Having now weighed in on the shortcomings of 'Mass Effect 3 let us never speak of them again. Seriously, even though Bioware has announced some sort of nebulous possible fan appeasement this summer I almost don't care anymore. I mean I'll probably still fire the game up to see what they added but I've really gotten tired of the level of furor the “fans” of the series have managed to sustain. That's why this week we'll be looking at, in comparison to the 'ME1' and 'ME2' retrospective of not so long ago, the mechanics of the 'Mass Effect 3'. OK, so I probably lied there. I'll probably be coming back to the 'ME3' story issues at some point but that point is not at this moment going to be anytime soon.
The Good:
I think that someone at Bioware realized that the cover based combat system that they had in 'Mass Effect 2' was probably about as good as it was going to get and as such it has seen only a few minor tweaks here and there. For example there is, for some reason, a slightly greater emphasis on melee combat in this revision. Why? Beats me. One would have thought we where past beating and stabbing people in the future and could stick to the civilized method of murdering things with re-skinned modern weaponry*. The good news is that if you so chose you can largely ignore the melee combat and stick to shooting things. It just annoyed me a bit to see so many branches on skill trees focused on increasing melee skills.
The Other Good:
So 'Mass Effect', rightfully, took a bit of beating for the extraordinarily unnecessary level of customization that it afforded players. It took criticism for overloading players with tons and tons of unnecessary guns, armor and add-ons for said guns and armor. 'Mass Effect 2', rightfully, took a bit of a beating for removing that terrifying level of customization and replacing it with nothing. Yup, as annoyed as people where with being overburdened they where equally vexed with no variety whatsoever. Well 'Mass Effect 3' seems like its found a happy medium. There are no armor add-ons but each weapon has two slots that can each take one of around five different weapon specific upgrades . And while there are no armor add-ons you can at least chose the different parts of you armor to best suit your playstyle, i.e. different helmets, gauntlets, chest pieces, etc. all have different affects/bonuses and you can mix and match to your hearts content or not as the default armor would fall under the category of perfectly functional.
The Bad:
When the Mako and its terribad physics left the Mass Effect series it left a universe that, without its awful steering and bouncing handling, felt a whole lot smaller. 'Mass Effect 2' as mentioned in previous articles tried to “solve” this problem by having the player scan planets for resources without actually having to go down to the surface and explore them. Believe me when I say this but that activity is even less interesting in gameplay than it sounds when typed out. Unlike the combat or customization this is one issue that 'Mass Effect 3' doesn't even come close to solving or improving. Sure scanning has been made easier and sure there's a sense that the resources you find this time around are somehow more important (war effort and all) but good lord it it tedious. I don't think I've ever partaken in something that I would describe as both fun and tedious. Pretty sure those descriptors are mutually exclusive. Oh and if you scan around to much in an “occupied” system your little ship will get chased around by Reapers**. I never got caught because your ship moves faster than theirs and I was never curious enough to find out what happens when you get caught.
The Ugly:
Probably the one truly new thing that 'ME3' introduces here is co-operative objective based multiplayer to what had previously been a single player series. Working with other people to gun down multiple waves of attackers while picking off select targets, hacking “mission critical” stuff, etc. is actually surprisingly fun even if 'ME3' controls are still not quite as fluid as other first person shooters. Even with some minor annoyances (unlocking new stuff in the multiplayer is kind of a crap shoot) I would still recommend that people check it out. So now you may be wondering why this is getting mentioned here? Well during the course of the single player game you will through storyline, side-questing and scanning accrue “War Assets”, that is the resources, ships, etc. that will take part in the final battle against the Reapers. You're even given a handy guide indicating whether or not your current force would be successful. You're also given a “War Readiness” indicator. This is a measurement of what percentage of your “War Assets” will actually be used in the final battle. Have '3000' points of war assets but only a 60% readiness rating then you'd best hope that 1800 points of war assets is enough to take down the Reapers. So what's the problem? Simple, the only way to raise your readiness rating is through the multiplayer. Now I have no issue with the existence of the multiplayer component of this game. What I do take issue with is potentially being forced to play it in order to get the best ending of the single player. That's not cool.
That's also it. No more Mass Effect anything for a while. Next week something new and different. See you then.
*Seriously this is one of the few things that people don't seem to harp on enough with this series. Why, in the future, are we still using the five basic categories of weapons (pistol, SMG, assault rifle, shotgun and sniper rifle) found in every modern shooter? Why are we still, essentially, using solid state ammo? I signed up for the future combat game thingy to blast things with lasers so why do all the laser weapons sucks? Think of (or look up if you don't have a working knowledge on this subject) how much weaponry has progressed in the last hundred years and then recall that the Mass Effect universe is set ~160 years in the future and realize how stupid it is that weaponry seems to have largely stopped evolving. If there is one certainty in the universe it is that people are always looking for more innovative and efficient ways to murder one another and the failure to account for this in the weapon designs of this game is among the more prominent minor failings of the series. Not a deal breaker just a kind of stupid oversight.
**Reapers who won't go away to let you finish scanning until you've done a story mission or landed on planet.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Of Mice and Mass (Effect 3).
Well as mentioned last week here's the long awaited (?!?) evaluation of the 'Mass Effect 3' storyline. Sort of. I say that because the more I thought about it the more I realized that my issue with the game unlike the many others who've complained about it isn't rooted in the ending. Sure, as you may have heard, the ending is more than a tad bit disappointing but a lot of the issues with it can be seen coming based on earlier events of the series. OK, so that isn't totally true the part of the endgame for 'ME3' where it basically comes down to push button receive ending can piss off. That sort of mechanic has no place in anything resembling open ended gameplay gaming and feels like a rush job. That said from an actual story perspective as already mentioned the seeds for these issues where sown very early in the series.
Alright before I get any further I should probably explain the Reapers. In the 'Mass Effect' universe the Reapers are giant sentient spaceships who appear every 50,000 years, destroy/harvest advanced civilizations and then leave. There are a lot of them. They are hard to destroy. They can subtly control peoples minds. That's probably enough of a guideline to get a feel for the threat that they pose within this particular setting.
Hopefully you've now got something of an idea of what the villains of the series are like. If not (and even if you do) I encourage you to watch this video from near the end of the first game of the series. This video is the players first and only interaction with Sovereign, the sole Reaper encountered during the first game. During this conversation, in between giving some pretty badass one liners, Sovereign, from a writing perspective, by my count gives no fewer than four complete cop out answers when queried about the Reapers creation, purpose, motivations, etc. This is not so good. There are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer wants them to play coy about something and then there are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer has no idea where they're going with something. This conversation falls squarely into the “no idea” category and at the time it occurred (late in the first game of a planned trilogy) it wasn't an issue. However once we've gotten to the third game it has become an issue and without giving too much of a spoiler let's just say that the eventual explanation is...lacking.
Alright that's my only complaint about the ending. The other issue I have with the series' writing is a little more...pervasive...I guess that's the right word. If you clicked on the link above and then clicked around a bit you probably saw a video or two showing the ending of 'Mass Effect'. An epic space battle with the combined human, lizard people and blue women fleets shooting at a really big ship being escorted by lots and lots of smaller ships (these ships belonging to a machine race that allied themselves with Sovereign). Good times. Or not. See in the first game to destroy a single Reaper is portrayed as being incredibly difficult and, according to Sovereign, there are enough of them to darken the skies of every planet. Houston we have a problem. How do you stop that?
Now before I answer that I'd like to direct you to the Wikipedia page for Galactus, a godlike being from the Marvel comics universe. His deal is that he's extremely powerful and likes to eat planets. Starting to sounds kind of familiar? Reading some of the quotes from those who created him it becomes clear that Galactus and similarly designed foes ***cough*** Reapers ***cough*** are a sort of end game for raising the stakes. The hero is powerful so an even more powerful villain is introduced so the hero levels up (or whatever) and defeats the villain repeat until your hero character is essentially fighting a god. Well that's a problem. We can't have our hero characters ascend to a godlike status or their heroing stuff is no longer compelling as it should, in theory, be too easy and I swear that there's a point to all of this. What it comes down to is that the writer needs to have way for the hero to defeat someone much more powerful than themselves without becoming as powerful as the thing they're fighting. Without going into too much detail of Galactus' origins/back story* one of the ways in which he is defeated is the Ultimate Nullifier, a massive writing cop out if ever there was one. How do we destroy a god? Why a weapon whose sole purpose is to destroy gods of course (this is the simple version of how all this crap goes down). How this relates to 'Mass Effect' is that from the first game onwards, given the difficulty as mentioned that destroying a single Reaper presents, I was very worried that a similar McGuffin would get pulled out of the writers collective asses when it came time to wipe out the Reapers. Again minor spoiler, it turned out that I was more or less correct. Really? You had ~4 years from when the first game came out to when the third game wrapped things up to come up with a plausible solution to this problem and an Ultimate Nullifier analog was the best that you could come up with? Bleh.
Yup, not super happy with how that turned out. It's even more frustrating when you think about the fact that this was (I believe) planned as a trilogy from the start meaning that there really should have been a greater degree of foresight with regards to how things eventually get revealed and/or solved. But no. Not even close. Oh well. See you all next week.
*Not going into any comic book characters origin/back story as any character that's been around for a while tends to have a very convoluted and often contradictory history having likely been written by dozens of different people over the years, each one with slightly different idea of how to write the property. Galactus, having been created ~50 years ago, has a back story that reads like a continuity directors worst nightmare.
Alright before I get any further I should probably explain the Reapers. In the 'Mass Effect' universe the Reapers are giant sentient spaceships who appear every 50,000 years, destroy/harvest advanced civilizations and then leave. There are a lot of them. They are hard to destroy. They can subtly control peoples minds. That's probably enough of a guideline to get a feel for the threat that they pose within this particular setting.
Hopefully you've now got something of an idea of what the villains of the series are like. If not (and even if you do) I encourage you to watch this video from near the end of the first game of the series. This video is the players first and only interaction with Sovereign, the sole Reaper encountered during the first game. During this conversation, in between giving some pretty badass one liners, Sovereign, from a writing perspective, by my count gives no fewer than four complete cop out answers when queried about the Reapers creation, purpose, motivations, etc. This is not so good. There are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer wants them to play coy about something and then there are times when a character gives ambiguous answers because the writer has no idea where they're going with something. This conversation falls squarely into the “no idea” category and at the time it occurred (late in the first game of a planned trilogy) it wasn't an issue. However once we've gotten to the third game it has become an issue and without giving too much of a spoiler let's just say that the eventual explanation is...lacking.
Alright that's my only complaint about the ending. The other issue I have with the series' writing is a little more...pervasive...I guess that's the right word. If you clicked on the link above and then clicked around a bit you probably saw a video or two showing the ending of 'Mass Effect'. An epic space battle with the combined human, lizard people and blue women fleets shooting at a really big ship being escorted by lots and lots of smaller ships (these ships belonging to a machine race that allied themselves with Sovereign). Good times. Or not. See in the first game to destroy a single Reaper is portrayed as being incredibly difficult and, according to Sovereign, there are enough of them to darken the skies of every planet. Houston we have a problem. How do you stop that?
Now before I answer that I'd like to direct you to the Wikipedia page for Galactus, a godlike being from the Marvel comics universe. His deal is that he's extremely powerful and likes to eat planets. Starting to sounds kind of familiar? Reading some of the quotes from those who created him it becomes clear that Galactus and similarly designed foes ***cough*** Reapers ***cough*** are a sort of end game for raising the stakes. The hero is powerful so an even more powerful villain is introduced so the hero levels up (or whatever) and defeats the villain repeat until your hero character is essentially fighting a god. Well that's a problem. We can't have our hero characters ascend to a godlike status or their heroing stuff is no longer compelling as it should, in theory, be too easy and I swear that there's a point to all of this. What it comes down to is that the writer needs to have way for the hero to defeat someone much more powerful than themselves without becoming as powerful as the thing they're fighting. Without going into too much detail of Galactus' origins/back story* one of the ways in which he is defeated is the Ultimate Nullifier, a massive writing cop out if ever there was one. How do we destroy a god? Why a weapon whose sole purpose is to destroy gods of course (this is the simple version of how all this crap goes down). How this relates to 'Mass Effect' is that from the first game onwards, given the difficulty as mentioned that destroying a single Reaper presents, I was very worried that a similar McGuffin would get pulled out of the writers collective asses when it came time to wipe out the Reapers. Again minor spoiler, it turned out that I was more or less correct. Really? You had ~4 years from when the first game came out to when the third game wrapped things up to come up with a plausible solution to this problem and an Ultimate Nullifier analog was the best that you could come up with? Bleh.
Yup, not super happy with how that turned out. It's even more frustrating when you think about the fact that this was (I believe) planned as a trilogy from the start meaning that there really should have been a greater degree of foresight with regards to how things eventually get revealed and/or solved. But no. Not even close. Oh well. See you all next week.
*Not going into any comic book characters origin/back story as any character that's been around for a while tends to have a very convoluted and often contradictory history having likely been written by dozens of different people over the years, each one with slightly different idea of how to write the property. Galactus, having been created ~50 years ago, has a back story that reads like a continuity directors worst nightmare.
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