Mass Effect – Page 4 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Tag: Mass Effect (page 4 of 5)

Cerberus Daily News

As much as I love BioWare, I can’t shake the notion they’ve gone in the wrong direction.

You see, they’re developing a Star Wars MMO. Granted, it’s set in the wildly popular and surprisingly rich universe of the Old Republic, the same as their previous RPGs and some of the best comics written in that universe (in my opinion). So while I’m cautiously optimistic and might try out the beta if I can, I don’t think I’ll be buying it.

If they had developed a different game, I think they’d be getting a lot more of my cash. And not just mine.

What I’m driving at is, BioWare ~~should~~ needs to develop a Mass Effect MMO.

I know there are arguments why this shouldn’t be done. A lot of people who play single-player games like Mass Effect despise MMOs. And I can understand their sentiment. I agree that I wouldn’t want a game that’s just World of Warcraft in space. I think that as the Mass Effect games continue to evolve, the combat system is becoming more refined, and porting that into an MMO would work as a nice change from the usual MMO method of point-and-clicking something to death.

Other people seem to think that having a massive amount of players in the universe will ruin the universe. Granted, you’ll definitely have people running around trying to be nothing more than Shepard 2.0, the latest and greatest Spectre who doesn’t play by the rules and is out looking for answers and is letting their assault rifle do the talking and their assault rifle speaks very loudly and rapidly. But there’s something out there that both gives me hope that this would be a minor problem and encourages for me the idea of an MMO in this universe working.

The Cerberus Daily News.

Established concurrently with Mass Effect 2, the CDN is an in-universe news bulletin board. They added a commentary box to it for visitors to use. Role-players were drawn to this like moths to a sci-fi lens flare. An official forum has become attached and the sheer amount of storytelling going on, for better or worse, is staggering.

I hope this community continues to thrive. To me, this is evidence that people want to play within the Mass Effect universe as somebody other than Shepard. Now, it may simply continue in this vein if Star Wars: The Old Republic fills the LucasArts/BioWare MMO niche, or they may expand into new territory with a Mass Effect MMO. I’m curious to see what happens.

Then again, maybe this is just my bitterness towards Lucas coloring my opinion. As I said, the Old Republic portion of the Star Wars universe has provided us with some great stories so far. Maybe an MMO set there will satisfy the sci-fi role-players unfulfilled by EVE Online and the lack of role-playing freedom in Mass Effect. It could very well be that, between the CDN and the folks who go into the Old Republic, a Mass Effect MMO would prove to be unnecessary.

I’d still rather play that than another Star Wars game, though. That’s just my opinion.

Until we know more for sure, I’ll continue checking out the CDN. It’s an interesting look at the sort of role-players drawn to the Mass Effect universe, if nothing else.

There Is No Sex

September 14, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 3 Comments

Art courtesy Lucian

Once again I’ve provided a provocative title to try and get your attention. Is it working? Is it?

Yesterday’s post on females in fiction has generated some feedback, but thoughts from one of my friends got me thinking. He said, “Why not disregard gender entirely? Why not just write characters?” This is something worth consideration. Tyrande, the Baroness, Hit-Girl… they’re characters no more or less valid than Brann Bronzebeard, Destro or Kick-Ass. They all have interesting angles, they all exemplify parts of ourselves and they call can be used and abused at the hands of different writers. There are differences in character much deeper and more nuanced than their disparate gonads. So why do gonads come into it at all?

Is there, in fact, no sex? Or more to the point, no genders?

Proceeding with Lucian‘s intriguing line of thought, consider the following. While this is not a direct quotation from the conversation we had, it’s still thinking outside of myself, hence it gets the blockquote treatment.

The purpose of gender existing is to help us construct schema for social situations. A schema is a semi-conscious pre-evaluation of a situation based on how things are “meant” to work. Driving’s a good example. Driving has a tight schema: we expect people to drive on a certain side of the road, stop at red lights, etc.

Gender works like that for social situations. You see a person, evaluate male/female, and pre-judge how they will act based on gender stereotypes. The problem is, stereotypes hardly ever really hold true,
and they are usually reinforced into place by social expectation. Not to mention, they are harmful and insulting to “both” genders.

That is how gender works and why it exists.

And why it is very, very boring.

From the perspective of the writer, at least when it comes to fiction, the goal should be to write compelling characters, regardless of their gender. Now, this doesn’t mean that the newsboy on the corner should have as much depth or development as John Dillinger. But the characters we do spend time with should have some dimension to them, things for the audience to discover.

Say what you want about the stories in the Mass Effect universe, but many of the characters we encounter have depth and nuance divorced from their gender. Would Wrex be any less interesting if it turned out he was female? How about Tali’s fans – would they still exist in their large numbers (with me among them) if Tali was a male Quarian? I’d still want to hang with Tali if he were a guy, for the record. I’d also like to believe that Miranda would be just as smug and Jack just as caustic if they were men. Sure, their character models would undertake radical changes and Miranda probably wouldn’t be called Miranda, but that’s beside my point.

Under those layers with varying degrees of curvature and color that we call “bodies,” the characters we create that carry our stories should be interesting, thoughtful, compelling – human. “Human” means more than gender. It applies to our lives, and I think it should apply to our fiction as well.

How important is gender, when you get right down to it? When it comes to what’s really important about our characters – motivation, outlook, goals and fears – is there, in fact, no sex?

Checkered Flags Ahead

September 12, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

It’s important to have goals, in just about everything you do. The somewhat tricky part is that not everything will have defined goals laid out for you. The deadlines of a dayjob, the billing dates of utilities, the expiration on a gallon of milk – these give us tangible goals. Other goals aren’t usually as well defined.

Take gaming, for example. People are under no obligation to reach a particular level in World of Warcraft, Mass Effect or EVE Online. In fact, EVE has no “end-game” content to speak of. There’s no sprawling story structure of quests and rewards – just you, your starting vessel and the vast emptiness of space. To keep things interesting you have to set goals for yourself – get this skill to a certain level, earn enough money for that class of ship, be good enough to be invited to the Awesome Express corporation.

Mass Effect, being a single-player experience, has the goals of the story missions, side quests and DLC, but beyond that you really don’t have any obligation to play it more than once. Yet I find myself contemplating doing just that. I’ve beaten both games on standard difficulty (as an Inflitrator) and Hardcore (as a Vanguard). But the Insanity difficulty taunts me. I also never hit the maximum level in the first game. So at some point, I’ll be revisiting it, and maybe I can put together a review of ME2’s DLC while I’m at it.

As for World of Warcraft, my main character’s plunging into the final end-game raid of the last expansion. I’m also getting him geared up for the arenas, which are pretty much the pinnacle of player-versus-player skill. Meanwhile, I have two other characters I’m working on, one for the purposes of change-of-pace gameplay (tanking as opposed to DPSing) and one for role-playing purposes. It’s difficult to portray a charismatic, powerful villain when you’re only half as powerful as everybody else in terms of level, after all.

Outside of my various electronic distractions, other goals approach as well. I’ve been doing podcasts for IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! for almost a year, and in a few months I’ll have been getting blog posts up for over 365 days. The editing process of Citizen in the Wilds proceeds, I’m trying to get a hold of Polymancer again and in a few weeks I’ll know the end result of my efforts to place in the Blizzard fiction contest. Once these goals are met, however, I know I can’t stop – new ones will have to be set, otherwise I’ll just be puttering around in games all day.

I mean, more than I usually do.

What sort of goals do you/have you set for yourself? How do you reward yourself when you reach them?

Ribs Without A Spine

May 12, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I’ve been inspired to write the following due to Alex Macris’ latest Check for Traps feature on the Escapist. You can read it here. The Cliff’s Notes is basically that a GM in a tabletop RPG should be less of a directive storyteller, and more of an emergent one. That’s a great concept in theory, but it’s possible for some GMs to consider this an excuse to do no story work whatsoever and that, my friends, is a mistake.

Characters with no story to bring them together or drive them forward is like ribs without a spine. Now, as a food, ribs without a spine are mostly what you’re looking for. Lather those ribs in a delicious sauce and cook them just right so that the meat’s nice and moist rather than tough and dry, and you have yourself a delicacy for a discerning omnivore such as myself. But even in those ideal conditions, the end result’s a bit messy.

A less food-based example of what I’m talking about is Mass Effect 2.

For most of the game, you go from one hot spot in the galaxy to another, either picking up a new member of your crew or helping them with a personal matter to earn their undying loyalty (for the most part). This series of mini-stories is bookended with the whole Reapers/Collectors business, but the nature of the game leads one to believe that they’re more of a backdrop against which the characters grow, rather than being any sort of impetus for change or tension. If the plot had been more coherent or the threat more credible, we might have had a more full-bodied experience rather than a plate of (albeit tasty) character ribs.

When you have strong characters, the story holding them together should also be strong. However, it shouldn’t overwhelm the characters. I think that’s what Alex has been driving at in his last few articles. The guy behind the screen, the man behind the curtain, the puppeteer above the stage pulling the strings – it shouldn’t be all about them and the story they want to tell to the exclusion of everything else. Role-playing games involving more than one player should be collaborative experiences, with players bringing interesting characters to the table while the GM weaves their plots together and gives them something against which to struggle. That is unless you’re running a demo at a convention or something and just want to show off how cool this dungeon is or how that class works in comparison to that other class. Then you go straight for the mechanics and rules, and leave most of your story-telling and world-building and atmosphere-creating tools at home. I learned that one the hard way.

See what I mean here? Are you catching my drift? Or am I completely off my rocker because I told those kids to get off my lawn a bit too violently? Share your thoughts, Intertubes.

Her Twenty-First

March 18, 2010 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

In honor of my wife‘s birthday today, here’s a bit from one of my favorite posts of hers. We’re taking care of some errands and going out at least for dinner tonight, thanks to a generous gift card to our favorite restaurant. Guess what it is. Go on, guess.

Enjoy this little taste of an opinionated game review peppered with swearing.

Good Game, Shitty Story: The Mass Effect Experience

Look at that title. I just summed up everything I’m about to say and I don’t even have to say it. I could stand back, look proud of myself and just let the title speak for itself.

However, I’m not. I suspect I will have hundreds of fanboys raging all over the place here if I were to, so I’ll qualify what I just said with some experiences.

For most of the fights worth a damn I used Liara and Alenko, actually.

As I said, the game itself was really good, but I feel I should qualify that too: it was really good when I was playing a Soldier. When I first started up the game, I figured I’d probably play a Soldier because I’m boring and like killing things, but after looking at the classes I figured I’d go for something I don’t usually play, and chose the ~~mage~~ Adept. The combat controls were confusing at first (the game arbitrarily has different movement controls for combat and non-combat), especially since you can’t zoom out, so despite it being third person I still got that “no peripheral vision” feeling that comes with first person shooters. Anyway, I quickly discovered that you can’t keybind more than one ability — despite never using the D-pad for anything the entire game — so if you want to play something that relies as much on abilities as it does on shooting things, and you’re not playing on the PC, you’d better like pausing combat. A lot.

After dealing with the flow-breaking pausing, or just ignoring it and shooting things for the entire first mission, I finally said “fuck this” and re-rolled. Maybe it’s because I could dump all my points in assault rifles since I knew I wasn’t going to use anything else, maybe it was because I’d gotten the hang of the way combat worked, but I immediately had much more fun with the Soldier and went on with the game. I did get a couple abilities throughout the game (well, “a couple” isn’t accurate, I had almost as many as Liara by the end) but most of the time I forgot they existed and just shot things till one of us died. The only ones I ever really took advantage of were my party resurrect and the one that reset all my abilities so I could use the resurrect again. These two got used a lot, too, because the entire party liked to huddle around me, and if I was behind cover, instead of going off to find their own cover nearby, they’d stand in the open near me and get killed. Despite this, the way the fights are set up I was grateful to have party members, especially later on when Kaidan and Liara both got Lift.

Lift is awesome.

As for the non-combat parts… Well. I often found it stupid that one charm speech would cause people to rethink their entire diabolical plan/career choice/life, but I guess it’s better than requiring five conversation trees of the exact same thing. There was also one thing that bothered me with the reporter coming to talk to you sidequest… I knew it was the Renegade option to tell her to fuck off, and I was going for a Paragon, but I chose it anyway because I’d previously promised Emily Wong, another reporter and recurring quest NPC, that she would be the first to get an exclusive interview. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to remember this promise because it never comes up again and everyone acts like you’re an ass for not doing the interview, and there’s no way to tell people I refused in order to keep my promise to Wong (thereby doing the right thing). Why make things like that a dialogue option at all if you’re going to assume the player will completely forget about them?

Other than hiccups like that, I really enjoyed the dialogue parts. I’m one of those OCD types who will get as much information out of an NPC as possible, which often led to spending ridiculous amounts of time chatting, though. Rarely in a game am I so eager to get back to the action after spending time in town as I was in Mass Effect.

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