Mass Effect LegendGary Edition

[MojoJojo]

To be honest, it was losing me with 2 anyway. Tying plot progression to picking up the characters was a dumb idea because it meant you spent almost no time at all with the later crew, and the story itself felt so thin. Also, Shepherd suddenly working for the guys who'd been consistently painted as psychos and cunts throughout the first game made no sense at all.

As always when Mass Effect comes up I have to mention this good but extremely long retrospective: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792

Here's where he talks about jarring and stupid the transition from one to two is: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=28485 (and the following entry).

ME2 is massively more efficiently produced than ME1. Splitting it up into mostly character recruitment missions means that is any one of the missions stalls in development they can cut it, and maybe add it back later as DLC. You're guaranteed to have a certain character in your squad, so you can add lots of character specific dialogue without worrying that most players won't hear it.

Contrast that with ME1, where they got Marina Sirtis to record a load of dialogue, which most players will miss because you have to have a particular character in your party, and you have to have done a specific mission first to even have them as an option to join your team.

There's a lot to like about 2 - the one on one dialogue with eccentric characters is were BioWare excelled, the improvements to combat are appreciated*, and a lot of the annoying cruft is removed (e.g. inventory management). Just a shame they had to torpedo the world building in the process for no apparent reason.

(*the heat sinks are stupid though)

[Mister Six]

Yeah, efficient production shouldn't really be a priority if it diminishes the game, especially in a genre (and even more so a series) that is heavily based around worldbuilding and choosing your own path. See also: Fallout 4, which is even worse for this kind of thing.

[Inspector Norse]

Looks an interesting article, that. Will give it a fuller read when I have time.

I think the gradual move from detailed worldbuilding to pacey character-based action did work over the course of the trilogy: the first got you interested in the world, the second got you invested in the people in it, so the third's focus on story and action felt more urgent and meaningful. They could have got the balance better, though: they didn't need to sacrifice as much. But nobody's perfect.

I started another go on Andromeda to fill the gap. It's not too bad, it plays smoothly and looks great (facial animations aside, the originals struggled with those but here they're just plain bad) and the two plotlines (establishing homes on new planets/investigating alien tech and civilisation) are decent, but it undermines itself too much with the lightweight tone - you've got this team of people who are struggling to find a viable home in a new galaxy, coming up against mysterious ancient technology, lethal clouds of dark matter and a violent unknown alien opponent, and they're reacting with no more passion than if they just read there's a new flavour of Ben and Jerry's come out.
This is heightened by the way it largely the worldbuilding from the original trilogy by having all but a small handful of the alien races go missing, and then the ones that do turn up just act like humans anyway.
It's still better than something like Assassin's Creed, but it's not a patch on the originals.

[bgmnts]

The Presidents weigh in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK2DqLU6fcE

[Mister Six]

And part 2:

https://youtu.be/FpuZBHjEJYU

[Inspector Norse]

Ho ho, pretty well done, those. Largely accurate rankings too, the best characters are Mordin (best written and most complex), Tali (best personal story), Garrus (most iconic, best voice in all games ever), and Wrex, though I agree that Garrus and Tali are a bit wooden in the first game. Found Liara's offscreen development from clumsy nerd to interstellar criminal mastermind a bit hard to swallow so wouldn't rank her at the top.
It's amusing the way that the characters nobody ever likes are all the human soldier types.

[MojoJojo]

This is heightened by the way it largely the worldbuilding from the original trilogy by having all but a small handful of the alien races go missing, and then the ones that do turn up just act like humans anyway.

ME3 is largely a fight between humans. I think there's a bias against having weird looking aliens in video/film/game making circles, too much association with crappy rubber mask schlok. And to be fair, I think a lot of people find it distracting - my brother could never get into Farscape because of it.

I ended up buying this. Playing through 1 and it's clear a lot of my memories are actually of ME2. It's not just the gameplay, the dialogue is very clunky and the delivery is stilted. Definitely showing it's roots; it feels like dialogue written to be read, then they just hired some voice actors to read it.

I have a suspicion that a lot of the motivation with the break from 1 to 2 was so they weren't trapped into re-hiring voice actors, and that's also why they have the anyone can die mechanic.

[Inspector Norse]

ME3 is largely a fight between humans. I think there's a bias against having weird looking aliens in video/film/game making circles, too much association with crappy rubber mask schlok. And to be fair, I think a lot of people find it distracting - my brother could never get into Farscape because of it.

ME3 is still stuffed with aliens - you have alien squadmates still, the main missions involve going to each of the major alien homeworlds etc. There's plenty of fighting against Cerberus goons too but I think that was just Bioware realising they had to do something about Cerberus, and making them into Bad Guy Number 2 to vary up the enemy types.
It doesn't make sense to make a game called MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA and then ditch half the stuff people liked about the original Mass Effect games. They were probably making a kind of half-arsed attempt to retain old fans with the name while trying to appeal a new audience - which is suggested by the way they seem to aim for some kind of Marvel/YA tone with all the characters reacting to every major galactic event with stupid quips or at the most mild bemusement - but this was coming in 2017, when CGI had already taken over in the film industry and fantasy had made a major comeback as well as the aforementioned Marvel etc having plenty of sci-fi elements with aliens. And they did include some aliens, it just felt like they couldn't be bothered reading up on the background for all the races from the first series so cut half of them out.

I have a suspicion that a lot of the motivation with the break from 1 to 2 was so they weren't trapped into re-hiring voice actors, and that's also why they have the anyone can die mechanic.

It's the same voice actors all the way through. I think some of them just got better and more comfortable in their roles, plus the second and third games cut down the amount of expository dialogue and make it more personal and relatable.
I think that the way pretty much all the characters could die or end up in different relationships meant that they wound up reducing some characters' roles in the third game, just so they didn't have to write and record reams and reams of extra dialogue that only a handful of players would even get.

[MojoJojo]

ME3 is still stuffed with aliens - you have alien squadmates still, the main missions involve going to each of the major alien homeworlds etc. There's plenty of fighting against Cerberus goons too but I think that was just Bioware realising they had to do something about Cerberus, and making them into Bad Guy Number 2 to vary up the enemy types.

I've not actually played 3, hoping to finally do that on this play though. I mostly commented because what you said about lack of aliens in ME:A echoed something said in that stupidly long* retrospective I posted before. He complains that the main antagonists in ME:3 are all human. But I've realised that that article focuses purely on the main story, to highlight how screwed up it is before the infamous ending. It does mention that the recruitment missions make up the bulk of ME2 and are mostly good. And endings of the Rachi and Quarian/Geth story lines also get praise, albeit with a bit of sniping that it's wrapping up stories set up in ME1. But that's all only a few hundred words in between the many thousands focussing on the main story.

With the voice actors, it's not that they all got sacked, but that none of them were essential to sequels so couldn't demand big paychecks. Or to be more charitable, the production wouldn't be completely derailed by one of them retiring or getting ill. I dunno, I'm just reaching for reasons for why ME2 burned everything down and has you recruit a new squad after you've already done that in the first one.


I've been doing some of the side quests in ME1, I quite like them as relaxing breaks but they are ridiculously unpolished. Shoot the last bad guy then a text box pops up saying they were infected by a virus but now it's all fine bye now. Even the asteroid DLC, which has a little bit of voice acting made specially for it, still reuses the tired old Rectangular Building 1** three times. Also the Mako would be fine, the problem is the landscapes it's put in require mountain climbing gear, not a tank.

*roughly 150,000 words, apparently.
**There is no Rectangular Building 2.

[bgmnts]

dunkey sums up Andromeda better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDjci1ODoBs

And yeah, sadly the majority of side content in ME1 that isn't character focused is extreeeemely unpolished to the say the least, it's almost like they put it in out of obligation. In my first playthrough of ME2 I had no idea who Cerberus were despite my Shepherd knowing, that's how unremarkable it was.

[The Crumb]

I assumed the squad do-over in ME2 was to make it easier to mostly ignore the consequences of player choices from ME1. The returning squadmates are the ones you can't kill or romance in 1.

[Pink Gregory]

I read some of that retrospective and, while quite good, it absolutely stinks of games writing in 2015.

[MojoJojo]

I assumed the squad do-over in ME2 was to make it easier to mostly ignore the consequences of player choices from ME1. The returning squadmates are the ones you can't kill or romance in 1.

There aren't many choices in ME1 though, and no romance. I think the only character things are whether Ashley or Kaidan dies, and whether Wrex dies.

[Inspector Norse]

Also the Mako would be fine, the problem is the landscapes it's put in require mountain climbing gear, not a tank.

I think we can just file it away as a classic piece of action-RPG mechanics. There are paths there that the developers have placed there. But we, the player, are always going to try to go to that map marker in a straight line from A to B and who cares if there's a mountain in the way? We've done it on foot in Morrowind, on horseback in RDR and in a horribly bouncy quad-tank thing in Mass Effect.

I read some of that retrospective and, while quite good, it absolutely stinks of games writing in 2015.

I read it and there are a lot of things he says which are objective criticisms, and it's not that hard to see how just a few small changes of direction would have resulted in a much better story*, but he also gets really nitpicky and like @MojoJojo says his focus on a couple of elements - the main plot and the worldbuilding - mean he almost seems to miss how much richer, smoother and three-dimensional the later games were overall.

*

Spoiler alert

fuck the Cerberus thing. If you want Shepard to go rogue, just have the Alliance secretly fund him because the Council are tossers, or there's different factions, that kind of thing. Martin Sheen can be President of the Alliance or something instead.
Then have the Collector thing tie into the main story a bit better rather than seeming like a timewasting distraction, which is what it ends up being. You've established the Reapers in ME1, so ME2 is about Shepard and co trying to prevent the Collectors from paving the way for them. Then in ME3 they arrive! and yeah you get the good missions there, the genophage and that tied in nicely, but then the ending is built properly on what you've done. So in the final battle your squadmates - because they're the experts after all - are leading or assisting the different forces, and depending on how well you've prepared your squadmates are going to get killed because say two of them are leading the Salarian force and you've pissed off the Salarians, so that's bye bye let's say Miranda and James, and then that leads up to a proper climax where instead of Shepard talking to some pissy little VI who ignores everything else, you need to fire the goddamn MacGuffin you've been building but there's lots of I don't know, buttons or different inputs or info needed and the fewer squadmates you have left, the less effectively it works, but if you get it right then it is basically a massive device that hacks the Reapers (because you've done something smart like having a mission to infiltrate a base and collect Reaper code, or even several missions leading this way) and turns them off, but if you've fucked it by killing off all the Quarians and not disarming that bomb in time and not getting Conrad Verner's thesis then you only have a handful of squadmates and it doesn't work properly, so it blows a ton of other shit up as well.
that's what I came up with in ten minutes and it's definitely better than the official version.

[close]

[Mister Six]

With the voice actors, it's not that they all got sacked, but that none of them were essential to sequels so couldn't demand big paychecks. Or to be more charitable, the production wouldn't be completely derailed by one of them retiring or getting ill. I dunno, I'm just reaching for reasons for why ME2 burned everything down and has you recruit a new squad after you've already done that in the first one.

Because it's a new game and they want to feature new characters and powers and stuff. It's pretty common - see Fallout, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls etc. Plus, Bioware's big strength is in character writing, so you can imagine them wanting to lean on what they're good at.

[Pink Gregory]

Remember when they released ME3 and only ME3 on the WiiU?

Genuinely who.

[beanheadmcginty]

There aren't many choices in ME1 though, and no romance.

No romance? Pretty sure I nobbed Liara in ME1.

[Inspector Norse]

Because it's a new game and they want to feature new characters and powers and stuff. It's pretty common - see Fallout, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls etc. Plus, Bioware's big strength is in character writing, so you can imagine them wanting to lean on what they're good at.

I think in the case of 1 to 2 it was simply that either of the two human squadmates would be dead, as would Wrex for half the players, so they couldn't be arsed writing a whole new game's worth of content for them. Garrus and Tali come back and Liara has a significant role and - Google tells me - was held back from being a squadmate because they'd already decided she would be a key character in the third game so couldn't send her on the suicide run.
For the third game they were probably stuck in between having about 15 characters all of whom* people wanted to see return, and knowing that any of them could have died in ME2, so they gave the majority slightly smaller parts, wrote in alternatives who'd turn up for key interactions if the original character had bought it, and avoided making most of them squadmates apart from the two or three who people would get up in arms about if they weren't there.

*except Jacob

[The Crumb]

There aren't many choices in ME1 though, and no romance. I think the only character things are whether Ashley or Kaidan dies, and whether Wrex dies.

Those are the ones I was thinking of. Easier to shelve them than try and write and design around characters that may or may not be dead.

There definitely are romances in the Bioware fashion. You can even get a scene with potential partners getting in an argument.

[MojoJojo]

Because it's a new game and they want to feature new characters and powers and stuff. It's pretty common - see Fallout, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls etc. Plus, Bioware's big strength is in character writing, so you can imagine them wanting to lean on what they're good at.

I was going to give a sarky response to this joking about how famous author x would would always kill off his main characters then resurrect them at the beginning of every story. But then I thought a bit more and realised that actually ME1 is the outlier because it is very much the first part of trilogy, and games just don't do that*. Sure we get sequels - set in the same world, and sometimes with the same lead(s). And sometimes picking up some points from the previous instalments. But we don't get games that leave stories incomplete the way ME1 does. And I now wonder if that's why they have the reset at the beginning of 2, because the producers decided this was a terrible idea for a videogame** and wanted to go back to a more-or-less self contained story.

This sort of ties into another thing I've noticed playing ME1 - it's massively ambitious for it's budget. It's not just the side missions that are rough around the edges.


(*I can't think of any that do).
(**Or films, or any other expensive to produce media. It's very rare to leave a story open outside genre novels)

[Jerzy Bondov]

In ME1 you meet the reaper guy and he's like 'oh mate there's stuff coming you'll never be able to comprehend' and then it arrives in the following games and it's just mean robots

[Inspector Norse]

This sort of ties into another thing I've noticed playing ME1 - it's massively ambitious for it's budget. It's not just the side missions that are rough around the edges.

I think it got caught in an awkward transitional period between traditional RPG mechanics and big open AAA games. There's a lot of sidequests that - despite the actual gameplay just being copy-paste drive to points A, B, C on this big empty planet jobs - explore interesting sci-fi concepts or moral dilemmas, but because of the old-fashioned design what actually happens when you get to the objective is you press a button and get a little bit of explanatory text. They seemed to run out of budget for cutscenes and visuals there.
It is a bit frustrating that they couldn't go further with the remaster, and actually recut or remake some parts of the game: I can't see anyone complaining if they'd ditched half of the sidequests (there are about 30 of those planets and they're all the bloody same) and added a bit of new content to the others, or at least made the environments a bit more interesting. Planetary exploration should be exciting and exotic, not just countless reskins of the same bland surfaces with little reward other than some more guff to clog up your overstuffed inventory and some credits you never spend.

The main missions are much better although again, they could have devoted a bit of time to improving the interior design so the places look more lived-in or at least decorated. This got better over the course of the series and one big improvement I did notice with Andromeda was that there was actually stuff, clutter around: they put the usual household or workplace junk everywhere, tables had coffee cups and pens on them, walls had decorations, etc.

[MojoJojo]

Yeah, that makes sense. It's not the first fully voiced Bioware game - that was Knights of the Old Republic, but it's the first one where they didn't have LucasArts helping out, and it feels a lot more like a BioWare game with peasants sending you on fetch quests and the like.

I've just finished Noveria, and it's actually a bit more fleshed out than the other starting missions. But it still has bits missing - like you're told Rachni eggs were sent there, keeping them away from the Queen in the hope of controlling them. But then you complete it and the queen's there? Just feels like it was missing some dialogue explaining how the Queen got there. And there are a few other bits were it feels like they ran out of money - the Rachni workers look like placeholders for example.

[Inspector Norse]

Isn't the story that they found the Queen egg, took her there, then separated the other eggs from her to hatch and raise them?
The bit I thought they screwed up was that a few rachni start attacking as soon as you get to the lab, before you've met anyone who can explain what they are, so your companions are asking WHAT THE HELL ARE THESE THINGS but when you look at them you get the target indicator saying "Rachni Soldier" which kills the mystery.
That, Virmire and Ilos are all cool missions I think, buried among the sidequest bumf. The other main one Feros is a bit too old-school KOTOR Bioware.

[beanheadmcginty]

It's the only game where I've read all the codex malarkey. I'm normally totally impatient with in-game lore and skip all of it, but there's something genuinely fascinating about a lot of the sci-fi concepts in this that lured me in and kept me reading.

[The Crumb]

Yeah, that makes sense. It's not the first fully voiced Bioware game - that was Knights of the Old Republic, but it's the first one where they didn't have LucasArts helping out, and it feels a lot more like a BioWare game with peasants sending you on fetch quests and the like.

It's the first Bioware one with a voiced protagonist I think, having to record an extra pair of voice tracks with all the possible permutations was probably an extra strain. I wonder if having both sides of conversations voiced changed their approach to recording.

[MojoJojo]

I read some of that retrospective and, while quite good, it absolutely stinks of games writing in 2015.

I don't know how I missed it but Shamus Young died in June 2022. His eldest child now writes the blog.

[Mister Six]

There another one of these:

[Inspector Norse]

It's the only game where I've read all the codex malarkey. I'm normally totally impatient with in-game lore and skip all of it, but there's something genuinely fascinating about a lot of the sci-fi concepts in this that lured me in and kept me reading.

I can never be bothered reading that stuff during gameplay - all the books and shit you find in Skyrim etc - because of the issues of my attention span and the general difficulty of reading lots of text on a TV screen, but after completing it I did find a Youtube where someone had put it all up including the voiceover, and listened to it all while at the gym and out walking. The dude reading it out has the perfect voice for that kind of nerdfest.

[Pink Gregory]

I don't know how I missed it but Shamus Young died in June 2022. His eldest child now writes the blog.

I used to be vaguely aware of him when I used to hang around the Escapist (before it went alt-right).  Wasn't really a fan but he clearly didn't get long enough, think he was only in his 40s then.