Arkham World: The Tyranny of King Washington

The Tyranny of King Washington is an overpriced DLC in three installments for Assassin's Creed III (the American Revolution one.) It is amusing to play and the production values are high, but as alternate history it leaves much to be desired.

The Assassin's Creed series has always had an uncomfortable relationship with history. On the plus side of the ledger, there are so very few games that even attempt to give a ground-level, personal view of a historical period (the market in history is generally combat sims, which either give you a General's view, or let you ogle warplanes or tanks but never engage with actual people).

The Assassin's Creed series doesn't even go after the low-hanging fruit, having games set in Alexandria during the reign of the Ptolemy's or New Orleans during the French-Indian War. And their Age of Piracy game spent as much time on land and deep in politics as it did on the High Seas.

On the negative side; well, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag took the piss on itself by setting part of the game in a game company who are writing twisted, dumbed-down, player-friendly versions of the real events they witnessed through the techno-magic of the Animus. Liberation (a full-length, fully independent spin-off of the AC III core game) took it a step further by revealing that the game play experience is being sculpted as propaganda by the, well, the fictional secret rulers of the game universe. Ouroboros, take a bow.

Well, alternate history is the historian's playground. Historical fiction can be hard work. Alternate history, good alternate history, is harder. You really have to understand the period before you can work changes on it.

More, alternate history is really about how history has unfolded in a unique way. A story set in 1930's New York can be a love story, a detective story, whatever. A story set in an alternate New Amsterdam is going to be about why it is different and what those differences mean.

The Tyranny of King Washington does not deliver.

The first thing the game delivers, in fact, is another disappointment. In this history, Ratonhnhaké:ton did not leave his native village, train as an Assassin and take on the name Connor. Most of the first installment takes place in the frontier and involves multiple Mohawk characters. But what do we learn and experience that is new? Damn all. Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a stereotyped Spirit Journey and gets magical animal powers. This is about as anthropological as the latest New Age book from a Plastic Shaman.

Even for the trite and the stereotyped, the game is not in any way designed to let you interact with the Mohawk people or explore the village. Trapping, tracking and hunting skills are still there, left over from the main game, but there is no reason to employ them. The game comes so close; the landscape is a surreal ruin of supernaturally deep snow, destroyed towns, dead bodies, and prowling wolves, and there is an option to feed starving locals. Which you could have hunted for some of the game which is, oddly and remarkably, still hopping about without a care in the world, except that there is insufficient benefit from it and you can get all the food you like just by ambushing soldiers and rifling their pockets.

And of course there is no exploration of what it means for George Washington to gain super powers and go mad. You meet Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, but they have no insight, no discussion; there is none of the frank conversation you had with any of these men in the main game. There aren't even interesting choices being made; Benedict Arnold, like so many, is simply and rudely brainwashed to follow Washington. There's no calculation, no lesser evil, no nuance. Just mechanics.

In a strange way it reminds me of Mass Effect III. This was after the excellent lead writer had left the company, and this may be why with the coming of the Reapers all the interesting human stories stopped. George Washington's army, like the Reapers, have plowed through everything as an unstoppable force leaving little but ruins and a small cadre of desperate survivors who can spare no thought for anything other than where to get gunpowder.

With no history to give, and no interesting side stories, and no interesting people to watch for more than a dramatic cut-scene, all that is left is the usual meat of running around from quest arrow to quest arrow killing whatever you encounter, and sometimes being forced by the script to play with some annoying special mechanic for a while instead of continuing to do the game play the game has been training and rewarding you with until then.

Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a spirit journey three times. Each time he meets a different spirit animal and each time gets a different super power. The bear is the least unbalancing but also the most annoying in that it allows you to do a ground-pound attack like a small bomb. And the game then throws up endless doors and fences at you to force you to use your Bear Powers on instead of just climbing over them the way you normally would.

It is very Batman: Arkham style. Tomb Raider did this, too, which each new weapon you got causing extra-special doors to spawn in your path that oh-so-conveniently required that exact device to overcome. The Batman series did it well and made it satisfying. Tomb Raider less so. In Tyranny, it is merely annoying. Fortunately, there isn't much of it.

On the other hand, the Eagle allows you to, well, fly. Which means all the climbing and jumping might as well go away, since it is easier to just fly across the city. You fly so very well it is trivial to lose pursuit, making the entire Notoriety mechanic a waste of time. You can kill a squad of soldiers in broad daylight, take the money off their bodies, fly to safety, then swoop down to drop a hefty bribe in the hands of a town crier who makes the entire populace stop paying attention to the six foot tall Native American wearing face paint and the skin of a wolf who keeps turning into a bird and flying around.

And then there's Wolf power, which you get early in the first installment. Call up ghost wolf assassins, that's bad enough. But it also lets you do another thing which wolves are well known for; turn invisible. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the game completely is your health bar depletes quickly while the Cloaking Device is enabled.

The only good thing that can be said is that after playing the main game through you probably have your fill of free-running and wall climbing and those ultra-annoying stealth tailing sessions. But these new mechanics are so incredibly overpowered they don't become a new tool; they become all you do. And they aren't as interesting. The levels are largely imported from the previous game and aren't designed around the new mechanics.

Take assaulting a fort. Used to be you'd have to either laboriously sneak in through the gate, or fight your way through from a sally port. Now you just fly over the wall. Boom, done.

The only thing that keeps you from basically being a Marvel superhero at this point is that the game only allows one Special to be mapped to a key at a time. And me, I found back in the main game that the Rope Dart is the only special weapon or device I ever need. The heck with laying bait or whistling up a horse or even firing a flintlock. Rope darts stun every enemy, even the highest-ranking mooks that otherwise can't be attacked even with a counter-chain, and they drag the enemy to you where you can deliver a coup de grace. 

It is only the annoyance of fussing around with switching Specials that keeps you from swooping over a wall, dropping down with a Drop Bear to kill half the lot, then going Ghost Doggie to snipe the remainder. The game was, basically, so dirt easy at that point I pretty much went with just one Special and stayed within the limitations. Also, the Eagle Assassination is, if anything, even cooler than the Jump Assassination.

So all said, it is an amusing addendum to the existing game. But not worth the money it costs, not even at Steam Sale prices.

These Rude Mechanicals, who never before now labored in their minds

I've done all the re-writing I can stand. Now is the mechanical work; running the entire thing through ProWritingAid again to catch any new mistakes.

Overall I am happy with that piece of software. It, like several other language tools, leverages an online databased and presumably a learning algorithm. Meaning it has to have an internet connection and it takes it a while to finish scanning a page. Means an edit session takes up most of a day, as there's a significant wait each time a new page is loaded. Which is where I'm finding the time to write this.

(The worst part of this is there is no progress bar. It is finished when it is finished. Many a time I've started editing, only to have new errors belatedly pop in as the algorithms continue to discover them).

But that also means it can handle things that would normally be a flag and laborious check. It recognizes famous names, oft-used quotations, place names, names from history, and foreign words. Some of these are not so easy to look up to verify.

Does mean there's a risk of SpellCheck error. If might have found, for instance, a word in the wrong language and thus failed to flag what is actually a mistake. It seems pretty intelligent about this, though; I've only caught it once or twice trying to fix something unrelated into a song title it thinks it recognizes or something.

Like all good tools, it flags and it lets you decide if you want the correction. The problem I have is that it hates passive tense and always flags it. It also makes some mistakes in dialog punctuation and it also doesn't always pick up idioms that include general-purpose words; I am often finding it marking me for subject-verb agreement on one word out of a compound that is, of course, in proper agreement. So I can't clear all the tags without a lot of extra work.

Fortunately, I'm using it off-line; it recognizes a Scrivener file and will happily open and even save to it, but for safety I aim it at a duplicate and make the actual corrections in the home file.

What is it about 3D?

Maybe it is because working on a 3-dimensional form is largely incompatible with the interface of flat display, keyboard, and mouse? Like doing orchestral synthesis; even with keyboard, breath controller, and CC knobs you just can't put the same nuances in you can with an orchestral instrument in your own hands?

It seems that every 3d application I have worked with re-invents the wheel. Usually badly.

They are largely unintuitive and often have clunky workflow -- the kind of design where something you do once an hour has a hotkey sequence but something you have to do several times a minute requires selecting from a drop-down menu.

And they lack useful manuals.

It took three days of searching to find anything resembling a manual for Cheetah3D. It is a third-party, fan-written, but fortunately free manual. Still, every resource I've seen seems to jump over those early basic steps that become so rote everyone forgets they have to be explained to the beginner.

"Adjust UV's by applying the Scale tool to your Selection..." Okay, great, but how do I select UVs in the first place? The regular selection tools don't seem to do anything. That's the sort of thing that gets skipped over.

Two things annoy me very much from both a workflow and a "why are we doing this" angle; first is that selection and manipulation are separate. So if you want to operate on more than one polygon, you click the Select tool from the menu bar, possibly go into Area or another Select Mode (which does NOT toggle, but only acts for the duration of one selection), then go back and click the Manipulate tool also in the menu bar, go back and pick up your selection (don't accidentally click outside!) and then you can move it.

Oh, except you didn't "Make editable" so nothing happens. That's the other thing. Like Fusion's weird way of splitting editable objects into different types, I don't understand the underlying philosophy behind "make editable" and what it functionally does.

There is one fix which should be easy to make and I hope will happen soon; grey out menu items that don't apply to the kind of object you are working with. As it is now, all the menus open up; even contextual menu pops up with every operation that could be done on any object. Carrara, for all that I have and would say (It is dead ware -- Don't buy it), gathered the applicable tools to the contextual menus.

Actually, I lied a little above. Although it too has unintuitive aspects to it, and lacks any and all useful documentation, Fusion360 is hyper-fast and efficient at navigation and basic operations. The hotkey camera and selection controls and the multi-purpose contextual handles meant I could model pretty much as fast as I could think.

I had a lifetime subscription at a locked-in rate that was quite affordable. So of course they broke the contract, jacked the price, offered me another "lifetime" subscription at about ten times as much, and from what I can tell from their official pages, broke that contract for the people who were foolish enough to sign for it and is now at something approaching what I pay for rent.

Carrara, meanwhile, no longer works under the last four or five upgrades to the MacOS and there is no support and no plans to ever make it work properly. Although they will still sell you an "upgrade" to 8.5 (yes -- throughout its history, Carrara almost never released patches. Instead they'd sell you the point upgrade for full price, promising that it would include the bug fixes for the last version. Which it never did.)

So, yeah, I'm pretty much waiting for Cheetah to get over the early teething problems, to get popular and powerful, at which point they will stab the user base in the back, sell out to Autocad, and jack the price out of range of the ordinary user. But for now, I think I can get it to do what I want.

At least it is easier to navigate than Blender.

Scrivenings

Based on the actual draft starting somewhere in early April, I'm averaging 10K words a month. At that rate I actually would have the first draft done before the end of the year.

That's NaNoWriMo pacing.

Is even slightly better than that. I've hashed out a lot of deep plot and character issues over these early chapters, and I have hope and a not-unjustified expectation of getting faster. Also I'm doing a lot of editing as I go -- very much against NaNoWriMo tradition -- and it will take mostly clean-up passes to get it into final shape.



But today's essay is about Scrivener IOS.

I've written several scenes from scratch, and done some editing, with nothing but iPhone and -- the almost indispensable -- iClever keyboard. It works...well enough. All of my complaints are basically due to limitations of the iPhone, especially, the limited screen real estate.

Oh, and to my current working methods, which leverage parts of Scrivener which do not emulate well in the IOS version.

So. Basic typing is good. One immediate and wonderful enhancement over using the built-in notes function is pinch-zoom. Basic hotkey functions work. And you are within the Scrivener file structure, meaning instead of typing into one long document, you are typing into something of controllable length which is nested (and can be nested indefinitely) into a hierarchy of chapters and scenes and projects. You can also flip back and forth between certain related documents with a single key press.

I wouldn't want to work without the external keyboard, however. Too much screen real estate is lost otherwise.



But as for the more powerful edit functions: well, first, selection is a pain on IOS. So selecting a block of text to paste it elsewhere is better left for the main computer. Split screen doesn't seem to be functioning, either, and that hurts in two ways; one is being able to cut and paste between documents so as to, for instance, save a previous draft to the cut file. The other is being able to leave a window open with the research data.

The iPhone version also lacks corkboard view. And, because of how IOS handles files (and memory issues) it can't do Scrivening mode. This is the ability to seamlessly string together separate documents into a single continuous read. If I was splitting files at the scene level this would be more painful. As it is, though, it is easy enough to tab through consecutive files. Oh, and there also doesn't appear to be the ability to move files around in the hierarchy, not on IOS. So to have this ability to arrange and re-arrange you need to duck back to the main computer again.

Fortunately synchronization is easy and smooth.

A last edit function I miss on the IOS version is hotkey text color. Let me get to that in context of my current work flow, though. First I set up a file structure with named folders for research, draft, and general planning -- the later has theme, outline, elevator pitch, and side discussions I want to keep intact instead of spread out among other folders.

Within the draft folder I have, currently, a five-book structure. Each "book" folder contains three sets of files; a set of drafts by chapter, notes pertaining specifically to each chapter, and catch files for deleted material. As I write the first draft of a chapter I plan the basic structure within that chapter's notes file, then flip between that and research files in the lower part of the split-screen with the draft on top.

When I go back for editing, I add the cuts file to the split. Usually, though, I start by reading through and using colored text to mark potential deletions (red), potential insertions (green) and line notes (blue). Then when I do the actual edit the deletions get saved in the cuts file (in case I change my mind later, or hope to move that cut material to a different scene), the line notes get cut entirely, and the insertions, when properly expanded and integrated, are converted to standard black text.

And obviously none of this process works on IOS.

I could probably come up with alternate ways of working. I used to jumble notes and cuts at the bottom of chapters during construction and editing, and delineate line notes with ///. This would work on IOS, but would get annoying when you can see such a smaller slice of text to begin with, and have more work to scroll to the end of a file.



So, yes. If planned around the functionality that is in the IOS version, I could write a novel entirely on the iPhone. But as it is, I'm happier to be able to do certain kinds of work there and leave the heavy lifting for a full computer.

My face is tired: Mass Effect Andromeda

Yes, the environments look nice.

In every other way, though, moving to the Frostbite engine failed the game. If for no other reason than it took too long to adjust to the new engine and construct the tools the engine doesn't include. Various insiders opine that what actually shipped was completed in less than a year, and that after many of the team had left.

The game shows over and over that there just wasn't time for the polishing steps. And this goes deeper than the bugs. Take the janky animations the interwebs treated with such derision. Those are partially the fault of an inadequate toolset and inadequate test time, but they expose something else specific.

Which is that they are canned. Sure, this is an open world, and it makes sense that the necessary interactions of the tens of sidequests are handled in-engine, but...there are key interactions, major story interactions, interactions happening early enough in the game to shape the player's perception of the experience, which never saw the touch of an animator.

In ninety five percent of the conversations my Ryder had, the camera snapped to a single over-the-shoulder two-shot and locked there while Mimic or whatever lipsynch engine they were using tried to match facial movements to recorded dialog. Poorly. So poorly does this automatic in-engine system work, my Ryder went through several conversations unable to see any of the people involved in it!

(There were also times the dialog wheel itself popped in and out, and even moments when Ryder would suddenly blurt out her reply five minutes later and five km down the road in the Nomad, but that's the kind of bugs the game is still saddled with despite multiple patches).

(And just to add insult to injury, every single conversation would exit with the cursor floating in the middle of my screen, in the way of everything. What kind of lame coding is it when you can't even keep a stray cursor from being left lying around?)

Doesn't help that this isn't the strongest writing or voice acting of the series, either. Or for the company, either; Fallout 4 uses a similar lock-camera plant-and-bellow approach, leading to what reviewer Yahtzee calls "The Bioware Stare," but at least there are hand-tweaks to the animation when the conversation is important.

Contrast this to Mass Effect 2 or 3. Conversations are hand-animated, with multiple camera angles, shot reverse shot, push-ins, props; each performance is carefully constructed and staged and will have unique actions. This is also true of The Witcher, of even the later Wolfenstien games -- which aren't even RPGs!

The point of this is not that this is bad, per se. Or that it is unforgivable, given that the toolset they were working with wasn't accommodating. There are plenty of games and not just older games where this kind of cinematic mini-cutscene conversation isn't in use or wouldn't even be appropriate. The point is that this is a Mass Effect game. Which have given us this kind of close-up of the people we are interacting with and given them a chance to be distinct characters not just in their voices but in the ways their bodies move.

As another reviewer points out, Mass Effect isn't a driving game (although Andromeda brings back the vehicle and the large explorable terrains). It isn't really a shooter (although the combat in ME3 and Andromeda is so good that in the later is is almost the best part of the game). What it is, is role-playing. About interacting with people, changing the world through your choices and defining yourself in the way you make them.

And it is not to say full metal cinematography and a full Serkis mocap is necessary to have this kind of interaction. Players were deeply moved when conversing with a sixteen-pixel sprite through a text window, back in the day.

No, what's really the issue (besides the failures of story, dialog, design, and acting that make few of the Mass Effect Andromeda conversations memorable) is that, particularly after the kind of intimacy you got in the previous games, there is a real lack of emotional connect here. This isn't interactive dialog, this is walking through the animatronic Hall of Presidents.

##

The scenery is lovely. It is also static. I will give kudos for tire tracks being persistent, but there's a similar lack of connection that makes it into more like watching an IMAX movie of the Mojave then actually feeling like you are in the Mojave.

The approach used in Skyrim (actually, in most of the Elder Scrolls series -- and as well in many of the Fallout series) is to make as much of the litter as possible into physics objects. This was brought out in interviews with the lead designer for Skyrim. They absolutely intended to forge that closer connection to the game world by making it possible to knock over stuff (the fact that Skyrim's physics model makes it nearly impossible for the player to actually pick up a cup and place it on a table is disappointing, but the idea is there.)

The reboot Tomb Raider games have, as a part of their hidden-rails philosophy, no such moveable objects. Instead they give this interaction to the avatar; Lara will noticeably push small branches aside if you send her through the shrubbery, feel along the wall of a cave, and otherwise react to the scenery around her. Which animates somewhat in response. It may seem a small thing, but it helps so very much.

The outdoor scenery in Mass Effect Andromeda is lovely, though some of it is a little busy. The interiors are ridiculously busy, every square inch of wall covered with boxes and consoles and pipes and blinkenlights -- it looks like the ISS in there -- and the floors are so cluttered her teammates are constantly struggling with their pathfinding. And, yes, there is a chair or two you can knock over, but for the most part it is not just a static environment, but it is an unnecessarily cluttered one. There's no sense to it, no aesthetic, no overall pattern. No flow. Just stuff, so much stuff you stop looking at it. Instead of actually enjoying the insides of buildings I got into the habit of just pressing the forward key and hoping Ryder would eventually stumble on a path through the clutter, while looking at nothing other than my HUD for the pop-up that would indicate there was something for me to interact with.

(Another failure -- though far from unique to Andromeda -- is that the "interact" popup is persistent. In Andromeda, even quest markers were persistent; as in, they'd continue to clutter up the map and HUD even after I'd finished the quest. And while we're on the subject, both the journey and the map are garbage, and the navigator part of the HUD is the worst I have seen in decades.)

I've talked about this before. I don't like the way we put a mass of detail that doesn't matter, and then put a giant glowing label on the only things we can actually get game points off of. It is just like the Quick-Time Event problem; the screen image and sound design might be showing something wonderful, but the game progresses when you press the right button in the right time or place. This kind of clutter-plus-HUD doesn't give you the feeling of searching a room for a weapon, it gives you a feeling of playing Simon Says while a movie is playing in the background.

Would it be possible to disconnect, or rather, reconnect? I've tried Skyrim with the HUD turned off. I found I could still locate medicinal plants and mineable ores. It just became more annoying trying to find the sweet spot where the "gather" animation would actually play. I bet this could be solved just by increasing the size of the interact area, though. Incidentally, every single conversation in Mass Effect Andromeda started with a clumsy dance of trying to get Ryder close enough to the NPC and facing in exactly the right direction to unlock the "interact" button with them.

Once again, you spend all your time looking at a glowing glyph on your HUD and not with the depicted world the game is pretending to simulate your immersion in.

##

These are just two aspects of the failure of Andromeda. They are in part philosophical. The team spoke of concentrating on making a better combat system and they succeeded. They prioritized free exploration in an open world knowing that this would harm the thrust and pacing of the more story-driven trilogy. And it has never really been a physics object world where you can pick up things like Skyrim or destroy scenery like Just Cause. And they made many, many changes and compromises in order to support multiplayer.

The real failure here is the adoption of a game engine that can't do many of the things that were strengths of the series. Worse, the limitations of the game engine impose its own aesthetic; one of a non-interactive landscape and equally conversations.

They dreamed of making a game where you seek out new lands and meet new peoples. What was shipped was a game where you look at static landscapes and are shown talking dolls.

White Human's Burden: Mass Effect Andromeda

It is probably too early for me to review Mass Effect Andromeda. There is quite a bit of story I have yet to encounter, nor have I drilled that deeply into some of the less obvious mechanics. However, I've landed on half the available worlds already and done the big plot thing on most of those so...

I can't help but be thinking of protagonist effect. Especially in games, there's a terrible tendency for nothing to get done unless the player avatar does it. This doesn't always mean they are recognized as The Chosen One in-story; in several of the Medal of Honor types the player avatar is at best a buck private -- what happens instead in these is that anytime a sniper needs to be taken out or a door opened all the sergeants can think of is demand that he be the one to do it.

(In other places this is a gameplay/story segregation fail. For instance, the player avatar might be just one of a squad trying to move through an area. The thing of it is, they win through -- or don't -- the moment the player avatar hits the invisible checkpoint. In many, many other cases, the story may treat the player avatar as being just one of many, but in actual play they might have done most of the fighting while the AI friendlies were still milling around.)

The original Mass Effect trilogy didn't do too badly at making the centrality of Shepard organic to the plot. First, the Commander starts as an "N7"; a top 99th percentile soldier. Then the Commander is hand-selected for elite Spectre status (a reports-only-to-the-Council special agent) and due to various events political and otherwise achieves it. So Shepard believably has both the prowess and the freedom to go to places with a problem and solve it for them. (Presuming, of course, that said problem can be solved by emptying magazines in its direction. Fortunately, the game largely delivers same.)

Later events up the Chosen One status; first Shepard stumbles across a broken Beacon left by the extinct Prothean precursor race, meaning he had first-hand knowledge about the World Threatening Problem. His success in trying to stop this threat are visible enough (eventually) that various people continue to give him the freedom to go about it his own way. Even the ending is a recap of the start; due to his abilities his squad is in the vanguard, and thus when someone breaks through to the final McGuffin it isn't that much of a stretch that it's Shepard again.

Mass Effect Andromeda is somewhat less elegant about this. In the game, another former N7 -- who also has a unique link with an extremely helpful AI -- has more-or-less created the idea of The Pathfinder, a single individual who leads the way for the colonization effort, doing the primary exploring and making many of the tough choices about when and where to attempt a settlement. Helps that he was a key organizer of the whole "colonize the Andromeda Galaxy" plan. Means he could credibly write his own job description, and largely sell people on it.

Unfortunately he dies on his first mission. Perhaps because there is no time to make a different choice, he invests that trust in one of his children, along with the special link to the AI that gives him some of his abilities.

The somewhat less believable part of this is that essentially all of the Andromeda Initiative survivors appear so shell-shocked by a series of terrible setbacks they've become unable to make decisions. Well, to be fair, the people who could make decisions did...they chose to leave (becoming yet another faction you meet later in the game). They pin all their hopes on The Pathfinder when he finally shows up -- and then, although rather less enthusiastically -- on his hand-chosen successor when he dies.

Sure, Sarah/Jack has a lot of training, and has the special set of AI codes, but even he or she is quite forthright about this being a ridiculous amount of responsibility. Still, this awkwardness is overcome by the game, both with the very probationary way they are treated early on, and their own professed worries, and, eventually, enough things that go right to win them a slow and grudging increase in confidence. It is still ridiculous just how many things The Pathfinder turns out to be responsible for.

The place where the game really falls down is with the Angarans. Long story short, they also had a cavalcade of disaster. First The Scourge, a Negative Space Wedgie that turns all the planets in easy reach down to only marginally habitable. Then the Kett arrive, slaughtering and enslaving. The first thing Ryder does is -- thanks again to the Magical AI -- start turning back on the forerunner magitech atmosphere machine-thingies that start reversing the effects of The Scourge. This is something the Angarans had been trying to do, but despite studying the stuff for hundreds of years they never made much headway in figuring out how it worked. Apparently they never had Sudoku on their planet.

(There's a gamification aspect to this. Most of what Ryder does is wave an Omni-Tool at the stuff, which is presented as letting the magitech AI do its thing. But a key part to turning on the towers is through the player playing a mini-game of Complete the Rows.)

If that wasn't bad enough, to earn the trust of the Angarans Ryder agrees to help fight the Kett. And single-handedly takes out a key fortress the Angarans had been throwing themselves against since the Kett arrived. Okay, sure; they got a rare chance at it because a code was intercepted, but how is it Ryder is in strike distance and no-one else?

In the television show Stargate Atlantis the protagonists go around doing things and shaking things up but this works for several reasons. For one, they are outsiders. That doesn't, however, give them a gift of insight to help solve other people's intractable problems. What it does, is make the Milky Way people dangerously naive. Most of the peoples they have run into have found ways to survive the Wraith incursions. Within days, however, the Atlantis crew shot the wrong Wraith and permanently upset the status quo. Now all the old ways of coping are failing.

More importantly for this comparison (the Pegasus Galaxy situation is unique) is that the Atlantis crew have...Atlantis. As in, the most advanced tech around. And this gets mercilessly pointed out by most of the people they meet. The Atlantis crew wins in places where no-one else could -- and at the end of it, the people they helped go, "Hey, if we had those cool toys we would have done it ourselves. And done it a lot better, too."

I find I can suspend a certain amount of disbelief for a the right kind one-man army. People do have a wide variety of skills and genetic aptitudes, after all. Bruce Lee's hands really were that fast. Especially in a less realistic game I haven't a huge problem going along with the player avatar being just that much better than anyone else. It does help, though, if there's an in-game reason. Otherwise you start feeling like the Only Sane Man. I had that experience in later play throughs of Tomb Raider 2013. "She's just one girl!" shout the Solarii as you mow them down. Yeah. One girl that can hit the side of a barn...unlike you lot.

This is pretty much where I was with Ryder. Her stated background in-game isn't super-soldier. She's defended an archaeological camp against pirates and slavers, she says at one point. And went hunting with her dad, I think. And okay, there's the AI boost that for various reasons only she and dad got. But past that, she's using the same weapons the Kett are using and she and her two friends are typically mopping the floor with squad to platoon strength adversaries. For all intents and purposes, it really is a world of cardboard for her. It makes you, through your avatar, feel less like you are skilled or lucky, and more like the rest of the world is incompetent.

(This is not something you could help by setting the game on "hard" mode. You'll still have to overcome the same ridiculous numbers. You'll just fail at it more often and spend more time in loading screens.)

I'm left on the fence whether it is worse to have a hero of clearly ordinary skill who wins despite the outrageous odds against it, or a hero who is so clearly superior it is hard to feel for them. Between, that is, the ludicrously lucky schmo or the unlikeable Superman. I've been reading a lot of Greek myth and particularly the Homeric "heroes" are rather notable in that theirs is a heroism of doing, not of trying. They are almost inevitably part god, and given godly gifts, and sometimes infused with even more power. Theirs is not a struggle, but a demonstration of superiority. I find this difficult to laud.

Still, one has to remember that the bulk of The Odyssey is about a man who struggles to overcome hardship. It reminds one that one of the great Spider-Man moments was not when he beat up Galactus or something, but a moment he was nearly crushed under a great weight...and refused to give in, taking an entire page to finally struggle free.

But back to the problem. Besides the way Ryder plows through opposition, and the way the alien tech proves so easy to manipulate, the number of steps and the overall effort is so very very little. This is a problem of gamification, of course. But it is also one of trying to make a game with a hundred-plus hours of play around too little plot to support it.

You can finish the Mass Effect trilogy in as little as forty hours, if you don't mind losing most of the galaxy on the way to your pyrrhic conclusion. But this is made up of one overall story arc, split into three distinct acts, each of which falls into four to six major episodes each. Mass Effect Andromeda doesn't give the same sense of overarching story and theme. It just feels like a bunch of fetch quests. If you do three similar ones, then suddenly there's a great victory and an entire alien race is calling you a hero from the stars.

You can pretty much sleep-walk through a couple of easy fights, drive or walk blindly from one pop-up quest marker to another, make no decision tougher than whether to answer a question in a manner that's funny and warm or professional but quirky, and come back to the Nexus to hear people singing the praises of the new Pathfinder who can do what they couldn't do over a decade of work.

There's even quests on the Nexus where you slide by on either the ridiculous latitude you get as Pathfinder or the magic AI. In the latter, there's a saboteur you catch because no-one else has the crypto-key to everything and a magic scanner to boot. In the former, you get to judge a murder case because you just arrived and are presumed impartial and because you are (deep breath) Dah Pathfinder no-one is going to question it.

(The Nexus is the big space station that's in-world supposed to be the meeting place and support facility for the colonization effort, and in-game functions as a hub that you actually don't need as ninety percent of the game functionality is available on your ship. And even then, I have yet to bother climbing around the ship to use the crafting stations. I just grab one at whatever alien I'm visiting at the moment. They all work the same.)

Now, this could be made workable. The big flaw is not that desperate confused and scared people -- who just got their asses kicked in what was essentially a civil war as everyone with a strong opinion went and left in a huff -- would turn to a newcomer who still has idealism, who comes in with fresh supplies and new hope, and has been vested with a reputation of being able to accomplish the impossible (a borrowed vest, but still). It is the way it is carried out in game.

The stories are awful, the underlying mechanics far too obvious ("A quest giver will appear and ask you to go to a point on the map and return. Bad guys will attack at least once.") It makes the rest of the Andromeda Initiative look stupid. But worse, it makes the local inhabitants -- indigenes that the Initiative really should have predicted when they planned this massive colonialist effort -- look worse.

You can make your Ryder any color you like (in an interesting mechanic, your choices for the kid reflect back to parent as well as sibling). The point is not that (the default) Sarah is white, or even that she's human. It is that she as the protagonist is functionally the same as the white dude in those unfortunate movies and books where apparently the natives had never figured out irrigation, or making peace with their enemies, or how to play basketball until the hero came along.

(Image from a Polygon article, showing how natural dad Alec can look even when taken far from the default appearance).

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.

##

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.

##

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.

##

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.

##

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.

Weighing in...three years late

So, Mass Effect 3. Particularly the ending.

Yes, it was a good decision to add more footage to the original release. Yes, there were some poor plot decisions made; a resolution that poorly prepared for the several violations of the themes and established lore of the series it made. And some poor directorial decisions that made it even more annoying than it was already.

But you know, there's two things that they could have done that wouldn't have added much more effort, would not have changed the way the end unfolds, but would have felt vastly more satisfying.

First and simplest. The majority of the truly plot-critical choices, particularly in the rest of Mass Effect 3, require either Paragon/Renegade options (unlocked via in-game reputation earned through play), or a Paragon/Renegade interrupt (sort of like a Quick-Time Event but unlike most such, they actually work).

(There are two Renegade Interrupts that are so damned satisfying even the most die-hard Paragon Shepard player will take them. Head-butting a Krogan is one...and you know damn well what the other is if you've played through Mass Effect 3.)

As the game stands now; assuming you have a high enough Readiness value (more on that in a moment), the Catalyst explains it had a system (the Reapers) which worked fine for it for cycle after cycle but events of this cycle have proven it is no longer a viable solution. So it offers three, albeit equally unpalatable, options. The way the dialog and even the setting frames these choices, they are there from the start of the conversation. All you are able to do from here until the end of the game is chose one. No other action matters.

Here's how it would work in a more Mass Effect style:

Shepard arrives at the Citadel/Crucible interface and engages the Catalyst in conversation. The Catalyst admits in the course of this conversation the Reaper strategy is no longer viable. Shepard urges it to consider new options. If Shepard's Reputation is high enough and/or if certain things had been done prior in the game; saving the Geth, say, or reversing the genophage, or even doing the Legion loyalty mission back in Mass Effect 2, then better options are unlocked in the typical Paragon/Renegade special dialog options.

And if you take the third option, that can be a Renegade (or Paragon?) Interrupt.

At the end of it you still end up with some tough choices that may feel like pyrrhic victories. The point of this change is you feel like you earned them. And by approaching them through truly interactive dialog, instead of via the SpaceChild nattering on like it ate a freshman philosophy class and hadn't digested properly.

See, this is a key part of every other interaction in Mass Effect as well; Shepard is given a situation with two equally bleak outcomes but is able through sheer strength of what he is come up with a better option. Dozens of times he's talked down a Mexican Standoff instead of letting it turn into a blood bath. This should feel no different.

Yes; I understand the writers were trying to make a point that sometimes there is no great solution. Sometimes even Kirk has to face up to a Kobyashi Maru that he can't cheat out a win on. But throwing it at the player with no preparation is just shitty writing. Give Shepard the wriggle room to properly explore just how bad the options are and chose to make that sacrifice. Don't just force him to chose which garbage hole to throw the universe in after spending hundreds of hours trying to save it. Be tough but make it feel fair.

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Okay, so here's the second thing they could have done. Takes a wee bit more time to do. First let me point out that all of the scenes of the final confrontation between the allied fleets and the Reapers around Earth, from arrival to the docking of the Crucible, is about a minute of non-interactive cut scene.

So let's not even think about the pipe dream of getting the make the kinds of choices you made during the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, where the person you assigned to each task or team had a dynamic effect on how that played out (and could cost you not just that person but others of your friends as well). Take that off the table.

Let's just look at the various ship models appearing, the cockpit scenes that are shown, the role-call that Joker gives from the bridge of the Normandy, and the close-up engagements that may or may not be shown in the game as shipped...err, as belatedly patched. Now change what is shown depending on half dozen variables. This is actually less effort than it looks like, because if your readiness is low you get creamed anyhow; the scenes collapse to being basically the same set of Reapers tearing the shit out of the Alliance core and the Crucible.

But as you get into the higher readiness, which also fairly well maps to specific in-game decisions, you'd get; a scene where a Quarrian fighter pilot has eye drones on his tail...and they get dropped by Geth fighters. Or a Reaper beam is about to take out the Destiny Ascendant...and an Elcor heavy freighter sacrifices itself to block the shot. Or a Reaper is suddenly swarmed by Leviathan uncloaking around it.

All of these would be goddamn incredible payoff for your work earlier in the game. They would be cheer out loud moments. And entirely in keeping with the rest of the game. Take, oh, say, how Counselor Udina's attempted coup plays out in Mass Effect 3. If Shepard had met and recruited the dying assassin Thane Krios back in Mass Effect 2, Thane pops up out of nowhere to give an epic takedown to the insufferable hitman Kai Leng. This kind of payoff is constant, throughout the games, from the tense meeting with the Virmire survivor while Shepard is working with Cerberus in the second game (a meeting even more complicated if Shepard had romanced him or her), to Jack showing up as a teacher to young biotics (and struggling to keep her potty mouth under control!) Even minor side characters have moments. This is what makes those choices worth making, and makes the world feel alive.

Look, fans have done re-cuts, using assets from elsewhere in the series. It isn't that hard. And, hey; the Destiny Ascendent shows up in the final battle of Mass Effect 3 under the right conditionals, that being that you saved the Council back in Mass Effect 1! So put a couple of other clips in there that get trigged depending on what you did so all of that work gathering War Assets doesn't end up with a single number and a pre-rendered fight scene.