StElmo wrote...
Pups_of_war_76 wrote...
shepard1038 wrote...
Who doesnt.ImCommanderShepard wrote...
I really really like Mass Effect's universe better than Star War's.
me.
How do you rationalize that? Just interested
I don't see it as something that has to be rationalized. It's just an evaluation.
Anyways, I guess it depends on whether we take the universe as a whole or the universe as portrayed in the main works within the IP (the films, for Star Wars, and the games, for Mass Effect).
At one level comparing the whole of the IPs is not fair to Mass Effect because of the sheer amount of Star Wars EU material, but at another level it's not really fair to compare the Star Wars films to the Mass Effect games, worldbuilding wise, on account of the games being individually far longer and having more material there, in the form of dialog trees and codex entries and soforth, for the player to progress through at their own pace.
So I ultimately prefer to go the first rout and compare the IPs as a whole, in which case Mass Effect comes up short., which is, again, mostly due to the sheer size of Star Wars EU.
It's not really a quantity versus quality argument because, while most Star Wars tie-ins are pretty bad, so are most Mass Effect tie-ins, and there aren't really any Mass Effect tie-ins of the calibre of something like the Thrawn trilogy yet.
This is all kind of waffly, though, so I guess I should expand on the way I feel about the way the respective settings are fundamentally represented in ways not dependent upon individual writer or artist talent.
I feel Mass Effect has clear disadvantages.
One of those - probably the biggest, actually - is scale.
Mass Effect has only a handful of alien races compared to Star Wars, and for the most part those races haven't been expounded upon to any greater extent than many Star Wars races, which, again, nullifies the quality-versus-quantity argument. That handful of races in turn control what seem like relatively small polities in space, with small fleets and short histories.
By Mass Effect 1 era, it has been only 26 years since First Contact. That's within the lifetime of most of the characters - some of the alien characters would even have been adults - and yet nobody speaks of this radical, paradigm-altering event in those terms or mentions much in the way of fallout from it, other than vague nationalism. There were cool things that could have been done with that, and yet everything seems pretty much taken in stride. I would expect humanity's insecurity and sense of awe/wonder/fear at the larger galaxy to be more pronounced given that it's only one generation since they were first exposed. I think that would have made various plot elements a lot more compelling.
By the same token, it has been only two Asari lifetimes since the rediscovery of the Citadel and in general 2000 years worth of history between all of these races is a pretty short timeline relative to other sci-fi IPs. That makes it hard to feel a lot of gravitas associated witht he institutions that are important within the Mass Effect galaxy.
Compare that to the length of the timeline in which Star Wars stories may be set. The Galactic Republic and the old Jedi Order lasted for 25,000 years. The Sith are millenia old as an order and as old as the Jedi as an ideology. There are thousands of wars, political coups, discoveries, paradigm shifts and other historical events to drive narratives at will.
I like very expansive things, even when that expansiveness is superficial and makes limited contributions to the narrative, as is the case - often, not always - with Star Wars.
I also don't think Mass Effect has developed - yet iconic archetypes and instititions to the extent that Star Wars has. At least, the iconic institutions that it has developed don't often seem to fit in that well, or to be that well defined. We don't have that good a notion of what a Spectre is, for instance, other than an office that facilitates Shepard's freedom of action. I think Bioware hasn't figured out whether they want Spectres to be more analogous to Jedi, 00 agents, other vaguely analogous positions in other settings (Imperial Inquisitors in 40k, Operatives in Firefly, other things) or to be their own unique blend of things, and so they end up not being any of those things in particular.
We have yet to meet one of these fabled Diplomat Spectres. We don't know anything about Spectre history or precedent; the reasons for the institution's existence or any subsequent threats to it. There are no Spectre traditions.
Overall I think Mass Effect does a good job of providing weighty sentiments but often doesn't have the depth of context behind them to really attack them to the degree it would like to, whereas Star Wars doesn't even seem to want to attack the weighty sentiments associated with it but sometimes ends up doing so anyways just by having so many things.
Star Wars has a lot of holes and has pulled a lot of cop-outs over the years, but given the degree to which Mass Effect hasn't really expanded itself that aggressively or covered its expositional bases to any extent, Star Wars wins by default, in my book.
TL; DR version I guess:
basically it's like Star Wars is a donut, while Mass Effect is a donut hole.
Modifié par Pups_of_war_76, 29 janvier 2012 - 09:36 .
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