Mass Effect 3: Thinky Thoughts

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IamLEAM1983
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Mass Effect 3: Thinky Thoughts

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

I'm knee-deep in the Citadel DLC and I've just reached the new threshold established by the Extended Cut. For all intents and purposes, I'm ready and able to win the war against the Reapers, no matter what I choose. I'm not writing this because of that, however. I'm writing this because it's been two years since Mass Effect 3's original ending polarized the fandoms. The tempers have cooled, so I figured I'd give my own thoughts on the matter.

Fact one : I've never played the game in its original state. From the get-go, I've had access to From Ashes, Leviathan and the Extended Cut's content. I'm forced (or blessed) to experience a drastically different ending than what others might have been subjected to. Let me do a quick run-down, for those of you who haven't played the series' third opus.

Most of what you do in ME3 involves the collection of War Assets, which are basically point-based representations of allied forces or technological resources. Cure the Genophage? You earn the support of the krogan fleet. Stabilize the Quarian-Geth conflict? You can earn both sides as allies to the cause. Throughout the game, you'll also find artifacts on distant planets, some of which are solicited by various races and organizations across the galaxy. Finding and distributing these amounts to a show of support, which bolsters your total force. The more you put time into the game, the more the galaxy is susceptible of posing an effective and unified threat against the invading enemy.

The catch is that your associated score was originally tied to a Readiness Rating, a multiplier that's based on your performance in ME3's multiplayer segment. What seems like an interesting concept – tying the multiplayer component into the single-player campaign's success – turns out to be a liability when you consider how the game's multiplayer element amounts to a fairly ho-hum selection of Horde Mode maps. EA had assembled a devious little cash cow for themselves, in that playing multiplayer allowed you to unlock weapon and perk bundles which could, in turn, bolster your Readiness Rating faster. To reach the same end, you could also turn to microtransactions and purchase additional races and classes. The best possible ending to the game depended on you having reached a complete Readiness Rating, and on your maintaining it throughout the last leg of the game. The Extended Cut gets rid of this, rendering both parts of the game's package as distinct as they should be. Someone who wants to focus on Commander Shepard's story as opposed to his or her gunplay skills (as more roleplayers are wont to do) shouldn't have to be penalized by their lack of willingness to put time into a fairly unoriginal set of maps and unlocks.

Fact number two : the original ending is a remastering of Deus Ex's original endgame trifecta, down to the smallest detail. I've always been inclined to assume that Casey Hudson and Mac Walters painted themselves into à corner in pure Peter Molyneux style, having promised oodles of unique and player-driven endgame choices, only to be bogged down by hardware and software requirements, as well as development time. The original intent was to have players follow the life and times of a single Commander Shepard across all three games – namely the one shaped by their decisions and their dictated morals. As there's a few thousand individual decisions across all three games, it more or less makes sense for every little thing you did to not have the same impact as game-changing setpieces. Your sparing Helena Blake in the first game obviously means less in the bigger picture than whatever choice it is you'll consider, when faced with the Rachni Queen's posed dilemma.

With this in mind, I have to admit that I'm not really one of those who railed against BioWare in regards to the original ending. What I do lament is how the general beats of the initial cut are so identical to those taken by another game made by a distinctly different company and dev team.

Destruction, Synthesis or Control. Those are the three prongs Mass Effect 3's conclusion offers. The Synthesis ending does fall in line with a somewhat late-game moral quandary posed in Mass Effect 2 – namely the fate of the Geth heretics being left in the hands of your character, an organic being for whom being reprogrammed into recognizing free will as an imperative feels like a bad joke – but it doesn't exactly jive with your actions throughout the trilogy. You've almost consistently destroyed synthetic beings on sight, and now you're expected to be able to use the Crucible's power to more or less “level up” the entire galaxy to a sort of omni-biological compatibility that will somehow not result into total and complete genetic destabilization. Robot on turian, quarian on human, salarian on geth – it's all good now, 'cause Commander Shepard went for the green light.

The Extended Cut fixes the last ten minutes' most glaring problem, namely that all three prongs are palette swaps of one another. Endings and the third game's pivotal decisions now suddenly matter, with Control and Synthesis offering positive, if strikingly different endings and futures for the galaxy. Calling for the Reapers' destruction largely works the same as before, while it still does condemn the Geth to oblivion.

If anything, Leviathan is now an essential part of the third game's package, simply because of its own endgame revelations. At the risk of spoiling anything, the Catalyst's creators reveal themselves, explaining how their created artificial intelligence is working off a gravely serious fallacy. Once the game itself starts recognizing the much-reviled Star Child's circular logic for what it is, it becomes much more easy to either pick what seems to be the most responsible ending, or to arguably do what feels better – which is to flip him the bird.

Shepard has the option to reject the Catalyst's flawed assertions, now, the only downside being that this does not result in a satisfactory conclusion to the series. The Victory fleet is stuck duking it out against a relentless foe, while Liara T'soni finds herself forced to walk in Vigil's footsteps, leaving behind a VI of herself for the heroes of the next cycle to find.

As a result of this and considering how I felt towards the geth (thanks, Legion!), I felt forced to choose Synthesis. Seeing how the core group of so-called “bad guys” was stuck waiting in the rinks and actively wants collaboration with organic races, I don't have any problems throwing the Quarians' former servants a life-preserving bone.

Thirdly : desperation. See, the first game was an introduction to the universe's laws and rules, to its species and politics. It was your chance to take the Citadel in, to be amused by the excessively polite Hanar and the anatomically phlegmatic Elcor, to see just how Humanity remained divided even as we took our first steps into galactic civilization as a supposedly unified species. The second game upped the stakes and unfurled certain concepts, greatly fleshing them out. The third game adds upon that complexity and is tasked with closing the book, as it were.

What I just don't get is why the third game had to be so maudlin, in places. Yes, Earth is attacked. Yes, people die. Yes, Shepard loses friends and allies. Yes, the situation is dire. This is fine when it's applied in minute doses – but an entire campaign's worth of downers?! The result is honestly jarring. Shepard spends two games being presented as this resolute paragon of justice or this absolute badass possessed of a mind like tempered steel – and the third game insists that the mask is starting to slip only now.

In some ways, going full Paragon justifies this. Sitting on your principles at the risk of losing billions of lives is more than enough to lose quite a few nights' worth of sleep, I'd say; while being a committed Renegade doesn't. Renegade Shepard is essentially an interstellar Jack Bauer : the most cost-effective and brutal means to achieve a goal is usually preferred, which makes the notion of suddenly losing sleep after two years more than a little odd.

Dig a little, and you realize that Breaking Bad played a lot into the final game's development. With a bittersweet ending that polarized the fanbase in exactly the same way, it's easy to think that BioWare wanted to showcase something mature and thoughtful, an opus that would contemplate the horrors of war and the immense personal sacrifices that the safeguarding of an entire galaxy's population would require.

I mean, what would you do if someone suddenly made you the main agency behind the continued survival of billions upon billions of lives? Commander Shepard is designed to be able to take the heat no matter your selected class, but I know I couldn't. Walter White only had his family and legitimate existence in the balance and he was already showing signs of profound emotional turmoil. Try saving the galaxy on the same basic impetus! If anything, this is pain of the sort that should have been perceptible from the moment your character was inducted into the ranks of the Council Spectres.

Shooting the Catalyst makes sense, then. It's Shepard snapping and denying that final ounce of moral and emotional pressure. It's a very human act, someone saying they can't take any more of this after years of constant pressure – plus their own resurrection.

The EC fixes a lot of smaller niggles, along the way. People survive in ways I can at least reconcile myself with and the last ten minutes turn from “LALALALALA, CAN'T HEAR YOU, SPACE MAGIC NOW! WHOOOSH, JAZZ HANDS!” to what feels like an open admission that capping off the Mass Effect trilogy is an undertaking that should have necessitated a few months of extra dev time – if not a year. At the very least, the end result is respectful of what you've chosen to do as a player and recognizes that roleplayers roleplay for the sake of emotional attachment and investment into a universe's lore. We don't roleplay to bump up numbers or switch to TPS mechanics to raise an arbitrary percentile value.

As for Citadel, it also seems to fall right in with these observations. After hours upon hours of Grimdark saved-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth action, you're thrust back to the Citadel for a weirdly random round of dry-dock inspections. Joker, the SSV Normandy's pilot, calls you in for sushi, and what starts as an inordinately talky and relaxed span of time in the Mass Effect-verse soon devolves into a sort of desperate-if-grinning and slightly silly spy tale of someone who's fairly determined to steal your accumulated glory. You also earn an apartment along the way, which feels like an extremely belated answer to one of the core aesthetic niggles of the series.

Namely, where the Hell does Shepard sleep when she's on leave? Does she ALWAYS sleep aboard the Normandy? Plus, the word “apartment” feels like a misnomer. It's more like a sort of partially customizable palatial loft that has about three times the footprint of my own fricking house.

Typical Game Logic.
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