Fair warning, if you have TL/DR ADD disorder, skip ahead or perhaps change the channel back to the "From Ashes" thread and continue munching on your popcorn.
lrrose wrote...
It's bad game design to screw over a player like that based entirely on a decision made two games ago, especially a decision made in a DLC. I could see Balak causing trouble, but killing off a squadmate without the ability to stop him in ME3...
So many posts worth responding to, but I didn't want a whole page of individual responses so let me choose this one and try to cover as many bases as possible.
It is not bad game design. In fact, that was Mass Effect's original selling point: a game where decisions that you make have ramifications and reprecussions in the future games. That's the point of this whole exercise: to offer up a unique roleplaying experience where precisely things like that can happen. You never really had that in games before. The Baldurs Gate games did a little trailblazing down that route (as I recall, certain BG1 decisions were reflected in BG2). More recently, "The Witcher" and even "Dragon Age 2" did decent jobs of presenting the effects of your choices (good, bad, and unintended) on your game's story.
But then, this was always supposed to be Mass Effect's achievement: that degree of "every choice matters" *across THREE games*!
I pulled the Balak example out of a proverbial hat, but it could have been any number of others. In Mass Effect 2, it was generally disappointing (to me at least) that the vast majority of carryover in your choices were received emails that couldn't be acted upon or generally benign, relatively meaningless encounters with certain returning characters. What I am hoping for in ME3 is that some of these chickens finally come home to roost.
Someone early on wrote,
"It takes more courage to play Paragon than it does to play a Renegade. Renegades just follow their emotions and whatever idea pops into their head at the spur of the moment. A Paragon takes all things into consideration then makes the best choice for that encounter to make the the most successful outcome for the present and also for the future."
If all the game does is generally reward paragon choices and generally punish renegade choices, then that statement holds no water at all. Choosing paragon every time in ME games has so far been like a little kid saying, "Gimme a cookie please" and getting that treat each and every time. Yes, certain renegade actions are capricious and silly, but others (like the Balak decision, the Citadel Counsel, or the heretic geth) have a great deal of validity to them. Beyond that, the fact is that few choices in life *ever* turn out exactly or without some kind of unintended consequences. So far, that truism has been absent in the Mass Effect games.
It's not enough to have the occasional vague negative result (like the recruitment #'s going down like with the Batia decision in ME1) for a paragon choice. Instead, some of the decisions have to have real and irreversible impact on your character. It's not a matter of wanting paragons to be punished (though of course I posited my initial argument sarastically), but rather I want Bioware to fulfill that original promise of a trilogy where every choice is fraught with implications and consequences in future games.
So far, Bioware hasn't done that. They've really made it so that you have to "play paragon" or "play renegade" because to "play paragon" always seems to mean "the better way", but that's not how life works. There's a reason why there's a term "moral victory" and why it is used in the absence of actual victory. When I say that I want Balak to slay your LI, it isn't personal nor do I mean that specific thing has to happen. It's my way of saying that I want Bioware to fulfill the potential of Mass Effect by having a trilogy where your decisions have consequences intended and unintended, and that you have to live with them.
Modifié par phimseto, 27 février 2012 - 05:10 .
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