AlanC9 wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
In all honesty, I think ME2 did a disservice for people by making it a point to have Ecstatic Happiness as an option at almost any given point. Not only did it step away from the more somber strengths of ME1, it established a frankly unrealistic expectation in people for ME3, in which a 'Everyone Important Lives Suicide Mission Perfect Victory' was never a plausible scenario. ME2 tried to be edgy and it largely failed: it glorified the Ideal Outcome, ignored the idea of costs, and got people so addicted to the Heroic High that when Shepard went back to the original point of being something less than an unstoppable Mary Sue, withdrawal hit.
Note that according to one of the devs (Weekes, IIRC) Bio flirted with the idea of making it impossible to do all of the loyalty missions before the Normandy crew gets abducted, which would have made saving all squadmates and the entire crew either much more difficult or absolutely impossible. Regrettably, he lost that argument.
If that had been just the Loyalty Missions, it probably wouldn't have improved things that much: it would have primarily refocused efforts to figure out how to min/max the outcome, and the flaws of the Suicide Mission would have stood out more.
@ Dr_Extrem: obviously, we disagree about how good the SM was. I thought it was a good try but suffered from the typical Bio problem of setting up a dilemma only to let the player slip out of it. But I'm going to let Dean handle the substance here since he's doing a fine job and it's lunchtime here.
Well, thank you kindly, Mr. Sandwich...
I'll throw out that I think the SM was a Bad Idea that was pulled off well. It was a great example of a successful feel-good finale, but has severe underlying weaknesses. It certainly did the Heroic High well enough, and the focus and ease of a Perfect Mission made it appealing, but suffered from three key points: it was never a good resolution point for any character who died there, it didn't tie into the characters, making it a waste of character development, and the fact that anyone could die there made it effectively sabotage the plot relevance of most of the companion cast. In a game about the characters and mission with a mechanic centered around having developed them, this was a serious weakness in how it sabotaged the character development.
The first point is pretty simple, and sad: character deaths have to be done well to be effective, and until metagaming factors of ME3 came in there was never a point in the Suicide Mission at which a character dying fit well with the character arc. Part of it was because of how cookie-cutter it was: you can't have a dozen different death speaches in the first place, and so not trying was a good thing. But there was never any personality in the deaths: it was all so sudden, and impersonal, that the ease with just how any character could be replaced in the death scene made the deaths triveal. No last words, no last reflections, nothing to suggest how far they'd come or how Shepard had changed them or brought them together. It's reaching to the fandom a bit, but a fitting example I'd cite is a fanfic re-interpretation in which Jack dies on the mission: dying, she murmers to herself that she knew better and should never have cared before dying with a friend by her side, and in doing so reached a character development conclusion right for her.
It would be too much to ask for, but it's still a weakness. The fact that ME3 made it feel more appropriate for some characters to die in ME2 than go to ME3 (romanced Jacob, for example) ties in a bit to-
If you were disatisfied with your favorite companion's role in ME3, the Suicide Mission is probably the reason. The Suicide Mission was built around the thrill that anyone could die, but nothing detriments a character's relevance to the future plot more than being killable. Since the story must be able to continue regardless, and huge divergences are too costly to make, the moment a character even has the possibility to die, their importance to the future plot is immediately marginalized.
This didn't impact some characters as much: Mordin proved that a marginal role can still look good, and Garrus proved a plot-irrelevant companion can be fun. But roles are roles, and the SM took away character-centric roles for the companions to ME3 and made the ME3 companions accessoraries to the larger plot. After a game in which the nominal plot was merely a framing device for the major characters, that was a huge change of pace that ME2 made a reality.
Finally, the Suicide Mission was weakened by the fact that the Collectors were pretty much irrelevant to the cast as a whole. Of the cast, only Jacob and Miranda are really on board for the Collectors, with Mordin as an arguable third. Everyone else is on the Suicide Mission for reasons different than the Collectors: quid pro quo for a favor, a chance for a good death, whatever, but the Suicide Mission isn't really linked to any of the characters.
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