DAMN YOU CHICK

I just don't think that's a very good answer. Mass Effect is basically a "ticking time bomb" story: there is a hidden threat to the galaxy, only the hero can stop it, and the time to stop it is rapidly running out. Sheppard doing loyalty missions while the galaxy inches closer to catastrophe would be like Jack Bauer taking a break half-way through a season to help a buddy connect with his kids. It's both a question of plot and of pacing.

I also don't think "the Illusive Man hasn't told me what to do yet" is a very good reason for Sheppard to sit around doing nothing. Sheppard has the fastest ship in the galaxy, is armed to the teeth, known and respected everywhere, is best friends with the shadow broker, and the reaper threat draws ever nearer. Surely there is something productive Sheppard can do beyond helping crewmates with their emotional issues.

Ticking time bombs just aren't a good fit for any CRPG ever. The platonic ideal of a ticking time bomb huge danger would have been hastily assembling the team that barely functioned together, being under constant escalating pressure with a setback or two that looks insurmountable, and then managing to pull together at the last possible second. Great sacrifice and costs to taste. Which is fine, but almost never a good fit for the Increase My Numbers! mold of a crpg.

Mind you, I never particularly cared about the overall time bomb, and liked the bunch-of-short-stories approach. I'd like to see more games do similar things, and not feel the need to shoehorn some world-shaking threat. Just traipsing about a hostile-to-goofy galaxy while telling various partially-connected short stories would be fine--there's a reason Star Trek and Doctor Who* and whatnot are firmly sunk into popular sci-fi consciousness.

*Going even further afield, I'd say the fact that the newer Doctor Who series' insistence on always Going Big is increasingly to its detriment and the But The Universe Will Time Explode! In Time! arcs need to be given a rest. I can't figure out a way to blame Tom for that, though.

The lack of a ticking time bomb is one of the reasons I enjoyed Dragon Age 2.

Agreed, although ME2 definitely continues it.

People want to save characters not because they care about the story, but because the prospect of losing that character means missing out on later game play.

Think about a character's death in a movie. Say, Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. His death has meaning because of what has happened to that character throughout the story up to that point. I like Boromir, but I wouldn't want to change the ending of Fellowship and have him survive because I care about the structure of the narrative too much.

In ME2, you aren't taught to value the story that way. Despite the fact that the game purports to be about story, in reality when a character can live or die based on nothing more than which missions you have played, it deprives that moment of any narrative meaning it might have, because the death is completely arbitrary.

There is absolutely a gameplay motivation to want to save characters -- saving them means getting to play better/more missions in ME3. There's just no story motivation, and in a game which is supposed to be about story, I find that to be a problem.

Dragon Age 2 had a great premise, marred by repetitive dungeons, Bioware's continued failure to realize any location that isn't a closed box, and Merrill. If DA2 had ME2 character polish, a fix on the combat cam, and a better written 3rd act, it would have been a much better game. As it is, I think it's only a slightly better game that ME2.

Yeah, I think it would have been a bolder move to actually kill off some of the characters they've build up in ME2 at the end. But it's sort of a catch-22 there isn't it? Since ME2 was the 2nd part of a trilogy.

Some of my favourite parts in ME3 involved the sacrifices of certain characters you got to know in ME2. So I suppose that the build up in ME2 was worth it simply for the continuation of their story in ME3. That still doesn't excuse ME2 weak through line, and its fairly unsatisfying main plot, but it did do the work in establishing characters for ME3 payoffs to really work.

While we're talking about it: something that really disappointed me was how few of the ME2 characters are squadmates in ME3. I think it's Tali and Garrus and uhh that's it. Oh yeah, and Mordin.

I guess that makes sense. It's still disappointing! Especially since my ME2 romance (Miranda) was relegated to a third stringer in ME3.

I do agree that a "collection of short stories" can work really well; I just don't think that once you've introduced the ticking time bomb into the narrative you can ignore it. By its nature, the ticking time bomb must drive the narrative, since the whole idea is that the hero has to solve the problem before it's too late.

I think it would be interesting for Bioware to do a more picaresque kind of story: a protagonist off to see the galaxy driven by a desire for riches, fame, and power. This would be a better fit for a traditional CRPG, where much of the appeal for the player is loot and character advancement. I think it would be interesting for the lead character to be driven by the same desires as the player. Plus it's always entertaining to spend time with a rogue! I gather they tried this with DA2, which I never really got into for non-plot related reasons.

That sort of plot worked well for DA2, which I'm on the record as liking a lot more than the original (despite its myriad shortcomings). I actually do wish more developers would take that tack, it worked out really well.

While gradually introducing plot points that can either redeem the rogue, if he needs it, or take the player into a darker power fantasy. Whether this sort of story has the same narrative drive as the ticking time bomb that works well in mainstream gaming today, is another question though.

After reading so much hate for DA2, I'm happy to say that it was probably my most pleasant surprise of 2012.

And we bring this thread full circle! Both Bahimiron and Tom enjoy being different from the pack!

I think the hate for DA2 was rather overblown myself.

I think this means that Tom and Bahimiron need to fight to the death.

Read Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole's books. They are better than a lot of non-series sci-fi books and a hundred times better than Mass Effect's story.

We did.

The one that survived now runs both accounts.

-Bahimiron

I'm actually replaying DA2 right now and really enjoying it. It's a great game marred by a few highly visible issues:

1. Re-used environments. I actually enjoy that most of the game is spent in Kirkwall and the surrounding area. The problem is that every cave, mansion, warehouse, etc. all have the exact same layout. It was obvious this was rushed to meet an arbitrary release deadline to improve EA's quarterly results.

2. Magically-appearing reinforcements. Spiders dropping from the ceiling makes a certain amount of sense, but I've seen baddies literally appearing from nowhere in the middle of combat.

3. Merrill being a poorly-written moron who never misses an opportunity to make a stupid decision.

4. Half-assed inventory system. It was an improvement to give each companion their own armour that can't be changed by the player, but they didn't go far enough. Why must I also play quartermaster for all their rings, belts, amulets, etc. too? Every time I loot something that looks like it might be useful to someone on my team, I have to hang on to it until I have a chance to change my party and check everyone's gear. ME3 did squad inventory right (limited customization of companion weapons only). I hope that system is incorporated in BioWare's future RPGs.

Take those issues away, though, and I'd say DA2 is a superior game to DA1.

I wonder if people who played the game early (i.e., when it first came out) and, like Tom, didn't realise that you could game the system to ensure the best possible outcome got more out of it?

Erk! I'm referring to ME2, not DA2!

I started playing ME2 the day it was released and got the perfect "no deaths" ending on my first attempt without reading guides or anything.

It was partly because I'm the typical RPG completionist-type player and partly because other games have trained me never to complete a main quest mission until you're finished with the side quests (advancing the story can often eliminate the possibility of completing certain side quests). So by the time I got to the invisible point of no return at the Reaper IFF mission, I had already completed all the squad recruitment and loyalty missions (less Legion's, obviously). From there, it was just a matter of choosing the right person for certain tasks, and even that was relatively obvious if you know the capabilities of your squad.

Same here. I don't think it required much more than thoughtful consideration of the mission parameters and a general familiarity with your squadmates to score a Flawless Victory on the final mission in ME2. Obviously if Tom did skip most of the side quests and loyalty missions, he was handicapped from the start (and may not have realized it), but I don't think that was a direct result of how early he played it.

Tom has flat-out admitted he skipped most of the loyalty missions, so that's why he lost a bunch of guys in the last mission. That's really all there is to it.

I don't think that Tom, as a reviewer, really cares at all about narrative in games. Which is fine. I personally think you can split gamers pretty easily into two large categories: people who approach games as a challenge, and people who approach games as an experience. I'm definitely in the "experience" group - I like narrative, I like exploration of game worlds, and I love this modern era of open-world design where I can encounter weird, emergent gameplay. That shit turns my crank, and I will forgive poor mechanics (to a point) if the overall experience is one I can groove on. Tom's totally a challenge gamer. Which makes sense - he loves strategy games, and multiplayer, and mechanics. So of course ME3 is the best game of the series, because it had the best mechanics. Neither of us is wrong. The irritation (for me) comes in Tom's dismissal of the experience. What hobbles him as a critic (and it's a large reason why I really don't enjoy Qt3 anymore) is that bullheaded refusal. And it's not just with games - how many times has he shit on comic books as being laughably beneath his critical consideration? But apparently every low budget straight-to-cable zombie movie ever made is totally worth a column.

And God knows, Tom isn't alone in this. My absolute most hated general nerd flaw is the hypocritical demand to take whatever they like seriously whilst they also dismiss anything they don't like as garbage. (I spent some time working in a comics store, and that attitude is endemic among a certain breed of dumb nerd.) I mean, I personally can't stand anime or manga - mostly it's just a dislike of the general art style - but clearly other people get a lot out of it. Does that mean I think anime is stupid? No, it just means it's not for me.

That just about sums the prevailing attitude surrounding Mass Effect 3 from all sides.

Was that not a bit of self-referential humour?

See also RPS's point-counterpoint posts from Rossignol ( Games are Best When Things Go Wrong ) and Walker ( Games Aren't Best When Things Go Wrong ). And although I, unlike you, am far more on the challenge/Rossignol side here, I try not to be dismissive of other views. Even though I know in my heart you guys would probably be better off reading books

I kid! Mostly.

No way dude, he was in Frank and Jesse, so he's totally more than just a TV actor =)

Maybe, but his magnum opus will always be his performance on 90210.

Not quite. My second time through, I had to play the whole last sequence twice because Mordin died the first time. Apparently that just happens sometimes if you don't lock him in a tiny box, because this well qualified and thoroughly experienced Salarian special operative is too incompetent at being alive to contribute without his fate being reduced to the outcome of a coin flip.

The broader point, however, is definitely true. Up to the third act of the last game in the entire series, I had lost the following:

1. Kaiden, who died not only because I was balls deep in the other choice at the time, but even if I hadn't been, Kaiden was such a boring, uninteresting non-character that I honestly don't really understand why anybody would save him unless they really just hated Ashley. Ashley had some interesting stuff to do, going from being a total space racist to a slightly better adjusted person. Kaiden was just kind of sad forever. The Walking Dead committed this particular error in its first episode as well, but much harder.
2. Mordin died curing the genophage. Given that the guy had maybe a year and a half at the outside (dude was like 90 in Salarian years), I'd consider this to be about the best way for him to go anyway, so I actually felt pretty good about that. It's not death by snu snu, but he was still happy when he went.
3. I forget when the Drell goes, but I wrote him off from the beginning. He had a terminal illness. I fixed every single thing that he presented to me that I could fix, I repaired his son, I got the family back together - I did everything I could.
4. I suppose I sacrificed a bunch of faceless humans saving a bunch of people who were actually characters around the end of the first game, but that's another one of those 1 kinds of choices. They weren't real. I just mashed my biggest toy boat into the bad guys' biggest toy boat.
5. Legion "died" so that billions of robots could become basically the same as him. Sort of. I'll admit that I didn't realize he was offing himself at the time that he made the call. I figured he was going to go up there, do his thing, and then come back. I obviously missed a line of dialogue or something, but I never really felt that loss.

That's it. That's all the necessary sacrifice that I can remember, and I didn't go out of my way to avoid taking losses. I just did The Right Thing all of the time and finished all of my quests in The Order In Which You're Supposed to Do Quests, Dummy. The result is that my game was very much like Star Wars. Sure, we were up against impossible odds and that's not a moon and whatever, but there was always an hallucinatory octogenarian to tell me when to push the I Win button and make everything work out all good, and, I mean, come on - that fatass's name was Porkins, so he's arguably better off going out in a blaze of glory. And then the ending to my game was basically crashing the forest moon of Endor into the Death Star with everybody still aboard. Something of a tonal inconsistency. Sadly, I think I actually came up with a scenario that would have allowed me to end the game in a satisfactory way if it was implemented and leave a bunch of interesting things for the series to do (I haven't bothered sussing out the details, but basically figuring out a solution that forces me to burn out a couple of relays to short out all of the Reaper brains, because then the canon choice can involve severing the Terminus Systems from the current active network, stranding Tali and any of the other Geth and Quarians that happen to be around, and leaving the system basically to its own, which seems to me to also make the Omega mission a hell of a lot more relevant, because I don't know how old that bitch is supposed to be, but you've got at least, like, six hundred years at that point to decide to put in the sequel wherein you finally reconnect to the sector and you find out that Aria united the mercenary bands under her and she's become the pseudo-law), and I think I'm starting to convince myself that it actually happened that way because I like it so much better, which will be confusing for me when there's a sequel.

I agree with your assessment of Tom, but I disagree with lumping narrative and experience together. I'm definitely an experience gamer, but I don't care that much about narrative because I think, at a fundamental level, story and gameplay don't mix. The more a developer tries to impose a predefined story on the game, the more you run into situations where, for example, a character who has been headshotting enemies in groups of five with no problem while withstanding barrages of fire is taken down by a couple of even weaker enemies in a cutscene, because it's necessary for the prison level the developer wanted to put in. Or where an NPC is invincible for no reason other than that they have a role in a later scene.

The only game I can think of that allowed the player complete freedom and also had a semblance of a story was Space Rangers 2. The story, or at least the premise, is basically the same as Mass Effect: galaxy threatened by implacable robot enemy. How the story played out beyond that was up to you, and was different every time. Mass Effect by contrast is almost 100% linear. There are a few choices along the way but for the most part the choice is only whether you play through a specific chapter or not. This is made most clear with the dialog choices, which might as well not even exist. In SR2 if you mock or threaten another pilot, they may refuse to talk to you or even attack you, in ME2 you might as well being saying "..." every time.

As an experience gamer, I'm willing to put up with a lot of bullshit if the experience is good. However, I generally consider the story to be part of the bullshit rather than the experience. I can't think of a game off the top of my head where the story was one of my favourite things about the game. The only writing that really comes to mind is specific characters, like HK-47 in KOTOR or the skull in Planescape Torment. I couldn't tell you the plot of either of those games.

You're really overstating the case for SR2. In terms of how the story played out it was no different than most choice games, a combative and non-combative way to handle the boss. The war was dynamic though, and it was open-world, but these weren't story elements. Unless you're doing that "crafting your own story, Civilisation wins!" thing.

And I don't see why the pilot thing is different to, say, being a conversation where the person kills themself, or you save them, or they're dead and aren't present due to things you did in a previous game. In fact Mass Effect soundly spanks Space Rangers in this area.

Space Rangers was awesome because it had a dynamic war and the best living world in any game ever to-date. It was in no way awesome on any narrative level, beyond the freedom you were given in tackling the war if you're talking about "personal narrative".

That's true - people who game for the experience are not necessarily in it for the narrative. But while I think it's all too easy to find examples of narrative and experience not mixing well, I can think of a lot of modern examples where they do. I think of something like Fallout 3, where exploration led to interesting little narratives embedded in the environment. And I think narrative can arise in wild, weird ways. Take XCOM, a game that would appear to be the definition of a challenge game, but instead lead me (and others, apparently) to build a narrative for my squad through the game in a way that completely took me by surprise. What I'm trying to say is that narrative is not something that needs to happen in cutscenes, and it doesn't have to be something that is at odds with the gameplay.

As an aside, I tried an experiment this year, where I tried to play challenge-type games in order to expand my horizons. And I had a LOT of surprises. I got super-sucked into Dirt 2 in a way that I never have with any racing game ever, and I'm recently trying to plow through Dark Souls, which apparently has a story but I'm dying too many times to really notice it.

In a save-the-world kind of game, the interesting story is never about the thing you're trying to do. It's about the characters and situations you meet along the way. ME's large-scale story was always going to be "there's a threat, and Shepherd overcomes it", which is the same story as everything else ever. Nobody cares about that. What we care about are the important questions, like will Mordin reconcile himself with being a genocidal war criminal or will Wrex ever realize that Wrex/Shepherd OTP.

Dark Souls (forum rules require at least one Dark Souls reference per page of thread YOU ARE ALL FALLING DOWN ON THE JOB) is particularly brilliant at this, because it spends approximately thirty seconds talking about what you're doing--and twenty of those are with Kaathe who you aren't even going to meet if you don't read wikis. The bulk of its narrative is the personal stories of incidental people you meet along the way. Of course, "bulk" is about five minutes total because Dark Souls, but hey.

Where ME3's ending really falls down is in thinking that there's anything "main" to the main plot of the ME series.

Yes, I'm talking about the whole game as the story, because on one level it has no story but on another level it does, it's just slightly different for every player depending on how they play the game. It's effectively Civ applied to an RPG, or an old-school grindy RPG where the NPCs and the world actually respond to the player.

If you think about what you do in SR2 and what you do in Phantasy Star, it's mostly the same. Fight, trade, level up, by better equipment, talk to people, do missions. It's just that SR2 is procedural rather than scripted, so instead of a scripted trigger causing the enemy force to do something that changes the game world, the world is changing all the time. Unlike most RPGs, including Mass Effect, you can actually lose in SR2. Not just die, but actually lose and have the galaxy taken over. This is the problem of the "ticking bomb" story vs the "go ahead and fuck around, we'll be waiting" gameplay in ME2.

If you don't see the difference between an NPC who either ignores your input and plays out the same scripted dialog as in Mass Effect, or else resets and allows you to repeat the same conversation over and over until you navigate their entire decision tree as in most RPGs, and a game where NPCs actually react to you as independent actors, I don't know what to say. In SR2, everything you did had consequences that could be more or less far-reaching. A guy you recruited as your side-kick might desert if you took him into a battle where he was likely to die. That to me is a lot more interesting than the suicide mission in ME2, where you were effectively playing rock-paper-scissors and picking the wrong guy for a job meant he would die.

In Mass Effect, there were only a handful of choices that were meaningful. The fact those few choices carried over from game to game might be a nice gimmick, I don't know because the XBox with my ME1 save on it died, and the game didn't bother to ask me whether I'd chosen to save that dumb fuckhead Kaiden instead of Ashley, it just assumed, which rather than adding to the game detracted from it.

Here's the thing: I like freedom in games. I like to be able to do what I want to do without the game getting in the way. I've played games for enough years to be able to accept when a game wants to force me into doing something stupid so I can get to the next part that's good (I'm looking at you, Red Dead Redemption) but accepting and celebrating are two different things. To me, the few meaningful choices in ME2 only serve to highlight how totally on rails you are the rest of the time. The loyalty missions didn't make me care about my sidekicks any more. That was grind. In between every mission I'd have to make a tour of the whole ship to everybody's personal hangout and see if I'd managed to unlock a new piece of dialog, and eventually a mission which would allow me to actually do something fun.

I am talking about personal narrative, because that's what games are. Like I said before, I can't think of a single game whose scripted story was worth remembering, and most of them are flat-out clichéd and stupid. Mass Effect 2 falls squarely in that group. The story of ME2 is that a galactic bad-ass assembles a team of other bad-asses to save the galaxy, then goes around doing other things for a while, and every time there's a battle everyone except the main character gets gunned down only to revive after the fight, and finally goes on a desperate suicide mission to save the galaxy which turns out to not actually be much of a suicide mission, except that a few characters die off screen. Can you imagine watching that as a movie? I can't. Never mind that it would be a 30 hour movie.

This is where scripting breaks gameplay. In games like SR2, or Port Royale 3 (which I'm playing now), or Civ and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, what happens in the game actually has consequences. There is no second set of rules for scripted sequences and actions have logical consequences. If you turn on an ally they will leave you and hate you forever. I don't remember what happened when you shot a comrade in the back in ME2, but it either had no effect or else no long-term effect just like when they were shot by enemies. But make the wrong choice during one of the Big Decision Points and then they're dead for good. Unless they're Kaiden, and then you can't fucking get rid of him.

As the "Thane ducts guy" I feel maybe I should say that he wasn't the only one who died in my first runthrough - I think I lost Mordin and Miranda as well, and the latter in a way that the popular chart doesn't account for, so take that with a grain of salt if you're using it to plan - I just complained about it because I felt like he was the only one where the game kinda tricked me. Not to restart that discussion, ahem. Anyway, I didn't feel "trained" to save scum my way through, I just went back and redid it afterwards so I'd have a couple different saves to take into ME3, including a 'perfect' one.

Also all y'all Merrill haters need to step off.