season 4 that was extra long, can't remember which.
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So. Mass Effect TV Series: better option than a film?
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