a.m.p wrote...
Thank you. I wish you worked at Bioware.
Thing is that type of choice is something they have repeatedly handled well throughout the trilogy. Whenever I was facing something I did not necessarily trust I always had the option to say "screw that, let's blow it up" or something similar.
I wasn't forced to trust the rachni queen. It was a choice. I wasn't forced to activate Legion or drag Grunt out of his tank. Sure, they are squadmates and this is a videogame so everyone does that anyway, but the very presence of the option, something any rational person with half a brain would consider, makes it a choice.
Legion's loyalty, even the collector base, as weird and unexplained as that choice was, the second encounter with the rachni queen. I could go on.
And at the end when everything depends on your choice - it's suddenly taken away.
No wonder IT persists. It explains why Shepard is not behaving like Shepard, among other things.
I wish I did, too, even with the worst possible fallout from all this, but I think I'd have to get a Canadian work permit or something if I wanted a place at that shiny office in Edmonton.
I've heard people say their choices didn't matter at the end, but as this is usually followed up with a comment about red, green, and blue, I didn't put much stock into it. As someone who took the endings at face value (see aforementioned literal personality), I saw a HUGE difference in the choice you made at the end and the implications they had on the rest of the galaxy, as have several of my "pro-ender" compadres. But what you're talking about is something different, and I think you have a valid point.
As someone who game masters tabletop games, I can understand the appeal of railroading in an RPG. When you're essentially game mastering for hundreds of thousands of people across the world, railroading becomes a bigger appeal. After all, you have to wrap uo all those stories
somehow, and each of these stories is unique. How the bloody hell do you do it without railroading?
One of the current campaigns I'm running is going to require a LOT from my players when they get to the end bits. Until they get there, it's my job as the storyteller to gradually bring their individual characters in line with my main plot. It's quite a task. But the advantage I have over BioWare is that I know these people and their characters personally, whereas BioWare just doesn't have that option.
I think, ideally, they wanted to bring the player and their version of Shepard (I know they say there's no cannon Shepard, but there are
definitely cannon things about Shepard, no matter how you play) into synch in the first two games. Ideally, if they had done this, you have less problem with the loss of the dialogue wheel. And ideally, when you get to the end, you're enough in synch with where they wanted you to go that you're ok with the choices presented to you, despite the fact that even in the best circumstances they are hardly stellar choices.
Problem is, most people are
not going to fall in synch so easily. Setting aside both Western culture's reverence of individuality and even the game's internal systems playing into that, no two people are exactly alike. While statistically some of us probably had extremely similar games, we are individuals, and even those people with similar games might pull completely different things out of it, or have made the choices they made for very different reasons. And the scope of Mass Effect is freaking
huge and chock full of little choices and subtle differences.
And thus you end up with a split fanbase, where those who managed to synch up with the game dev's thoughts are... while mostly
not 100% content, at least not upset by the endings, and you have everyone else, who feels trapped, tricked, and cheated out of one of the things we all loved most about the game: the element of choice. What's more, we're not even given an understanding as to
why we don't have this choice, and I think this is the big key issue.
I think this lack of choice and explanation was less of a big deal to us "pro-enders" (and I guess I should specify that I use the term loosely, since it seems to mean anyone who doesn't hate the end) because we were still able to accomplish whatever we had hoped to accomplish in the game without it. How much of this was letting ourselves be railroaded and how much has to do with our personalities just matching up right is one of those individual experience things again, but either way, it allowed us to take a lot more satisfaction from the final scenes than most people were granted.
Our relative contentedness, however, does not justify bad writing. It is entirely possible to leave the things open to speculation while still providing understanding of the events that are taking place immediately around Shepard. Most people aren't comfortable trusting pseudo-divine beings they just met, and very, very few people are truly comfortable with the unknown. The Catalyst is an unknown entity. We know it controls the Reaper cycles. We know it is telling us stuff that it feels we should believe. We know that, to some degree or another, it can get in Shepard's head. But that's really it.
We don't know if it's an AI, or a VI, or some sort of alternate life form. We don't know if it's malicious or if it truly believes what it is doing is for the greater good of the galaxy as a whole. And we are not given the opportunity to figure this out. Thus, we are left with... speculations. And man, do those speculations run the gamut.
Without a deeper understanding of the nature of the Catalyst and its connection to the Crucible and the Reapers, every speculation from the best to the worst becomes equally valid because they all have the same lack of data to stand on. I've seen good and sound arguments for why each of the three ending choices is ideal, why each is terrible, and why it's best to do nothing. I've seen cohesive arguments both for and against IT. I've read plenty of reasons why people feel the ending is in line with the series, and plenty for why it just doesn't fit.
And, for better or worse, until we get the EC, we're left to flounder in all these possibilities. The best we can do between now and then is try and understand why these possibilities exist, and try and withhold judgment on those who hold to ones we disagree with until we've received our clarification.
Then we will all throw pies at the losers, 'cause that's how we roll.
Modifié par ardensia, 11 mai 2012 - 10:14 .
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