delta_vee wrote...
My biggest frustration with IT in general (not you in particular) is that while each and every piece of (highly circumstantial) evidence in favor can be alternately explained by more mundane means, the strongest arguments are paratextual - budgets, resource limitations, and especially stated authorial intent (which I hate to rely on so heavily, but this whole debacle leaves few options) - instead of textual. At least, the narrative portion of the text. The game portion is far less ambiguous, but I'll get to that.
The options? Their problematic construction is largely what's behind the dissonance of the audience, yes. But they line up pretty well with the old leaked script, and the collateral damage is there to prevent players spamming the red button in the final choice. Oh, and it didn't look to me like a husk transformation at all during control or synthesis; it looked like disintegration. The dream sequences? They're signposts of Authorial Intervention and Stuff To Take Seriously. They're sledgehammers, clumsily applied. Nothing more. (Also note that those sequences were always literalized as dreams. More on that below.) The breath sequence? If any portion of the game could be called unreal, that would be it - primarily because, judging by comments from Gamble et al, it's not considered a distinct ending. Remember that they've stuck with the "best ending is achievable in SP only" line pretty consistently. Synthesis is that ending. It's the one you get access to when you fill the EMS bar you're told to fill. The breath scene can only be regarded as an easter egg in reward for multiplayer.
The game component is even more straightforward - there's no point in the game where control over your avatar is subverted. Not once. Relinquished during cutscenes, limited to movement during the dreams, but never subverted in the fashion required to properly signpost (even subtly) that control could be taken away, or that the game even allowed for anything but what-you-see-is-what-you-get literalism. Indoc was considered during endgame development, but was discarded due to difficulty with the mechanics - which indicates that they found it impossible to communicate to the player what they needed to know to play the game properly. And arguments about players deserving to "fall" for indoctrination (or even being allowed to do so) if they chose control or synthesis are specious. The dialogue-wheel mechanic is never used to create a dead-end. (Well, technically it did. Once. With Morinth. In ME2.) Dialogue-wheel gameplay always allows forward motion. Seeing as the final choice is constructed as a large-scale dialogue wheel, breaking with this well-established gameplay convention so late would be disastrous game design.
I agree completely that the collateral damage was there to keep people from spamming the destroy option. But why? If BW thought the other two were good (and synthesis the best) why did they feel it necessary to contrive to make the player fret over it? Why were the other two so obviously revolting to nearly everyone but Bioware? Why can those two choices be so easily connected to TIM and Saren (two indoctrinated antagonists)?
I agree that the dream sequences can be easily interpreted at the time as "You MUST feel bad about this dumb kid." The interpretation of them as IT evidence can certainly fall into the category of post-facto reimagining, so I try not to focus on their content too strongly as evidence. Although, either way they are there to instill guilt and doubt and Rana Thanoptis talked about the first stage of Indoctrination being about breaking down morale and will (not evidence, just food for thought). What
is significant to me, is the seque in and out of them. That fade to white is seen 6 separate times in game.
Three are the dream sequences, One is the
Geth Consensus, One is
Harbinger's beam and one is that magic elevator up to the catalyst. The first four are all dreams/virtual realities. So many people felt those ending scenes were surreal or dreamlike, because the game
conditioned them to feel that.
The breath scene is an interesting thing. They've never said it was an easter egg. When people say "D*****, Gamble I can't get 4000EMS w/o multiplayer" He responds with "Did you do all the side missions and scan all the planets?" He doesn't say that wasn't the scene they were talking about. They've also been intent not to be prescriptive about which is best, maybe because they don't want to give their secret away yet (Just sayin')? I've always seen it as some sort of bug, like they attributed the wrong EMS values to something. I can see why you think it's an easter egg, but I'm not so sure. Also, husk or not, the
eyes are significant. They were an intentional design choice. They could have kept the designated player chosen features, but they put that in. Because of budget constraints?
I have a problem with the counter-argument being "Bioware was lazy/ran out of time/had budget constraints" for a number of reasons. The journal is a mess, there's a bunch of fetch quests, and there is some narrative weakness with the macguffin/deus ex machina that is the Crucible. However, the rest of the game, at least visually and cinematically is pretty well polished. It looks good and the mechanics are good. The gameplay/visual things that are "unpolished" all fall into the end, and nearly all of them have significance. There is the
bizarre pile of only ME1 era Kaidan/Ashley 2D (virmire survivor guilt). There's Anderson saying he's on the walkway Shep is on. There's the architectural similarities in the final sequences to previous locations, following after Legion explains how VRs populate the environment with images from the users memory. A lot of the evidence is highly circumstantial, but it becomes compelling in bulk. At what point does it stop being coincidence?
The game is always moving forward yes, but that is because it was striving towards this point. Not all decisions are equal, there are good decisions and bad ones (some involving the dialogue wheel, others not). You can choose not save the Rachni queen, but that hurts the war effort. You can choose not to save Wrex, the council, or cure the genophage but these all hurt the war effort. They make it more difficult to succeed at the end. You can choose not to do anyone's loyalty mission, upgrade the normandy, or choose the wrong specialist, and the suicide mission falters/fails as a result. You can choose to hook up with Morinth, as you've already pointed out. Not all decisions are good decisions. Some are not obvious at the time, that was what Mass Effect was always about, living under the weight of you decisions. This is just another decision, but because of its timing in the game and its significance the stakes are higher than ever before. Because of the subtle nature of Indoctrination, the implications aren't spelled out for you. The producers also promised that the Reapers can win, and yet at face value they cannot. You can do the minimum, unite noone and bring a puny armada to earth and the cycle still ends. Unless (possibly) Shepard is turned at the pivotal moment.
The Final Hours app says the
mechanic was discarded, not the idea. We've always maintained that to Indoctrinate Shepard requires indoctrinating the player. Shepard is an extension of the player. We are his/her moral compass, we make virtually every major decision. Indoctrination is insidious, it corrupts your will and motivations without you even knowing it. It makes you think that the Reaper solution is the best solution. Look at Saren and TIM. They each went an entire game without even knowing they were doing the Reapers bidding. That's what makes IT brilliant (if true). It wasn't Shep that was Indoctrinated, it was
us. We were the ones that didn't see through the charade, that didn't remember Vendetta's warnings about control or Legions warnings about accepting technological evolution from the Reapers. It was us that were given the option to implicitly agree with the Reapers, and unknowingly chose to do so.
There's a reason so many people feel that IT fixes the narrative and a reason the most prevalent counter-arguments against it are speculation about laziness, budgets, and timetables. It doesn't fix the narrative, it
is the narrative. Either BW royally screwed up its own narrative, giving people three awful choices, and invalidating much of the previous journey, or they screwed up the nuances of delivering an ambitious meta-gaming experience. One of those seems a much easier mistake to make.
Caveat: I write as though I'm certain, whereas I'm just confident. My counterargument is that they put all this stuff in here as foreshadowing an ending that got scrapped, and didn't have time to take it all out. But, then again I can punch holes in that too.
EDIT: Actually, my
real fear is that the post on Penny Arcade Forums attributed to Patrick Weekes was legit, and arguably the two weak links in the writing/dev team froze out the talented support writers like Weekes himself who brought us all the moments we actually love.
Modifié par Hawk227, 02 mai 2012 - 10:00 .
Retour en haut
) got the breath scene as the "tell" moment to clue them in. But even people that picked wrong got a similar (but substantially more subtle) tell by the way Shepard appears to be turned into a 
The use of the just-now-discovered-main-antagonist to present the ending options is part of what's wrong with the whole thing. It's jarring to have the bad guy double as the wise mentor with all the answers.
