At any rate, most of the criticism ME catches is gameplay related. People think its either too shooty or too RPG'ish, depending on what they were expecting going on. More of the former than the latter, admittedly. But that's not my gripe. I think the game's a very good mix of both. Arrival does make me fear for the RPG nature of ME3, that I will have to admit, but whatever complaints I have about the gameplay honestly pale in comparison to my gripes about the story.
I think it is really important that whoever writes this (Drew Karpyshyn I assume) understands what's going on here, because right now I don't think anybody really understood the storytelling ramifications of ME1 and the new Arrival DLC combined. Had they, I am convinced that this DLC would not have been published until the story had been polished. Because for a DLC that's supposed to bridge two games, all it seems to do is instead create a massive plot hole.
Let me tell you what I think is currently going on in the Mass Effect universe. Writing this from a female perspective since that's what my Shepard is, and Bioware insists that its a story about our Shepard and not about theirs. So in a nutshell:
Commander Shepard gets sent on a mission to prevent the inevitable return of an extragalactic sentient machine race from destroying all life in the galaxy. In the first game, she discovers that there is something called the Conduit that she has to find because it will bring the Reapers back. Turns out that the Conduit itself won't, it's simply a backdoor to the citadel that the game's main antagonist, Saren, only needs because he was stupid enough to risk his Spectre status in search for it. If he hadn't searched for it, he wouldn't have needed it, since the Conduit itself did not help any in the single thing that Sovereign needed Saren for: closing the citadel arms.
This is the big plot hole of ME1. The imminent Reaper invasion actually has very little to do with the Conduit itself, which was merely a backdoor device for the Protheans to sabotage the Citadel's relay function after the invasion had occurred. The Reapers could've taken their sweet time to search for, and destroy, the Conduit AFTER their invasion. All that was needed for the invasion itself to occur was for Sovereign to connect manually with the Citadel and activate its relay mechanisms. And all he needed Saren for was to provide him with... well. Come to think of it, I don't even know. Because if Saren hadn't died in that fight with Shepard, Sovereign's shields would never have fallen, and he wouldn't have died at all. He was invincible to the combined might of the citadel fleets right until Robo-Saren dropped.
But, I accepted ME1 as simply being a cool concept sloppily executed. There's too many holes in the story itself to actually care about any invidual one. So in a sense, I just accept ME1's events as "having happened" outside of the game itself, having them serve as a general backdrop to ME2. There was a Reaper invasion which was halted at the very last minute, and now it's up to Shepard to continue to safeguard the galaxy.
And this was a role that ME2 fulfilled fine. The writing seemed to be better because while ME1 was riddled with plot holes, ME2 didn't seem to have many of them, if any at all. You can sort of wonder why they were building the whole Terminator Reaper in the first place, but there's no real reason to count that as a plot hole since no actual justification for it was given and therefore there are no justifications to fail as such. All we're left with is that it happened and strangely enough, for storytelling purposes, sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is better to not explain anything, rather than explain it in detail. Leave it to the imagination of the audience.
But now Arrival shows up and completely removes whatever remaining justification there was for the Conduit plot in Mass Effect 1. Because the only reason it had to exist was for the sake of the Citadel being the backbone of the whole Reaper invasion plan. As soon as there is more than one Relay through which to enter the universe, the point of sabotaging any single one is removed. Furthermore, the Reapers' approach at trying to reactivate the Citadel now seems amateurish and clumsy, since why not just do that AFTER the invasion that Arrival revealed was still inevitable? Why send Sovereign into organic space, risk discovery, and risk having your entire plan backfire? There was no need to reactivate the Citadel, there was no need to look for the Conduit, there was no need for Shepard to get alerted to anything, because guess what, there was another invasion point all along.
But it doesn't stop there. Suddenly the Collectors have turned into a massive waste of time aswell. Why spend two years harvesting people to make a new Reaper, when the Reapers themselves could've harvested a thousand times as many people, a thousand times faster. They would've had their new Reaper regardless, and now the sudden unexplained presence of the Terminator Reaper has been reduced to being an entirely arbitrary waste of time for a race of slave-Protheans whose only purpose has now been reduced to being a story-filler.
Whatever was good and solid about the ME2 story has now been reduced to nothing. And that is not an exaggeration, since with storytelling there is no middle road. Either your story adds up, or it doesn't. ME2 felt like a solid interlude between a beginning and an end. There was no imminent invasion danger, there was only the threat of the Collectors slowly building up a Reaper inside citadel space, presumably to, well... you think of it. That's the beauty of leaving it to the audience's imagination.
So to conclude this topic, I guess all I can say to Bioware is good job removing the only remaining justification for the Conduit plot in ME1, aswell as reducing the Collectors in ME2 to an arbitrary waste of time. I really doubt that you've given the story content of Arrival a lot of thought, and if it turns out that you have, I will have to honestly admit that I am sort of worried about ME3's story. The best thing you can do at this point is just retcon the whole Arrival DLC and admit to not having thought it through so well, but that would mean people feeling ripped off at having bought it. So that's what the choice seems to be between. Integrity and income.
And I wish it would speak for itself that you'd choose the former.
Modifié par Eain, 01 avril 2011 - 10:42 .
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