metagame

Story is where an RPG should shine — even a hybrid RPG like this one. The RPG player demon­strates a will­ing­ness to take things at a slower pace, to invest him­self into char­ac­ter and story, and to rel­ish the narrative.

So let’s look at the Mass Effect 2’s plot [Spoil­ers!]:

1. Hero is killed by aliens, then resurrected.
2. Hero finds out the aliens are snatch­ing humans.
3. Hero inves­ti­gates derelict alien ship to find out how to get to aliens.
4. Hero finds out that aliens are boil­ing humans down to organic soup to make an evil giant. Hero kills evil giant.

That’s the story that takes 20+ hours to deliver? Seri­ously, we have a vol­ume of con­tent equal to ten fea­ture films, with less plot than some­thing directed by Michael Bay. This is a story that takes (con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate) 100,000 lines of dia­logue to tell! Even just in terms of pure cin­e­matic sequences, I haz­ard that Mass Effect is close to a fea­ture film in length. Why is there so lit­tle actual con­tent there?

For fair­ness, let’s boil down a sim­i­lar story — another sec­ond part of a trilogy:

1. Hero is wounded by a mon­ster, then rescued.
2. Ene­mies attack the home of our hero and his friends. They escape.
3. Hero goes through train­ing montage.
4. Hero’s friends are cap­tured. Hero’s best friend is frozen in carbonite.
5. Hero res­cues his friends. Hero finds out the leader of the ene­mies is his father.

Now that’s a story. And that story has a vil­lain we remember.

It’s Not Per­sonal
The vil­lains of Mass Effect 2? Face­less, anony­mous evil. Unknow­able men­aces. They show up every 50,000 years and kill every­one. They’re like a nat­ural dis­as­ter, and just as imper­sonal. Guess what, guys, vil­lains with­out faces make ter­ri­ble oppo­nents. We have to see the vil­lain (and ide­ally, under­stand him) before we can get emo­tion­ally invested. Before we hate. The Reapers kill plenty of humans, but their goals remain unin­tel­li­gi­ble. The best vil­lains make their enmity per­sonal, and so the story becomes per­sonal too.

Come to think of it, this story never ended well either.

The funny thing is, Bioware’s writ­ers know this. They knew it in Knights of the Old Repub­lic, dur­ing which we dis­cover the pri­mary vil­lains are you… and the side­kicks who betrayed you. They knew it in Mass Effect 1. Remem­ber Saren? The player inter­acted with that vil­lain repeat­edly, and when we weren’t argu­ing with Saren, we watched cin­e­mat­ics of the evil bas­tard doing ter­ri­ble things. Remem­ber also how much we focused on Shep­herd becom­ing the first human Spec­tre — an accom­plish­ment per­sonal to you. The devel­op­ment staff in Edmon­ton hasn’t for­got­ten how to tell a good story in Mass Effect 2. There are good sto­ries, really good sto­ries, embed­ded in the game: sto­ries of betrayal, loss, and revenge. Sto­ries of self-discovery.

That’s true of every character’s story except for one: yours. You’d think that the player’s story is the one that would mat­ter most, right? Regret­tably, the player has been reduced to play­ing generic action hero fight­ing generic alien bad guys. The story equiv­a­lent of Space Invaders.

And what’s worse? The mate­r­ial to make a per­sonal story is there in the nar­ra­tive. The aliens killed you! Sure, it would have been bet­ter if the possessor/lead vil­lain had appeared to do you in him­self. But as it is, Shep­ard is returned to life before we can blink, and all too quickly the whole thing is for­got­ten. Your char­ac­ter doesn’t seem to care that he died, and the enemy doesn’t care or even acknowl­edge that he killed you. If no one in the game cares, why should we? Our char­ac­ter spends more time argu­ing with side­kicks about why they res­ur­rected him. Really, why was Shep­ard killed at all? Was this all a mar­ket­ing stunt?

By the way, the whole alien Har­bin­ger boss employ­ing a pos­ses­sion is a great mechanic, if under­used. I love the idea of beat­ing up the mas­ter vil­lain repeat­edly, though I wish he had more lines of dia­logue than “I will hurt you.” The design­ers appear to be sav­ing the Big Bad for the third in the tril­ogy, but why not script up a threat­en­ing con­ver­sa­tion with a pos­sessed Col­lec­tor? I could kill the crea­ture after­ward, feel good about myself, and still know that the war is far from over.

These are cool side­kicks. I wish my story was as good as theirs.

It’s Not You, It’s Me
I’ve cir­cled around this point here and in the last post, but the fun­da­men­tal fail­ure of Mass Effect is that the game isn’t about the main char­ac­ter and the story isn’t about him either. In terms of pol­ish, effort, and sheer game­play hours, the game is all about the side­kicks. Recruit­ing each of the side­kicks, and com­plet­ing their loy­alty mis­sions, com­poses the bulk of the game’s con­tent. Imag­ine instead if that effort was expended on deal­ing with your char­ac­ter, in mak­ing your choices and your deci­sions mat­ter, and pro­duc­ing branch­ing con­tent that actu­ally branched as a result of your actions and con­ver­sa­tions. I think I’d like to play that game.

It’s another point worth mak­ing: twelve side­kicks and five allies? Really? I know the design­ers want to encour­age replaya­bil­ity, and hav­ing over a hun­dred (12 x 11) dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties of side­kicks to bring along would seem to fur­ther that cause. And yet not really. A big cast doesn’t mean any­thing other than a whole lot of char­ac­ters I won’t spend much time with. There are great lit­tle pay­offs in each of their sto­ries, but I won­der if we couldn’t go deeper instead of wider. I’d rather have fewer side­kicks, but develop them more. Maybe their side sto­ries could be inter­wo­ven and tan­gled instead of form­ing totally inde­pen­dent nar­ra­tives. Couldn’t Mordin have some­thing to do with the Warlord’s genetic pro­gram? Maybe Jack was on Samara’s or Garrus’s tar­get list. Why not tie together Tali’s and Legion’s story and advance the story of the geth to some resolution?

We love this genre of game because it offers mean­ing­ful choices. Or at least appears to. Embrace that. As far as replaya­bil­ity goes, make this game one in which the player deci­sions are the most impor­tant thing. Make  branch­ing con­tent that affects not just how you get some­place in a lin­ear story (a always leads to b, regard­less of how much of a saint or bas­tard you are along the way). Change what actu­ally hap­pens dur­ing game­play (a could lead to b, c, or d). I know that branch­ing con­tent is expen­sive, but the band­width appears to be there. The focus is just on other char­ac­ters. The usual argu­ment against branch­ing con­tent is that you’re mak­ing a bunch of con­tent that a high per­cent­age of the audi­ence won’t see. I don’t think that argu­ment applies to Mass Effect 2.

The only way your story can really change in Mass Effect? As best I can tell, your choices in doing loy­alty mis­sions and assign­ing roles to side­kicks in the final level can deter­mine if side­kicks die. That’s it. Your lit­tle story though, is stead­fastly lin­ear, all the way through. Your choices can’t affect you, or any out­come we see dur­ing this game — but don’t worry! They promise it will in the next!