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[delta_vee]

While we're whittling away a lazy Sunday, here's a bloody fantastic article on games as narrative architecture:

http://web.mit.edu/c...&narrative.html

It's long, and dense, and very academic, but it's brilliant and goes into great detail about much of what we've talked about here. And by its rubric, I think ME3's central failure was the nature of the war narrative it locked itself into, which pruned away our options by the bushel, compared to the more freeform, expansive, and spatially-oriented ME2.

[KitaSaturnyne]

I haven't read the article yet (will have to wait until I'm back from work), but ME3 really does pare down the galactic exploration factor, which ends up coming off as restrictive and unsatisfying, rather than just a necessity of the narrative.

ME1 and ME2 basically handed us "explore the galaxy" cards out of the gate, and set us loose in a galactic sandbox. ME3 restricts itself by starting with the Reaper invasion, which means we don't get to spend quite as much time admiring the sights before racing toward the endgame.

Modifié par KitaSaturnyne, 27 mai 2012 - 06:43 .

[JadedLibertine]

So drayfish, as somebody with an appreciation for Arrested Development were you also pleased to discover that in her shower scene Samantha Traynor is revealed to be a never-nude?  

[drayfish]

@ JadedLibertine: Ha! Beautiful reference.  
 
Indeed, now you mention it, I think Tobias would find a number of kindred spirits in the Mass Effect universe: telling people he 'blue' himself again to dance in an Asari cage at Purgatory; opening a stall on Tuchanka, trying to sell the Krogan copies of The Man Inside Me; and no matter what the EC is like, if Bioware offers a DLC pack with Mrs Featherbottom as the Normandy's on-board housekeeper: I'm downloading it. I'm downloading the hell out of it.

[delta_vee]

 I've been turning that Jenkins article around in my mind all day, it seems, and thus I feel the need to extend it to Mass Effect. A textwall of some size is incoming. Brace yourselves.

(What's most striking about the piece, I think, is how contemporary it seems, despite being published a decade ago (yes, that's right, it's from 2002).)

Relevant excerpts:

As such, games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives. The best works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Homer, L. Frank Baum, or Jack London fall loosely within this tradition, as does, for example, the sequence in War and Peace which describes Pierre's aimless wanderings across the battlefield at Borodino. Often, such works exist on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters - our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds. Anyone who doubts that Tolstoy might have achieved his true calling as a game designer should reread the final segment of War and Peace.

Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident, or what I am calling micronarratives. We might understand how micronarratives work by thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin. First, recognize that, whatever its serious moral tone, the scene basically deals with the same kind of material as most games - the steps are a contested space with one group (the peasants) trying to advance up and another (the Cossacks) moving down. Eisenstein intensifies our emotional engagement with this large scale conflict through a series of short narrative units. The woman with the baby carriage is perhaps the best-known of those micronarratives. Each of these units builds upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama. None of them last more than a few seconds, though Eisenstein prolongs them (and intensifies their emotional impact) through crosscutting between multiple incidents. Eisenstein used the term, "attraction," to describe such emotionally-packed elements in his work; contemporary game designers might call them "memorable moments." Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicate across and through these discrete elements. Even games which do not create large-scale plot trajectories may well depend on these micronarratives to shape the player's emotional experience. Micronarratives may be cut scenes, but they don't have to be. One can imagine a simple sequence of preprogrammed actions through which an opposing player responds to your successful touchdown in a football game as a micronarrative.

Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space. Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of kludges which allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively salient spaces. Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a television soap opera, where the assumption is that a certain number of viewers are apt to miss any given episode, or even in classical Hollywood narrative, where the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways. 

Where Mass Effect is strongest is these smaller narrative chunks; it is weakest when it is trying to make the overarching plot more than a skeleton. Despite the distinctive nature of the Reapers and the menace of our conversation with Sovereign, the specifics of their return and the method of their defeat is almost incidental to our real relationship with the game.

CulturalGeekGirl mentioned earlier that the characters were the most important thing. I'd say that's partially true, but incomplete. The psychogeography of the series is just as important, both to us and to the characters themselves. What are Wrex and Mordin without Tuchanka? What are Ashley and (or) Kaidan (and Kirrahe!) without Virmire? What is Aria without Omega? For as boring as many found Jacob, his father's false paradise defined both of them far beyond any mere conversation on the Normandy. We examine these characters, learn about (and from) these characters, in the context of the places they are attached to - and I'd argue we in turn become attached to the places as much as the people.

ME2 made this intersection of people and place the central conceit, to glorious effect. Each location was different, tied to specific characters and encounters, and the structure of the game allowed us the freedom to hop between them at our own pace, explore them in our own time, traverse the contested spaces of our own will, and the game gives us reasons to revisit time and again. To return to Dark Souls (drink!), there is a similar principle of encouraged (and sometimes enforced) revisitation, which compels us to construct a psychogeographic relationship with the locale itself, instead of merely shooting our way through and thinking no more upon it.

This aspect was the most truncated part of the third game, due to the overarching plot taking center stage (at least in theory) from the intro onward. We are thrust into a sea of calamities, and lurch from one catastrophe to the next. By limiting us to one single hub, cutting us off from the others we have come to know over the series, we feel adrift. And by expecting us to care so much about Earth, which we haven't seen and have no connection to within the game itself, we are robbed of some of the urgency which would make the railroading more bearable. (One could say much of the same things about Thessia, which we only see as it falls, or Palaven, on which we never set foot and see burn only from its (boring, grey) moon.)

I think this lack is most evident (by contrast) during the singular triumph of ME3: Tuchanka. The ruins and the catacombs speak as much or more about krogan history than any morose pontificating by Wrex, but it's through him that we truly understand what those ruins meant and might mean. We can contrast those new vistas with the blasted, shelled, and wrecked place we visited in ME2. That intersection also allows us to use Wrex and Eve as a metonymy for the whole krogan species, their history and homeworld, not just as a reference but as a focal point of our own opinions and decision-making process.

The ending, too, suffers in this respect. Not only do we lack closure with the characters, we lack closure with the various planets and stations and colonies we've seen on our travels and in whose state we have invested ourselves. The destruction of the relays (and the Citadel in two of three colors) ensures that even if Shepard survives, even if we are (magically) given post-game content, we will never see those places again. And I think that hurts us just as much as anything else.

Edit: two addendums.

1) Garrus' "This is my favorite spot on the Citadel!" scene also shows (gloriously!) that some of the writing staff understood this concept. That scene was (for non-Garrus-romancers, anyways, and even some of them) the culmination of three games' worth of interaction with both Garrus and the space stations he seems to find himself home in.

2) Part of my disappointment with the Rannoch sequence, I now think, comes from our lack of connection with the place except as a concept. That the planet itself wasn't terribly distinctive didn't help. The geth Consensus was far more interesting both as a location and as an exploration of the intertwined geth/quarian history, which only exacerbated the forgettable nature of the landscape. (I may be pilloried for this.)

Modifié par delta_vee, 28 mai 2012 - 04:10 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

@delta_vee

In that context, what changes would have to occur in the ending to make it satisfactory?

EDIT: Forgot to say: Nicely said. It makes me wonder if Mordin's death is forgivable, given the high quality of the rest of the Tuchanka missions.

Modifié par KitaSaturnyne, 28 mai 2012 - 04:25 .

[delta_vee]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

In that context, what changes would have to occur in the ending to make it satisfactory?

Don't blow up the damn relays. I still find that the most inexplicable part of the ending, even moreso than the options themselves (which I can contort my thinking enough to see why the devs thought they would work). Final Hours has a big chart of the narrative beats, one of which (on Thessia, I think) establishes that the Crucible will result in a "galactic dark age" - this was cut...oddly. Walters, it seems, was hell-bent on wrecking the place. (See also his tweets about the Citadel and "bad times".)

EDIT: Forgot to say: Nicely said. It makes me wonder if Mordin's death is forgivable, given the high quality of the rest of the Tuchanka missions.

Almost. I still think Mordin's death could've been justified in a more naturalistic way, instead of the Exploding Tower of Doom.

Modifié par delta_vee, 28 mai 2012 - 04:33 .

[Hawk227]

delta_vee wrote...

 2) Part of my disappointment with the Rannoch sequence, I now think, comes from our lack of connection with the place except as a concept. That the planet itself wasn't terribly distinctive didn't help. The geth Consensus was far more interesting both as a location and as an exploration of the intertwined geth/quarian history, which only exacerbated the forgettable nature of the landscape. (I may be pilloried for this.)

You WILL be pilloried for this.

I loved Rannoch, both as a location and as an idea. As an occassional Talimancer, the idea of helping Tali step foot on her homeworld was quite meaningful. I also thought Rannoch was incredibly beautiful. Both of these ideas actually materialized not in the Priority mission, but in the Zaal'Koris rescue. Stepping foot on Rannoch, in the dawn twilight amongst the dry rocky buttes, knowing Tali was finally seeing her homeworld, resonated with me far more than any Tuchanka mission, ME2 or ME3. When I think of locales whose future we miss out on in the end, Rannoch is number one. There were several times, in both the rescue and Priority mission, when I just stopped to look around. The only other time I've stopped to really enjoy the view was under similar circumstances in Red Dead Redemption. I would find I high place, and watch the sun rise over the world around me.

For me, the Geth consensus was interesting, but it didn't resonate. We did not see the consensus the way the Geth do. We did not experience it the way the Geth did. As a location, it was pretty... meh. What was significant about it for me was the history. The opportunity to look back on the Morning War from the Geth perspective. Rannoch had the opposite impact. The missions themselves did not resonate so much, but the environment did. Not just what it signified, but how it looked, and how it felt to be there.

That said, I largely agree with the rest of your post. I think the locations were hugely important. When Hackett gave me that coded warning that there would be no exploration beyond Chronos Station, I realized I would not be returning to Illium or Omega, and I was rather disappointed. When the relays exploded, my first thoughts were of Rannoch, Palaven, and Thessia, and how we were cut off from this magnificent universe, stuck in Sol. 

EDIT:

As an aside, this topic actually mirrors my biggest complaint about Dead Space 2. I am pretty fond of the first installment, and thought the second was pretty dumbed down, but my biggest complaint is actually a location issue. For those that don't know, the second game takes place on the almost completely mined out husk of Saturn's moon Titan. It's almost completely irrelevant to the narrative, but I found myself annoyed that they would effectively destroy one of the most interesting celestial bodies in the solar system.

Modifié par Hawk227, 28 mai 2012 - 04:58 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

delta_vee wrote...

Walters, it seems, was hell-bent on wrecking the place. (See also his tweets about the Citadel and "bad times".)

I'm sure many of us here are aware of my opinion of Mac Walters.

Could you link me? I'm curious to see what he said.

[delta_vee]

@Hawk227:

1) I could never try to get into my (adoptive) little sister's pants. She was practically a kid in ME1. There'll always be a certain squick for me. (Yes, I'm well aware of my...minority opinion in this matter.)

2) Maybe I've just seen more than my fair share of desert buttes and scrub brush, but for me Rannoch just didn't have the kind of resonant landscape on its own merits. Compare to Haestrom in ME2 or that planet-what-I-forget-the-name-of in ME1 with the perpetual meteor shower. Conceptually powerful, sure, but the landscape itself - well, it just wasn't alien enough for me. Maybe I've just been watching too much Frozen Planet of late (highly recommended, by the way).

3) I thought the Consensus mission was a nice break from shooting Reaper minions, and a way for the level designers to stretch their legs a bit and play with the surreal. Plus, the Reaper code strains seemed almost more Lovecraftian than the mechacuttlefish.

4) Right with you on Dead Space 2 and the baffling decision to crack Titan. I love that moon almost as much as I love its sibling Hyperion.

@Kita:

http://twitter.com/m...930229329829888

Edit: off to bed. Usual caveats.

Modifié par delta_vee, 28 mai 2012 - 06:21 .

[edisnooM]

That Walters comment seems to go against what Weekes said about how people on the Citadel would survive the Crucible explosion, or maybe just not many of them are left to survive. It makes me wonder if the writing team has decided yet what happened in the wake of the Reapers taking the Citadel.

[GoblinSapper]

*emerges from the murky, emo depths* Hey, someone agreed with me about the this being a deus ex machina and being bull**** since plato, yay

[Hawk227]

@delta_vee

I didn't think she was that young in ME1.

Having lived most of my life only a few hours drive from SE Utah, I'm certainly familiar with the desert buttes and especially scrub brush. Yet Rannoch still felt a little alien, though certainly not as much as many of the planets in ME1. For me, I think, it felt like a more beautiful (and slightly different) version of home. The desert southwest without the shopping malls, trailer parks, and freeways. It was Tali's home, and on some level it reminded me of my home.

I didn't dislike the consensus. I think it could have done without the blasting of reaper code, which got tedious halfway through. Though, I'm not sure what (if anything) to replace it with. 

Hyperion, eh? I've never been partial to irregular moons. They just seem like asteroids. The only other Saturnian moon I'm partial to is Mimas.

[frypan]

Two pages since I last posted and things have moved along nicely, which puts paid to any doom and gloom that may have seemed apparent in my previous posts. I should state that doom was not a prediction; I was merely trying (as a compulsive planner) to think head to a time when folks might start to drift away. Glad to see that time is a long way off – which is good as I still have a couple of topics to bore you all with.

Moving on though, that was an excellent article Delta_Vee, but there is so much information in there that it will take several reads to digest it. The author has really tackled some of the issues we’ve been discussing.

Specifically, the idea of “narrative chunks” is interesting. I’ve never seen Battleship Potemkin, but the scene quoted suggests a strong link between the moments on the stair and the overarching messages of the film. This is something often missing from ME3, most evident in the Cerberus missions. As Delta_vee notes, the loyalty and recruitment missions of ME2 told stories related to the idea of team building and the disparate nature of the Normandy’s dirty dozen, but the ME3 missions often lacked a powerful message.

While we can easily cite Tuchanka, Rannoch and Thessia in ME3 as thematically powerful, the majority of missions simply lacked the association with the broader themes of the work, at least in my opinion. This may be why I have to be reminded by others of so many of them, there was no message implicit in the scene, to be carried beyond the level itself or embedded into my experience of the story. They really missed some opportunities to communicate messages about the game using exemplars, combat vignettes, or characterisation of Shepherd’s various allies and enemies.

The disagreement between Delta_Vee and Hawk227 over Rannoch and the Consenus is interesting, and prompted me to ask what I felt most strongly when playing through each . I must admit in my case it was the concept rather than the execution of Rannoch that worked. I personally found much of the level design rather bland, especially the rescue mission, as nothing was really said about the nature of the conflict in the levels themselves. There were powerful consequences, but no driving message that had not been established before – the whole section of the game rode the coat tails of the previous games. (Something Delta has noted before I think)

I still ended up enjoying it, only because of the Tali bond. This seems a perfect example of psychogeography (if I’ve understood the term right) driving the gaming space and giving it meaning. In my case it raised Rannoch above the limitations of the level design. This fits Delta’s view of Tuchanka too, and how the whole story is elevated by the interaction of space and the characters.

One thing I should like to add here is from history. The “Great Person” view of history is prevalent throughout this series, something I guess is inherent in the way games must tell their stories. In the case of Tuchanka, this is a good thing, as the presence of Eve, if she survives, allows for a fundamental shift in Krogan interaction with society, and hope for a better future, making Mordin’s sacrifice part of something that will be more likely to have a long term beneficial effect.

In regards to the consensus, Hawk227 is right about blasting the reaper code, which was rather dull. However, I agree with Delta_Vee that the way the story of the Geth played out was excellent. To see Quarians trying to save their creations was a new revelation that changed the nature of the conflict and redefined, without invalidating, the comments of the participants - who often simply acted as any would do in such a situation. This was a perfect example of development of the story, rather than a simple reliance on the previous games for resonance.

Modifié par frypan, 28 mai 2012 - 11:10 .

[drayfish]

@ delta_vee:
 
Lovely post, delta_vee (as is so often the case), and great article link (you are quite the font of impressive research),
 
I like your discussion of the significance of place as being a defining attribute of how this narrative communicates. And you're absolutely right: for me, alongside the characters, it was that excursion into these diverse environments that I really loved in ME2 (and which scratched my explorer itch in the absence of any Mako action from ME1). It seemed like the beginning of every mission consisted of swinging around 360 degrees, firstly to drink in the atmosphere, and only then to scan for enemies. Standing on the rain-soaked platform at Jack's Cerberus base; the plague-ridden alleys of Omega; the scungy metropolitan backstreets of Illium; a cursory scan of these scenes communicated far more about the delightful lowlifes I was rolling with, and the periphery of the universe we were sailing through, than any codex entry ever could.
 
I was appropriately stunned by those war-torn vistas in Mass Effect 3, and they most assuredly pressed the urgency of the tale into me, but that exploratory wonder was somewhat sidelined in service of the shock and awe. ...Although I do agree with Hawk227: it was a rush to get to be with Tali the first time she saw her home world, even if, as was fitting, it was a goddamned bombed out wreckage, the visible manifestation of a needless war that ached for healing. (Although I could have done without that stupid bugged-out invisible rock...)
 
And I've got to agree with you on Earth too:
 

This aspect was the most truncated part of the third game, due to the overarching plot taking center stage (at least in theory) from the intro onward. We are thrust into a sea of calamities, and lurch from one catastrophe to the next. By limiting us to one single hub, cutting us off from the others we have come to know over the series, we feel adrift. And by expecting us to care so much about Earth, which we haven't seen and have no connection to within the game itself, we are robbed of some of the urgency which would make the railroading more bearable.

I remember standing on Earth's moon in the first game, putting my gun away and just tilting the camera back, drinking in the image of that beautiful blue orb hang above me. I got chills.  Indeed, in every playthrough of the first game since I have gone back to do that same ritual. Every one of my Shepards, no matter how gristled and grey or idealistic and bold, has shared that moment.  I was so curious to see what Earth was like then, so eager to learn how far we'd come as a species. But I was surprised to find that by the second game, I didn't really care. That wasn't any home that I felt attached to in the game anymore: my home was the Normandy and where'er she flew.
 
(It's also why the kid dying at the beginning of the game doesn't work for me so well – curiously a human face triggers less reaction for me than a Krogan curling their lip.)

Modifié par drayfish, 28 mai 2012 - 11:51 .

[JadedLibertine]

drayfish wrote...

@ JadedLibertine: Ha! Beautiful reference.  
 
Indeed, now you mention it, I think Tobias would find a number of kindred spirits in the Mass Effect universe: telling people he 'blue' himself again to dance in an Asari cage at Purgatory; opening a stall on Tuchanka, trying to sell the Krogan copies of The Man Inside Me; and no matter what the EC is like, if Bioware offers a DLC pack with Mrs Featherbottom as the Normandy's on-board housekeeper: I'm downloading it. I'm downloading the hell out of it.

Now I've got the (admittedly not entirely displeasing) mental image of a blued-up Asari Tobias gyrating before that bachelor party in Eternity.  Perhaps instead of being Mrs Featherbottom  he could take over Kelly's position as the Normandy's psychologist, as he can combine the roles of both analyst and therapist.

If they do the Mass Effect movie with a spacer Shepard, I hope they get Jessica Walter to play his mum.  I picture their relationship as Sterling and Mallory Archer, or for Femsheps like Lucille and Lindsay Bluth

[Seijin8]

I was underwhelmed by Rannoch's visuals, though it was mainly because I thought it was going to have much more vegetation. In my head, I had a dark and mysterious sylvan forest dominated by animals with glowing eyes, flitting from one place to another. And large chunks of this landscape dotted with rusted-out industrial complexes, craters, and fallen starships.

[IndridColdx]

 I think I wanted to cry a little bit when I read this post.  This writing is almost the epitome of how I feel about the game.  The ending to ME3 is nothing short of tragedy.  And not the good kind that fits, like in Romeo and Juliet, but the kind that leaves me feeling betrayed and slapped in the face.

Artistic Integrity?  How sad...

They haven't listened to a damn word we the fans have said.  Their only saving grace at this point could be the Indoc Theory, but everywhere I have read, it just doesn't seem to be the case.

SHAME on you Bioware.  If your company falls, it's your own damn fault.  I will never forget this.

[edisnooM]

On the topic of the various missions in ME3 I think I agree with what has already been expressed, that I cared about the missions mainly because of the parties involved. Without Tali and Legion, the Rannoch arc would have been just some more missions. Same with Tuchanka, I wanted to cure the Genophage because I saw the hope that Wrex and Eve had for their people and what it meant to them, I wanted to give Mordin the redemption he sought (though he never admitted it in my Paragon playthrough).

The same can be said of the smaller missions, Grissom academy with Jack and again with David Archer stood out for me. And also with the Ardat-Yakshi monastery, which has one of the moments that made me realize I could never ever play as a Renegade.

This has been true I think throughout the Mass Effect series, even when BioWare introduces new characters I've never met before, they were very adept at drawing me into the missions and making me care.

But missions like the Communications Hub where you just talk to some faceless tech, and never actually see her, seem rushed and lacking (also it's a multiplayer map).

Modifié par edisnooM, 28 mai 2012 - 07:35 .

[KitaSaturnyne]

See, I'm on the flipside of Seijin. I expected Rannoch to be covered with sprawling cities, comprised of expansive industrial sectors, and ancient skyscrapers, still pristine (due to Geth maintenence) in spite of the Quarians vacating the planet. Maybe even multiple well-used space ports.

As for Tuchanka, I expected a bombed out rock, and that's what I got. I wasn't disappointed. I think Kalros could have used a little more foreshadowing, though. Mention her legend, or even fight her a bit in ME2 when you do Grunt's loyalty mission.

Palaven definitely disappointed me. Why couldn't we help out a little on Minae, and then go down with Garrus to kick some Reaper butt planetside? You can't just have Garrus point out a burning part of a background asset and expect me to care about it.

As for Earth, yeah. I think the developers expected us to automatically care about Earth because in real life, we live here. But what I think they failed to see is that in Mass Effect, the Earth Shepard starts the game on is not the same Earth. It's a world just like Thessia, Palaven, or Ontarom. It needs to be characterized and made important within the context of the game. It can't just be a matter of "Well, the player lives on this planet in their real life, so it'll be important to them if we put it in the game".

ME3 could have accomplished all that if they'd delayed the Reaper Invasion. We could have seen this Earth of the future and become attached to it. If Shepard loves the planet enough to want to save it, we need to know why. We also need reasons to want to join that fight ourselves as the player.

You know what the most important plot point for ME3 was for me? Not saving Earth. It was uniting the galactic community towards acheiving a common cause: Destruction of the Reapers. Earth wasn't even icing on the cake, it was a little candy decoration.

And how hard would it have been to have included some rural areas on the way to London, instead of landing right in the thick of it head on? "Oh my god, I'm taking shelter in a barn, just like the Asari commando!"

Modifié par KitaSaturnyne, 28 mai 2012 - 07:44 .

[deliphicovenant42]

Rannoch is a tough nut to crack for me. There were some great moments that did work in my playthrough, but there were also numerous moments of wtf that broke my immersion.

As has been discussed previously, having the quarians attack the geth when they did seemed like a stretch; an example of the writer imposing an event on the universe rather than it making sense in game. At the very least, the way it unfolded felt like it minimized possible outcomes to Tali's loyalty mission in ME2.

The most jarring moment for me, however, was legion uploading the reaper code to the consensus. Given his comments about the Geth making their own future in the prior game, his decision seemed contrived at the time, and in retrospect seems like it was done just to add justification to the Destroy ending encompassing the Geth. Maybe there are ways to have his choice make sense in universe, and maybe I missed some dialog along the way that might have helped me buy into it, but as it is that was one moment I felt was very contrived and I was begging for the 'investigate' options from ME1 and 2.

What's worse is I remember talking to a friend about how engrossing some of the conversation about the nature of the Geth was at the time, how effective Bioware made the case for peace and the Geth being equals if you stuck to your paragon guns, that the final ten minutes seemed even more unconscionable when I reached the end. The conversations with Javik presented a great in game opposition to the typical paragon path, but Bioware seemed so clearly to be arguing against his outlook that they're adoption of it as the supposed core conflict gave me whiplash.

[CronoDragoon]

delta_vee wrote...

2) Part of my disappointment with the Rannoch sequence, I now think, comes from our lack of connection with the place except as a concept. That the planet itself wasn't terribly distinctive didn't help. The geth Consensus was far more interesting both as a location and as an exploration of the intertwined geth/quarian history, which only exacerbated the forgettable nature of the landscape. (I may be pilloried for this.)

I can't agree. Landing on Rannoch was an emotional high. It didn't really matter to me that the landscape was rather indistinct because Rannoch was always an idea, a goal, something that one of your squadmates/love interests had dreamed about, and the fact that it had existed only as a concept thus far in the series bound the character and race to the planet in ways unachieved by any other race/planet. The plight of the quarians, their very reason for existing as a narrative element in the game, is indistinguishable from their planet because of its highly developed status as a concept. Accordingly, when the concept is realized after 100 hours of gameplay, the moment takes on a rather surreal quality, as if you can't actually believe you have landed on Rannoch.

Compare this with Thessia, where the planet really has nothing to do with the asari as a culture/race/who they are. To be honest, as someone who gets easily bored by Codex entries, I'm not entirely sure I knew what Thessia was before I visited it. Ilium, to me, was a great representation of the asari. It would have meant more if that had been destroyed instead. Anyway, Thessia is certainly unrelated to Liara's character in terms of her personality or life goals. Any pain I felt losing Thessia was unrelated to the planet itself or Liara's connection to it. I felt bad after Thessia because 1) Shepard (me) had failed when I needed to succeed the most, and 2) Liara was a wreck, but my sympathy only amounts to a visceral reaction to her emotional state, not some understanding of Thessia's loss as a symbol of something important to the player or his/her squadmates. By contrast, how would you have felt if Rannoch was destroyed before the quarians could land on it again?

[Hawk227]

frypan wrote...


In regards to the consensus, Hawk227 is right about blasting the reaper code, which was rather dull. However, I agree with Delta_Vee that the way the story of the Geth played out was excellent. To see Quarians trying to save their creations was a new revelation that changed the nature of the conflict and redefined, without invalidating, the comments of the participants - who often simply acted as any would do in such a situation. This was a perfect example of development of the story, rather than a simple reliance on the previous games for resonance.

I suspect I didn't articulate my point well enough. There's a lot I like about the consensus mission. The only thing I didn't like was the incessant blasting of Reaper code. My greater point was how I saw the consensus and Rannoch as they relate to psychogeography. In that regard, Rannoch was very powerful. Just standing there was meaningful. But the consensus didn't have that same effect for me. I wasn't terribly engrossed in where I was, but what I was doing, which was watching the Morning War play out through the eyes of the Geth. Both missions were powerful for me, but for different reasons. The same reasons it seems you (frypan) are citing.

I think part of the problem with Priority: Tuchanka from a psychogeographical standpoint was that I was, frankly, tired of Tuchanka. We had two missions there in ME2, and had already done 3 missions there in ME3. I wanted to see Thessia and Palaven. I wanted to go somewhere new. The ancient ruins (particularly the catacombs section) resonated with me, but Tuchanka's success was all about the characters. If Wrex, Eve, or Mordin were not alive I don't think I would have cared about that mission. Likewise, it could have occurred somewhere else entirely, and it would have had the same effect. Rannoch was special not because I was uniting the Quarians and Geth (although that was nice) but because it was on Rannoch. The progressiveness of Wrex and Eve was the only thing that made me want to cure the genophage, and that was tied almost exclusively to the characters rather than the setting.

As for what Rannoch would look like, I wasn't really expecting desert buttes, but Tali had talked about the desert grasslands before so I was not expecting a lush forest. It was a bit devoid of civilization, as Kita mentioned, but I think that was part of its appeal. The Quarians hadn't lived there in 300 years, and the Geth have no use for skyscrapers. I think that Rannoch as an almost virgin world seemed fitting, at least to me.

@Deliphicovenant42

I don't have too many qualms with the Geth/Quarian conflict. I thought it was dumb, but not out of place. Tali's loyalty mission in ME2 showed that (with Gerrel and Xen) the Quarians were dead set on taking back Rannoch. I saw the invasion not as the developers forcing the issue, but as the Quarians having tunnel vision and not seeing the bigger picture. It was a Geth tactical mistake, rather than a developer narrative mistake. For me, it all worked within the narrative.

The same cannot be said about Legion uploading the code. I don't really have issue with the Geth gaining "true intelligence" because I thought that fit with how they explained Legion and Geth intelligence in ME2. I also didn't really have an issue with Legion "dying" to upload the code at the source. It was a little contrived, but I forgive them. The issue for me is specifically the Reaper Code part of the equation. What happened to the "Geth make their own future, the heretics ask the old machines to give them their future"? I guess since it was on their own terms (no Reaper control as the price) it made a little sense, but it still feels like a betrayal of how well they developed Legion and Geth society in ME2.

EDIT:

@Kita

I agree about Earth. The emotional push was not saving Earth but saving all the places. I was doing it for Garrus and Palaven, Wrex and Tuchanka, Liara and Thessia, Tali and Rannoch, and I was doing it for Illium, the Citadel, and Omega and all the wonderful places we'd been. There was no real emotional anchor to Earth, for me. We didn't spend enough time there to be attached. I certainly didn't want Earth destroyed, but I was never thinking "I've got to do this quick so I can go save Earth!".

Modifié par Hawk227, 28 mai 2012 - 08:21 .

[drayfish]

I think I tend to agree with ChronoDragoon about Rannoch. I had wondered for three games what this mythic planet would look like. I think it mutated in my mind from something like Seijin8's beautiful forest landscape (wonderfully described!), to a gnarled cityscape of half-shattered buildings patched with Reaper chrome. I think I was once imagining it as something of a glass structure (you know, the complete metaphorical inverse of the whole hidden-behind-suits-thing), but maybe that was a product of my fascination with the Doozers from Fraggle Rock.
 
Ultimately for me it seemed fitting that what was finally revealed was so featureless, so abstract. I guess you could (justifiably) argue that it was some lazy asset design, but in this specific case, I was happy to see it as galactic metaphor of that whole Geth/Quarian war: an amorphous, indistinct shape, that means only whatever is projected upon it. 'Homeland', 'gravesite', 'bountiful future', 'land of ash and despair'...
 
Promise, regret (or even, frankly, apathy, if you were never really that invested in the war) could be cast upon those barren plains, summing up the whole regrettable cycles of carnage that led to the moment of its viewing.
 
And I completely agree with you KitaSaturnyne, I would have loved some more opportunity to fall in love with Earth:
 

KitaSaturnyne wrote:
 
You know what the most important plot point for ME3 was for me? Not saving Earth. It was uniting the galactic community towards acheiving a common cause: Destruction of the Reapers. Earth wasn't even icing on the cake, it was a little candy decoration.

In the context of the game at present Earth is little more than a prison for Shepard to flee. Sure, it's no fun seeing people get carved up by space lobsters (...well, okay, maybe a little), but it's only after you get to pull out of atmo from Earth that the game opens up in to the Mass Effect we recognise and your freedom to fly kicks back in. Earth was more of a restraint (at least structurally) than a hub.
 
For some weird reason, I always through we'd get at least one scene in that sunflower field from the game trailer, or maybe a field of wheat – I don't know. But on Earth, and brimming with yellow. I had this vivid picture of that in my mind, and it never eventuated...
 
Okay.  With that, I should probably stop. At this point I sound like I'm trying to describe a crazed fever dream: 'And you were there...  And you... And there were amphibians who liked show tunes...  And a cop jellyfish...'

'Okay, no more Seafood for you.'

Modifié par drayfish, 28 mai 2012 - 09:14 .

[drayfish]

Hawk227 wrote...

If Wrex, Eve, or Mordin were not alive I don't think I would have cared about that mission. Likewise, it could have occurred somewhere else entirely, and it would have had the same effect.

Random aside: what an extraordinary thought! I wonder what indeed those scenes must be like if all those characters are dead? Does Shepard become more of an interloper in this conflict then? Is it just one more thing to tick off the Galactic to-do list? Or does the game compensate with alternate emotional investment? I've heard Padok Wiks is quite a loveable new character, but I've not really experienced him; and I know that Wreav is a clown...

Modifié par drayfish, 28 mai 2012 - 09:15 .