where an impoverished young woman is trying to sell herself into slavery and the game presents the most ethical outcome as helping her negotiate a better contract for her indentured servitude?
Looking back those games were Fukuyama'd as shit, jfc
I still have a soft spot for the ME games, but the liberalism is hard to un-see now, and that hampers my enjoyment of it.
Was there even anything particularly good about the Citadel/Council government? All their worlds still had capitalism, evil corporations, income inequality, poverty, crime, desperation etc
Or was it just the liberal thing where everyone else, like the Batarians, are just brutal dictatorships and standins for China/Russia etc
The Mass Effect Earth codex literally states that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. It also says "Less fortunate regions have not progressed beyond 20th century technology, and are often smog-choked, overpopulated slums" implying that the global south is still brutally exploited by the West.
I love ME, but it sucks how they basically just teleported the present neoliberal system 200 years into the future instead of doing something hopeful like Star Trek.
Would've been fine if the storyline was becoming a spectre and then immediately using your authority to start a third worldist revolution on Earth.
What if instead of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism you just had space liberalism? Go down the wrong elevator in the Citadel and you're in a slum with roving criminal gangs everywhere. Shepard even starts as a Jack Bauer super troop with a license to murder anyone
Shepard even starts as a Jack Bauer super troop with a license to murder anyone
Which makes it even more obnoxious (and liberal) when the capitalist asshole on Novaria (the snow world with the labs in ME1) refuses to comply, and you are given no option to threaten him or escalate violence towards him, you can only get him on a corruption charge.
It would be one thing if they gave you an option to threaten to kill him, and he simply made a greater threat in return ("my mercenaries outnumber you, we could disappear even a specter, etc."), but the fact that you just aren't permitted to enact violence against the capitalist, even when you supposedly have galactic authority to kill anyone, is perfect liberalism.
And remember! Killing the last queen of a sentient eusocial species that had been subjected to a galactic genocide and subsequent military expermients is presented as morally equivalent to letting her live.
I don't think I even need to mention the genophage storyline
they never also never bring up the Rachni again regardless of the choice. It’s so odd to me from a “lore” perspective they say this race is like super important and no one seems to care if you kill her, and just vibes out of you free her. Seems really weird to never bring them up again across your multi-game adventures
She is in ME3, and has a cameo/reference in ME2.
In ME3 she will appear as clone if you killed her, and betray you if you give the mind controlled clone a second chance. If you saved her in ME1, she will assist you in the final battle if you save her from the Reaper's mind control device.
In ME2 an Asari who is a member of her hivemind colony will approach you and thank you, in addition to updating you on her progress and informing you that she intends to assist you when the Reapers inevitably return.
I thought they showed up in ME3 as reaper'd enemies regardless of the choice you'd made?
Suddenly flashing back to that one dialogue where a human woman is desperately trying to get her mixed human/asari daughter out of a warzone and the galactic beuracrat she's speaking to initially won't do anything until the woman gives an emotional Sorkin speech that changes the beuracrat's mind.
I still like the first game the best, despite all the shit politics the world is interesting and I love the atmosphere and the sorta Star Trek-y clean utopian scifi atmosphere the game has. And while I love Sovereign and the lore surrounding the Reapers in the first game, I honestly feel they should have been a one and done threat.
All the trite "chosen one saves the world from an ancient evil" mystery bullshit completely sucked the air out of cool stories they could have done within that universe, especially since they ended up completely wrecking said universe for the sake of it
It's unfortunate, there was originally a whole "dark energy" storyline that was supposed to provide an actual justification for the reapers and become the main story after they were gone. If I remember right, the gist was that the mass relay-based tech that keeps being re-developed in every cycle effects space-time in a way that would threaten life across the universe if it was used at too big of a scale, so the reapers regularly purge advanced civilizations to keep it from getting developed too much, to preserve life in the rest of the universe. But we would only find this out after stopping the reapers, so then the story becomes finding a way to stop it from happening without having to resort to cyclical genocide. They started hinting at it in ME2 so they could do the big plot twist in ME3, but then there was a change in the writing staff after 2 came out, and between that and 3 being rushed so much, it was never picked back up. Except for the sort of half-assed reworking of it for the plot of Andromeda lol
Shepard even starts as a Jack Bauer super troop with a license to murder anyone
And humans have to save all the other species in the Citadel by eschewing their bureaucracy and sending Jack Bauer to kick some ass. Humanity in ME is basically just Space America and the whole thing is a justification for American militarism.
Mass Effect was a lot of fun, but something about Bioware's writing always feels lacking to me, and the fact of how frequently you are presented with situations where both options suck or the good/evil labeling betrays some incredible I D E O L O G Y is a big reason why.
TBH I don't even know why they bothered with the choices after ME1. They had the data that said that like 90% of players only played the good route, if your "choices matter" storytelling is so bad that everyone just picks the same options then you should give up and do a linear story I must say.
TBH I don’t even know why they bothered with the choices after ME1. They had the data that said that like 90% of players only played the good route, if your “choices matter” storytelling is so bad that everyone just picks the same options then you should give up and do a linear story I must say.
Because the mass effect games were never about actual choice, but rather the aesthetic of choice.
Even putting aside that 90% of the player base made the same choices; the alternative options never even changed the story that much to begin with.
And that's because choice in the mass effect games was always nothing more than a charlatans magic trick. Bioware never really had to give players an actual choice: just the illusion of one. The player never really had a sense of true freedom or agency within the games...but the choice and dialogue system was really good at making players feel like they did. That feeling of engagement is really powerful even if it's all smoke and mirrors.
...but hey, enough about the American system of democracy.
That's def another reason why Bioware games fall flat for me. Although games that offer narrative choice that is actually substantial are few and far between - does Disco Elysium count? There's a lot of routes, but the ending is always the same. Fear and Hunger has a ton of possible outcomes, but they aren't really signposted and honestly feel more like discovering bonus content than interacting with a narrative. Heavy Rain had a ton of routes and endings, but also a lot of very ham fisted writing that felt like it was forcing you onto certain paths even if it wasn't.
Maybe having narratives with genuine choices in a computer RPG is actually a cursed problem without a solution.
It doesn't help that the good route gives you the best outcome 99% for the time whereas playing solid renegade screws you over significantly more.
I mean I don't exactly mind because I like to play the starry eyed optimist paragon protag that tries to save everyone possible, good or bad, but there's seriously only a single instance where playing that character actually screws you over, and it takes place in an offscreen news email in ME3.
Well I guess this is probably better than rewarding you for killmurdering and saying that doing a hecking genocide was actually the correct choice (though that doesn't stop Bioware fans from frequently arguing that anyways...)
Extremely lukewarm take but the combat in ME3 was really good. Especially the adept and vanguard classes.
The multi-player was actually pretty fun too. I had a great time with my salarian teleporting into enemies, blowing them away with the beefiest handgun available, and then cloaking out.
If only it wasn't buried under 101¹⁰¹×(101¹⁰¹×101¹⁰¹) lootboxes
PSA: this thread is a cooldown space for everyone who got very mad and nude in the How to Blow Up a Pipline thread. Please come here and reconcile in clowning on these once-beloved games from my childhood
This sort of capitalist realist nonsense is why in all my own sci-fi games, global communism has been achieved
I don't say it outright, I just deliberately don't mention things like money or corporations
My partner’s reading a smutty fae novel where most of the 7 fae courts are feudal and the human world is feudal, but there’s 1 court that’s just exists in… a modern capitalist city? It’s portrayed like, oh this one court is so advanced and wealthy compared to the other ones because it was allowed to flourish! And flourishing happens to involve the standardization of wage labor, commodity fetishism, and the requirement of having money in order to obtain food. Imagine otherwise feudal fae, but their landlords are modern landlords instead of feudal ones.
I'm all for recommendations. It's depressing to me that even sci-fi games on the more hopeful side (Stellaris and... that's it) are still confined within the logic of capitalism. There's an intergalactic market and an equivalent of the UN (and all that entails) and everything.
Since you've so kindly given me an opening to plug my work, I recommend checking out Genepet and Xenologist! I also made Dark Cosmos, but that one's a lot more on the depressing side (still no capitalism, though).
Thanks. will try. I dig the late 80s retro game aesthetic.
Uncritical support to the reapers, unlimited genocide on the citadel
Which world was this one? I have played through the series a few times and I don’t believe I recall this side-quest. What’s it an optional one?
If Mass Effect really allowed player choice I'd be able to go full John Brown on Illium.
It's that asari planet you go to to recruit the lizard assassin guy, the one that's basically space Monte Carlo.
I tend to get Thane last in my playthrough, my memories of lillium (I think that’s the name of the planet) are few. I tend just rampage through his recruitment so I can talk to him, but I always find world just too generically sci-fi-y to stick around.
Remember that Mass Effect 2 DLC where an autistic person is literally said to be more alien than an actual alien?
I remember the conversation between the Quarian girl and the Turian who claimed territory within the Friend Zone of the Milky Way (populated by losers who can't take a hint and move on)
