>make a pretty high effort worldbuilding setting with multiple likeable races
>hinge 80% of the story on the weakest part of it
What did they mean by this?
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>make a pretty high effort worldbuilding setting with multiple likeable races
Mystery Box storytelling from studios like Bad Robot completely poisoned videogame writers into thinking everything that every new release had to have an earth shattering hook. They wrote themselves into a corner and couldn't get out of it. If BioWare just made more Mass Effect games set in that world they would be far better off than what they've done with DA and Anthem.
I remember believing we were going to get to visit cities in each race's home world in ME3.
It's 1's fault. 2's episodic formula was the best fit for the series but 3 was obligated to follow up on 1.
After 1 or 2 they could have easily said the threat was defeated or at least pushed off into the distant future.
2 is conflicted with itself, the episodic formula clashed with the collector main story trying to rush you. 2 also forced 3's hand becsuse of arrival dlc. 2 ruined the franchise even though it's good game.
They could have easily said the reapers were 50 years or a century out and had 5 more games like Mass Effect 2 in the series by now.
EA just didn't care about single player games and wanted the series to finish before they needed to pay to make all new next generation art assets for it. Combine that with the fact that everyone decent leaves a few years after a megacorp buyout of a developer like Bioware and it was all over.
I agree. Reapers killed Mass Effect. First game should end claiming that they are indefinitely delayed. I never understood people obsession with wanting to defeat them. Or complaints that ME2 is a sidequest that wasted time instead of being about preparing for Reapers
The Reapers are still an looming threat in ME2 and one is taking control of enemies to talk to Shepherd for most of the game so you're supposed to be thinking about them even though they aren't in the galaxy yet. In that context ME2 does seem like you're doing a side quest, especially since the Collector Base doesn't even end up being important in ME3. I looked it up to double check, the Human Reaper's brain or heart is added as a war asset when you attack TIM's base, other than that the base is not important at all.
It would have been easy to integrate it into ME3's plot too, it's in the center of the galaxy so it could have been revealed that some secretly not mind controlled faction of the Collectors had surreptitiously added tech to the base to send out the Crucible's energy all over the galaxy or something. Or made it a galaxy-wide listening post that Shepherd takes back control of in the beginning of ME3 to be able to monitor where the Reapers are in the galaxy, and that the Reapers can't attack directly because they are too big to navigate the asteroids around it.
>especially since the Collector Base doesn't even end up being important in ME3.
Biggest problem me3 has, at least ludo narrative wise.
Honestly, it was stupid of them. Setting up an impending machinegod invasion from the first mission makes everything else you do seem so insignificant.
You do epic stuff like restore the quarian homeworld and cure the genophage but they all seem like detours as you're constantly urged to focus on the reapers.
bioware writers are awful
mass effect having a reasonably interesting setting was a complete anomaly
How they ended up with a decent setting actually is surprising given how generally cringe a lot of the dialogue is, especially in 1.
People wouldn't buy a game about ayy conflict where humans are just randos who maybe help, maybe not.
See explosive popularity of ME2 which completly turned series into "humans are the coolest and bestest of all species and are totally a key to defeat all evils of the world".
I mean we are kinda awesome.
>See explosive popularity of ME2 which completly turned series into "humans are the coolest and bestest of all species and are totally a key to defeat all evils of the world".
That was already a thing in ME1 with humans rising in a few decades to rival the council races and even taking over completely with the renegade ending.
Lore is easier to write than story. World Building is actually the fun and lazy part. Putting it all together in a cohesive narrative takes effort. And since most dullards will sooner accept the former as a show of depth the equally dull writers will just as soon not bother.
>mass effect
>high effort
>at anything
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
>one part is bad
>therefore the whole thing is bad
100IQ post
>the culmination was bad therefore the whole thing is bad
Mmmmmmmmmm Yes?
Most of the ending was bad, and that's your final impression of the game so it has more impact than middle parts that are good. ME3's main plot was based on a Deus Ex Machina that wasn't set up at all in the prior games and the plot of the game is to build the Crucible because Hackett got a copy of the script and it told him the Crucible was what the plot needed. Nobody knows what it does and they build it anyway, which is convenient for the plot because we find out at the end it can do whatever the writers want it to do. It's like JJ Abrams came into the writing room one day and sold Casey Hudson on mystery boxes.
The gameplay is fine and there are good missions in the game, but the main plot is abysmal, most notably it's a plot for a game trilogy sold on "your choices matter" that has barely any interaction with any of your choices in the prior games, and shunts most of your choices in ME3 into a generic point system instead of anything happening based on them individually.
Prior choices end up mattering for the Krogan and Geth conflicts, at least.
Sure, and that's part of why I thought some of the individual missions were good. I haven't played the game in almost a decade now so I may be misremembering, but I don't remember any differences in the final missions on TIM's base and Earth other than which major characters were alive depending on who you sided with. For example, if you cured the genophage then there could be added Krogan soldiers to help you in the final assault on Earth, whereas if you sabotaged the cure the Salarians could give you a better stealth drive that lets you start closer to the end of that mission. There might be better ideas but that kind of unique mechanical effect is what I wanted.
What do you mean anon?
It's not like you could possibly make an rpg without a plot where you need to save the world/galaxy/universe. It just can't be done.
It shouldn't have been a mystery box especially if the writers had no idea how to resolve it. It should have been some relatively low stakes adventure/political intrigue. The whole tracking down a rogue Spectre plot works perfectly fine even if you don't include the reapers and replace it with something else.
>go on an epic journey across space
>to find one guy
>just find that one guy and bring him to space jail
>yeah but he's like smart and mean
>well yeah someone else could probably do it
YAWN
Yeah, my bad. I forgot marvelbrained zoomies these days are incapable of appreciating any story that's not about saving the world.
Boomers have lives so pointless they're entertained by games about paying taxes and sorting files
Sovereign works well in the first game, it's intro scene does a good job making it menacing and it comes off as a legitimate threat once it's at the Citadel, forcing the player to make decisions that seem like they will have a tangible impact on the next games. I think the problem is that they either didn't know where they wanted to go after ME1 or the direction changed and they didn't have enough time to come up with a good main plot for the next two games that builds on the first one. Really I think that's the bigger problem than the story, if it had a serviceable but not fantastic story it would still make up for it by giving the story a lot of branches that make visible, mechanical impacts on later missions.
>I think the problem is that they either didn't know where they wanted to go after ME1 or the direction changed
I think they just had no plan at all. In ME1 Karpyshyn planted a few seeds that he supposed future writers/designers MIGHT use to develop sequels, but nobody had any concrete idea about what the future games would be about beyond "Shepard stops the Reapers".
It's a real tragedy because they could have set things up really well with some planning ahead of time. Like say, if Shepard being dead at the start of ME2 was already decided upon then they could have killed Shepard off at the end of ME1 when the wreckage hits the Citadel. Gives the game a dark ending. Then avoid marketing the game as a trilogy with a single protagonist and instead imply each game will be a different character. Then when players boot up ME2 and Shepard is awoken from a coma they'll be surprised and you avoid the silly way that it all comes together if you play ME2 right after ME1.
I kind of wish the series had no Reapers in it and that instead each game was a mostly self-contained story about one of the major conflicts in the series. It would work pretty well. There would be a chronology and carry-over of decisions and character relationships, but each game would still work on its own.
>Mass Effect 1
A rogue turian Spectre conspires with a hidden cabal of turian military commanders to depose the Council and fold the Citadel Races into the turian hierarchy as client species.
>Mass Effect 2
Devastating terrorist attacks by batarians are threatening to trigger a full scale war with the terminus. It turns out these terrorists are batarian abolitionists who want to goad the Council into destroying the Hegemony.
>Mass Effect 3
After 300 years the quarians have finally amassed enough firepower to attempt the recapture of their homeworld. This will radically change the balance of power in the galaxy with many interests for or against it.
>Mass Effect 4
A covert group of human supremacists have found and reactivated the Klendagon Gun, and are using it to hold the galaxy hostage, devastating critical alien worlds and enabling the human Systems Alliance to dominate its rivals. Shepard must end their tyranny and also prevent violent retaliation by the other races that could utterly destroy the progress humanity has made.
Each game would be connected back to one another and first game. In his plot in ME1, Saren would have worked with Daro'Xen to influence the geth, using them as a front for his operations. He'd have hired Balak as one of his chief agents, funding his movement as long as they attacked human worlds. He'd have even worked with Cerberus in the interests of developing biological weapons and uncovering ancient technology. His goal was to create a crisis in Citadel Space that would force the Council to cede emergency powers to the Turian Hierarchy.
Considering that the resolution of the genophage and the geth-quarian conflict were the only good parts of ME3, this is the obvious correct answer.
Mass Effect 4
>He’s not dead, he’s fixing the stars and when he’s done, he’ll come back.
Love that comic
Shepard lines up with Supes, I’m convinced there used to be a Superman fan at BioWare. The Easter egg in Dragon Age, the Cerberus Network “MSV Kent” story, Shepard’s friendship with Garrus, Liara’s borderline stalker relationship and the Reapers pretty much being Brainiac, plus the way he dies in Synthesis is almost 1:1 All-star
You are telling me Shepard is israeli?
They do make you recite heb-talk at Thane’s funeral
Both are very transparently pseudo-Jesuses, it makes sense there would be a bunch of parallels.
Don't care, I cried during ending
Console bioware is absolutely vile and is basically the video game equivalent of a Netflix exclusive series.
Only contrarians say things like this. Nobody on their first play through of mass effect ever thought to themselves that the reapers were uninteresting.
The prothean VI or talking to Saren are almost always said to be the most interesting parts of the first game. The reapers were cool. But the problem was that the writers did not finish developing the motivations for the reapers and how the story would end. They were just lazy.
>Nobody on their first play through of mass effect ever thought to themselves that the reapers were uninteresting.
The mystery is interesting and the stakes they pose, but they have always been less interesting to me as entities than any of the other races in the series. What is interesting about them is how to survive them.
Nah, the ayys and their politics and the general feel of the setting were always the hook. Le edgy robot man fleet was cringe a decade ago and it's cringe now.
>Only contrarians say things like this
Nah, ME2 is liked the most in general, because it's main story is basically irrelevant, barely connected to Reapers and game is focused on companions and fricking around doing sidequests. ME3 was heavily criticized for barely having any sidequests and heavy focus on main story, turning sidequests into eavesdropping and players in general disliked that Reapers were chasing them on campaign map instead of letting them be. Reapers were never the main appeal. Main appeal was getting into random, disconnected, self contained stories with your crew
Like in Star Trek.
>game is focused on companions
Which they then proceed to sideline for ME3.
What fricking moron decided to remove the characters that they spent so much time developing in ME2?
>Like in Star Trek.
But less bad.
I've seen a lot of people that thought that conversation with sovereign in the krogan base thing was this amazing gaming moment; I think it actually worked for a certain kind of person. If you'd played stuff like Freespace or read some middlebrow sci-fi novels it didn't really even register, but most people hadn't.
>I've seen a lot of people that thought that conversation with sovereign in the krogan base thing was this amazing gaming moment
Was it, though? It was just cringe.
I personally didn't even really "notice" it, as in it didn't feel like a major reveal, just basic plot development. But I'm telling you for a lot of people it was shocking and not what they expected at all, probably because they don't know much other sci-fi, and really whet their appetite to buy the next game and they'll still talk about it reverently to this day.
*and obviously those people are butthurt by this sci-fi thing the first game introduced them to being a big let down in the rest of the series
Feels like they abandoned the Elemental Zero plot after the introductory Talia mission in ME2.