KainrycKarr wrote...
Aedan_Cousland wrote...
Again, you still have the dark and not-everyone-survives ending. But you also have the fantasy ending.
You take the dark ending. I take the fantasy one. Me taking the fantasy ending has absolutely no effect on you taking your darker ending.
There is room for both.
The problem with those that suggest having both an 'everyone lives' ending, and an ending where some or all of your team dies, is that nearly everyone that wants that option wants casualties to be tied to player performance like it was in ME2. In other words, you get the everyone lives ending by making all the right tactical decisions and by making all the necessary preparations beforehand, and team mates die when you fail to prepare adequately or when you make the wrong tactical decisions. The issue with tying casualties only to player performance, is that it means that those that want a more emotionally engaging and realistic game where some of their squad dies, only get that outcome if their Shepard is incompetent. And that sort of defeats the purpose of having squad mates die in the first place, because the story isn't all that emotionally engaging if the protagonist is a poor leader that only gets his team killed through tactical or strategic errors.
I would have preferred to have lost some squad mates in ME2 for story telling purposes, but I didn't because it would have come at the expense of my canon Shep. I could only do that by making him a moron that thinks Grunt would make a better team leader than Garrus. So instead, I stuck with the outcome of my first playthrough. (everyone lives) The same is true for a lot of those who like me, prefer a game where some of their squad mates die. The suicide mission, though fun, shouldn't have had an 'everyone lives' outcome and shouldn't be used as a template for ME3.
I'm all for an 'everyone lives' ending so long as there are consequences.
The US Marine Corps defines the two main responsibilities of a combat leader as
1. Mission Accomplisment
2. Troop Welfare
Whether an NCO or an officer the welfare of the men under your command is an important priority, but always secondary to accomplishing the mission. While I'm using the US Marine Corps is an example, these priorities are the same for the militaries of most nations. The combat 'leader' that is afraid to risk the lives of his own men is no leader at all. Google George B. McClellan.
What does that have to do with Mass Effect?
I'd tie the 'everyone lives' ending to a style of play where you are placing the lives of your team above mission priorities. You might defeat the Reapers in the end and get everyone out alive, but you'd do so at the expense of the rest of the galaxy. Maybe Earth is rendered uninhabitable and greater damage has been done to the major alien civilizations of the galaxy, whereas the endings where you made the right tactical decisions and lost some squadmates resulted in Earth still being habitable, and less damage done to the galaxy than the 'everyone lives' ending.
As important as Shep's crew is, I can't imagine a situation where simply not getting them killed would result in an entire planet being unihabitable.
Imagine if a special operations unit conducting a hostage rescue mission came under concentrated small arms fire during the raid, and in an effort to minimize the risk of casualties among their own force, ceded both time and initiative to the enemy instead of clearing the compound aggressively. While being cautious during the raid would minimize risks to their own force, the delay could also cause it to end in failure with the loss of life of all the hostages.
Simply apply that to a much larger scale.
Shepard is presented with some incomplete bit of intelligence during a mission, that suggests some secondary objective *could* be important to the overall war effort. The intelligence picture is incomplete however, and no one can say with absolute certainty whether or not this objective is worth the risks to your squad, and you are warned those risks will be considerable. The objective might be important, and it might not, and the call falls to Shepard with his squadmates having differing opinions on the right course of action.
Those that decide to take the risk and take out this secondary objective run into heavy resistance, and a 'Virmire' where at least one squadmate's death is unpreventable. The payoff however is important Reaper technology or some overall part of the puzzle on how to defeat the Reapers.
Those that choose to put the lives of their squad before incomplete intel, and not to go for the secondary objective still complete the first mission they were tasked with, but don't immediately gain that tech or intelliegence that was gained by those that tackled the secondary objective. Instead they'll get another oppurtunity later in the game to gain that intel or tech on another planet in a mission that those that already gained the intel or tech don't get, but at the cost of lost time. It takes longer to defeat the Reapers with much more devastation to the galaxy and many more lives lost.
Or at least that is my idea. Bioware has much more creative people on their payroll that come up with an idea of how the story would change for those putting men before the mission, and vice versa. At any rate, it can be done!
Modifié par Aedan_Cousland, 22 juin 2011 - 04:36 .
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