By John Walker on August 26th, 2008 at 11:03 am.
I’ve been playing lots of Mass Effect recently, because as a leading games critic it’s essential I stay ahead of the curve and keep my finger on the pulse. A mere nine months after buying it on 360 and then never playing it, and then blagging a PC version only three months after its second release, I’m on the case.
It would probably be controversial to say that BioWare‘s three most recent RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, are all exactly the same game in a different setting. Because Mass Effect’s setting is quite similar to KotOR’s. But what’s rather fortunate is that they change the combat style in each, so there’s always something unique to complain about on a forum. What’s also important to note is that they’re all three flipping ace, and I love them. They just… they just tend to do this one really silly thing.
One thing I really want to do is go and sit down with Dr and Dr BioWare, and be having a regular chat, probably asking questions about Dragon Age or something journalistic like that, and then suddenly in the middle of it all I’d shout, “MY SISTER WANTS TO GET AN ABORTION! WHAT SHOULD SHE DO?”
When they look scared and ask what I’m talking about, I’d only offer them the very slightest pieces of information about the situation, probably saying that the unborn baby might have some sort of horrible disability and she doesn’t want it to be born to suffer, but her husband is currently away at sea and unreachable (because it’s happening in the past or in space or somewhere where radio signals don’t work) and won’t be able to have his say. I’d only give them two possible answers, and their stuttering, unprepared response would decide the fate of this unfortunate foetus. And then I’d ask them about how the Sonic license first caught their attention.
I’m not sure, but I don’t know if RPGs are quite the place to try and resolve the most controversial and devisive subjects of our day. Well no, that’s not true at all. They could be, but perhaps in a setting slightly more dignifiied than as a result of overhearing a conversation on a street, and then immediately being given life or death decisions to make for complete strangers.
It just happened to me in Mass Effect. I’m back in Space City One (I don’t pay much attention to names – if you ask me, I’ll tell you what all the companion characters are called in my head) and trundling about the confusing bridges, popping in to see people who need to know about the contents of crates on distant planets, and I pass an arguing couple. Being a paragon of virtue (seriously, you should see my Paragon status. I haven’t quite matched my immediately being a glowy angel like in KoTOR, but my goodness-o-meter is almost full) I of course stop and ask them what’s up. Oddly they don’t tell me to fuck off, but rather immediately adopt me into their family and confidence, and explain the skeletal nature of their dilemma. They’re brother and sister-in-law, and her kid might have some illness. But she’s heard on the news that the treatment for it is potentially dangerous, and doesn’t want to risk losing her child treating him for a disease he might not have. Her husband just died, and the brother says she’s acting out of grief, and that she should just take the treatment.
So we’ve got ourselves a cipher for the MMR debate. You find out the stats, and the chances of having the illness are reasonably high, and the chances of the treatment causing problems are 1 in 300. But she’s heard this news story, and she says what if her kid is the 1 in 300? DECIDE THE CHILD’S FATE!
So, as anyone with a modicum of scientific reason knows, there’s no evidence that the MMR vaccine causes harm. Utterly none. But that’s hard to keep relevant when you’re a mother of a baby, and you have to make this decision without any expertise of your own about whether the evidence is correct and there’s definitely no chance of your kid getting autism… Good grief, this suddenly got a bit heavy. Which would somewhat be my point. This is a completely inappropriate subject to appear in this jokey, silly post. And it’s far too big of a subject to decide on the bridge of a scifi game for a couple of strangers, before I carry on looking for that last bloody Keeper to scan that I cannot find anywhere despite combing the entire place three times.
I really love that BioWare include these tough choices, but I wish they’d include them in a slightly more dignified way. I wish they’d be part of a larger story, a continued struggle of conscience where decisions are made based on multiple conversations, varying expert and inexpert opinion, and a wealth of emotional and emotive situations. I want to be forced to contend my scientific reason against the irrational emotions of those in the throws of a situation. I want to wrestle with the toughest subjects, with data and passion from people on all sides trying to sway me to their way of thinking. I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think because they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you.
Bizarrely, I told the bridge couple that it was her child, and her choice, and as a consequence he had the emotional breakthrough of recognising his motivations were not as pure as he had claimed, but rather because he wanted to hold onto this last piece of his brother. But that’s not what I think! I would have gone through the statistics of the situation with her, had her talk with doctors, and encouraged her to go with the scientific odds. But I was given two choices and one cop-out. Side with her, side with him, or leave them to it. Really, I think the right answer in that situation should have been to leave them to it, but dammit I’m playing a videogame and I’m going to see what the consequences of my choosing would be. I’m interested that I went against type and chose her. But that was because the situation was so peculiarly binary that I was really deciding: who has a right to make a choice about a baby, the mother or the uncle. Well, the mother then. That I want to clobber people who ignore science and risk their children’s health because of reading idiots misreporting facts in newspapers was suddenly irrelevant. And more, that I think that wasn’t challenged by the situation. In the end, the encounter oddly cheapened a serious topic.
It is great that BioWare aspire beyond most other developers when creating their games, and I love that the worlds are rich enough to have space for recognising universal subjects. Occasionally it works – the woman who had transfered her love for her dead husband onto her missing droid in KotOR was especially splendid, but mostly because it played out as a quest, rather than a conversation, and the situation was remarkably complex. You could force the droid to stay with her, leaving her in a perpetually futile relationship and the droid trapped against what he knew was best for his master, but her apparently happy. You could free the droid, and in doing so force her to face her grief, potentially destroying her. You could even kill the droid, and then go back to her and tell her it was still alive and she should keep looking for it. Muah ha ha! But it was a droid, and unique to a science fiction world, and it gave you space to discuss and explore the subject. It wasn’t a morally ambiguous situation on which you’re forced to flick a giant fate-deciding switch before you can quicksave, which unfortunately is the more typical.
I can’t wait for Dragon Age. But I do rather fear I’ll be wandering through some remote village, searching for the missing mystic rune of Grogglefanaar, when a local baker’s wife will ask me to decide whether she should allow her sickly husband to die against her doctor’s wishes.
26/08/2008 at 11:12 ImperialCreed says:
So what do you call your companions in your head?
Also, interesting little piece. It’s great to see games trying to grapple with something a bit more highbrow, but even the best of ‘em often make an absolute balls of it. I’m going back to the Citadel to find the couple you’re talking about. I’ve missed them on two playthroughs.
Edit: Come to think of it, a lot of the side quests have the same outcomes – go with one side, or the other, or cop out. Now you’ve pointed it out it all seems a little too transparent for my liking.
26/08/2008 at 11:19 John Walker says:
Giant Fat Slug Guy, Lizard-Head Guy, Sexy Blue Girl, Facemask Girl, Mr Full-of-himself Guy and Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl.
26/08/2008 at 11:21 ImperialCreed says:
Haha, I ended up calling Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl something like Lazy Eyes when I was describing the character to my girlfriend. There’s something about her facial animation that’s slightly off…
Nice to know I wasnt the only one who found Sexy Blue Girl sexy.
26/08/2008 at 11:28 Rook says:
This sounds like typical Bioware. There’s an obviously good answer, and an obviously bad answer. Bioware don’t ever seem to be able to offer the players a choice that they can’t figure out which side of the coin it’ll land on and the never make the right choice work out the wrong way and I think their games suffer for it. Obsidian are way ahead of Bioware in this camp, and I think CD Project did a good job on the Witcher too.
26/08/2008 at 11:28 _Nocturnal says:
They are located near Barla Von, the shady guy with connections to the Shadow Broker.
Interestingly, I chose the same thing as John, for the same reasons.
26/08/2008 at 11:29 James G says:
What I really want is a Bioware RPG that allows me to storm the offices of a certain newspaper (that may or may not rhyme with Daily Heil) and forcibly infect them all with Measles, Mumps and Rubella (at the same time) and ask them whether they think the very real symptoms they are suffering are preferable to their fictitious constructs. I’m too nice to do something like that in real life, but I’d quite happily pick up a few Renegade points to achieve the fictional equivalent. (I was especially spitting with rage recently when I noticed that said newspaper contained an article now attacking the various parents who were, against all scientific evidence, failing to administer the MMR vaccine to their children. What they failed to mention was where these ‘ignorant’ parents could possibly have got their misinformation from.)
26/08/2008 at 11:30 Schadenfreude says:
Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl has the same name as Bruce Campbell’s character in the Evil Dead trilogy which leads me to believe that Bioware originaly wanted to include a time-travelling one-handed chainsaw-weilding zombie slayer but found out after they recorded everyone else’s V.O. that they couldn’t get the rights.
Or am I reading into it too much?
26/08/2008 at 11:33 ImperialCreed says:
Schaden: You make a thoroughly plausable case.
26/08/2008 at 11:34 Myros says:
The quest you listed and the ‘right to life’ one where you get to decide wether to turn off a life support system for the husband of a crazy spacer woman – both seemed a little odd to me, like Bioware were trying too hard to be relavent (to 21st century earth perceptions). Or as you said, not putting these elements into an ongoing and meaningful context just cheapens the real moral dilemas.
Oh and the MMR shots can cause “harm” just not the kind of serious harm that some media and net sources have been freeking out about. ;p
26/08/2008 at 11:35 PetitPiteux says:
>”I’m not sure, but I don’t know if RPGs are quite the place to try and resolve the most controversial and devisive subjects of our day.”
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! anyone?
26/08/2008 at 11:35 Psychopomp says:
That’s *SEXY* Facemask Girl to you!
26/08/2008 at 11:36 Jacob W says:
So what games offer more sophisticated choices than Demon Hitler/Baby Jesus? Things that come to mind:
Jade Empire claims to be not about a good/evil dichotomy but rather a more nuanced yin/yang thing, but that’s basically a huge lie.
The Witcher has a uniformly grim and amoral system that I found refreshing.
The Fallout series often had more than the usual binary choice, especially if you count the ever-popular Kill Everyone Involved.
I’m sure I’m missing some. Any suggestions?
26/08/2008 at 11:40 Schadenfreude says:
There’s Bloodlines. The Heather thing in particular.
26/08/2008 at 11:46 Heliocentric says:
i’d like the option to punch them both in the face. I find that solves most of the issues.
Imagine those 2 people were party members and the effects of that one choice would resonate through the whole game now say you have a dozen of these for each of a half dozen characters, thats about 2^72 possible outcomes assuming all these choices are binary.
26/08/2008 at 11:51 suchchoices says:
Fallout (2?) had those great bits where you’d walk into a shop and the street kids either side of the door would pillage your pockets and run gleefully back to their keeper with the only decent weapon you had. Oh, what to do, what to do. Lovely way to drop an implicit moral decision into the lap of the unsuspecting player.
26/08/2008 at 11:55 mrmud says:
I do recall Mass Effect having several choices that were representing either Kant based or ethics or Utilitarianism. A choice that isnt so much about good versus evil but about different ways of percieving good (good for the individual or good for the whole)
26/08/2008 at 11:55 Diogo Ribeiro says:
Probably not, unless we’re talking to those scurrying Bioware fanboys. Actually, the similarities in approach and design also stretch back to Neverwinter Nights as well, and many of those moral issues are a throwback to the Baldur’s Gate era as well. They found a formula that works for their target audience and whammo, copy & paste.
26/08/2008 at 11:59 CakeAddict says:
I found mass effect great to play, but KotOR is still my favoriet bioware game.
Problably because it’s star wars (yay jedi’s) but I also found the choices and ways to approach a problem better done then in Mass Effect.
… To bad that they are making a mmorpg out of it..
26/08/2008 at 12:23 suchchoices says:
re: Heliocentric
Sadly, for games that tout “over 200 endings” (*cough* Fallout 3 *cough*), I suspect that the decisions leading to the different endings don’t actually interact to any large degree. For example, supposing that fallout 3 has 2^8 = 256 endings. Worst case scenario is that there are only 8 important decisions that influence the ending, and none of these decisions interact with each other (ie ending has 8 components, each one decided by one of your previous decisions), so you’d only need to play the game to completion 16 times to see all the content.
Actually producing content by hand for 2^8 (let alone 2^72) interesting distinct endings would be a nightmare. Of course, if anyone writes a game that manages to procedurally generate interesting and distinct storylines based on one’s choices, now that would be something.
(Self reflection: Oh dear. The topic? forced and limited Grand Moral Choices in games. My response? Mathematics: Cartesian product vs tensor product.)
edit: at least the kotor games cater to my demographic with the inclusion of towers of Hanoi puzzles and the like
26/08/2008 at 12:23 Optimaximal says:
*smiles*
26/08/2008 at 12:26 Gap Gen says:
This is one of my problems with games pretending to have choices and consequences in general – I read Quintin’s article on Pathologic recently, and I agreed with his comment that Bioshock’s choice concerning children looks a bit shallow and trite, even if there is a genuine point being made.
Deus Ex managed the choice aspect fairly well, I thought, but then it is Deus Ex. In contrast, I thought this was the one of the weakest aspects of Invisible War – in many cases, the choices you could make made no difference at all. The worst one was whether or not to kill your partner after fighting them, which was a yes/no choice that had no consequence afterwards. The characterisation wasn’t even strong enough to make me care about them enough for it to matter. But enough IW bashing…
26/08/2008 at 12:36 CdrJameson says:
Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Now Blown Up Girl in my case, I fear. Oh well, she was Hateful and Racist, not to mention Fundamentalist.
Anyway. Bioware! Stop spending all your time on (admittedly lovely) shiny graphics and detailed descriptions of planets you can’t interact with in any way, and put more interesting side quests back in! That’s the way to make longer games, not forcing me to trek back and forth from lab to barracks just to complete a no-choices conversation.
Mass Effect, you’re so pretty, with several lushly different planets to land on, but wait! Why, if the evil space pirates haven’t set up another identical-except-for-the-crate- positions base. Looks like I’ll have to stand in the doorway again until they eventually run at me one at a time. Oh, mustn’t forget to clear the guards from the outside. Won’t take long… after all, I’ve got a tank and they haven’t.
Good thing the main plot missions are interesting. I’m off to Baldur’s Gate 2 after this one I think, just to check that the side-plots did used to be more interesting.
26/08/2008 at 12:39 subedii says:
You know, I keep hearing people describe Ashley as a hateful racist type, but I never really saw her that way at all.
Fundamentally (no pun intended) she has issues with Earth being independent and capable of functioning for itself on the galactic stage. In her eyes the sovereign nation state of Earth should not have to depend on a galactic council or other nation states in order to be able to survive. If nothing else it’s an understandable viewpoint, and it’s one that shifts her thought processes appropriately. The reason she doesn’t want aliens on board the Normandy isn’t because she thinks they’re slimy, it’s because the Normandy is an advanced prototype with incredibly sensitive information on board that she feels it best kept secret from other species. She does have some initial aversion to alien species to begin with but that’s about it, and stems more from culture shock than anything else.
By the end of the game if you take her down the paragon path she comes to the realisation that Earth cannot fundamentally survive just on its own, the universe is too big for that, and it’s important to be a part of something bigger in order for everyone to be able to survive.
As a character I found her far more interesting than Liara. To be honest, I thought Liara was just about as shallow as a damp puddle on a hot day, and largely present as a fan-service for the people looking to Captain Kirk it up with a blue alien.
Closer to the topic at hand, I feel that Planescape: Torment usually gave quite a good amount of depth to it’s moral questions. In particular there was usually a lot of information given about the subject beforehand, and your choices were usually far more varied than just binary. Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them. That was pretty impressive to me. The whole question of “What can change the nature of a man?” was brought up repeatedly throughout the game and with different contexts. By the end you had pretty thoroughly been taken through the concept and were allowed to say your piece on the matter. That was very well done.
Having said all that, I personally think that John might be reading too much into the specific choice given in the example. Might just be me but I never saw this as a cipher for the MMR debate. I suppose it could have been, but I think that Bioware were just trying to insert something “edgy” and “topical” into the game. I did feel it was fairly out of place though, given the universe saving shenanigans that your character is usually up to.
I thought a good choice sequence was the one with the Rachni (or however you spell that). You’re given a lot of information regarding the history of the situation beforehand, and allowed to draw your own conclusions. Some more diversity in the choices might have been appreciated but I didn’t feel too limited with the “yes / no” scenario as it was presented. What I did object to was the labelling of goody / baddy to the choices (let’s face it, everyone knew which choice would be which there). Anyone making the choice they did wouldn’t be doing so out of spite, but because they felt it was for the best. It’s something I feel a lot of RPG’ fall down on, labelling actions as simple good or bad is always such a relative thing.
26/08/2008 at 12:39 Reverend Speed says:
Can I ask a question?
Don’t play too many RPGS, but I often find that the limited number of handled choices combined with some rather ambiguous text lables can place me in some odd positions. For example, the Consort.
“I just saved your political position on this here space station, so no I DON’T think this little trinket’s gonna be enough to reimburse meee wwWAAH we’re gonna have sex now? Wait, hang on–”
“Sir, should me and Utterly Boring Biotic Guy just stay in this room and watch?”
“What? WHAT? Why the hell would you–”
*Weird little sex pod chamber thing (how erotic) seals shut, allowing only the occasional panicked squeal and thud to escape*
“I guess that means he’s into it.”
“Awwww yeahh…” *steps closer to pod*
…
I mean, that was just uncomfortable. And unintentionally hilarious.
Isn’t that, on a fairly large scale, awful story design? I mean, the plot can carry on, but what kinda idiot universe is this?
And then there was the (seemingly) unavoidable romantic plotlines that really had nothing to do with the main plot. With no direct connection, it just felt like the designers were going out of their way to offer their audience (who could never possibly have experienced sex in real life) to enjoy SOME SEX! SEXY SEX!
WITH AN ALIEN! FROM A RACE! WHICH WE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY! SO YOU COULD HAVE SEXY SEX WITH ‘EM!
Which becomes far more appealing when the alternative is Racist Cliché. But then Blue Alien is basically a Wet Blanket.
Worst of all, I couldn’t find a way to turn ‘em both down with style and humour. Instead, I settled on becoming the biggest boor in the galaxy. And STILL I got blue chick.
And you’re left with a fucking montage of Ooh! OH! Ahh… and there’s still no goddamn point to it all. Don’t write a sex scene that’s not plot essential! It’s just a sequence with an inevitable end! Jesus, Story 101…
GRRAAGH!
At least in San Andreas, I’d get a new car…!
Mass Effect’s mostly an insultingly silly waste of time, bar exploratory gubbins which are mostly boring. Mostly. The plot that kicks in during the last quarter is just GREAT and the conclusion is excellent. =)
Also, Bring Down the Sky. Surprisingly good. Lovely knife twist if you save the hostages.
Ahh. I feel purged.
—
CdrJameson: Mass Effect, you’re so pretty, with several lushly different planets to land on, but wait! Why, if the evil space pirates haven’t set up another identical-except-for-the-crate- positions base.
Actually, this coulda been great. If they’d spent more time drawing attention to this, talking about the major suppliers of modular planetary living quarters, that coulda been great. You could have rescued the chairman of that company and demanded greater variety, etc… =) Hang a goddamn lantern on it, wouldja?
Subedii: Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them.
Absolutely. Planescape beats out most rpgs for choices and subtlety. Deus Ex hammer’s ‘em for plot, character, humour, setting…
26/08/2008 at 12:40 Tom says:
I did laugh at that bit. It was like: “Hey! Not to eaves drop or anything but I couldn’t but notice you were talking about a deeply personal matter”.
26/08/2008 at 12:43 dartt says:
Great article. I think it’s a common problem in RPGs that the developers have these wonderful ideas for moral choices for the player to agonise over but then forget to weave them in to the strory in a way that introduces them to the player effectively.
26/08/2008 at 12:45 Gap Gen says:
Stop spending all your time on … detailed descriptions of planets you can’t interact with in any way…
I hate this part of games, where they feel that an extremely detailed backstory is a good thing. Often it is, but only when you don’t have to sit through pages of exposition. If you do, your game is poorly written. HL2 is the perfect example of the opposite approach, and it works far better – I can work out what happened through the hints they gave me, and didn’t have to trawl through pages of dross that has no relevance to anything.
Still, at least they didn’t publish a Mass Effect novel. Please tell me they didn’t publish a Mass Effect novel.
26/08/2008 at 12:51 Richard says:
There’s a Mass Effect novel. Two of them, actually.
26/08/2008 at 12:53 Seniath says:
@Gap Gen: I’m afraid they did. Twice.
Edit: Nads, beaten to the punch.
26/08/2008 at 12:57 Ian says:
I think the whole “talking to random strangers just to see if they’ve got anything to say” thing is a bit odd in RPGs anyway.
26/08/2008 at 12:58 Naurgul says:
I put this in the same category I put “Look! Racism!” from the Witcher. It’s the evolution of “blood+tits=mature”. It’s like they specifically made it as material for the fanboys to shout how the game has depth and as a bullet-point for the box: Choices & Consequences! Pressing Issues!
Let’s just hope developers think of things like this in a way other than just another selling point.
26/08/2008 at 13:02 Psychopomp says:
“Probably not, unless we’re talking to those scurrying Bioware fanboys. ”
Hello, have you spent much time on the Bioware boards? We’re *VERY* aware of the flaws in Biowares games…
26/08/2008 at 13:07 subedii says:
I think John’s objection wasn’t so much to the issue itself, it’s the fact that he wasn’t allowed to resolve it in the manner that he wanted to. Instead he had to make a choice that he wasn’t happy with. I’d also say it makes a person uncomfortable when having to make a choice that they fundamentally disagree with when it’s the best out of what the player views as worse choices.
It’s an unfortunate limitation with too many RPG’s that they don’t allow you to make a real choice, just a good / bad choice.
26/08/2008 at 13:12 suchchoices says:
Subedii: Sometimes you were even given the option of taking the same course of action but with different reasonings behind them.
Torment was a wonderful game.
I think a great example of this separation of action and intention in fictional characters is the movie Memento. You see the characters perform the same actions over and over, but each time the actions are presented in a different context due to the additional information you have seen.
(edit: i think i’m talking about the playoffs between action and context, with intention being part of the context.)
I guess some games do this as well, to a degree – Braid springs to mind. Bioshock along with any other game featuring a ‘grand betrayal’ twist probably count too.
Surely games, as an interactive non-linear medium, offer a far greater potential for exploring these kinds of subtleties than other mediums.
26/08/2008 at 13:22 Mr. Brand says:
I’m disappointed about the lack of Wrex romance options.
26/08/2008 at 13:24 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
When I think of the awkward treatment of “choices” by Bioware, I’m reminded of this awkwardness:
In BG2, Male characters could romance three characters, all interesting–especially Viconia. Female characters had one, who wasn’t quite as interesting. And he also looked kinda sleazy, which didn’t help.
26/08/2008 at 13:25 John Walker says:
subedii – She describes aliens as like a dog you might love, but would let die if human lives were at stake!
That’s just about as racist as you can get.
26/08/2008 at 13:26 Heliocentric says:
the 2^72 statement was a negative comment. Who is ever going to write meaningfull dialogue for all that. As black and white as it was i liked gal civ’s moral choices. Commit genocide? But they had no relivence but to a variable. For a game to have real choices it has to genuinely escape being linear. Changing a stat or a static npc wont work. As games plots arch ever wider the time on each one would shrink. That is apart from procedural morality, like stalker. Each group represents a point of view.
26/08/2008 at 13:33 subedii says:
@ John: I may be reading this incorrectly, but my understanding was that she described it the other way around.
She describes how the council views humans as a Dog. Useful and friendly to them, but ultimately if the issue of survival came down to either them or their dog, it wouldn’t be the dog that survived.
That’s not even racism, that’s just Machiavellian politics. To understand it from her viewpoint, would the council choose to sacrifice the rest of the council races in order for humanity to survive, or would they allow humanity to die in order for the greater whole to survive? It’s a difficult choice, but the practical one is the latter, and the previous history of that universe has showcased them making similar choices with the fates of other species.
If you view things from that basis, it becomes understandable why she views a detachment and independence of Earth from the council and council races as necessary: She believe the only ones that the humans can really rely on when the chips are down are the humans. That’s not to say anything strictly bad about the Council races in themselves, but just that politics of the situation is like that if viewed from a utilitarian perspective.
26/08/2008 at 13:36 Dinger says:
Can you present a complex moral issue using only a dialogue wheel?
The world you create is, willy nilly, the world you understand, and that includes the implicit moral and ethical rules by which it functions. SimCity, for example, doesn’t give you artificial choices about what your ideal society should look like. It does, however, assume a grid model of urban planning, that people will commute to where they work, and that food and water production are givens. And the easiest way to get a “high score” is to make a city for the rich. But SimCity doesn’t tell you that the “right” city should look like Orinda; it just stacks the deck that way.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, on the other hand, set out to make a statement on similar moral/ethical/political issues. The whole game is wrapped around the developers’ vision.
In other words, the “moral landscape” of a game is the gamespace: the rules and the entities that make up the game. Putting “moral/ethical choice” into the narrative is jarring, superficial and beside the point. If you want ethics to really matter, make it the core of the game, so that “weighty consequences” are truly weighty. Otherwise leave it alone.
In American terms, Dennis Miller sucked as a Monday Night Football commentator not because his references were too obscure, but because they had only a superficial bearing on the action on the field. Without context, there can be no meaning.
26/08/2008 at 13:39 Requiem says:
“Deus Ex managed the choice aspect fairly well, I thought, but then it is Deus Ex. In contrast, I thought this was the one of the weakest aspects of Invisible War – in many cases, the choices you could make made no difference at all.” I’ve not played IW but I have to laugh at this, Deus Ex had only one choice that made a difference later in the game and it wasn’t much of a difference at that. Everything else was just a tactical choice no different from most other shooters, that only affected the situation there and then.
Trouble with BioWare games is they tend to throw you straight into the deep end of the main plot which makes the side quests stick out like a sore thumb. Mass Effect, oh you’re racing against time to save all organic life in the galaxy, oh please stop and go find these trinklets/bandits/monkeys etc. Jade Empire your master has been kidnapped and taken to a fate unknown, please stop and help this woman find a husband. KotOR is probably the best of the bunch since it’s main story is a search for clues and helping people is in character for a Jedi, making stopping and sticking your nose in and talking to random people fit right in.
Mass Effect would of been so much better if they had held back the main plot and your character becoming a spectre until the last third of the game. This sort of ethical dilema wouldn’t of felt so out of place if you weren’t on a save the galaxy quest or if you’d been able to choose less combat fixated character roles at the start of the game, before becoming a spectre.
26/08/2008 at 13:41 Okami says:
@Naurgul: Hold on a sec! While racism surely is an issue in The Witcher, it doesn’t feel tacked on. You don’t deal with it in a purely black/white manner. The non humans are neither innocent victims, nor is the order of the flaming rose a collection of ultra racist evil doers. There’s a whole lot of different shades of grey in there.
Also “choices and consequences” in the Witcher were implemented rather well. Especially concerning the whole order vs elves issue. The choices themselves weren’t easy to make and could have very far reaching consequences later on in the game.
If you really need to whack The Witcher, concentrate on the sexy sex with sexy girl. Though I didn’t mind it, this is a feature that was obviously added in order to go all “OMG TEH MATUREZ” about it.
26/08/2008 at 13:58 MissingKeeperSpoiler says:
Don’t look at this if you’re heart-set on finding that missing keeper, but I’m willing to bet it’s on the balcony out the back door of the embassy bar.
26/08/2008 at 14:01 Gap Gen says:
subedii – She describes aliens as like a dog you might love, but would let die if human lives were at stake!
You could get more xenophobic – you could argue that aliens should be killed even if no human lives were at immediate risk.
In any case, most humans are pretty specieist, and that’s not seen as really that bad a thing. After all, her example of a dog is routinely observed if an animal might harm someone, or indeed if people feel like eating meat or wearing leather. In many sci-fi stories where non-human intelligences are sufficiently different from us, we’re generally at war with them.
26/08/2008 at 14:04 CdrJameson says:
I think the whole “talking to random strangers just to see if they’ve got anything to say” thing is a bit odd in RPGs anyway.
Well, in Baldur’s Gate you had to break into their houses to poke your nose into their business…
26/08/2008 at 14:06 John Walker says:
Nope Missing, I found that bugger. There’s still yet another.
26/08/2008 at 14:08 subedii says:
You might find this map useful:
http://www.dukewebem.com/xbox-360/mass-effect-scan-the-keepers-locations-47/
26/08/2008 at 14:09 John Walker says:
Awesome, thanks.
26/08/2008 at 14:13 subedii says:
I spent ages running around the station looking for the last one. Turned out it was in the docking bay just past the Normandy. I never visited there until a little later in the storyline (when you actually need to head down to the Normandy to start off on your Epic Quest), I kept trying to find them everywhere else. So ironically, I only found it when I gave up on trying to find it.
26/08/2008 at 14:19 Schadenfreude says:
There’s two or three of the buggers in the Council Chambers; the one I was missing was in there.
26/08/2008 at 14:30 Kevlmess says:
The funny thing about the Renegade path is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re truly evil or amoral or anything. You’re practically as goody-doody and heroic as a Paragon but also quite a cunt.
Fortunately that doesn’t steal the joy from solving situations by punching people in the face.
Oh, and every game should let the player get lesbian sex without meaning to.
26/08/2008 at 14:43 Maximum Fish says:
The problem with morality systems in videogames is that you can’t include one that offers the player different avenues to follow without passing judgement on those decisions. The writer’s conception of the outcomes of those choices, how those choices are presented (the “way of the closed fist”, that sounds good, right? Right?), how other moral archtype characters respond to those decisions, etc., all represent judgements of player decisions.
This all reminds me of the beginning to Neverwinter Nights 2, when the bandit guy tells you if you let him live he’ll hunt you down and kill everyone you know or whatever. I chose the stab him in the throat, quite reasonably i thought, but then the game gave me a handful of evil points, and some handwringing “i don’t know if i support that” whining from my sidekick. At that point i was like, fuck it, i guess i’m going to be evil…
The interesting thing about real life, as opposed to Star Trek or other famous morality plays, is that situations in real life are infinitely more complex, and cheesy moral truisms (violence is always bad, etc) never actually quite work out as they should. Like any complex system, a coneniently simplified equation will never accurately describe it. There is no universal prescription, and when i’m playing a videogame, i like to pretend i’m not playing a videogame, ie imagine all the real world complexities and so forth play a part. It’s only too bad the game doesn’t play along.
For example, in Star Trek, the bandit guy would probably, given a chance, come around and later become a productive citizen, or it would be discovered he has an ailing 8 year old daughter or some shit. In real life he’d show up at your quaint Faerun cottage and gut your quibbling bitch ass with a rusted bread knife, all the while saying “I told you”.
26/08/2008 at 14:50 Dinger says:
Come to think of it, that was why I never got into Ultima IV. Ultima III was great, especially when you became powerful enough to wipe out a village, so that only the inaccessible shopkeepers were left. You could turn a lively community into a ghost town and get rich off it. Ultima IV had some sort of morality system that effectively made it difficult to be bad.
Sometimes we want to be bad guys, and that’s recognized in game design. So successful game formulas have to leave that option. Then they try to throw in moral choices? Well, they can’t have consequences then, can they?
26/08/2008 at 14:51 Iain says:
@Requiem: Mass Effect, oh you’re racing against time to save all organic life in the galaxy, oh please stop and go find these trinkets/bandits/monkeys etc.
This is basically my biggest gripe with the post-KotOR BioWare model. OMG, we’re in this big race against time to save the entire galaxy from destriuction, but the world and his droid still want you to sort out every single last problem for them on their behalf, even though they could conceivably just get off their arse and do it for themselves. Let the Big Bad wait. I’m sure he’ll wait for us to get there to foil his plans before he destroys all known civilisation. He’s nice like that…
My second biggest problem is that they give you these moral choices, but then don’t show you the consequences. How are you meant to know if you made the “right” decision or not? All Mass Effect does is pop a few Paragon or Renegade points into your character stats and that’s it. You don’t get to find out if she has a natural birth, or goes for the treatment or not, nor do you find out what ultimately happens to the child either way. So what was the point of getting involved? Other than the stat boost?
This is one of the reasons I really liked The Witcher – you got to make the tough moral choices, and you had to face the consequences later in the game. The whole thing was so far away from being black and white or clear cut that the choices you thought were “right” often turned out to have negative effects later on; choosing the lesser evil still turned out to be evil (a recurrent theme from the original books, I might add).
I see people have been referencing Deus Ex with regards to freedom and choice. Was I the only one person who thought that they missed a trick? Where was the option to stay with UNATCO? I thought the game forced you into jumping ship over to the NSF way too soon. I wanted to be the bad guy, dammit!
And finally: Sexy Blue Girl is *SOOO* dull. Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl is far more interesting. And her ass looks terrific in a combat hardsuit…
26/08/2008 at 14:55 Chaz says:
Well Ashley may have been a hateful racist, but I didn’t kick her out of bed for it. Oh yeah baby!
26/08/2008 at 14:57 dhex says:
the witcher did seem to get inter-cultural conflict well enough – at least enough so that it didn’t stick out like the whole trading cards thing.
26/08/2008 at 14:58 Maximum Fish says:
@lain
I agree entirely. The rush-rush nonsense was a huge problem in both Mass Effect and Jade Empire. They give you a “what are you waiting for?!” urgent quest to save all of eternity or whatever, and then on the way out the door some poor bastard asks you to look for his friend in bumfuck outer space and fly back to the station if you get word.
Oblivion did the same thing. No Sean Bean, I DON’T want to go to motherfucking Cloud Ruler Temple, so ease the hell off. Seriously. What’s this about Lovecraftian menaces ravaging the countryside? And why is this more important than my nirnroot potions and… or fine, whatever. Save the planet. Save the planet, and then indulge in the anal retentive completist trap you so maliciously laid for me.
26/08/2008 at 15:01 Sucram says:
When your moral choices are boiled down to a screen with three dialogue options, which you read while sipping a cup of tea and wondering how many XP each will give you, it’s rarely going to be particularly good.
At best you might get a witty comeback which leaves you wondering if the other responses are as witty. Hmm better quickload to check ‘em out.
Either these things need to played out over a longer period, though often that ends up feeling contrived, or the fact that you are making these choices need to be obfuscated.
the most impressive moments are when you act on instinct in a game, only to be told later ‘Hey, do you realise what you did?’. Like when you flee your brothers apartment in Deus Ex.
26/08/2008 at 15:03 Sum0 says:
Two things that niggled me about Mass Effect:
1) The fact that in these moral dilemmas, everyone folds so quickly when you pull out your Charm or Intimidate or even just talk a bit more. It’s as no one holds any actual opinions. It didn’t feel like I was talking these people round to my viewpoint, more like I was just flicking a big switch to OPTION A or OPTION B.
2) Scans reveal a derelict space station in orbit around the second moon of an enormous gas giant. The Normandy pulls in close, matching its rotation, and docks. The intrepid boarding party enters and discovers mysterious artifact X. Great fun to play, right? Except we don’t get to play it. We just read a little text box. Not even a cinematic?
26/08/2008 at 15:12 Maximum Fish says:
@Sumo
Yeah, the “you found platinum on this floating wreck” bits were sort of a letdown, but then judging from their planet base interiors, all one of them, and how tired i got of trudging through rocky corridors and shooting biotic krogans or whatever, i’m not sure i wouldn’t have just gotten shit-tired of the spaceship interior too. A cinematic would have been cool probably.
26/08/2008 at 15:14 Requiem says:
@Iain I’d call it the BioWare model fullstop, you can see it in their progression from BG to ME, KotOR is the odd one out as the model actually fits the Jedi character and the story line isn’t one of imminent doom, well not until you reach the end of the game that is.
The one excuse I’ve seen for the lack of consequences in ME is that it’s the start of a trilogy, but until episode 2 or 3 show my character get court-martialed for punching someone out, leaking info to the press, disobeying orders and stealing the ship, or the effects of releasing the queen bug or destroying the colonists then it’s not much of an rpg. A great adventure game and fun third person shooter, but just not an rpg.
Deus Ex is big on tactical choices but there’s only really one ethical choice, saving your brother, and yeah I spent ages telling him I wasn’t going to destroy the transmitter and trying to arrest him but the damn game just wouldn’t let me stay in UNATCO.
26/08/2008 at 15:20 Iain says:
@Sucram: The thing with Paul’s apartment in Deus Ex was handled a bit too randomly, though. You could kill all the MIBs, but if you left via the window instead of the front door, Paul would still die.
A better example of a tough (im)moral choice is one from early in The Witcher: a village is persecuting the local witch, Abigail. She’s utterly innocent of the crimes they accuse her of, but they’re intent on blood, because they’re ignorant enough to believe that killing her will solve the real problem (which it won’t, incidentally).
Now, do you let the baying mob tear apart a completely innocent woman, or do you save her, having to slaughter the entire village in the process, on the principle that she’s innocent?
The payoff being either you still get to use all the amenities of the village for the rest of that chapter of the game, but you’ve let an entirely innocent woman be killed, or Abigail helps you later on in the game, but you’ve wiped out an entire village in her defense. They’re two utterly morally untenable decisions. But you still have to make a choice…
I’d like to see more games that reflect shades of grey, rather than blandly predictable right and wrong choices.
26/08/2008 at 15:22 Maximum Fish says:
I’m still waiting for the Enhanced Edition Witcher, still waiting…
26/08/2008 at 15:25 Andrew says:
Interestingly, I think Baldur’s Gate II works against the tropes in the article. There’s a lot of typical fantasy, but also a few odd ones which really don’t turn out to be a standard affair. One quest I recall actually has a bad outcome even if you replay it and try ever option. Really interesting that one.
I admit that the two-option response is pretty pathetic. Culling down a situation to a few responses, with no general ability to reason or debate, discuss or act apart from choose one of a few options is rather sad. Oh well, it is progress, just could be written a bit better – but couldn’t everything be a bit better? :)
26/08/2008 at 15:28 Okami says:
Now that was one decision that wasn’t hard to make – kill the village of course. I hated every one of them anyway.
26/08/2008 at 15:34 Maximum Fish says:
Being that games are increasingly well-defined worlds (in a mechanical sense) with rules and predefined interactions well established, “emergent gameplay” is possible, and creative solutions to developer defined problems are occasionally possible. But in a broader sense, because games are essentially a series of predefined responses to predefined inputs, the prospects of games recognizing player creativity in any meaningful way is extremely slim.
You may be able to board an NPC up in his house so he can’t get outside and activate some quest, but you aren’t going to hear about it from other NPC’s. So i predict a lot more of the “press one for the path of righteousness, 2 for villainy, 3 to speak to an customer service representative” in the near future.
“I see you stacked crates in front of wizard Dorthoks house. Very Clever. He’ll have fun trying to path through that shit…” The closest i ever got was when i shot Anne Navarre in the face on Juan Lebadev’s plane, and got chewed out by Alex Jacobson about it shortly thereafter.
26/08/2008 at 15:35 Iain says:
@Okami: Yeah, I murdered them all, too. Bloody inbred ignoramuses.
26/08/2008 at 15:37 Bananaphone says:
Morals and choice and consequences are all very well, but how about Bioware make team mates who are able to get behind cover and shoot at the enemy, instead of STANDING BEHIND YOU AND SHOOTING THE PLAYER, or at least STAY OUT OF THE WAY WHEN THEY ARE TOLD INSTEAD OF MOVING AND STANDING RIGHT BEHIND YOU AGAIN AND JUST BLASTING THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR OWN SHIELDS.
Sorry.
26/08/2008 at 15:37 James says:
Iain: did you have to murder the villagers to save Abigail? If I recall correctly, you can scare them off (even the holy man) and then go fight the ridiculously hard-to-kill demon dog. That sort of deals with both issues. Maybe I’m misremembering.
26/08/2008 at 15:38 Requiem says:
BGII still falls into the BioWare model of having your friend and companion from the first game get kidnapped at the start. You still have lots and lots of unconnected things you can do if not need to do, for the experience points, before you can find her.
26/08/2008 at 15:43 Citizen Parker says:
I agree with this completely. It’s mind numbing that there are always two solutions to a problem, one “good” and one “bad.” I want shades of gray, and I want to be done with the stupid morality slider.
I’m also looking at you, Fable.
26/08/2008 at 15:43 Iain says:
@James: I wasn’t able to scare them off the first time I played through. Perhaps I hadn’t done enough of the side quests in the village to be able to persuade them. I ended up having to butcher the lot of them. Which was okay. More XP that way, and the vendors were only selling rotten fish…
I might try a different tack when I replay it with the Enhanced Edition.
26/08/2008 at 15:50 JonFitt says:
Did anyone else think Carth (or whatever that copy/paste dude in Mass Effect was called) seemed to be hitting on you when you played as a male?
I was thinking “Whoa, Bioware have gone all out and given people *all* the options”. But as it turned out it was just shared Male/Female dialogue which should have been redone for the males.
Also, on the Deus Ex-brother-apartment thing: that amazed me. The first time I tried to fight and got exploded, so I thought “damn this is un-winnable” and ran away. It was only later I read that I could have saved him. It was great that they made it so hard that you probably should flee, but if you stuck it out and beat the enemies it didn’t break the game or they didn’t resort to infinite/unkillable baddies.
26/08/2008 at 16:19 maxmcg says:
I just played & finished ME recently too. Super game but for two things.
1. Stupid APC thingy. Where is the Vorsprung Durch Tecnik in the future. Idiots. How did Bioware think that actually worked.
2. Lifts. Stupid lifts are just too damn slow. And there’s too many of them.
26/08/2008 at 16:21 Schadenfreude says:
@JonFitt: Bioware pretty much gave you all the options in Jade Empire. Lots of bicurious NPCs in that one. You can go Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy, Girl/Girl and Boy/Girl/Girl.
26/08/2008 at 16:31 Okami says:
@James: Well, you scare them off, then kill the ridiculously strong dog and then butcher the villagers, because they want to kill you anyway, eventhough you just saved their sorry asses.
26/08/2008 at 16:51 Nimic says:
“Mr Full-of-himself Guy” is Carth, right? I mean.. Kaidan. I mean..
I found that “choose between Kaidan and Ashley” part really hard. Not because I wanted to keep both, heavens no, but because I couldn’t decide who I wanted to see dead more.
26/08/2008 at 17:00 elias says:
Let the baker die. : )
26/08/2008 at 17:04 Iain says:
I didn’t find the Ashley vs Carth (I’m not even going to pretend that was a mistake) decision very hard, myself. Ashley has all the best lines, therfore Ashley stays, Boring Guy gets nuked…
26/08/2008 at 17:21 Requiem says:
Ah the nuke, another missed opportunity, you should of been able to choose between any of your companions at that point, or all of them.
Though one day I hope someone will make a game where I can choose to make a heroic last stand and detonate the bomb myself. As a proper ending with outcomes and credits etc.
26/08/2008 at 17:34 Jaxtrasi says:
> “With no direct connection, it just felt like the designers were going out of their way to offer their audience (who could never possibly have experienced sex in real life) to enjoy SOME SEX! SEXY SEX!”
I hear it worked on Gillen. He loves the tail.
26/08/2008 at 17:41 phil says:
The Drow seem to bring the best out of Bioware’s writers – in both Baldur’s Gate and the last Neverwinter Nights expansion, providing you skipped the slaughter everything moving option and got to the politics, you had a range of nice ethical situations.
To get the ‘best’ solution you had to out evil them, even if you were going for a lawful good playthrough. The dragon’s egg treble cross in BGII and mock seduction, then betrayal in Neverwinter Nights, were really quite satisfying
The open palm/closed fist approach from Jade Empire was a bit disappointing. The open palm hardly ever allowed you to side step the violence whilst closed fist was just crude cackling evil. I suppose it allowed you access to the Zombie Darth Vader character, but frankly he was arse.
26/08/2008 at 18:04 Bas says:
I liked Ashley. She’s not racist, just uninformed. So I used my superior intellect to make her see the light, and then sex her up.
26/08/2008 at 18:18 matte_k says:
Yeah, bit of a waste of the voice actor in ME, I quite liked Carth in KoToR.
Obsidian have played with this good/bad thing quite a bit in KoToR 2, i’m thinking specifically of the side quest involving the beggar asking for money. Because regardless of what you do, you get a bollocking from Kreia, and a cutscene showing the consequences of your actions. Then, in dialogue with Kreia post-cutscene, you can lose influence by disagreeing with her viewpoint, as she is trying to teach you the lesson that running around helping everyone is not necessarily being the good guy- you can potentially weaken these people by making them dependent on someone else to sort out their problems for them.
Actually, now that I think about it, quite a few of the gang of companions in that game make comments about you helping people all the time…
So looking forward to the Sith Lords Restoration Project being finished- proper endings at last! :D
26/08/2008 at 18:28 James G says:
I’m waiting for the Sith Lord’s restoration project to be completed before I try KOTORII, its meant to restore some of the content which made the latter parts of the game so disjointed.
26/08/2008 at 18:29 phil says:
@Max
I agree the cementary was annoying, trapping you in the least visually interesting section of the game with an Morrowind style list of minor quests to complete.
From memory it also arrived on the heels of the utterly fantastic John Cleese cameo, making it a huge down shift.
26/08/2008 at 18:33 tmp says:
KotOR 2 is perhaps one game where going the middle route feels the most rewarding. Not in the getting tangible rewards sense, but rather it’s like the story was made with such character in mind, and the ending makes the most sense with it.
26/08/2008 at 18:36 Patrick Weekes says:
Howdy. I’m the writer responsible for the widow and her brother-in-law mysteriously having no trouble with you intruding yourself into a deeply personal discussion about gene therapy. This article had me laughing out loud, and it also raised some excellent points that reflect what we’re thinking in the office.
That plot coming down the way it did was the result of a lot of factors.
We needed to fill up some space on the Citadel with a ton of little quests. The Citadel is beautiful and marvelous and epic in its proportions, and also really flipping huge and empty. This meant that fairly late in development, the writing team hunkered down to fill up an area the size of one of the major story worlds with a ton of small roleplaying encounters.
Also, the fact that the Citadel is so big means that if you try to have combat, the 360 emits a high-pitched whine and then explodes. Even without combat, the Citadel pushes the 360 to the edge of its memory constraints pretty hard, and at one point in playtesting, we were playing in a special game mode, “Get from one end of the Presidium to the other without crashing,” using our FPS indicators as sonar to try to figure out which way to go without our memory going splat. As a result, our plot designs for the roleplaying plots had to include not a whole lot of combat and limits to the number of characters and the size of their dialog files. (Note that combat that does take place on the Citadel as part of the critpath tends to happen in small hallway areas with doors nearby as level-load areas.)
Add to THAT the fact that the tech guys are swamped by putting together a game in a new engine, with the arrival of new combat functionality like cover and tech beacons requiring last-minute changes to every fighting area in the game, and you’ve got tech guys who don’t have a whole lot of time to do complex scripting on the plots you wrote in about a day apiece. The plot with the grieving widower, for example, is generally considered to be stronger than the not-at-all-about-MMR plot. It’s also more complex, with two conversations and multiple options for who says what and goes where and when they do it. (It’s not very complex as plots go, but it’s more complex than “These guys fire one conversation, then despawn after you’re done talking to them.”) That complexity extends to QA as well. Given that QA found bugs on these plots that ranged from people not appearing to people appearing too early to people despawning but still firing their ambient “Hey, Spectre, come talk to me!” lines despite, you know, not being there, the simpler we could make those plots, the better. (Note: Not a knock on our tech guys. Our tech guys were awesome. Also, they were learning a new engine and scripting system. The writers made their share of fun mistakes, and our conversation system didn’t change as much as their scripting system.)
None of which means that you’re wrong and I’m right. What it means is that at the time, we looked at that plot and said, “Okay, we’ve got some that have several conversations already. Let’s try to do this one as a one-and-out.” It was my call, I made it, and when I looked at it in the final game, I knew that I’d been wrong, since, as you correctly noted, it feels way too weird to have these people just include you in the conversation. In the more complex widower plot, there’s at least a plausible reason that the widower needs you to be involved.
What bums me out about that plot is that it really isn’t one the writers just tossed out casually. We argued about what the issue would be. After I wrote it, I passed it to our editor, and she came back with some tough criticism. Where she will often just correct my spelling or grammar, this time she told me that my initial take was turning the widow into the stereotypical weeping woman, with the uncle as the voice of reason. We wanted it to be more complex than that, with both sides bringing their own baggage to one of those “Neither of these choices are exactly right” issues; the wife is grieving and afraid to lose the baby, the brother is grieving and desperate to give the baby the chance his brother didn’t have. The editor and I actually stayed late working on revisions to that one, and we were proud of how it turned out.
Then we heard it voiced over and realized that I hadn’t been specific enough in my VO comments (which the writers place on every line), and when I’d written “angry and frustrated”, I’d been thinking of a West Wing kind of way, and what I got was an actor yelling “My BAAAAAAABEEEEE!!!” because she thought she was supposed to be more overwrought than I’d intended. It came out like bad soap opera, but it wasn’t a major enough plot to do a retake on the voicework, so in it went. That’s also on me: I’m a newb writer, and I didn’t make my VO comments detailed enough. With better delivery, I think the plot would have felt stronger.
Finally, Mass Effect is the first BioWare CRPG to take place in a setting that includes the real world in its history. It’s not the real world, because it’s the future, but it’s a heck of a lot closer to the real world than Jade Empire or KotOR was. The fact that we can actually reference real-world history and events (except for Hitler, because, you know, we want to sell in Germany) gave us an opportunity to hit real-world problems in new ways, and we were excited about that.
That new cool opportunity also screwed some things up. People talk about the Uncanny Valley as it applies to character design, but it’s equally true for plot design. Your elven ranger can walk up and interrupt the baker and his wife as they argue about whether to use garden crystals to keep the bugs out of their garden, even though garden crystals attract skeletal rats in the long run, and even if some part of the player’s mind realizes that these people are awfully eager to include you in their thinly veiled pesticide metaphor, the player is generally thinking about magic crystals and undead rats and just doesn’t care that much about being invited into a deeply personal conversation between a husband and wife, or is congratulating him- or herself for seeing that incredibly complex pesticide metaphor and doesn’t care how gamey the plot structure is.
You put that same plot in the real world, or something where people have names like Ashley “Boom-stick” Williams instead of Alustria Swiftarrow, and people aren’t thinking about crystals and rats, and that plot design that wouldn’t have bothered the player in a fantasy game sticks out like a sore thumb… a sore thumb who is JUST THINKING ABOUT THE BABY!
Overall, I’m really proud of the small part I had on Mass Effect. There are some plots I’d love to take back and get the chance to do again, knowing what I know now about how they’d play once they were actually in the game, and there are some that came together just wonderfully. In the offices, designers on all the projects are playing the game, making a lot of the same observations you just did, and looking for ways to improve what we do. I hope that you’ll see us improve in the next game.
26/08/2008 at 18:43 Justin Fletcher says:
RE: Side quests and the timeline
The problem with optional side quests in RPGs is that they’re optional. Developers have a harder time creating a sense of narrative urgency when the expectation is that players should be able to go anywhere and do anything at any time. So they sacrifice immersion for variety. And this leads to you being told that you only have a few hours to prevent a cosmic catastrophe, one that then fails to occur when you decide to go treasure hunting instead.
What’s to be done? Here are a few options:
1) Lessen the story’s emphasis on the timeline. This frees you from watching the clock, but it also decreases the urgency and drama of the main story. On the plus side, it might encourage plot lines beyond “Save the town/world/galaxy/universe!”
2) Institute consequences. If you prioritize chasing down your last rare metal on Planet Whatzis instead of chasing after Saren, then your reward is a flood of Reapers at your door and a Game Over screen. However, consequences would have to be communicated and implemented very carefully or they could be huge turn-offs to players.
3) Make some side quests mandatory. For example, advancing through sections of the game would require completing a certain number of quests to gain X, with X being something you would need to survive the next big story mission. However, you would have a choice in which quests you choose out of a large selection. That means that you couldn’t just zip through the main story, but why have side quests in the first place if you expect players to just zip through the main story?
Variations on these have been done in the past, but they seem old fashioned in today’s climate where open worlds are in vogue and linearity is the devil. But I wouldn’t mind a bit more structure being imposed by RPG developers.
26/08/2008 at 18:48 simonkaye says:
I think that making the good/evil scales unlinked was a really important step. Yes, the raising of the moral question was sometimes pretty ugly, but the innovation here is that this isn’t simply one sliding scale, as in KOTOR. You can comfortably be a badass at the same time as making nuanced judgments about the rachni etc. My main complaint is that there wasn’t really enough STUFF in the game to properly develop both metres, but I can understand why such a design decision would be made in an RPG.
Patrick, your specific baby encounter actually prompted me to reload and experiment with the options. I thought it was clever that the game would adapt to justify each line of decision-making without over-informing the player before the actual point of decision. So the decision would be committed from an actual point of view or belief, and the game would not isolate that or pigeonhole that in discourse terms as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘paragon’ or whatever.
Maybe I’ve been playing games too long, but I don’t think I really jump anymore when total strangers want me involved in their problems…
26/08/2008 at 18:59 perilisk says:
That’s damn weird, I just played through the same bit last night, made the same choice, thought roughly the same thing.
It’s substantially worse in Mass Effect than other Bioware games, as in many cases the little blip they give you doesn’t convey all the subtleties of the line, so Shepard ends up saying something completely different from what you expected. Also, the two options aren’t always available or equally obvious, or have different skill checks, so you end up with only one option that you don’t agree with.
Besides, the fact that Paragon/Renegade choices are roughly always the same place means that you get lazy and just say “just say the good guy thing” without actually worrying about it. And it boils down to yet another game with a simplistic good/evil meter as a stand-in for character building.
26/08/2008 at 19:16 subedii says:
Thanks a lot for your comments Patrick, it’s always interesting to hear from the devs about what was going through their minds and what was happening in the background when they made certain parts of a game.
Having said that, you’ve made an awesome first game with the engine, and now unfortunately you’ve raised the bar for yourselves and we shall be expecting even better things of you all in future.
No hard feelings.
- The fan community
26/08/2008 at 19:18 Sören Höglund says:
subedii’s take on Ashley is exactly right. She’s easily the best-written of the npcs, and one of the few where you feel like you’re having an argument with an actual person. With a personality and everything! As opposed to Liara, who’s just there to have blue boobs and go “oh I’m so shy and awkward but you’re so awesome that I want you to take my virginity now”.
Oh, and it clearly it can’t be an analogy for the MMR thing, because if it were, it’d boil down a choice between being a sensible, responsible adult, or endangering your child and everyone else because you take advice on medical science from Jenny McCarthy.
26/08/2008 at 19:27 subedii says:
Man I am so glad at least someone agrees with me. I was beginning to think I was crazy being the only person who saw Ashley’s character in that light. :mrgreen:
I do also think she was one of the better written characters in the game. I think that people tend to get more emotive about Ashley’s viewpoints because she’s more well written.
26/08/2008 at 19:34 Someone says:
I actually played only with Wrex and lizard head guy, because the other companions were pretty boring.
26/08/2008 at 19:40 Requiem says:
It’s interesting about the technical problems, I didn’t realise the citadel was so big (as compared to the planets) though I suppose it’s more detailed. One thing about that situation that I thought would have made it less jarring is if you had met previously or were connected to at least one of the characters involved. Perhaps the mother was formally part of the Normandy crew or you’d saved the uncle during the shootout in the medical centre, it would of taken away the total strangers tell you their most intimate problems feeling.
@Justin Fletcher the game really needs restructuring many of the side quests, at least those on other planets tied into or gave clues to happenings in the main story line it’s just a pity most of them were unlocked after you’d completed the story section they hinted at. You didn’t need to work for anything in the main story, except finding Sexy Blue Girl, it was all handed to you on a platter. If more of the game had you searching for clues and stumbling over the main plot it would of made the optional side quests feel less out of place.
26/08/2008 at 19:55 BrokenSymmetry says:
Another Ashley fan here: I think her the best developed character I’ve encountered in a Bioware game.
On the sidequests: The poor sidequests in Mass Effect were the more surprising to me, as Bioware’s previous game, Jade Empire, has such excellent side quests. Quests in that game, like “Aishi the Mournful Blade”, “The Drowned Orphans”, etc. had great story and emotional content.
26/08/2008 at 20:15 Simon Jones says:
Crikey – I didn’t realise so many people shared this general opinion of Mass Effects/Bioware’s storytelling.
The stuff John talks about is very similar to my main gripe, which I mentioned in my equally belated review recently.
I think Bioware’s greatest storytelling flaw is that they don’t tie their themes to their story. So we have themes cropping up all over the place – racism, lesbianism (sort of), the vaccine John mentions, the whole organic-vs-mechanoid thing, divided loyalties, etc etc etc – but they never get properly interwoven into what actually happens. Even the organic-vs-mechanoid thing isn’t really explored properly – Sovereign happens to be a giant robot thing, but it might as well be a giant space cat. There’s some interesting machine backstory to do with the Geth and Facemask Girl’s race, but that’s never explored properly outside of the Codex. Ash’s racism is handled really well at first, sneaking in under the radar…but it never really becomes an actual issue.
The story, in the end, culminates in a fight between a giant space robot and a load of spaceships. None of the themes you happen to have encountered along the way (usually in side quests) have any bearing at all. Which is a problem, as a story without themes is really very disposable and a bit pointless.
The Witcher, while by no means perfect, at least went to great effort to tie its themes directly into the story and setting. Bioshock wove its themes into the set design and storytelling and gameplay, even if it was a bit clunky at times. Even Half Life 2 manages to portray themes of fear, intimidation, propaganda, liberation, loss, love and hero worship, despite being far less overtly focused on ‘themes’ than any of the previously mentioned games.
This is partially why Bioware’s last few games feel rather samey. It’s not just the gameplay and structure, but the fact that none of theme are really about anything. There’s lots of themes nibbling away at the edges, but they seem to have forgotten to use the story to really say anything about anything.
I appear to have rambled.
26/08/2008 at 20:32 Xander77 says:
I’d have to say that Space Control 2 and Baldur’s Gate 2 handled the sidequest issue better than most “Go anywhere before moving on in the plot” games. BG2 went with the easy path – you have a reason to do all the side quests because NEED to get your hands on some cash to save your sis/pursue the big bad.
SC2 choice was frustrating to some players who were intent on messing around without paying attention to the main plot, but it made sense in the context and the overall effect was awesome. I wish more people would take that path…
26/08/2008 at 20:37 Justin Fletcher says:
@ Requiem
“If more of the game had you searching for clues and stumbling over the main plot it would of made the optional side quests feel less out of place.”
Exactly. The reason that many RPG side quests have such a jarring effect on the primary timeline is that they are completely unattached to the main story. Therefore, you wonder why your character would bother dealing with them when much more important and time-sensitive matters await.
But tying the quests more into the main story doesn’t fix the issue all by itself. If the world is hours from its end and you are able to advance to the next critical event in your attempt to save humanity, why would you stop to do something else unless you had to, no matter how much it was related to your goal? And if you *did* have to stop to do that something else, then it wouldn’t be a side quest, would it?
(ASIDE) In fact, “side quest” has become a misnomer. In recent RPGs like Mass Effect and Oblivion, missions that don’t directly tie into the overarching story make up 50-75% of the game. It’s the main story that’s become the side quest, so it’s no wonder that you can get around to saving the universe on your own schedule.
26/08/2008 at 20:41 Tom Camfield says:
Patrick Weekes!
Edit: by which I mean, I wonder how many developer comments are lost in threads like these rather than given their own little podium to shine on, but it was fun, at least, to find this one.
26/08/2008 at 20:45 kadayi says:
Nice article, but like a few others I have to say optional sex cards aside, The Witcher is a far better RPG than Mass effect in terms of really challenging you when it comes to moral dilemmas. Everything is gray, and the pay offs regarding your choices almost always play out much later in the game, rather than straight away, meaning you can’t backtrack easily when something doesn’t work out entirely as you’d like it to. Instead you just have to live with the consequences of your actions, and soldier on. It adds a degree of weight to your decision making that Mass effect with it’s transparent caring/ruthless dynamic just doesn’t match up to. The Witcher treats you the player as an Adult, Mass Effect is still hand holding you as you cross the street. Don’t get me wrong I still enjoyed it (it was a good romp), but it is just the same game as Kotor and Jade Empire in a more shiny suit, and I don’t think there is anything remotely controversial in saying that tbh John. I’m hoping that when the enhanced edition is released, you guys might re-evaluate it.
26/08/2008 at 21:46 Jacob W says:
Mass Effect had its share of plot irregularities (as any non-linear game will), but one of the things I really liked about the story was the whole arc pertaining to the Cerberus group.
I think I mostly liked it because it wasn’t really an arc per se: Instead of having a coherent quest chain, they would show up as the surprise antagonists in a bunch of seemingly unrelated missions. Because of this, they seemed less like another boring faction, and more like a secret society that controlled everything behind the scenes.
They’re also the only faction whose motivation remains unclear. I wouldn’t be surprised if they played a bigger role in Mass Effect 2.
26/08/2008 at 21:50 Requiem says:
“But tying the quests more into the main story doesn’t fix the issue all by itself.” No but restructuring the game would. It’s this insistance on starting the player right in the main plot, or at least the prologue to the main plot that puts the side quests and main quest at odds. Shooters, racing games, beat them ups, adventure games even. They lend themselves to this style of story telling but rpgs are the literature of gaming not the summer blockbusters. Dumping the character straight into the deep end works for other types of games but in an rpg you need time to explore the setting and more importantly explore your character before discovering the plot.
For instance if you’d started off on the Normandy doing the shake down cruise, but the shake down cruise was searching for the mineral deposits and trinkets then you would of had an opportunity to explore and find your own way to the main story. If allowed to visit the citadel and some of the other main plot planets before hand then the side quests could of been got out of the way, as both just something to do to earn experience or setting up the story and developing your character. Then when returning following the main quest you’d have the opportunity to make the player face the consequences of their earlier actions. Once the player reached a predetermined level or discovered a certain quest they could of been called back for the rogue ai quest. Which would turn out to be a set up, a test to choose the candidate for the first Human Spectre. Then start the main quest in earnest, to be honest despite the rousing music and dramatic camera angles I felt no sense of accomplishment at becoming a spectre, since it came so early and with me doing nothing to really earn it.
Alternatively most of the side quests on the Citadel could of been handled on the Normandy. Exploring the Citadel was nice and all but given the size of it and how much we actually saw it just gave it an artificial feeling. The Normandy could of been a bigger ship (or a shuttle of a bigger ship) with a larger crew then most of the quests could of been set there. Be it a wooden sailing ship or an interstellar battleship, ship travel gives an encapsulated time frame seperate from the main story arc which also doesn’t interfer with any urgency of the main timeline as you put it.
26/08/2008 at 22:04 Funky Badger says:
I think Ashely was a complex well written character. Unfortunately she was written as an fundamentalist bigot, so she, well, had to go…
For it’s faults Mas Effect has possible the coolest moment in games I can remember, you know when LANCE HENRIKSEN says you, I mean me, I, am the only hope for the galaxy.
Was grinning about that for days. (Also all the major plot points are fantastic)
Can’t wait for the sequel.
26/08/2008 at 22:11 DSX says:
I think the game did really well if the random silliness of moral conundrums is the biggest complaint.
“but dammit I’m playing a videogame and I’m going to see what the consequences of my choosing would be.”
26/08/2008 at 22:26 Geoff says:
Patrick beat me to the Uncanny Valley reference.
And you explain it fairly well in your elven gardening example, but you could go even farther with stuff like Mario or Quake.
Nobody complains that the moral choices in those games aren’t sophisticated enough, because there are no moral choices.
So you ADD moral complexity, and people start complaining that it’s not complex enough. Seems unfair, but if you tell people “shut off that part of your brain, this is just about fun action”, they’ll do so happily. It’s if you tell them “sophisticated moral choices!” and don’t deliver, that’s when they get rather critical.
26/08/2008 at 22:38 malkav11 says:
I think possibly the place where Mass Effect best handles sidequests is on the planet where the sidequests are basically “you don’t have space to rescue these colonists, but these are things that need to happen for them to be able to survive until they *are* rescued” and you have the choice to either do ‘em (nabbing exp, rewards, and Paragon points) or do the Renegade thing and ignore them on your laser-focused path towards your actual goals on the planet.
Pity the denouement kinda throws all that away (as memorable as it was).
26/08/2008 at 23:07 Requiem says:
@malkav11 yeah but that’s a main plot world and I don’t think anyone’s saying that the main plot worlds aren’t tied up nicely. The main plot might have some big holes in it but the side quests on those worlds aren’t distracting. Unlike say getting a mission to rescue some scientists as you are just about to race off to save the galaxy and have just stolen the Normandy.
Besides that world is fairly early in the main plot, before you find out what’s going on. You’re sent there to investigate so you can look at doing the side quests there as a chance to snoop around and to earn the colonist’s good will, in the hope of finding out why they are acting strangely.
27/08/2008 at 01:55 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
@Patrick:
Thanks for the insight. The “Uncanny Valley” of Plot was pretty on the ball, but as you’ll know, toeing that line between “realistic” and “uncomfortable” in plot always has its pros and cons. And the dissonance between the gravitas of the subject matter in real-life (as well as the “correct” answer to it, by most peoples’ reckoning) and the circumstances the sidequest pops up in, that’s what tipped the matter over the line, I suspect.
Now that you guys don’t have to make an engine from scratch, you can more easily fit your sidequests into the play narrative. Also, Simon Jones is right about the “tying themes into the main game,” but you guys at Bioware do well enough that we can forgive that particular lack of icing.
Jokes aside, of course.
And I’m also of the opinion that Ashley is probably the most interesting of the party members because she can challenge your own beliefs, sometimes leading to a backlash as seen by Walker’s reactions to her. She was the most interesting to talk to, and judging by a lot of opinions the aliens held of humans, her opinion that humans have to look out for themselves is as much a reaction to humanity’s place in the universe as it is a prejudice to overcome.
Second most interesting NPC: The one with four testicles.
27/08/2008 at 06:00 sinister agent says:
Also, on the Deus Ex-brother-apartment thing: that amazed me. The first time I tried to fight and got exploded, so I thought “damn this is un-winnable” and ran away. It was only later I read that I could have saved him. It was great that they made it so hard that you probably should flee, but if you stuck it out and beat the enemies it didn’t break the game or they didn’t resort to infinite/unkillable baddies.
They did, though – you can fight all the way back to the train station (though paul will mysteriously disappear if you lose sight of him in the hotel, which you will) and board the train, and when you get off, you’re confronted by Anna (if she’s still alive), and if you kill or escape her, you leave the station and are faced with an invincible Gunther and a bunch of robots. You can confront him, then run back inside and refuse to come out and just leave your pc on for the rest of eternity, but most people tend to just walk out and get inevitable captured.
It was well done nonetheless – considering how hard it was to get that far, it’s hard to see what else the devs could have done.
27/08/2008 at 06:58 James O says:
I liked Ashley’s design quite a bit; it was refreshing to see a character with a conservative viewpoint (as it pertains to the US) instead of boilerplate feel-good leftism. She’s for greater state (planetary) sovereignty, though I thought it was made clear it wasn’t a racial matter so much as a matter of pragmatism (if you have her in your party during the encounter with the Earth-First politician, I recall her chiding the guy’s xenophobic tendencies but agreeing that Earth has to look out for itself first and foremost.) Her skepticism of the galactic council seems well-founded too, considering both it’s history (acceding to complete genocide of one race and later genetically crippling another) and her family history (i.e. her grandfather being forced to surrender a human planet to aliens.) Given that and the general disdain many alien NPCs show for humans, her viewpoints seem pretty reasonable in context – in a Hobbesian galaxy, humans certainly can’t trust other species to guarantee their security for them.
I tend to think characterizations of her as racist and fundamentalist tell you more about the player’s political views than they do about the character herself (I really don’t get the fundamentalist part – she was always in my party yet I only remember her referencing her religious beliefs once, and even then it was simply to say something like after seeing the marvels of space it was impossible not to believe in a higher power.) In any case, I was pleased to see a piece of entertainment media treating real concerns conservatives have in the real world (i.e. border security, skepticism of the UN and internationalism) with some dignity and respect (or at least, more than you’d expect to see out of Hollywood.)
27/08/2008 at 09:46 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
@James O: I tend to think characterizations of her as racist and fundamentalist tell you more about the player’s political views than they do about the character herself
Precisely. I’m not even a right-winger, and I find the tendency for people to over-react to even mildly not-completely-left-of-center sentiments somewhat chilling. But that’s a thought for another day.
27/08/2008 at 10:45 Naurgul says:
Okami, I think that’s the point of John’s article. Shades of grey or not, if the themes are not presented in a dignified and thoughtful manner, it’s still tacked on.
Choices and consequences can have a similar problem. If you want to portray a world where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, then you’d better not do so by preventing the player from having a choice that would lead to a good result. You’ve got to have a situation that simply cannot have a good outcome. Drawing an example from the Witcher again (sorry about that), there’s a situation where there are some villagers that want to kill a witch but you can protect her by killing the villagers. If you don’t, they kill her. So, you have to choose to either kill her or the villagers. What pray tell prevents you from just intimidating the villagers to leave her alone or getting her with you and escaping?
Patrick Weekes, thanks for the insight. It’s pretty hard from the player’s perspective to have the whole picture in mind and not just point out flaws.
PS: I’d criticise Witcher for the women trading card game too, but that would be too easy.
27/08/2008 at 12:25 Johnny Law says:
Props to subedii, James O, et al. for their Ashley-explication. I wonder if it’s a little disheartening for a writer who tries to make an actual fleshed-out character when they see it get pegged with kneejerk reactions like “racist fundamentalist”, the former of which is questionable if you examine Ashley’s reasoning (and the latter of which is _really_ questionable, as from what I can recall Ashley’s religiosity was pretty vague).
Not to mention that “racism” is sort of an odd label to hang on someone for their opinion about how to deal with altogether different _species_. Although I guess most people will assume that it’s supposed to be a blunt metaphor about race relations, so I guess that’s to be expected.
27/08/2008 at 12:42 CooperHawkes says:
Utterly no harm? You willing to bet that? You willing to say beyond that shadow of a doubt that absolutely NO HARM comes from injecting viruses into a blood stream? You mean no child ever accidentally developed Measles from the shot? Cause that sounds like harm to me. If we’re talking MMR versus Autism, I’m clear on that subject, but you can’t make a sweeping statement like “Utterly None.” I would clarify to mean Autism.
Other than that tiny tiny TINY nitpick, spot on sir!
27/08/2008 at 12:55 Okami says:
So I guess, that would make her a speciesist…
27/08/2008 at 13:04 Johnny Law says:
Indeed. :) But of course the thing about racism being wrong is that it’s _wrong_, as in “incorrect”… it uses people’s superficial characteristics as indicators of things for which they are terrible indicators.
Different species on the other hand actually do have differences from each other. E.g. I am confused by people who lecture about how racist the good guys are in LOTR for being anti-orc. Hell I’d be anti-orc too… orcness is a pretty reliable predictor of bad behavior.
27/08/2008 at 13:07 Max Cairnduff says:
The speciesism thing is an incredibly popular argument on paper and pencil rpg boards.
Is hating orcs racist? Someone will always say yes, it is. Someone else points out they don’t actually exist and in the fiction are irredeemably evil. Someone argues that the very concept of an evil race is itself racist. Hilarity ensues.
27/08/2008 at 13:55 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Remember, though, Tolkien himself had problems with the idea of an entire race being evil. After the book was written, anyway.
Apparently, he came to realize the real-world implications of such sentiments and didn’t quite like what he saw.
27/08/2008 at 14:39 Sam says:
Argh, in every story that mentions KOTOR there is a screen shot of HK-47 in Taris. (the corridor outside the starting room in the world) Whhhhyyyyyy?
27/08/2008 at 14:59 perilisk says:
I pretty much agree with every thing James O said about Ashley. She’s probably my favorite Bioware party NPC yet, because she actually seems to a character unto herself, rather than a device to serve the plot or a one-dimensional archetype. I think having a setting based on real-world history helped to make that possible.
While it’s certainly possible and reasonable to disagree with her opinions, the difference is not between whackjob right-wing and sensible left-wing, or between hate and kindness, or whatever; it’s just between optimism and pessimism — between striving to bring out the best in people and preparing yourself for the worst in them.
27/08/2008 at 15:09 Kieron Gillen says:
Dorian: Indeed- my problem with Elves has always been pretty much the opposite of the Orc issue. The idea that one race is just better than people in every way just makes Elves the Nazis who happen to be right.
KG
27/08/2008 at 16:23 Janto says:
As indeed are Jedi.
But on obscure RPG fronts, played Avernum 5′s demo recently, and I was impressed with how certain options were handled, in terms of dealing with the moral implications of hunting down and killing ‘villains’. Basically after fighting a minor villain he tries to surrender, but you’re not here to take him prisoner, so you have to choose between letting him go, to potentially cause more havoc, or do your mission and kill him. But he doesn’t fight back if you decide to kill him, which was actually quite disconcerting.
28/08/2008 at 03:27 Sean Beanland says:
I’ve always thought that it would be cool to have a Bioware style RPG that wasn’t focused on saving the world/galaxy/realm but had a more local focus. Say, a family. Or a town. Something that was less expansive but had more depth. In that sort of context, a conversation like the abortion one would fit more easily I think, and could have more impact on the world around you in some way.
28/08/2008 at 05:27 lesslucid says:
“Divisive”.
28/08/2008 at 05:50 Thiefsie says:
Great to hear that little bit of insider writing information from Patrick! Very enlightening!
28/08/2008 at 13:29 CdrJameson says:
Um, surely Hateful Racist Fundamentalist Girl is Racist because she thinks badly of characters because they’re not human?
She’s a deliberate contrast with Mr Full-of-himself Guy, who thinks badly of characters because they’re arseholes, irrespective of species. Probably why he’s full of himself, what with that smug moral superiority.
Maybe she sees the error of her ways in the end, but I guess I’ll never know, as she’s now Hateful Fundamentalist Racist Cinder.
28/08/2008 at 17:54 John Walker says:
You should all be fascinated to learn that I chose to save HRFG over Captain Boringheadaches. I did, however, agonise over the choice for AGES, eventually concluding that he was going to die because he’d come on to me in a really inappropriate circumstance, and if I were a girl that’s the reason I would kill men.
It was an interesting moment, because I’d not bonded with either character, and so it really did become quite a mercenary decision (she seemed more likely to be interesting later on), only hindered by my conscience being very cross with me for making even a pretend decision this way.
Had I had to choose between Sexyblue (I saw her bum!) or Sluggy, that would have been awful.
28/08/2008 at 18:07 CdrJameson says:
Captain Boringheadaches has so far failed to come on to me so far in any circumstances, so I thought I’d give him a chance to get around to it at some point. SO HE LIVES.
28/08/2008 at 19:21 Funky Badger says:
You’ve been spoiled, JW. I didn’t realise one of them was going to die. I thought there’d be a last minute resucue, just like in the films…
28/08/2008 at 19:31 Pike says:
Ashley was simply ignorant and misguided as a result of tragic family history. With a tolerant and wise guide she’d find the right path towards tolerance.
Unfortunately she ended up with a jingoistic superior officer who relished the idea of squashing alien insubordination benath the jackboothed heel of human military might and who also decided to mock her religion and dead grandfather.
A bit of bad luck there.
28/08/2008 at 20:12 Nick says:
Captainboringheadaches is a brilliant name for him. I ended up only talking to Ash and .. err .. the women with the mask as I found the others all fairly dull or unengaging.
28/08/2008 at 22:41 CdrJameson says:
Wowzapolawza! I’ve just played Bring Down The Sky, and although it’s got the same identikit pirate bases they’re so much better laid out (i.e. you’re able to walk through the door without being mobbed and flanked) it’s unbelievably more fun to play. The asteroid also seems to have the highest habitation density in known space.
Which is good.
The game they wanted to make, I suspect.
29/08/2008 at 00:10 malkav11 says:
The sidequests I mentioned I brought up because I think they’re an excellent example of how optional sidequests could be presented during (fictionally) urgent primary quests without much disrupting mimesis. Even better, if a bit less player-friendly, could be forcing one to deal with real, actual time limits of some sort so that doing the humanitarian thing does have real tradeoffs as far as accomplishing your main goals. Forcing hard choices.
31/08/2008 at 16:32 Derek K. says:
I’m absolutely a Bioware fanboy, but I agree somewhat. I still buy every Bioware game reflexively, though.
On the flip side – what else is there that comes close? The CRPG is a fairly limited platform. Bioware does a pretty dang good job within the constraints of having your DM be a computer processor, I think.
As much as liked the dialogue wheel, the fact that it was “Up-Right == Paragon” “down-right == Asshole” “Left == XP/Plot” did frustrate me at times. Occasionally, late at night, I’d just hold Up-Right and keep pressing X….
But again, kicks the ass of most everything out there, and is a blast at the same time. So I give them a pass. ;)
Also, the fact that the big beef most people have with Bioware being the lack of impact and the chiaroscuro (ooooh) world suggests that Bioware has done most everything right – when we’re free to complain that the moral choices lack impact on the storyline at large, it suggests that they did a pretty good job on the little bits like gameplay and characterization…
Yeah, yeah. Fanboy. :p
And I’ve yet to play an RPG that said “You are the only hope of the world hurry hurry hurry that enforced it meaningfully. A number of 4x games do. But honestly, I’d be *pissed* if my RPG told me “Hey, stop doing that sidequest, my artificial timer is up.” It’s my RPG. Screw you, hippy.
01/09/2008 at 10:13 David Long says:
If you still can’t find the last keeper try this:
Keepers Walkthrough
Make some interesting points but feel that if every side conversation lead to a full scale investigation the game would be come very dull. And if the short side conversations were missing the game would be poorer for it. Sometimes it’s fun to just give ridiculous or evil responses to the most emotional dilemas.
Tip – in mass effect bioware have kindly placed the responses in a fixed way so you can get the result you intend.
Top right option = Paragon/Good/Kind
Middle Right = middle ground – will get you through every conversation but not gain you much/any paragon/renegade points
Bottom right = Renegade/evil/aggressive response
Options on the left are to investigate further or use your charm/intimated skills.
If you want to be goodie goodie go for top right and charm more often.
01/09/2008 at 21:59 The Shed says:
Which’s Garrus? I sure hope he ain’t Mr Full-of-himself Guy. Garrus was like my right hand man, I love that dude.
02/09/2008 at 16:01 animal says:
I enjoy power fantasies as much as the next guy, but it becomes a bit boring if in every game you are the saviour of either the city, realm or universe.
That was one of the places where Torment scored a lot of points. Essentially in the game you still had as much power as in others, but it played out a bit differently where you were your own worst enemy and the responsibility of moving forward was left up to your character’s choice.
02/09/2008 at 21:06 Patrick Weekes says:
My first with-actual-game playthrough was with Tali and Gare-bear. I was a Sentinel. We didn’t have a lot of raw firepower, but man, we could debuff anything.
I did Liara’s World at about Level 40. The cutscenes were unintentionally hilarious.
Big massive cutscene of armature unfolding.
Me: Oh, no, an armature! Gosh, it’s not like we’ve been fighting those on foot the whole way here just to get more experience than you get from one-shotting them in the Mako! Hey, Tali, could you be a dear and… thanks, awfully.
Watches as AI-Hacked armature zots the geth ghosts while my team lounges against the railing and has a smoke.
Me: Hey, armature, I have to tell you, that’s some great stuff. Listen, though, I think we might be taking this whole squad in a different direction. Best of luck to you, and all, but Sabotage Overload Stasis-that-I-can-fire-through Tali-do-Carnage aaaaaaand we’re done.
03/09/2008 at 12:24 Calabi says:
@animal In Torment your character was hugely powerful. Compared to other RPGs your stats and gains, The Nameless one was for all intents a god, just without the omnipotence.
The irony was that he only cared for himself, as perhaps a real god would. They tease you throughout the game with bigger things, like perhaps you are going to stop the war, or save the lady. In the end those were to big for one man, even an immortal, he could only influence his own fate.
08/09/2008 at 22:56 Klaus says:
I’ve been playing games for a while, but Kreia is actually the only character who influenced me outside the game. I played through Kotor 2 as neutral the very first time, and light-sided the next. Didn’t have the heart to play dark-sided as I didn’t want Kreia to yell at me. :(
The morality thing was interesting when I got started with BG, but now it’s pretty amusing. I agree very much with Kreia’s philosophy but you really can’t apply these in other games. Refusing to help someone usually results in a “Oh PC! How could you be so heartless!” from a goody-two-shoes npc, and there usually isn’t an answer to explain it other than “Shut up, before I skin you!”.
Jaheira and I almost always come to blows when I refuse to hand over the Harper killing sword. (can’t remember if that’s mod or not though).
I never really liked the Orcs are unrepentant evil argument, as I saw it as a nurture issue, I really do usually hate the Elves. They’re supposedly above all mortal quibbles and yet they express the same bigotry and flaws everyone else does, and they get to make more of those flaws since they live for centuries and NEVER learn from their mistakes.
For the BG2 SOA ending, good thing they intertwined getting your soul back with saving the elven city, because I would have left those assholes to die. Argh, probably the most annoying aspect about the game.
15/09/2008 at 16:47 Strike says:
Kreia only yells at you when you don’t agree with her views. Most of her influence convo are somewhat on selfish side. I believe it is much harder to gain influence on her when you are in the Light side than you are in the Dark side. Taking to account my experience of doing replays in both sides. It is easiest to gain influence is when you are neutral.
I wish that they included the option to become Jensaaria. It is quite perfect for people who are tired of choice to become a Jedi or a Sith.
25/10/2009 at 11:25 Emexy says:
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17/11/2009 at 02:37 BillHWaters says:
Leave the moral issues to philosophers and politicians. I don’t care if an alien jelly created by an ancient race of interstellar aliens wants to preach his spiritualism in a park. I want relevant plots and no politics/ethics in my games.
17/11/2009 at 03:05 Gregon says:
Because Ashley believes in God that makes her a fundamentalist? That’s like saying because a guy listens to rock he must love elvis/thebeatles/creed/three days grace.
21/01/2010 at 04:37 BloogaBlooga says:
Unless you have a really ignorant view of religion or faith or spiritualism, than Ashley was not a fundamentalist. Rather, she was justvocal about her beliefs.
I actually thought her character was the best. She was different than the other rehashes-I mean archetypes- that they had done before.
21/01/2010 at 04:40 BloogaBlooga says:
To add to what I just posted, I always thought it was odd that Bioware’s KOTOR had sort-of grey moments in morality. Wasn’t the original intent of the films that it was a war between good and evil? Light and Dark.
07/11/2010 at 17:37 Trebor says:
“I’m back in Space City One” – can you name any other space city in this game? Or any other city whatsoever in this game for that matter?
No?
Such a great rpg but only one real city in it.