Really?
I am talking about the dissonance between the two narratives. You point out that my premiss is flawed and when i show how mechanically there are no consequence you say but there are story consequences. Yeah you are right there are story consequences. So... if mechanically there are no consequences and the mechanical narrative is that everything is pretty much cost free or at the very least consequence free and you feel fraking powerful, that creates a problem BECAUSE the story narrative is telling an entirely different narrative to what you feel from play. How is my premiss wrong? When your counter is that the story narrative disagree with my point about the mechanics narrative? I know they disagree which is the point of my premiss.
Each narrative requires closure but it is impossible to give the player closure for both because they are mutually exclusive narratives. Which is why for MOST players the endings feel off, feel like they lack closure because there are two separate narratives in the game that are at cross purposes.
As I stated in a previous post....
There is nothing exceptionally wrong with the endings taken as just the conclusion of the story narrative told through the series. So why are they almost universally panned as crap writing? Because of the conflict between two diametrically opposed narratives in the series or at least in the last two games in the trilogy, it creates a situation where you don't get closure or at least most people are always looking for more and that is because of the conflict.
If they gave us a closure for the power fantasy where we kick reaper ass and saved the galaxy the ending would feel like what? That's it? The biggest threat to the galaxy and we just won because what? reasons? It wouldn't give closure to the story narrative that was told in the previous games . So we would have closure for the mechanical narrative but nothing for the story narrative and that would make any closure we had feel off. Just like it feels now, currently we get a decent story narrative closure but nothing for the mechanical narrative and as I just pointed out reversing things doesn't solve the problem.
The endings of ME trilogy are fubar because the developers unintentionally created a dynamic that could not be solved just by having the writers write a new ending, you can't write yourself out of this, which is why i don't think the writers are to blame it is as much fault as the other developers as it is the writers. The only way to solve it was to DESIGN the game so the mechanics didn't work at cross purposes with the story narrative. You can't do the retroactively.
See, the narrative is part of the mechanics; it is the aspects of the plot you manipulate through playing the game. You can manipulate it through the choices you make, narrative decisions for an idealistic outcome, a pragmatic outcome, a ruthless one; most of that done internally with your characterization of Shepard or with your own personal style of role-playing.
To argue that the narrative is not part of the mechanics, or separated from the combat gameplay, is where the flaw is. Narrative mechanics and choice and consequence is not only part of the game mechanics, but integral to the games design, otherwise the choices would be made for us instead and there would be no need to role-play during the game, it would be a dungeon crawl or rogue-like by design, going from map to map to meet out objectives. That dissonance doesn't exist in the way you describe it because there are costs to your decisions, sometimes big ones depending on your said consequence, as they affect the narrative tone of your game and your in-character experience.
The theme of overcoming an unstoppable force is met with an immovable object; the need for change, with Shepard being the one who changes it, is paramount from the first game. Mechanically and narratively speaking, that makes sense right down to the conclusion, where Shepard literally makes the final decision. Even this choice is part of the theme, where we don't really know what our decisions will do for the future, but we make them and hope for the best anyway, because of the reasons we give your character, or the reasons we make through gameplay.
If you played it without all of this in mind though, without delving into the reasons "why" through a character or personal lens, then I can see where you are coming from then. Even so though, Mass Effect has little to do with power fantasy mechanics- that is what Skyrim is all about because you have no restrictions to what you can actually do, through combat or otherwise, forges your own narrative through play. Mass Effect is grounded in a more light-RPG mentality; the narrative and plot take precedence in the game design because it is designed to be linear and character heavy, versus total control of your actions. Combat and powers are easy to use and simple, borrowing from third person shooter gameplay to create something that is more "pick up and play" vs stat-based.
Mass Effect is essentially a hybrid between Western and Japanese design, a trend we see in a lot of modern RPGs as of late- The Witcher for example, is another that follows this hybridization, as does Dark Souls and Final Fantasy as of late, to a lesser extant. Narrative and plot, how choices and consequences are resolved not just through in-game rewards, but dialogue and reaction to them, is part of the games focus by its very design; they are the mechanics as much as shooting the avenger is.
I truly believe the reason why people were pissed is not due to diametrically opposed narratives, but a combination of not understanding what type of narrative they had to begin with and not being able to control the fate of their character fully; the latter of which is found throughout the entire game, the former which can be confusing if you weren't looking at it.
If what you say is true, then the reason why people are pissed about Mass Effect is because they didn't play it like an actual RPG then; taking those narrative decisions as part of the games mechanics. I really doubt that is the case.
Retour en haut
War is ugly and painful and dirty and some much of the death in war is undignified but not anyone around Shepard they are all super duper extra special. 
