What I would have written (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, February 12, 2016, 06:57 (2997 days ago) @ Ragashingo
edited by narcogen, Friday, February 12, 2016, 07:08

I don't have an exact ending in mind, but I wouldn't have taken the series anywhere near where it ended up. A few things bugged me about how everything played out and wrapped up:

- The full sized Reapers were shown to be effectively completely invincible in Mass Effect 3. Yes, we killed a couple of the little ones in unique ways but in all the glorious fleet battle cutscenes I don't think we were ever shown anyone so much as damaging a Reaper.

...and?

Do you really not understand or are you just being ultra reductionist?

I'm not, particularly-- at least, no more than the game is. ME has two (three if you count deus ex cutscene) ways of resolving conflict: action scenes and conversations. If the conversation is insufficiently heroic compared to previous resolutions, then mostly what you're suggesting is that you either wanted it replaced with an action sequence, supplanted WITH an action sequence, or solved by some clever rabbit being pulled out of a hat (cutscene).

I wanted Mass Effect to be a series where playing the hero and uniting the galaxy allowed much more of a true victory.

Yup. You wanted it to be something different than its creators intended. I think the way the game ended in all of its permutations was far more than adequately foreshadowed from the start of the series, but you obviously feel differently. So what you're really faulting the game for is allowing you the freedom to fight the direction it was moving in, but not at the very end. But if you'll allow that as the maker of the game and its story, how it ends, or at least the boundaries of how it ends, should be properly within Bioware's control, then what you'd be arguing for is not more freedom in the ending, but less freedom everywhere else.

Even then I'd argue that many of the ways you resolve problems are inelegant, forced compromises. Often you're forced to kill people you might actually sympathize with a little bit (until you've maxed out persuasion and intimidation and/or paragon/renegade options) or else accept a less than ideal resolution.

For instance, I just finished off an ME1 sidequest that started out with you confronting (that is, shooting) some criminals, only to find out that the person who hired you is also a criminal.

If you attempt to arrest them, it starts a firefight where either you die (and reload) or they die, and that's it. So you were duped into killing some people and then ended up making up for it.. by killing more people. Hurray, you're a multiple murdering vigilante!

You can also converse your way out of it, convincing the criminal to give up the life of crime, which she will do-- but only if you agree not to arrest her! Try that, and it's back to square one with the gunfight.

So you either let a known criminal who tricked you into murder get away, or you commit another murder. Which of those resolutions was "playing the hero and uniting the galaxy" or a "true victory"? I'd say this sidequest is much more typical of how events go in the series than anything like what you say you want.

ME1 ends with the defeat of Saren and a single reaper, but at the cost of massive loss of life and serious damage to the Citadel.

ME2's mission could end up costing the lives of part of your crew, depending on how you play it. You spend most of the game working for a human supremacist group that you either hate or probably SHOULD hate. If you do a certain DLC mission, you end up causing the deaths of 300,000 aliens, supposedly justified by saving millions or billions more. Necessary, perhaps yes. True victory of a hero? Very debatable.

Sure, there's a certain neatness to a series that commit totally to an inevitable bad ending, see Life Is Strange for a very recent example, but I don't think Mass Effect as a series made that commitment. Instead it lead players on to believing that their choices mattered then abruptly those choices didn't.

ME1 was showing you that some choices you made didn't stick right from the start. Save the council or kill them? Doesn't really matter, at least not in a gameplay sense. Stack the council with humans? Again, doesn't affect a thing, gameplay-wise. Udina or Anderson? Ditto. Those choices, like the one at the end of the series, are less about what actually happens and more about how your character feels about what happens. It's not about how or to what degree your Shepard saves the universe, but what kind of Shepard your Shepard is.

- I really hated the Crucible. Over and over and over we are told that we don't know what it will do yet we pour every resource we have into building it. How do you even build something without an end goal in mind?!

- While its a game and I'm the hero, I didn't really like how it came down to one choice by one person at the end. I would rather have had victory depend on the galaxy fighting back as a unified force or fail because of cracks or gaps in that unity.

Well, it does, but only up to a point. You can't get anything but the bad ending if you fail to achieve that by doing the readiness missions and/or playing the multiplayer. What we're talking about is success (or failure, depending) over and above that. Given the credible and near-invincible threat posed by the Reapers, I never-- not for a second-- supposed a military victory was possible, so I was not surprised when things did not end that way. Given the massive effort required to bring down, what, a total of 3 Reapers in the series-- one of which was unfinished, and one of which required the efforts of an entire fleet to dispatch-- the idea that the Reapers, once they arrived, could be defeated even by the unified military efforts of all factions was not believable to me. So when that turns out just to be to gain time and access for Shepard to seek out what was really behind it all, I was not unsurprised, nor was I disappointed.

Those are two really valid points. The Crucible struck me as a really obvious MacGuffin, and the way it was handled felt wrong to me in a similar way.

On the second point... yes, the distinction between the Reaper solution and the Synthesis ending is basically really small-- synthesis is voluntary in the sense that Shepard, standing in for all of humanity, chooses it. Our right to do so was apparently earned by shooting lots of aliens in the face. Sometimes.

One, each ending was shown to affect all races. So, if anything, Shepard was standing in for the entire galaxy.

Yes, that's true. I suppose it's just a necessary compromise with the nature of being a video game. You could have called the star child into a council meeting, and had everybody vote, although we've already sort of gotten that kind of scene on the Flotilla, so it'd be repetitive. The difference between this cycle and all the others is you-- Shepard-- so the thing that breaks the cycle has to be a thing the Shepard can do. And while Shepard is a very, very good soldier, that's not what is special about them, and it's not what makes them the protagonist.

Two. I am very very much not interested in continuing this if you're going to reduce it down to "shooting aliens in the face." Yes, that was the primary gameplay loop, but it was not the point of the game's story. Reducing it down that far feels like you are ignoring very present themes within the game, as well as other poster's arguments. It kinda feels insulting and like you don't care to have an actual discussion, you know? I think the Mass Effect series was about a lot more than simply shooting aliens in the face and there's not much more to be said if you are going to return to that no matter what...

By that I meant what I said at the top-- resolutions are either conversations or combat, of which there is already plenty and to spare in the game. That's the very real binary the game presents, and the source of much dissatisfaction by fans and detractors alike, despite the games complex treatment of a lot of themes. For myself, I fully expected the final resolution of the game to be a conversation, as it was in the previous two games. All the games have a climactic action sequence, but that's not really the resolution of those games. ME1 leads up to and ends with your decisions about what to do about the Council; in ME2 its mostly about determining what your relationship is to Cerberus and its goals.

So what I'm saying by harping on "shooting aliens" is saying that I not only expected, but wanted, ME3 to end with a conversation and not a fight. Once that's agreed upon, the question is, who should the conversation be with, and what should it be about? I think Bioware decided, and correctly, that the conversation could not be with the Reapers themselves, but a force that could potentially mediate between the approach to the conflict represented by the Reapers and some possible alternatives. I think it's also necessary to recognize that some solutions are not permanent-- brokering peace between the Quarians and the Geth, for instance, is difficult, but possible, but the game underscores the idea that the balance is unstable.

So the fact that the conversation ended up being about what those big picture alternatives might be is fitting-- do you usurp the reapers, destroy them, or unify them with you and everyone else, removing the underlying reason for the conflict?

So for my endings, there would still be a "you lose" ending where the cycle continues. There would be variations of partial wins where some races came through the war intact and others were completely defeated and scattered based upon your choices throughout the series. And finally, the solution to the Reapers would have been some sort of inversion of Sovereign's revelation that they continued beating the galaxy because it evolved according to their design. We'd beat them because we would know their expectations and act contrary to them. And hopefully that solution would involve, you know, the mass effect.

I honestly think that the entire point of ME's story to that point is the idea that there is no such easy solution to this problem. There's no clever trick, no simple ruse, no device-- even the Crucible turns out to be nothing like what anyone expects, and instead of enabling a shortcut past tough choices, just forced you into making one.

But remember, I already consider the Crucible to be a horribly flawed plot device that itself introduced new characters and dumped out new backstory within the last fifteen minutes of gameplay. The "starchild"and the Reaper's true purpose to name two of the big ones. I really don't mind unhappy endings but I do think that games need to commit to them and embrace them and support them, and I don't feel as if Mass Effect as a series did any of those things.

Remember, my favorite ending of Mass Effect 3 is the everybody loses ending because it is the most strongly supported... of the four. But that it is the most strongly supported is a travesty to me because all three games spend the whole time telling you that you can make a difference.

You want a way out of a choice that the makers of the game wanted you to make. It wasn't an oversight by BioWare that they didn't leave that opening there, the point of the story was to close it. The Reapers are invincible and have imposed their solution to the problem. The answer is either defeating them or destroying them or becoming like them in some way or other. Having some trick or a super secret weapon is just a narrative crutch, and I appreciated the ending tremendously for not allowing the player a cheap out like that.

Except you're reducing my ending to a cheap out when I adamantly do not want it to be.

I know you don't want it to be, but I think it is, and I think the authors of the scenario considered it to be, and I think that's demonstrated by the way they hierarchically structured them. The "lose to the reapers" ending you can get by simply charging into the final battle and losing, sort of like botching the Omega relay mission in ME2. I think the message there is clearly that a military-only solution is doomed to failure. For Shepard to have lived through the scenario to that point and still think enough violence would solve everything I think is naive. That ending is the one that least explores the themes the game has brought up, and I think that's why you like it. What you don't like is the result; it's the only ending that is military only in its nature, but it's a loss, not a win, because within the structure of the fiction there is no credible military victory possible. In fact, there are conversations where Shepard addresses this very point, and I always saw the responses to those as ranging from an admission that the situation was impossible, to false bravado. Nothing about how hard it was to kill a couple of Reapers suggested that anything the combined fleets were actually going to be able to win, and they aren't.

I do find it interesting that within the context of war stories people are more than willing to accept an implacable enemy, but rarely willing to accept an invincible one. I suppose that is a healthy viewpoint for a culture to have, from one perspective, but that doesn't necessarily make it accurate.

I would want any such winning solution to be foreshadowed at from very early on. To have it demonstrated in a small scale as the series moved forward. Have it become important enough to be noted on more as things really heated up. And have it been a solution that could work but at great cost perhaps of sacrificing entire worlds or sections of the galaxy. To put it simply, I want any such solution to be very strongly supported both in subtle ways and direct ways as the series progressed. At that point it no longer would be the crutch you are making it out to be and would instead be the plot of the game.

You wanted an entirely different game. Not a different ending. Not a different sequence. You want a fundamentally different game, and for me, one that would have been philosophically unsatisfying because it would allow you to "win" without addressing the fundamental questions that the final sequence poses.

Does that mean I wanted a different game? Sure. Like I said up top, I would not have taken the series anywhere near where it ended up. Because I didn't like where it went. But not only did I not like where it went, I do not think the did a good enough job to support the "all choices had to be bad" ending that we got, if that was actually the intention along.

I think it was, and I think you ignored the parts of the series that presaged that, either because you were constantly fighting or ignoring those choices, or because you avoided thinking about them, or because you didn't like where the game was going and so you blocked those portions out.

A couple possible solutions that make sense in universe:

- Investing everything in laser technology. Mass effect fields don't do anything to lasers and even ships with the most powerful mass effect shields are vulnerable to them. Maybe the galaxy could invest in a fleet of fast agile Normandys that defied the status quo of deflecting small, heavy, fast moving kinetic projectiles and instead dodged them and tore through the "superior" reapers with short range lasers.

That again is just a cheap plot device. It's different than the crucible, but not better. The primary problem in ME is not fighting the Reapers. They are incidental. They are the visual manifestation of the larger problem, which is about the coexistence of different life forms. They are a force that have imposed their solution, and the challenge is not to overthrow or become them (although it could be if you want) but to choose a different solution (synthesis).

No. It is very much a better solution than "pour all our resources into a device who's end goal literally nobody understands."

You're conflating in-world with out-of-world. I'm not saying that making some super-mega-weapon thingy would, in the context of the gameworld, for the characters making that decision, would be a worse solution.

What I am saying is that for Bioware to allow such a solution would be an even worse Deus Ex Machina than the one they used, because it specifically allows for a resolution that I think Bioware made clear was not going to be possible: conventional military victory.

If I'm going to stand behind any point in this discussion it's that the Crucible was the absolute stupidest part of the entire Mass Effect series. We spent all of Mass Effect 3 searching for "the catalysts" but that didn't turn out to be an exotic gas or material or type of energy... it turned out to be the freaking huge space station that the Crucible docked with, a station that every race working on the Crucible knew about. It was facepalm your head into a bloody pulp against the wall stupid and almost any solution consistent with the game's lore is better.

Yeah, dumb, I agree. I suppose the only thing one can believe is that within the story, the characters were desperate enough to cling to any hope whatsoever, and that is what they got. For the purpose of the story, it's just a bridge that gets us to the real final confrontation.

Beyond that, one of the last major accomplishments you are able to make in Mass Effect 3 before the ending sequence and battles is convincing the Quarians and Geth to coexist without controlling, destroying, or merging with each other. Why show peaceful separate coexistence between organic and synthetic life if the three choices you intended to present to players all along did not include that choice? It does not make any sense.

I'll refresh my memory when we reach the last game in our LP series, but if I recall, achieving that was not one of the easier things in the game, on a par with saving Wrex in the first one, and I seem to remember it being underscored at the time that the peace was not a permanent solution.

(Yes, in some cases a Geth mind would temporarily exist within a Quarian's environmental suit to help speed the immune system adaption to their homeworld but that was temporary, voluntary, and the goal was to allow the Quarians to stop needing their suits so it has very little relation to the synthesis ending which was permanent and involuntary for all the trillions of life forms who were not Commander Shepard.)

-Do something with the static charge buildup that comes along with using element zero mass effect drives. As I recall, the fiction was if a starship continued using its mass effect core the electrical charge imbalance would eventually be unmanageable and the core would discharge into its host ship badly damaging it or outright destroying it. And the established ways to discharge a ship were to interact with the atmosphere or magnetic field of a planet or other large object. Well, who has the biggest, most power mass effect cores? The Reapers! Sure, make them invincible and unstoppable but with a weakness that nobody ever had the smarts or guts or forces to exploit. Maybe the big plan would be to have enough forces and tactics to keep the Reapers fighting and using their mass effect shields and drives while somehow denying them the ability to discharge their static buildup. This could be a galaxy wide hold the line scenario where not having gotten a race's or group's support would cause massive losses, especially for that race, and allow for everything from a total loss to various partial wins to an outright win depending on your success throughout the entire series. To keep the player involved in gameplay, maybe it's your fleets that keep each Reaper occupied and away from planets while ground teams have to go in and destroy critical discharge hardware or something...

I don't know... maybe combine the two... maybe something else. Like I said, I don't have a clear idea of exactly what should have been done. But, in the end, the way we delayed the Reapers in ME1 was great because it exploited a small flaw in their plans. The way we stopped the Collectors in ME2 was great because it put the emphasis heavily on teamwork and good team choices while still letting the player's moment to moment actions matter. Mass Effect 3? It pretty much did neither. It didn't utilize its own fiction effectively and as much as I love ME3's core gameplay loop, the ending wasn't even close to as effective exploiting and building off of gameplay as ME2's was.

ME3 used its fiction amazingly; just the parts of it that many people ignored in favor of clever ways of, well, shooting aliens in the face.

Again. Too reductionist for me. Either have a conversation or don't.

Sorry, I don't think I'm required to meet your arbitrary standard for reductionism. All of the above reads to me like "have a different McGuffin that lets me win the battle" and that, to me, sounds cheap and silly.

How does static buildup explore the theme of race relations? You're dealing with this on the level of plot devices, and I don't care about that because I'm discussing the themes. Finding some trick that wins the battle means you resolve the conflict the same way Illusive Man wants to; the only difference is the nature of the trick. In fact, turning Indoctrination to your benefit is exactly the kind of trick you're suggesting. If that's your thing, what's wrong with that ending? It also conveniently means that the central question-- can organic and synthetic lifeforms coexist without conflict-- is either unaddressed entirely, or answered by "yes-- as long as I'm on the winning side"! And that's the part I find cheap, because while I think Bioware wanted to allow players to choose that, they didn't want to allow them to feel good about it.