Marauder Shields

I've been reading some articles, as well as an excellent webcomic (Marauder Shields, taking off from a meme that spread around the Mass Effect community shortly after the third game released). And I am thinking the problem is largely one of framing. I offer this not as a rant or a way to blame a company that has moved on to newer things, but as a way all of us that try to tell a story can learn from what went wrong.

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Not to say the original release wasn't flawed. It was. One story going around (none of the behind-the-scenes details are really exposed through anything other than rumor and off-the-record quotes) is that the budget was slashed and they were given only a month to finish. This may have had something to do with their purchase by EA.

And it wasn't because of a lack of player choice, per se. After all, in Mass Effect 1 you don't have a choice to join Saren and let Sovereign  destroy the world. There are many smaller choices but the overall plot arc remains the same. In fact, several fan-made patches solve the Mass Effect 3 ending in the same way; they remove all choice from the final mission. Shepard gets to the Citadel, the Crucible fires, Reapers are destroyed, end of story.

The problem with the original release is that in none of the choices was it particularly clear what happened. The team had put so little in the way of animation or even explanatory dialog all players were really able to grasp is the Catalyst said some crazy stuff then Shepard got to decide what color the galaxy blew up in. f you chose "Destroy," the Crucible lit up red and the mass effect relays exploded...and you went to credits. If you chose "Dominate," the Crucible lit up blue and the mass effect relays exploded...and you went to credits.

Okay...it was a little better than that, but it wasn't until Bioware was dragged kicking and screaming back to sink a little more money into actually finishing the game that it became at all obvious what this final choice meant, and what it meant to the rest of the galaxy, for all the races Shepard had worked to save, and for all the people Shepard had worked with over three long games.

And it is also not to say the ending isn't illogical.

Again few details escape corporate secrecy, but the story is that the original direction the series was going to go had been leaked and to preserve the game experience for the player the producer ordered it changed (he also is rumored to have hated the original idea). At some point the original writer left entirely, and according to some stories floating around the new script was created secretly, without consultation with the rest of the design team, and with only a month to work.

Which would certainly explain both the way it doesn't seem to fit the universe as previously presented, has huge logic holes that a longer discussion might or might not have been able to fix...and why it fails in the main point I am leading up to in this essay.

That point being one of story-telling. Of preparation, of thematic unity, and of training the player.

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A little more digression. Framing is the problem here, and there is also framing around what it is that happened to the game. The original gloss by Bioware was that the players didn't get the ending they wanted. And some people bought into this; there is still the idea that the game chose to end with hard choices and sacrifice and the players pulled a hissy fit because they wanted to win everything and have the last frame being Shep and Liara strolling off into the sunset (Or Garrus...but anyhow!)

So the discussion was presented as one of artistic integrity, as well as a sort of Millennial Baby complaint about people who couldn't stand a little realism in their games.

And...look. You can't crow about artistic integrity when all you had was an explosion and three sets of color filters. That's not a unique artistic vision that is being attacked, that's just lazy (not lazy on the side of the artists and writers, of course; lazy on the side of the game company who thought they could ship it like that and were soundly shown otherwise.)

With the Extended Cut, and with time to ponder, the ending is artistically defendable and can be made to work within the whole. I have played two of the available endings (one of which was only made available after fan outcry) and I found them both a satisfying ending to the character arc I had nourished for those two specific play throughs.

There is still heated discussion about those three endings. But this is good. When you read the online discussions, discussions which hotly debate the ethics, the support in story, the real-world implications, you discover that the majority of players have found and are (reasonably) satisfied with one of the four choices. It is great that there is so much disagreement about which one, and what they really imply, because that means the writers succeeded (at last, and after being funded to go back and clarify what it was they had tried to say on too little budget and too little time) to produce something that people could really get their teeth into.

Even the Indoctrination Theory is holistic here. Indoctrination is a fan theory that the entire last scene of the game -- everything involving the nattering annoying StarChild -- isn't actually happening, but is a battle within the mind of Shepard as the Reapers try to brainwash him into going along with their plans; either the Dominate plan the Illusive Man was Indoctrinated into believing, or the Synthesis plan Saren was Indoctrinated into in the first game. Or Destroy -- which in some versions of Indoctrination Theory, is the Reapers convincing Shepard to blow up the very weapon he had hoped to use to stop them.

There's no official support for it, of course...but it works within what is shown and is an acceptable, logical, cathartic conclusion to the game experience to some players.

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So here's the real failing. The ending(s) is tacked on. And it feels that way. I explained part of that in a previous post; about how the final scene breaks with the conventions that had been established up to that point. It feels rushed, it feels railroaded, it feels incomplete. Even with the Extended Cut it has these failings. But mostly, it doesn't follow the established flow of the game.

The lesser of the two problems here is that the events are unprepared for. Fiction thrives on revelations, but they must be satisfying revelations.

Take Mass Effect 1. The Citadel, the giant space station that is the largest meeting place of all the Council races, the political, economic and military hub of the Council, the de-facto hub of the Mass Effect Relays that allow interstellar travel...is revealed in late-game to be a honey pot established by the Reapers.

Shepard, and the player, are surprised to learn this. But they are not shocked. Why? From the first moment you land on the Citadel you are made aware there are mysteries there. You are told right off that no-one really knows who made it (probably the Protheans, but...) You encounter the mysterious Keepers, who maintain it, who speak to no-one, who live and work in the multiple levels of the structure no other Council race has ever visited.

Heck, the other end of the Illos Conduit is right there in a public park and people tell you they have no idea why the Protheans put a scale model of a Mass Effect Relay there....and if you stand close enough to it...you can feel it humming.

Same for the (rather less impressive) revelation of the Human Reaper at the climax of Mass Effect 2. It has been well-established what the Collectors had been up to before that. Or even the "Leviathan" DLC; there is a race of giant beings who go back to before the Reapers and have kept themselves hidden through something that looks a lot like Indoctrination. Surprise; they built the Reapers.

The third game has, however, as many things that come out of nowhere as it does things that are satisfying and logical when you encounter them. Mordin's cure for the Genophage -- absolutely prepared for (largely during Mass Effect 2, both in the main campaign Tuchanka mission and in his optional Loyalty Mission.) Even Kalros, the giant Thresher Maw, is something you accept as being something you really should have seen coming -- Thresher Maws have been a thing, and especially a thing deeply connected to the Krogan, since the first game....and are you seeing a pattern here?

The StarChild, Kai Leng? Invented for the third game and they totally feel like an ass pull. In fact, pretty much everything about the Crucible and the way it is finally used, all the way down to the London Conduit, comes out of absolutely nowhere.

The really sad thing is how many of these elements could have been seeded. Even then, even with only one game to go, they could have been slipped in more organically than they were. There was one thing,the game tried very hard to prepare the ground for. It did not succeed, perhaps because it was too far in cross-purpose to what had been shown before. Or perhaps merely because that one thing was slid in sideways, inorganically; established supra-narrative when something so important needed to be tied implicitly to actual play.

(It is just one more sign of the hamfisted nature of this that a random kid that appears for all of thirty seconds in the early part of the game is supposed to be the symbol that Shepard latches on to, and that the Catalyst takes the form of. They pick this, instead of, say, Mordin Solus, who the player spends hours with and either watches his heroic sacrifice...or is forced to shoot him himself. Or any other of a dozen names that are a lot more meaningful to Shepard...and to the player.)

Basically, they told instead of showed. Through two games Shepard had never surrendered. Not even death could stop him. He fought to convince others the Reapers were real, and he fought to keep them from returning. In the third game, the Reapers arrive...and he gives up. He stops believing he can win, he starts obsessing about the people he couldn't save, and he make his final decisions from a position of hopelessness.

But this isn't ever established in play. This sort of thing is almost always a mistake when it comes to games. Constructing an inner world is difficult enough without having a player who constructs an outer world through actual play. Take, as a belabored for-instance, Tomb Raider 2013. I've played through that game role-playing Lara as a reluctant warrior, terrified by the violent situation she has been thrust in. And this is gameplay. I put the difficulty up full, I crouch behind cover making maximum use of sniping and booby traps. Even with Sam in danger she has to force herself to proceed.

I've also played that Lara as pushed to the brink and angry as hell. That is, fought up-close and personal, wading into the enemy with ice-axe flailing, as well as taking huge risks moving through the world. Both of these are functional approaches within the structure of the game. Each has different advantages and other follow-on effects (you get hit less from cover, for instance, but you gain more points and progress faster with the close-in approach).

The Mass Effect series is built from the ground-up as a role-playing system, where the player decides the background and career of their Shepard, their specialization, their skills, even their gender and skin color. And also their approach to problems; along the Paragon/Renegade axis, or in a more complicated and nuanced fashion.

This is exactly the wrong sort of game to inform the player in cutscenes that Shepard is finally succumbing to PTSD. And this is especially the wrong way to inform the player that the final victory will be pyrrhic at best.

Do it in game play. It is that easy; have people Shepard cares about and is trying to help get killed within actual play. They come so close with the resolution on Rannoch. On Rannoch, you almost have to chose between letting the Quarians destroy the Geth they originally created, or letting the emergent intelligence of the Geth defend themselves with genocide. Thing is, though, if you play very well...if you do everything right...you can save both.

If the game is going to establish that as the reality of its world, then the final act of Shepard's life can't be to kill the Geth for good, no chance of finding a better solution. You can make that the default, you can make that the ending that most players achieve, but if you've established that the player can earn a better victory on Rannoch then you need to accept as designers and writers that the player can earn a better victory on the Citadel.

Or deal with your darker vision and make sure you've established it, in every scene -- not just in cutscenes where Shepard can be forced to flinch and miss, but in actual play. Instead through the game, even if you haven't made that nth percentile, even if you don't make peace between the Geth and the Quarians on Rannoch...you keep winning. You make alliances. You rescue friends. You kill Reapers.

It is one of the worst bits of gameplay/story segregation ever foisted on a player.

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The bigger error, however, is one of preparation in gameplay. And it is a problem throughout the last parts of the game, not just within the last choice made. Throughout the series Mass Effect worked around what you might call a morality system, a variously-constructed two-part meter inherited in part from their previous Star Wars games Knights of the Old Republic and sequel.

Choices -- choices made generally in dialog -- map (though not always neatly) to what are called Paragon and Renegade outlooks. You could gloss them as Diplomacy versus Expediency.

Here's the reason I wrote this essay, however. At the final moment of play, at the top of the Citadel, Shepard is given three choices. These are physical choices, but...look at them:

On the right is the Destroy option. Go this way and shoot a relay (more obvious symbolism, as many of the Renegade options, especially the Interrupts, result in you shooting something) and the Crucible kills the Reapers...along with every other Synthetic in the galaxy and much of the technology civilization is using, up to and including the cybernetics keeping Shepard alive.

In the dialog wheel, Renegade options are always on the lower half, and marked in red. This option is to the Right and just look at it.

To the left, which for any culture that reads left-to-right maps conveniently to "top," is the Dominate option. Shepard holds out his hands to two bars (as if making peace) and takes control of the Reapers, forcing them to his will.

Thing is, there are more meanings folded into Paragon and Renegade than I touched on above. The Renegade is expedient, but can also be accused of violence for its own sake. They are in many ways the "Lone cop who doesn't play by the rules" archetype. Paragon plays by the rules, but sometimes too much. You are taking the path of justice and it is sometimes cold. Even...controlling.

Here's an example from play. On Novaria, a company world, you are stuck during a lock-down of the main colony. A businessman offers a way out; evidence against the corrupt colonial administrator is in the process of being grabbed by the cops. If you can snatch the evidence he'll blackmail the administrator and as thanks give you his garage pass. Do this and you proceed with the mission.

However, as you are securing the data you are approached by an undercover operative who asks you to turn the data over to her. You can chose to betray your contact and trust the wheels of justice will move swiftly enough that after the administrator is taken away you'll get a pass to get out. This is the true Paragon path; upholding the law and doing what is right but at the risk of losing everything...and despite the hardship it may cause to innocents.

Or you can turn the data over to the corrupt administrator! Both businessman and undercover investigator are hauled away and you get a cash bonus. As well as the pass you need to proceed with your mission. This is less expedient and more mercenary but really, the main reason to do it is for the lols. Really, in a lot of options Renegade maps to "be a bastard."

So, so far, the game has well prepared these two color-coded choices. It could have improved them by using more Paragon/Renegade like language to describe them, or by making sure they agreed with the other semiotics (such as having them appear in the correct places on a dialog wheel). It could, in short, have been better prepared and better established but it is in keeping with how the player has been trained to respond and as to what to expect.

Here's the bigger problem; there's a third choice. It goes right down the middle. It isn't color-coded at the Citadel but in the following cut scene is color-coded green. It is, according to various evidence both internal and external to the game, the preferred, even canonical ending.

This is...wonderful...in several ways. It offers a third option. It offers a way out of the cycle of conflict, domination, and the cycles of synthetic uprise and destruction the Catalyst claims it is trying to stop. It is semiotically placed as right down the middle....

...But this clashes with every other semiotic the player has been given. In no other place in the game is there a third option presented in this fashion, and it certainly is never done so with a green coding or a center position (in the Dialog Wheel, center left is "ask for clarification" and center right is exit...usually Shepard's terse "I should go now.")

And, no. None of this maps to the purported inevitable conflict between organics and synthetics (a conflict, mind you, that not just the entire series but numerous specific instances in the third game have proven is no more intractable than the long mistrust between Krogan and Salarian.)

In fact, the two special slots in the Dialog Wheel (two slots I've been calling Paragon and Renegade for convenience but are more properly called Persuade and Intimidate) function in exactly this take-a-third-choice manner. Over and over in the game, you are asked to let the crook escape or let him shoot the hostage....or -- and they are not always offered, and are rarely offered in convenient opposing pairs but are more often in isolation -- snap-shoot him to save the hostage, or talk him into putting his gun down.

What is especially illuminating is that in the final scenes of Mass Effect 3 the developers seem to have forgotten how the system worked at all! After you've defeated the insufferable Kai Leng in standard combat, he crawls back to his feet and sneaks up on Shepard in a cutscene. There's a Renegade Interrupt offered; if you take it, Shepard snaps his fancy sword as he tries to strike, then stabs him to death with her Omni-tool.

If you decline that Interrupt, a Paragon interrupt is offered. If you take that, Shepard dodges his sword....and stabs him to death with her Omni-tool. No; you don't get to take him prisoner, or do the "you're not worth it" routine. This isn't even a Han Shot First difference here; in both cases the fight goes down the same. The only difference is the Renegade Interrupt is cooler.

Later, a Renegade Interrupt is offered to shoot the Illusive Man. If you don't take it...he kills Shepard. Game over. This is not how Interrupts work! In all of the previous hundred hours of game play, they have never been plot-critical. There's a Paragon Interrupt during the Mordin Solus recruitment mission while you are trying to get directions from a sick Batarian. If you take it, Shepard gives him some Medi-gel. You get the information you need either way; the only difference is the Batarian may say, surprised, that not all humans are the bastards he thought they were.

In another case, a Krogan warlord is pontificating about how he is going to rule the galaxy...from a position above an exposed fuel line. The Interrupt makes the ensuing fight a little easier, but the main reason to do it is that Shepard gets to do something bad-ass, James Bond quip and all.

They are not quick-time events and have not previously been used that way in the game.

If the game wanted to lead you to discover a way beyond the cycle of destruction, a way to achieve a real lasting peace between organic and synthetic life, it should have done the groundwork. It should have established this thematically. And it should have worked this into the established conventions the player had been working with for over a hundred hours of gameplay.

Even, just having something green you could open. Or a center Dialog Wheel option that was other than clarification/exit. Anything to establish this for the player in a previous scene or two.

But it failed in every way possible. The conflict between the Geth and the Quarians was nicely explored in both the second and third game. You understood how the conflict came about, but it was never painted as inevitable. Merely as a cascade of mistrust and misunderstanding. No, actually it is much worse than that. Here is Shepard's own interaction with the Geth:

He fights them as a faceless enemy in Mass Effect 1. In Mass Effect 2 the Geth send an emissary and explain that the Geth only want peace, and only a small number of them joined with Saren and the Reapers (a partnership that worked out poorly for them). Shepard invites the Geth emissary, Legion, onto his ship and works with him to oppose the Reapers and the so-called Geth Heretics aligned with them.

In the third game, it is underlined through memory excerpts how the Geth only acted in self-defense, with the Quarians attacking from a mixture of fear and...guilt. And of course, on Rannoch, you can help the Geth achieve individuality outside of the Collective and even make peace with their creators.

The same evolution is experienced with EDI. Shepard's first experience with her is as an LI on Luna that went haywire and killed everyone there. Shepard deactivated it, but Cerberus picked it up and used it -- with appropriate overrides -- as the new Normandy's electronic warfare suite. When the Normandy was taken by the Collectors in Mass Effect 2 Joker disconnected the overrides and gave EDI control of the Normandy to effect a rescue. Throughout Mass Effect 3 EDI continues to grow, and Shepard (well, depending on player choices) supports her gaining more free will and beginning to establish her own moral code -- knowing full well the danger this entails.

Even the Reapers, when presented with the idea that they are machine intelligences -- synthetics in the language of the game -- respond that they are much, much more than that.

So, no. This supposed core conflict is not developed in any way in the game. It is a statement made by fiat in the last twenty minutes of play. In the same way, any axis of inevitable conflict versus potential resolution is never presented in a clear way that will eventually resolve into the final choice Shepard is allowed to make.

It is, in fact, much worse than that.

The Catalyst presents Synthesis as another option -- an option no better and no worse than Control or Destroy. And it doesn't explain what it means. Thing is, what has the game shown us previously in terms of integration of organic and synthetic life?

The first thing Shepard encounters are the husks on Eden Prime. These are battlefield corpses turned into terrifying yet also pitiful rotting zombies covered with blue circuitry. At the end of the game Shepard has a final encounter with the rogue Council agent Saren, who urges cooperation with the Reapers and has had much of his body replaced with similar technology. There is no cooperation, of course; the Reapers intend the destruction of organic life, and they take control of Saren's mind. When (and if...Paragon Interrupts y'all!) Saren breaks free of their control, he choses to shoot himself rather than serve them any longer. At which point the Reaper takes control of his corpse and uses it to fight Shepard.

Indoctrination, mind control via technology, is shown over and over in the series and is always horrifying. This is also a way the game indicates that Domination is a really nasty option. Particularly in the third game Cerberus has been intentionally shoving cybernetics into their own people to turn them into slaves. Their leader, the Illusive Man, is all about Control, absolute domination...and through the technology he has implanted in his own body has become another unwitting slave of the Reapers.

So, yeah. This is what the game has actually shown of any fusion of technology and humanity. This is not a way to lead the player gently into picking Synthesis as the best game ending...much less accepting that it is so (especially when all they actually saw was a green-tinted explosion spread out over the galaxy).

(Here's some more places the symbolism is a mess. When the Catalyst is explaining the first two options Shepard has a vision of them being executed. For Dominate, The Illusive Man is shown striding to the two levers and taking control. No better is the symbolism for Destroy; what Shepard sees here is Anderson, an old soldier and her mentor, doing the deed. In an earlier scene The Illusive Man claims that Anderson is a simplistic destroyer, "seeing everything over the barrel of a gun" but he is much more intelligent and caring than that. End result is the symbolic affect is nil. Or perhaps leans a little towards hinting that Destroy comes closer to the choice that provides the greatest good to the greatest number.)

There are two borderline cases. If you make peace on Rannoch, team member and old friend Tali will tell you in a minor bit of dialog that she has Geth "programs" (sort of atomic units of their gestalt consciousness) running on the environmental suit she wears, and they are helping her to get healthier and stronger. She is, that is, sharing with synthetic life in a rather intimate way.

The other, and more obvious, borderline case is Shepard herself was raised from the dead with implanted technology. Which looks ugly in the early parts of Mass Effect 2 and makes her friends wonder if she is still the Shepard they knew. The game comes so close here to actually exploring this properly. Very late in the third game, on the Cerberus base, Shepard can chose to view some records of her resurrection and confront again the question of whether being fused with technology has changed her.

But it is underplayed, under-expressed; rarely commented on in any part of the game, and has absolutely no effect on gameplay ever. At no point does the game really confront this idea of whether something like a synthesis can be experienced in a positive manner. Instead, in the last minutes of gameplay, the player is told by a thoroughly unlikeable NPC that Synthesis is Good Now, so it is okay to chose it. And you wonder why so few players did?

(The only game play connection of Shepard's own surgery is a strangely orthogonal one. Her scars will fade in time...if she plays towards the Paragon side of play style. The more Renegade choices she makes, the more the scars will stand out; at larger values of Renegade her eyes will begin to glow a technological red. At absolute best this is yet more indication that Synthesis is not a Good Thing -- especially not for someone who is trying to find the diplomatic solution that provides the greatest good for the greatest number.)

So, yes. Between the Reaper behavior, the story as developed through game play of every other synthetic intelligence, the presentation of technological fusion, any attempt at thematic unity falls apart in a jumbled mess.

In short, none of the options presented at the end of the game grow out of the game as played in any way, thematic, logical, story, structural, or in play mechanics. It feels pasted on because it was. And players had full right to complain.