93 réponses à ce sujet

[CronoDragoon]

 Also, although I understand how the P/R system could make people pick dialogues based on it rather than on their personal preference, it's not the system fault, but the player's.

 

It is the system's fault. A playthrough wherein someone skips all dialogue and selects the Paragon option everytime is equally successful (and possibly more successful) as one where a player carefully considers all the sides and moral tensions in play and decides based on that. A system that fails to reward a player for paying attention (or fails to punish a player that does not) is not a worthy system.

[RoboticWater]

Yes, yes it does. I'm not saying full renegade or full paragon are tied to a singular world view, just that the system won't stop you from having a change of heart. And it really doesn't. My example is sound. 

Also, although I understand how the P/R system could make people pick dialogues based on it rather than on their personal preference, it's not the system fault, but the player's.

It may ultimately be the player's "fault," for playing into the game's design, but it's the game fault for letting that happen in the first place. Merely having the thought "how will this choice affect my P/R score," is detrimental the overall experience. A more nuanced system that doesn't boil down actions to arbitrary good/bad points and trivialize conversation by providing auto-win choices would contain all the benefits the P/R system (all two of them) with none of the drawbacks.

[Googlesaurus]

Right because everyone hated ME1 when it first came out because you HAD to lose a squad member. I recall the outrage and the broken keyboards and the nerd rage over the virmire choice... oh wait no i actually remember people loving ME1 and people praising the Virmire choice because horror of horrors it felt marginally like a real combat choice.

 

The suicide mission in Me2 has overwhelming variables and NO absolutely zero intelligence, by your very admission there SHOULD be casualties regardless of leadership ability but nope not in the one mission billed as a suicide mission. It should NEVER have been possible to save EVERYONE. Not a single crew member dies once a player knows to do the loyalty mission first. Hell i figured that out in my first play through so its not exactly rocket science to solve that tactic. 

 

When the only casualties in ME2 and 3 are a terminally ill drell and a scientist that sacrifices himself and you could even save him so that only ONE person dies who was terminal any ways. i have to say the story is poorly written given that this is the BIGGEST THREAT in galactic history kills no one on your team. Ashley/kaiden's death made the conflict with saren/Sovereign feel "real" it made you feel a sense of loss. What's worse is this BS "Shepard can save everyone" trope translates in Shepard being able to save every species in crisis. The Krogen, Geth, Rachni and Quarian all can be save by that super dooper awesome trooper Shepard, it trivializes the entire conflict because Shepard can just go "all in" and obtain the "I win" button. No hard choices, no casualties for frak sake the only reason the memorial on the Normandy has any names on it is because of the fraking prologue of ME2.

 

I am an adult give me tragedy in war don't BS me by making war into rainbows and unicorns.

 

...and now you ignore all the people who shrugged their shoulders because they didn't care. We can celebrate all we want over the idealistic notion of having "hard choices", but frankly a good part of the player base made the Virmire decision based on who they thought was less boring. The poignant tragedy you describe didn't exist for them. Big surprise, tragedy in fiction is more complex than presenting zero-sum game theory scenarios. 

 

The suicide mission in ME2 does not have overwhelming variables. Get all ship upgrades, do all loyalty missions, and all the squadmate choices within the Collector Base can be done from basic intuition. The Collectors, like most enemy NPCs in game, are tactical morons when it comes to engagements; facing more intelligent, trained combatants, they were rightfully wrecked. No one on your crew can die from variables outside of your control.

 

Now if it was true to real life, people would die during a significant percentages of playthroughs since playthroughs would have to be treated as simulations. Let's be modest and assume in 60-70% of playthroughs, you lose 1-4 people; both numbers are randomly generated after fulfilling some quota regarding survival odds. Okay, makes sense from an authenticity standpoint. How would actual players treat this system? What would the worst-case attitudes be?

 

- They treat the SM as a loss-minimization routine. Since squadmates losses can only be compensated so much, who dies matters less than how many die. There's very little tragedy in utilitarian max-min scenarios. 

- Their concerns become dictated by metagame concerns instead of immersion. Players who understand the mechanics of the SM start playing it like roulette: past a certain save point, they will constantly re-roll to get the desired outcome. This is also antithetical to building a tragic atmosphere. Tragedies must be perceived as irreversible to have weight, and they are weak if they decrease inversely with knowledge.  

 

Don't harp on its kid gloves treatment of war as if that's the only issue. The whole story was poorly written. The fact that the writers needed two deus ex machinas (the Catalyst and the Crucible) to justify a victory tells you more than enough. If the story followed naturally from ME2, every race except the geth should have exterminated. Not to mention it had an uncomfortable aura of power fantasy surrounding the whole thing. 

 

For tragedy to work beyond masturbatory fantasies of what adult fiction should be, it needs to fulfill a lot more criteria than "you can't get the ideal outcome".

[Mcfly616]

But really though....there should never be an "ideal" ending (i.e no casualties, everybody lives happily ever after.)

 

 

Never.

[God]

Synthesis as presented comes a little too close to that divide. I don't agree about it being happy ever after, but it's kind of difficult to argue that that wasn't the intent. It's an interesting premise outside the context of its presentation, and even workable into the ending, but considering how you're achieving it at the end, it doesn't strike me as a 'no-cost' ending. Bioware obviously viewed it that way.

 

I'm fine with the costs of the endings as they are and don't think they need to really change beyond context, just execution.

[Gothfather]

Yes, yes it does. I'm not saying full renegade or full paragon are tied to a singular world view, just that the system won't stop you from having a change of heart. And it really doesn't. My example is sound. 

Also, although I understand how the P/R system could make people pick dialogues based on it rather than on their personal preference, it's not the system fault, but the player's.

 

Err Actually any mechanic that actively encourages and rewards players not to pick dialogue based on a role playing persona is a failure in a RPG. Its not a failure in say a GTA type game, but in an RPG its a failure because it is contrary to the goal of the game which is to experience a role within the game. The P/R system actively encourages and deliberately punishes players who do Roleplay anything outside the confines of the totally uncompromising, be that uncompromisingly Paragon or uncompromisingly Renegade. What about a character that is not an anti-alien nor human first type character who generally tries to do the right thing but is willing to bend/break the rules in some situations? This isn't a schizo type character but this character would pick both paragon and renegade choices throughout a playthrough yet this character would be penalized with interrupts available and the ability to use the "i win" button. (Granted the "I win" button shouldn't be there but it is so players KNOW when they are prohibited from using it.) It doesn't take a genius to see that players will modify their actions to get access to these two forms of content, especially when one directly effects your access to "better" endings in that your war score will be vastly better if you use the "I win" button. Its poor design.

 

  Lets look at this with the analogy of combat. Lets say there was a combat system that allowed you to pick from three sets of abilities. You have strong abilities, fast abilities, and balanced abilities. If you picked all strong abilities it gives you super ability that gives you a huge advantage in combat, if you picked all fast abilities you also got a different super ability. yet there is no super ability for picking all balanced abilities and no super ability for picking a bit from all three or a bit from any two. This means you have because of your mechanics of the game created a system that really has only two choices. Your mechanics have effectively funnelled players in to either being "all in" on strong or "all in" on fast. Its a design failing to make a game this way as it eliminates all the diversity your system inherently allows for otherwise.

 

There should be no mechanics advantage for any moral position. I am all for story advantages for a moral position, but not a mechanical advantage. If there is a mechanics advantage then you effectively nullify all the diversity you built into the system that doesn't have the mechanics edge. You never want any one type of character to have a mechanics advantage in a game that is by design suppose to encourage players to explore different possible roles.

[Gothfather]

...and now you ignore all the people who shrugged their shoulders because they didn't care. We can celebrate all we want over the idealistic notion of having "hard choices", but frankly a good part of the player base made the Virmire decision based on who they thought was less boring. The poignant tragedy you describe didn't exist for them. Big surprise, tragedy in fiction is more complex than presenting zero-sum game theory scenarios. 

 

The suicide mission in ME2 does not have overwhelming variables. Get all ship upgrades, do all loyalty missions, and all the squadmate choices within the Collector Base can be done from basic intuition. The Collectors, like most enemy NPCs in game, are tactical morons when it comes to engagements; facing more intelligent, trained combatants, they were rightfully wrecked. No one on your crew can die from variables outside of your control.

 

Now if it was true to real life, people would die during a significant percentages of playthroughs since playthroughs would have to be treated as simulations. Let's be modest and assume in 60-70% of playthroughs, you lose 1-4 people; both numbers are randomly generated after fulfilling some quota regarding survival odds. Okay, makes sense from an authenticity standpoint. How would actual players treat this system? What would the worst-case attitudes be?

 

- They treat the SM as a loss-minimization routine. Since squadmates losses can only be compensated so much, who dies matters less than how many die. There's very little tragedy in utilitarian max-min scenarios. 

- Their concerns become dictated by metagame concerns instead of immersion. Players who understand the mechanics of the SM start playing it like roulette: past a certain save point, they will constantly re-roll to get the desired outcome. This is also antithetical to building a tragic atmosphere. Tragedies must be perceived as irreversible to have weight, and they are weak if they decrease inversely with knowledge.  

 

Don't harp on its kid gloves treatment of war as if that's the only issue. The whole story was poorly written. The fact that the writers needed two deus ex machinas (the Catalyst and the Crucible) to justify a victory tells you more than enough. If the story followed naturally from ME2, every race except the geth should have exterminated. Not to mention it had an uncomfortable aura of power fantasy surrounding the whole thing. 

 

For tragedy to work beyond masturbatory fantasies of what adult fiction should be, it needs to fulfill a lot more criteria than "you can't get the ideal outcome".

Oh for frak sake REALLY? I am not saying that the only flaw in the ME series was the P/R system and the fact that their are no causalities. Pointing out OTHER failings of the series doesn't in anyway neutralize or prove your point against my position. Having other failings in a game, movie or book does not mutually exclude said media from having the failing originally presented in the conversation. So it really doesn't matter one fraking bit that the endings for ME3 where bad when talking about how the series failed in allowing for the "I win" results to situations.

 

You don't need total realism to create a good story, but any story about fighting for the very survival of your species and those of your neighbours has to have loss. Why must it have loss? First it needs loss to show what the stakes are, ME3 tries to show you the stakes in that Earth is invaded but what it really shows is that the Reapers are pushovers because in under 2 years the galaxy unites and no race is eliminated. All those cycles that happened where all the advanced races were harvested must have been really bad at fighting. You need loss to show the power of the enemy.

 

Second you need loss for emotional impact great literature has loss for just this reason. And you can argue people don't care about that in games but that is a falsehood. Some people wont care but that doesn't matter you don't write good literature for people who don't give a sh!t, you write it for people who do. It doesn't matter that some players couldn't careless about the Virmire choice. You write that for the player that do care. You argued first that you can't have loss because people would rage, when presented with the real life example of this NOT being the case you then changed your position that people don't care. So which is it people don't care or people will nerd rage? Seems like you position is contrary for the sake of being contrary.

 

ME2 and ME3 both suffer from creating  story where no loss is the natural result of the mechanics of the game. The suicide mission mechanically doesn't have huge variables to it, in that you are right but story wise it has vast number of variables that would result in crew casualties. Any mission where you are jumping blind into a situation you have NO intelligence for will result in combat casualties. These are the very things you stated result in casualties in combat. Well you got those in spades with the suicide mission, yet it is so easy in fact you are naturally pushed in the direction of the "perfect" result with that mission. It took me 1 mission with 1 casualty to figure out the "rocket science" of the mission. I know other gamers who got no casualties in their first try without googleing the result. So there should have been a situation where you had to make the virmire choice. The perfect mechanic for this was the crew confrontations with Legion/Tali and Miranda/Jack, eliminated the I win button to these confrontations and you have at least two vulnerable crew members and you'd get two casualties.

 

And yes any virmire choice can be "gamed" in such a manner that you lose people you don't care about but i know many gamers who don't do that. They are mature gamers who acknowledge that loss add to the experience. gamermd83 has a youtube channel she is a big bioware fan and her love interest in Dragon age:Origins was Alistair and she was devastated when he stopped her from killing the arch demon and died instead. You know what her MAIN world state is for for DA2 and DA:I? The one where she and Alistair are lovers and he dies. No gaming the system to get the result she wants no redoing things, why? Because the loss ADDED to the experience. You write in loss not because some people will try and game the system but rather because people wont do so and loss adds to the overall gaming experience, as contradictory as it might seem loss doesn't diminish a story in enhances it. ME is a lesser story because it lacks any real loss as most situations can be "i win" button fixed, which all ties into the Paragon / Renegade system. Which is why the system should be scrapped because it diminishes the experience. I don't need the world/games presented in a Disney fairytale manner, I can handle loss and mature writing.

[chris2365]

It is the system's fault. A playthrough wherein someone skips all dialogue and selects the Paragon option everytime is equally successful (and possibly more successful) as one where a player carefully considers all the sides and moral tensions in play and decides based on that. A system that fails to reward a player for paying attention (or fails to punish a player that does not) is not a worthy system.

 

This 1000 times. If Bioware addressed only this issue for the dialogue system I would be a happy camper. No more Paragon to win, as much as I like the idealistic mentality, but I please ask you to repeatedly burn and make me suffer for being too much of a do-it-all and goody two shoes. 

[Pasquale1234]

ME2 and ME3 both suffer from creating  story where no loss is the natural result of the mechanics of the game. The suicide mission mechanically doesn't have huge variables to it, in that you are right but story wise it has vast number of variables that would result in crew casualties.

Lack of crew casualties =/= lack of loss.

Both ME2 & ME3 were rife with loss.

In ME2, you witnessed colonies wiped out by collectors, and saw the body piles and pods on the collector ship. You saw the results of the plague while recruiting Mordin, learned of Morinth's victims, saw the abuse on Prison Ship Purgatory & Pragia, saw Tali lose most of her team in 2 separate missions - shall I continue?

ME3 starts with heavy loss. Every moment throughout that entire game, millions are being harvested by the reapers. You see heavy losses in ground battles and ships explode. Walk around the Citadel, and you'll hear more stories of personal loss - there are even a couple of sidequests that have you delivering a loved one's last message, and you have some funerals to attend.

If players don't experience any of that as tragedy, it certainly isn't the writer's fault.

[Gothfather]

Lack of crew casualties =/= lack of loss.

Both ME2 & ME3 were rife with loss.

In ME2, you witnessed colonies wiped out by collectors, and saw the body piles and pods on the collector ship. You saw the results of the plague while recruiting Mordin, learned of Morinth's victims, saw the abuse on Prison Ship Purgatory & Pragia, saw Tali lose most of her team in 2 separate missions - shall I continue?

ME3 starts with heavy loss. Every moment throughout that entire game, millions are being harvested by the reapers. You see heavy losses in ground battles and ships explode. Walk around the Citadel, and you'll hear more stories of personal loss - there are even a couple of sidequests that have you delivering a loved one's last message, and you have some funerals to attend.

If players don't experience any of that as tragedy, it certainly isn't the writer's fault.

All the loss in Me2 and ME3 is only setting loss, its background loss. These losses only help create the glaring absence of loss for shepard. It is one of the reasons the dream sequences in ME3 feel "forced" for so many fans, Shepard is in this impermeable bubble the galaxy is falling apart but no one dies who he is close to except one terminally ill assassin who is doomed to die period and likely one Scientist who commits suicide. That is terrible writing.

 

There is no loss to Shepard's immediate circle of friends and co-works after the Me2 prologue with the exception of Thane and most likely mordrin solas. This means that when the galaxy is falling apart around Shepard, Shepard really doesn't experience the pain of losing people close to you. Jenkins' loss in ME1 was rather emotionally meaningless for the player because you get one dialogue scene with him before hand and then on the first mission at the very start he dies. There is zero chance to get emotionally invested with the character, this happens in Me2's prologue with the Normandy as well. At the very start poof the Normandy is gone and you lose twenty crew members of which only ONE was a crew member you could have a conversation with and he was the least sympatheticly presented character of the crew. It takes bioware to miraculously have his diary/journal survive the crash for Preston to be made sympathetic. 

 

maybe there was some significance to Shepards death that caused him to be divinely touched and is able to magically protect his crew from the reapers cuz none of them die from the reapers after the ME2 prologue. Maybe that was the intent, if it was its poorly implemented, I don't know why the writing team went from writing a story that presented the costs of war on a PERSONAL level in ME1 but radically does a 180 so that the reapers and the reaper war can't seem to touch his crew.

 

"A single death is a tragedy and million deaths is a statistic." That is how loss is presented in the series and the creators realized this with the creation of the boy on earth, regardless of what the indoctrination crowd say, there is a direct quote in the art of mass effect p.16 "One child would be the face of the people of earth whom Shepard could not save."  So it wasn't some convoluted hallucination, it was a child put there to create some type of emotional sense of loss. Which works up to a point but the dream sequences fail and a re vastly unpopular because there is no loss for Shepard's immediate social circle. No crew die, no squad mates dies except the one person you knew was going to die from a terminal illness and most likely one scientist who kills himself in an act of redemption. Both of which are NOT losses because of the war.

 

How does Shepard go through the war without losing a single friend to the war? The reapers can't inflict a single casualty to his crew or squad past the prologue of Me2. If they had had members die of your crew of your squad then the dream sequences would not feel forced, the drama of the losses during the war would resonate, the dialogue of soldiers lamenting and celebrating their fallen comrades would have tangible emotional connection. Hearing people talk about the loss of their homes, friends , families, the invasion of homeworlds would all have more impact because you the player would have suffered loss as well. But Shepard is such a god damn super dooper awesome trooper that this one person can go through the war and save every race, every crew member and every squadmate from the reapers.

 

i am not a child, I am not a teenager, I want mature adult stories that are not afraid to give me loss and tragedy. I can handle victory with a cost I don't need an "I win" button that gives me a cost free victory. I can handle losing a favourite companion, I can handle not being able to save everyone, to see the cost of victory as painful. If I had this then the bloody dream sequences would have made sense and not felt so bloody forced and ham handed. I want a mature title that is mature because it talks about things in a mature manner not just because it has T&A in it. Bioware can write like this they started the series like this and then they went to a Flash Gordon style serial where Shepard ALWAYS saves the day.

 

I pray to god that they create a cannon history for the reaper war where not every race survived, not every member of Shepard's team lived. I want there to be a sense of profound cost to the victory that has a personal sense of loss for player who played the original trilogy. The galaxy should feel like Europe circa 1919, devastated by war and the player should have a sense of loss to, to add personal emotional validity to the setting, because of the "I win" button most players don't have this sense of loss on a personal scale because the reapers didn't kill anyone on your team and there was no cost to victory because when things get sticky and difficult Shepard presses the "I win" button and its all solved with no cost. That's bad writing that's bad game design. This is not a Slam to the series or the developers this is constructive feed back, I want the series to mature and improve, I want it to evolve beyond the adolescent to the adult with regards to story telling.

[Malanek]

All the loss in Me2 and ME3 is only setting loss, its background loss. These losses only help create the glaring absence of loss for shepard. It is one of the reasons the dream sequences in ME3 feel "forced" for so many fans, Shepard is in this impermeable bubble the galaxy is falling apart but no one dies who he is close to except one terminally ill assassin who is doomed to die period and likely one Scientist who commits suicide. That is terrible writing.

 

I simply can't disagree with that (and the rest of your post) strongly enough. ME3 was by far the most emotionally immersive, heart-wrenching game, in terms of story, that I have every played. Emotion in writing isn't just about loss, it is the manner of the loss. It was the strength of ME3. Thane, Mordin, and Legion, all likely went down in heroic deaths to help unite the galaxy. The Virmire survivor spent the majority of the game out injured. You saw refugees, injured, sick, maimed and despairing, all over the place. You saw entire ancient civilizations crushed or altered forever. You build a relationship with the Turian Primarch who loses his son who was fighting alongside you. There was a lot that personally touched Shepard.

 

It should never be about simply making the story unremittingly bleak, it should ultimately be an emotionally uplifting experience and ME3 was right on that line, adding more deaths to squadmates was simply not needed. Nor would it be desirable unless it had immense meaning.

[Googlesaurus]

I simply can't disagree with that (and the rest of your post) strongly enough. ME3 was by far the most emotionally immersive, heart-wrenching game, in terms of story, that I have every played. Emotion in writing isn't just about loss, it is the manner of the loss. It was the strength of ME3. Thane, Mordin, and Legion, all likely went down in heroic deaths to help unite the galaxy. The Virmire survivor spent the majority of the game out injured. You saw refugees, injured, sick, maimed and despairing, all over the place. You saw entire ancient civilizations crushed or altered forever. You build a relationship with the Turian Primarch who loses his son who was fighting alongside you. There was a lot that personally touched Shepard.

 

It should never be about simply making the story unremittingly bleak, it should ultimately be an emotionally uplifting experience and ME3 was right on that line, adding more deaths to squadmates was simply not needed. Nor would it be desirable unless it had immense meaning.

 

I would have to respectfully disagree on this issue. ME3 tried very hard to be the climactic, sturm und drang finish that fans expected but most of the moments fell flat for me (except for Mordin). That's more on how I personally interpreted the narrative as a whole. But you are right: the difference between loss and tragedy is that the latter stands for something bigger than itself. 

 

There is such a thing as a bleak story that feels right. I feel there was a way that you could have the Reapers triumph in ME3 and still have the story be true to its themes. It would require a radical shift in tone, especially how the player perceives his own autonomy. 

[Arppis]

I guess in a way it's counted as reputation of your actions.

 

I mean, when you kill someone instead of saving their life and there are people to witness it, it builds your reputation in certain direction. So people do take your threats more seriously when they know you have an itchy trigger finger.

 

It DOES make sense. But at the same time it does limit your options quite a bit and that's a bit of a bummer. I just wish the characters would notify your actions a bit more, so folks could understand WHY your actions fail if you try to do it other way around.

 

I don't know, it needs more work. In ME3 they basicaly gave up on the system and just made it into one big bar. It didn't even affect the game at all. So it lost it's point.

[Gothfather]

I simply can't disagree with that (and the rest of your post) strongly enough. ME3 was by far the most emotionally immersive, heart-wrenching game, in terms of story, that I have every played. Emotion in writing isn't just about loss, it is the manner of the loss. It was the strength of ME3. Thane, Mordin, and Legion, all likely went down in heroic deaths to help unite the galaxy. The Virmire survivor spent the majority of the game out injured. You saw refugees, injured, sick, maimed and despairing, all over the place. You saw entire ancient civilizations crushed or altered forever. You build a relationship with the Turian Primarch who loses his son who was fighting alongside you. There was a lot that personally touched Shepard.

 

It should never be about simply making the story unremittingly bleak, it should ultimately be an emotionally uplifting experience and ME3 was right on that line, adding more deaths to squadmates was simply not needed. Nor would it be desirable unless it had immense meaning.

None of the losses of thane, Mordin or Legion are losses inflicted by the reapers. None of these losses create a sense of lost due to the war, which is not saying they have no emotional impact, only that you don't lose any of these crew members because of the war. They all die to solve issues outside the reaper conflict so you can get assets to fight the reapers.

 

The whole point of the dream sequences is, not to reflect on loss in general, but loss because of the war directly, losses that Shepard couldn't save it is why the child is centre stage. (If we take what commentary on the concept art of the child says to be true. in the book The Art of Mass Effect.) So many people find those scenes to fall flat, because the War doesn't cause Shepard to lose anyone. I think Mordin's death scene was an incredibly moving scene but it has NOTHING to do with the war, it was about setting the mistakes of the past right. Mistakes that had zero to do with the reapers, it was about a scientist finding redemption for a wrong he committed. Again nothing to do with a wrong committed fighting the reapers or because of the reapers at all. its something that happen years before the game. Which doesn't mean it was meaningless only that it can't be used as an example of a loss suffered from the war.

 

The whole system with its "I win" button creates a climate of Shepard going from victory to victory at zero cost inflicted by the reapers to Shepard personally and some cases no loses period. The reapers as suppose to be this unstoppable force that destroyed EVERY civilization in all of galactic history. You don't think they should have been able to kill someone on Shepard's crew? I do. You don't arrive on earth thinking, "this is a gamble, it will take a miracle." The player arrives on earth thinking, "Lets kick some reaper ass!" That is a terrible tone to instil in your game when the theme is about a struggle to survive against overwhelming odds. The story and mechanics should compliment the theme not create a tone that is at cross purposes. The root cause of this cognitive dissonance, and why most people hate the endings is the P/R system. Turning morality into a mechanic that not only gates content but greatly effects your ability to succeed using said conflict does nothing to further the mass effect story abut rather works to its detriment which can be seen at the climax of the series when people are like "Why would I accept these choices?" "Why wouldn't I tell starchild to go to hell?" People feel that way because everything in ME3 makes you so god damn super dooper awesome about your ability to fight the reapers. There isn't a single "setback" to your plans, no mission to get support that fails. The reapers don't stop you at any point you ALWAYS win at little to no cost for said victory. By the time you arrive on earth you don't feel like the reapers can stop you, because you ALWAYS defeat them.

 

When you write a story about a desperation move that is your only hope of victory, your protagonist shouldn't win every fight against the enemy, there should be losses (as in failures), casualties and you should enter the climax of the story thinking you didn't do enough, not thinking "I am fraking awesome!"

[KaiserShep]

In Mordin's case, while he wasn't killed by the reapers directly, it's the urgency created by the reaper war that leads to his death. The only reason the shroud was the linchpin of the entire plan was because time was of the essence. Otherwise, Mordin would have explored other options at his leisure, or possibly not even bother at all, since outside of a reaper invasion, the cure would be unnecessary.

[Googlesaurus]

The whole point of the dream sequences is, not to reflect on loss in general, but loss because of the war directly, losses that Shepard couldn't save it is why the child is centre stage. (If we take what commentary on the concept art of the child says to be true. in the book The Art of Mass Effect.) So many people find those scenes to fall flat, because the War doesn't cause Shepard to lose anyone. I think Mordin's death scene was an incredibly moving scene but it has NOTHING to do with the war, it was about setting the mistakes of the past right. Mistakes that had zero to do with the reapers, it was about a scientist finding redemption for a wrong he committed. Again nothing to do with a wrong committed fighting the reapers or because of the reapers at all. its something that happen years before the game. Which doesn't mean it was meaningless only that it can't be used as an example of a loss suffered from the war.

 

People found those scenes to fall flat because no one cared about the child in the first place. He was a placeholder in the most literal sense of the term. For those sequences to have any weight, they must be centered on someone Shepard has good reason to mourn. Choosing which character was close to impossible for the beginning of the last game, since Bioware would have to cater to new players and old dogs simultaneously. It should never been attempted in the first place. 

[Vazgen]

People found those scenes to fall flat because no one cared about the child in the first place. He was a placeholder in the most literal sense of the term. For those sequences to have any weight, they must be centered on someone Shepard has good reason to mourn. Choosing which character was close to impossible for the beginning of the last game, since Bioware would have to cater to new players and old dogs simultaneously. It should never been attempted in the first place.

They should've used a cutscene to show the kid's mother being killed by a Cannibal and have players to rescue the kid and tell him to go with the Alliance soldiers. The shuttle explosion and dreams would've had much more impact then.

[Googlesaurus]

They should've used a cutscene to show the kid's mother being killed by a Cannibal and have players to rescue the kid and tell him to go with the Alliance soldiers. The shuttle explosion and dreams would've had much more impact then.

 

Maybe, not sure. It's always dangerous to ask the player for emotional commitment in a transparent way. Oftentimes it backfires or leaves them feeling hollow about it. It's a fine art to arrange such significance without showing the strings in motion. 

[katamuro]

I understand the need for realism in storytelling but at the same time playing RPG's or games where my choices impact the story in some way I do not want to feel like in real life. And lets be honest here, real life sucks, most of the time our choices are between picking bad or worse, then there are a lot of times when there is seemingly choice but in all actuality there is none and we must continue on doing something because otherwise would be far worse. 

 

So I do not want something like that in a game, yes realism has its place but realism for its own sake is bad for the story. And anyway if the Reaper war was really fought like it was supposed to, with Reapers so overwhelmingly powerful and the rest of the species just strong enough to slow them down a bit then instead of playing for a single protagonist,, instead of Shepard we would have a dozen or so if not more soldiers who would die during the missions or after them or somewhere in between and we then would start a next chapter with a new one. You have to admit that you would find it hard to care for a new someone if you knew that by the end of the mission he/she is going to die and you would be in control of the next unlucky sod who was picked for a suicide mission. 

 

Also there were people in all kinds of wars that we had over the last century who survived through hell multiple times, who done things that seems like fiction and came back alive. 

 

I think instead of going through the trouble of inventing the whole dream/nightmare scenario they could have easily used something that was already present in the game, Shepard being assembled from pieces using quite a lot of cybernetics. During the ME2 Shepard would not think much about the subject since he was just woken up, the threat was real, there was a lot to do. Now after spending time on Earth in isolation, having a lot of time to think and then the war with reapers breaking out, it would definitely amp up the stress, possibly make some components start to fail. That rather than some plot armour invented for the main bad guys would have worked well as a reason for Shepard failing to do some things. 

 

 

As for the Paragon/Renegade system, I thought it was a bit too black and white in ME1, ME2 had the nice balance where someone could use both parts of the spectrum.