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Could Mass Effect have been serialised instead of a trilogy?

Débuté par Guest_alleyd_* , août 19 2014 11:48

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#1
Guest_alleyd_*
Posté 19 août 2014 - 11:48

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I was watching a recent talk that GRRM made in the Edinburgh Book Festival were he mentioned that the original intention for Ice and Fire was to be a Trilogy, but the plan was changed to a more serialised approach to do proper justice to the series. The Ice and Fire conflict being too vast for a trilogy format to do proper justice to the story

 

I got to thinking of Mass Effect in the same way. A galaxy wide conflict is even more vast a scale than Ice and Fire after all. Might it have been better serialised rather than a trilogy and allow for more exploration of the MEU and possibly incorporate a narrative that didn't feel so squeezed?


#2
cap and gown
Posté 19 août 2014 - 12:10

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Tolkien's publisher tells him his book is too long and needs to be split into three different ones, and ever since then everyone and their mother feels obligated to do a trilogy. :P


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#3
Guest_alleyd_*
Posté 19 août 2014 - 12:38

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Yeah the trilogy format was used instead of the Author's original intention of a 2 part series along with the Silmarillion; which was removed and released after the author's death, IIRC. In this extension of the original format is my point, the scope of LOTR was too large to be condensed.

 

I say that the scope of the Reaper War was very similar, far too large for a single volume and that it could have possibly been a better decision to allow for an extension on the original format. As in LOTR and in Ice and Fire and many other Epic series.


#4
Fixers0
Posté 19 août 2014 - 01:05

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Mass Effect is a good example of the weaknesses of the trilogy format when impropery used. For example, Mass Effect 1 is after all just Mass Effect, the game was designed in such a manner that it could function as a singular story if there wasn't enough interest or didn't perform well. The Reapers would just be forever trapped in darkspace. the narrative is purposely ambigious about future events with minimal foreshadowing on what would happen in future installements . What little foreshadowing there was present in ME1 was largely abadonend in ME2, instead the developers chose to reinvent the universe through  a series contrived plot points. The game itself shifted focus from underlying themes such as the rise of humanity to as series of character-centric narratives, with minimal progression to the overarching plot. Come Mass Effect 3, where player's are suddenly thrown into dark, but poorly thought out war story , the premise and opening the third game had almost no connenction to the previous games and might as well function as an independant story in it's own righ.

 

Put bluntly, the Mass Effect trilogy was an experimental mess, with each game having radical differences in approach in tone and style compared to the other games, in retrospect, on a design level the series lacked any form of coherence.


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#5
Guest_alleyd_*
Posté 19 août 2014 - 01:25

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I felt the same way Fixers0 about the trilogy. Each game seemed more to be a compilation of separate story lines that had little connection to each other over the 3 games. It was part of the reason I think serialisation may have been a better format to recocile the variables and remove the sense of disconnect between the story arcs.

 

My intention in raisng the subject isn't to bash the past games, that is ancient history. It is for future releases etc that I am thinking of.


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#6
Display Name Owner
Posté 19 août 2014 - 01:32

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Who knows, maybe a 4-game series would have been a good way to go. With the extra time, the Reaper war could have gone on longer and the whole sense of a struggle could have been done more justice. Or alternatively we could have had 3 games before the Reapers arrived giving us the time to explore the universe like we did in ME2 and also explore the means to defeat the Reapers on top of it. With a 2 part Reaper war I suppose one game could be more about building alliances and the strategic side of things, and the other could be about locating, building and deploying whatever means used to defeat the Reapers. Not necessarily the Crucible, but if the Crucible weren't just whipped out of nowhere like it was I for one wouldn't have had any problems with the use of a DEM to beat the Reapers.

 

More than 3 games would make the import feature a massive headache for the devs though, I'm sure.


#7
Raizo
Posté 19 août 2014 - 06:20

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In hindsight a 'serialised' approach to the series would have been a better option than a fixed trilogy especially since it's obvious that Bioware did not plan out the series properly. That way the series has a proper beginning and Bioware would be under no pressure to end the storyline at a certain time, that way the series does suffer from filler material (ME2) nor is it rushed at the last minute (ME3), the storyline is simply done when it's done
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