Apologies for length and probable typos. Short version: Those who played Extended Cut and didn't like the refusal option should scroll down to the links for a look at how this option might have been hanlded.
BioWare’s Extended Cut is out, and with it, a refusal option of sorts. When I first heard that, I was excited. Several forum members had come up with what I think were really good ways of making refusal a legitimate option, without ruining game balance or obviating the need for hard choices. But that’s not what we see in the Extended Cut. Refusal here is tantmount to failure. It’s hard for me to express my disappointment fully. I want to spell it out a bit, and also touch a bit on why I think refusal remains important.
I don’t think the Extended Cut fixes much. I had a (really) long write-up as to why, but to keep it short(er), several big problems remain: the Reapers not guarding the Citadel, for instance; explaining why exactly synthetic-organic warfare is inevitable when it’s possible to get through the games refuting this point repeatedly; why Star Kid suddenly helps Shepard onto the space elevator; and more. Some will be satisfied with the terse explanations to a few issues the EC added. Some won’t be. I don’t mean to go into that here. Some are satisfied with the choices now that they’re spelled out in more detail; others aren’t. I consider myself in the latter camp.
I think the endings themselves are still problematic. and they’re largely presented as unmitigated successes. For instance, is Synthesis explained? Nope. It’s glossed over: people glow green and that somehow instantly makes them half robotic, even though there’s no apparent impact to that fact whatsoever for organics. The only way we know they’re synthetic is that we’re told they must be, and their eyes are now green. How this rewriting happens, or what it means are just sort of skipped. Synthetics appear to remain largely the same, except now they like cuddling. Even the Reapers like cuddling and reconstruction efforts, so the whole eons of galactic war that completely obliterated hundreds of billions of lives in horrifying, blood-soaked, bone-crushing fashion; leaving corpses, destroyed and bloated, viscera smeared across the pavement, stinking in the sun; the dead filling worlds on the planets the Reapers opted not to ‘preserve’ during a long, painful genocide; the few survivors huddled in horror amidst the ruins of their worlds while the Reapers carried on their merciless killing spree with brutal efficiency - that was just, you know, a misunderstanding. A speedbump on the road to happiness. I guess we’ll all have a good laugh about that in a few years when we’re drinking mojitos with Harbinger at a beach party. Oh, and meanwhile, there’s galactic peace between races, too, for some reason. Just as an added bonus.
It’s such a Panglossian finale that it’s hard to see how it fits in with the rest of the tough choices faced by Mass Effect players. And it happens regardless of which ending you pick - unless you pick ‘refusal.’ Refusing to side with the genocidal maniac who’s presenting you with a series of bewildering choices that offer no guarantees they’ll even do what he says always ends in death. Not playing by the terms of the monster who orchestrated all that suffering for untold millenia is presented as a colossal mistake. Then your war ends and you lose and someone else down the road presumably makes the Crucible and fires it anyway, which is remarkable because, you know, you’d expect maybe the Reapers might have tried to use those thousands of years to change the Citadel or something. The abruptness and hollow doom in any kind of refusal ending - by which I mean, Shepard refuses to participate, but makes no attempt to do anything else but then stand by and watch what unfolds - seems almost like a rebuke from the developers to critical fans who didn’t like the ending. You don’t want to choose what we offered? Fine, then game over, and everyone dies. Happy?
Not really, no. I’m glad BioWare seems to have absorbed the criticism that Shepard’s passive attitude and actions in the final sequence are problematic to some gamers. (In the final moment the protagonist goes from being resourceful, pragmatic and determined to a pushover and milksop, eager to do what Star Kid tells him. Throw myself in this beam of light to get disintegrated? Well, I guess you know best.) But BioWare included a refusal option that amounts to throwing a bit of a tantrum, then passively standing back and watching Earth’s destruction. That’s what people asked for, right?
No, it isn’t. See this thread about refusal for arguments about why refusal is important, and what form it could take. See this suggestion for a script based on refusal. Or check out this one. Or the one I made. There are several others on this forum. The key difference here is that in BioWare’s interpretation, refusal is a passive, petulant dismissal with nothing of substance to back it up. It’s bluster and bravado marked by inaction, or simple base posturing; that’s not the Shepard most of us played. In the presentations above, refusal is the beginning of another plan, not the plan itself.
Why does this matter? Ultimately, I suppose it doesn’t. But if you’re like me, and you still think the ‘choices’ offered are irrational and disappointing (and the choice giver untrustworthy), refusal was the last holdout. BioWare has apparently decided that it would be best to nip that particular line of thought in the bud and reject it: we either play the game exactly as they wanted, or not at all.
I want to point out ways in which people have done, by far, a better job of presenting how rejection might be handled than what’s present in the Extended Cut. It doesn’t need to be canonical. BioWare’s dedicated to their choices and that’s their decision to make. They’re not obligated to change it for me any more than I’m obligated to them to accept it. For those who, like myself, were hoping for something very different from Shepard and the trilogy, I want to reclaim refusal from being a childish pouting into being something meaningful and powerful. BioWare has repeatedly stated that this series belongs at least in part to the fans. It’s a little bewildering why, given that attitude, they’ve attempted to rebut fan-driven solutions to an ending many found lacklustre.
Please, do yourself a favor, and take a look at how rejection might have been handled. I won’t guarantee you’ll like the above formulations. I do hope that for anyone still disappointed after EC, this will give them a few more options for their mental canon on how Mass Effect should have ended.
Thanks for reading.
Also: I don't mean this to trash the developers or to suggest they're poor writers or anything like that. They've generally done a very good job with the trilogy, and I'm happy to have played it. This is meant for fans, like myself, who were hoping for something different at the end of it all.
Modifié par torudoom, 29 juin 2012 - 03:21 .
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That was fun!
