Tarrek723 wrote...
A lot of people seem to be bothered by side quests being unrelated to the main story, especially if it is an urgent matter at hand. That doesnt really make sense to me for one simple reason: space is HUGE. [...] I always thought of Mass Effect's sidequests like episodes of Star Trek, whereas the main plot is more like a big budget sci fi movie. The side quests are somewhat standalone and resolve themselves and dont have as much work put in to them in order to produce large quantities of them. The main plot is more dramatic, has a bigger budget, and continues on past the individual segments.
I sort of think I see what you're saying, if you're talking along the lines of DS9 rather than TOS/TNG, or a show like, oh, Alias or A:tLA or whatever, where there's a season-long main arc which sometimes has entire episodes devoted to it, and also a lot of self-contained episodes inbetween that don't really advance it. And that certainly does have quite a few virtues as a system. It adds variety and lets the writers do different things and lets us see characters in different ways, it helps pace the wider arc and give it a strong, slow build-up, it gives the impression that we're looking at a whole wide authentic world and not a narrow setpiece with nothing behind the walls but empty space.
The thing is, episodic TV designs main plots specifically for that format; that is, they're generally written so they
can't progress any faster than they do. The good guys can't just march up and take out the bad guys in the first three episodes because they don't know the bad guys are even planning anything until mid-season, or it takes them time to find out where the bad guys are, or they're waiting on resources that nothing they can do will make show up any faster. So it makes sense that they're sitting on their thumbs or worrying about prom or whatever, because as dire as the situation is, there's nevertheless nothing they can do about it at exactly that moment.
In something like Mass Effect, though, the main plot is always available to you. You know, from the minute you leave the Citadel in ME1, of three leads to check out. The instant you've finished the second one, you're given a fourth. As soon as you finish the fourth, you can hit the endgame. There's no point at which your character is incapable of moving the plot forward - and considering the urgency of that plot, it feels either irresponsible or metagame-y (or both) to
ignore the impending doom of the galaxy just to prove that space is big.
This, actually, is something ME2 made a pretty smart stab at (I think the execution failed, but major points for trying). You spend the game waiting on intel from TIM; you genuinely
can't move against the Collectors until he gives it to you, and as soon as you can, you do. At any point in between Freedom's Progress and Horizon, or Horizon and the Collector Ship, you really
don't have anything better to do than sidequests. It's a really fluid way to do it and helps verisimillitude immensely - there were just problems with the implementation (for one, it's bad that as a player, you don't know what will trigger Horizon until it happens. For two and more important, tying a no-choice event like that to TIM's orders was a
huge fail. At the very least, give us a conversation option to hang up on him in a snit, then have Joker ask "are we really going to not help that colony" to which Shep responds "of course we are, but you of all people should understand the need to be petty about a situation you don't like". Player control, it's essential).
Retour en haut
