Mass Effect, the end.

I managed to complete my journey through the Mass Effect trilogy last week and originally I was going to write a bit about my thoughts on that ending, but since the Internet has been inundated with people arguing for and against how Bioware chose to finish up their tale I thought I would do something a bit different. (For the record I was disappointed with the ending and I think this article and this video sum up my problems with it.)

No matter how you feel about the ending though we should be praising Bioware for what they have achieved with the Mass Effect trilogy. Over the course of three games they have managed to bring to life a world and a cast of characters that players have grown to love. For the first time a series has allowed you to shape and mould the protagonist over not one, not two, but three games. The Sheppard and story that you had to tell at the end of Mass Effect 3 was one that was shaped by your actions, not one that had been predefined before you even started. This is pretty much unheard of in the realm of video-games and I think this fact has been lost beneath the vitriol coming from both sides of the divide. 

 

The amount of fervour on both sides of this divide about the ending, clearly demonstrates that people have become invested in the characters and world that Bioware has created. That people care so much about the way the story has finished shows what a great job Bioware has done with the series. People have become emotionally invested.

For me the Mass Effect series feels like the maturation of what Bioware started to do with the Baldur’s Gate series. In those games you had a few decisions to make that changed how things played out, but with Mass Effect they have taken that genesis further.

Despite the success however, I do feel like this may be a once in a lifetime series. With budgets increasing and EA already meddling with the design, I don’t know whether Bioware will get the chance to do anything like this again. The cost involved in designing a number of different stories must be quite large, added to that–people’s expectations will only grow leading to cries for more choices and even more divergent outcomes. It’s hard to see a publisher, especially one as conservative as EA, green-lighting such a project again.

So whatever your thoughts on how the series has wound-up, I urge you to recognise the feat that Bioware have managed to achieve with the Mass Effect series, especially as we may never see its like again. 

Mass Effect 3 you decide, maybe.

Tomorrow sees the launch of what is arguably the first major release of 2012, Mass Effect 3. It is the final game in the long running trilogy from RPG luminaries Bioware, and brings an end to an epic tale that has allowed players to directly influence the story in subsequent games, based on the decisions made in the previous one. With the release of Mass Effect 3 you can guide your own unique character through to his/her dénouement.

For most gamers who have followed Commander Sheppard, the protagonist, through the previous games, this is a thrilling climax to a story that they have become heavily invested in. However, with various sites and publications, along with our friends across the Atlantic, having had a three day head-start on defeating the Reaper threat, news is beginning to emerge that people might not be altogether too happy with how the story turns out. 

You see, it seems that in order to get what has been classed as the ‘perfect ending’ the player is required to jump through a number of hoops, hoops which in the first two games have not been necessary. The hoops in question are as follows:

Hoop 1- Multiplayer

The player must engage in co-op multiplayer where the objective is to survive wave based assaults and complete objectives. By doing this they increase their ‘Readiness’ meter which acts as a multiplier for their War Asset number. Basically by engaging in multiplayer you can raise your War Assets which make the final battle easier with fewer casualties.

Hoop 2- Scanning

The old scanning chestnut from the second game rears its ugly head, albeit in a slightly less ghastly manner. In this case the player has to scour systems for planets that aren’t marked on the map and then fire a probe at them. This added to completing all the quests in the game will push your War Assets to the required mark without having to engage in multiplayer.

So it is a case of either/or if you want to get what Bioware terms the ‘good ending’. Fail to do so and I suppose you end up with a much worse ending, although that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all this game sees the whole galaxy at war, there is going to be death and suffering and you should expect to lose friends. The problem is that this stance taken on the ending by the developers is in direct contrast to that of the previous games in the series. In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 the ending you got was largely dependent on the choices you made during play, not making sure you did every quest in the game or playing multiplayer in order to fill some arbitrary meter. It certainly feels like after sticking to their guns throughout the series and allowing the player’s choices to decide the story for them, at the last minute Bioware have decided to abandon that to a certain degree and introduced a totally different mechanic.

Without completing the game it is impossible for me to make any forgone conclusion about whether this decision has spoilt Mass Effect 3. However I will go into the game knowing that in order to get the ending I want, I’m a sucker for wanting to keep as many characters alive as possible; I will have to jump through one of the two hoops Bioware have placed before me and personally I have little to no interest in playing multiplayer Mass Effect and do not want to go near anything that is even vaguely like the planet scanning from Mass Effect 2. So I may end up with the less-than-perfect-ending, which if that is the case, I will not have got the ending I would have wanted, and for a game that has prided itself on letting the player influence the outcome that is a pretty terrible thought.

As I said, right now I don’t know how I will feel once I complete the game and I will certainly enjoy finding out how the story ends, but I look forward to re-visiting this topic once I have completed Mass Effect 3 and seeing whether Bioware really have fundamentally changed the way the player’s choices impacts on the story’s end. I live in hope that my decisions still have a major impact on which path the story takes.