Mass Effect 3, or: How Ten Minutes Can Ruin 100 Hours Worth of Gameplay

This review assumes you possess a certain degree of familiarity with the Mass Effect franchise. You've been warned...

Review - Mass Effect 3, or:

How Ten Minutes Can Ruin 100 Hours Worth of Gameplay

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[Update] Bioware's Casey Hudson has "responded" to the gaming community's complaints by a typical non-response coupled with the sales pitch for new DLC content. Sorry buddy, but this isn't the way this thing will go down. You wanted your game's ending to be "unforgettable". You sure achieved that, but how do they say? 'Be careful of what you wish for'. This ending sure is unforgettable, but only in the sense that it's among the worst endings in gaming history.

Mass Effect is one of the great gaming franchises that came virtually out of nowhere to take the hearts of gamers by storm. The story of Commander Shepard and his crew fighting against the odds in a very detailed and, for the lack of a better word, breathing galaxy evolved from RPG to interactive cinematic epic already between the first two games. As such expectations across the board were sky high when last week the third and final installment of the saga around Shepard and the galatic threat of the "Reaper" machine intelligences was released.

This review will not spend too much time on the things that were good in Mass Effect 3, and not due to them not being present. In fact, Mass Effect 3 refines most parts of its predecessors, tweaking the grafics even a bit, offering close to 35 hours of extremely engaging singleplayer gameplay. You will meet all your surviving squadmates from previous games. Some of them won't remain with you for your whole path, but their sendoffs are wonderfully done emotional scenes without exception. I won't spoil these parts. They are astonishingly well written and directed, and you deserve to enjoy them untainted by my description.

As for the paid Day 1 DLC, I wasn't one of those bitching about it. In fact I bought the Collector's Edition and downloaded it immediately. What I am mad about is the wasted opportunity this DLC has proven to be. Almost 600 MB in size it offers a prothean squadmate – who is okay, btw – and a nice insight into the end of prothean civilization. But for something of that size the actual new level it offers is almost ridiculously small, with Eden Prime being nothing but a small cluster of container-like houses. Content-wise, it was underwhelming, also because it wasted the opportunity to at least hint at the possibility that more of the protheans in that bunker may have survived. Given that this race combines the imperialism of the turians, the biotic abilities of the asari and the ambition of humanity bringing a colony of them back would have been a wonderful way to upset the post-game balance.

As for the missions they range from awesome to boring and unimpressive, with the scales definitely tipped way in favor of the awesome ones. The Mars Archives have a great atmosphere to them with a formidable mix of setting, action, drama and mystery. The mission to save the Turian hierarch however has to be the most bland and unimaginative level design I've seen in a long time, with a largely featureless landscape and miniscule buildings. The only things memorable about that one are the fleet action scene at its beginning and the vista you get of the burning turian homeworld below you.

Between the missions you get to talk to your squadmates on the Normandy or on the Citadel, or you simply listen to the conversations developing all around you in crowded spaces. I feel never before has a game felt so alive while at the same time establishing such an overwhelming atmosphere of dread. As much as this is possible with the technology we have and the medium Mass Effect uses the universe Bioware has created - though nothing too spectacular from a Scifi POV - feels real. In fact, if you've played the other games during the past 5 years you'll have developed a definite emotional investment to the setting and the characters, so much in fact that there are scenes beyond count in ME 3 where you're on the verge of tears, deeply moved, grinning like stupid or laughing out loud. Just walk around the Citadel and listen. Small tip: go to Huerta Memorial and listen in on the asari with PTSD... and later listen to what Joker, your pilot, has to say about his own family.

What makes the coming disappointment so incredibly baffling to me is that during the remaing 99% of the game the writing is, how do I best put this, FRIGGIN' AMAZING! The way even the smallest stories are interconnected, how the chatter of random bystanders evokes real emotions, how all the small tidbits and information from the previous games are tied in and, last but not least, how very much alive your squadmates and their personal stories feel after three games, with Liara telling you about her childhood, Tali trying to live up to her new responsibilities, Garrus being an awesome but wisened bro – this is real talent at work here. Not only that: it's evident from all this how well the writers understand the characters and the universe.

Which is why I'm so flabberghasted about the glaring faults the game's setup and story do have.

What about Haestrom and the Dark Energy subplot that reared its head time and again during ME2? That went nowhere even though ME 2 left us with the impression that something which kept aging A SUN must be pretty damn important.

What about Cerberus and the Illusive Man? In Mass Effect 2 they were an ambiguous, cell-based, illegal organization that resorted to murder, kidnapping and terrorism to further its goal of human survival and supremacy. They were decidedly of the "the ends justifies the means" variety of protagonists, but they had their merits and their limits. Bringing Shepard back from the dead and rebuilding a stronger and more advanced Normandy was seen as a major investment by TIM.

And in Mass Effect 3? There they are reduced to the function of cartoonish villains with a ressource pool larger than that of COBRA from GI Joe, with the ability to field fleets of actual warships and attack and subdue colonies with millions of inhabitants. How does one get from the small scale behind the scenes machinations of ME 2 to "Minor Galactic Military Power" of ME 3 in less than a year? Does that make sense? Suddenly there is a "Cerberus Cruiser" over the krogan homeworld of Tuchanka, and Cerberus assault teams can attack secret salarian installations on the salarian homeworld which are guarded by crack STG troopers. And TIM, an ambiguous but ultimately rational character in ME2 gets hit with the Bond Villain stick, turning him into a moustache twirling villain doing evil deeds almost just for the heck of it.

The most frustrating realization, even more so than the vast disappointment of the 3 possible endings themselves, is that ninety percent of what you do in game is basically pointless. The gathering of war assets, the gaining of allies, the bringing together of old enemies to bury their hatchets in face of a new and overwhelming adversary? You spend much of the game trying to fulfill that goal, much like you spent ME2 with gathering your team members and doing their loyalty missions. And in ME 3 it just doesn't mean squat. The fleets and ships and extra brigades you gather, the allies you gain, the technologies you salvage or research, nothing of it matters because you're never taking on the reapers in a fight except as a diversion for you to attach the Deus Ex Machina to the Citadel! All it does is add extra time available for the building of that deus ex machina, the Crucible, which is going to win you the fight anyhow!

Compare this to Mass Effect 2, where you had to gather a team of the most badass, well-connected, deadly hombres of the galaxy and led them on a suicide mission on a ship you had upgraded with the best technology available to a point where it was a generation ahead of everything the rest of the galaxy possessed. Your chances of success were directly linked to your preparations, your investment in your team members and your knowledge of their strength and weaknesses. They went with you through the worst of it, and you cared because even though they were assassins, genetically engineered superwomen, rogues or amoral mercenaries you had come to know them for the personalities their own stories had to offer. Everything you worked for contributed directly to the success of your mission. Your Shepard was the centerpiece of the story, but it was your team mates who gave that story life.

Narrative-wise everything is still fine until you get up to the Citadel in the final battle... and then the game just throws a ton of crap your way completely out of nowhere. I mean sure, we all knew it would take a ton of crap to defeat the Reapers, but not like this. This is just... unfitting.

The ending leaves me with a feeling rather quite similar to that of the new Battlestar Galactica series: after all you've done and gone through you get whacked with the stupid stick.

You get to chose from three options, none of which are truly satisfying, and none of which offer any conclusion to the whole storyline.

Yeah... right.

If the game was uniformly mediocre, the judgement of the writing team concerning the ending would be questionable, but except for the ending the writing is superb, hence I don't understand how the writing team expected the fans to find such an ending satisfying?!

[Update 03/14/2012]
It leaves me feeling... empty. I won't lie to you: before I ended this game I had decided to put some time aside to continue to write on my old ME fanfic. I mean, how's that: spending time on writing something I don't get paid for instead of writing for money. That in and by itself should give everyone the right idea about how involving the ME franchise was up to this point.


But instead of writing on it I find myself gnashing my teeth when I'm home from my dayjob.

Now, lets not kid ourselves here: there will always be people throwing a hissy fit about something. But this is different. This isn't me or a bunch of other people whining about not getting their cookies. This is customers, dedicated fans of a franchise, voicing their concerns about something that goes beyond bafflement or disappointment and enters the territory of, dare I say:

Even mainstream media outlets such as Forbes Magazine have recognized the fan outcry, and - unlike game magazines - are actually sympathetic to the gamers' gripes. Forbes has been on the ball with this one, following up with pretty objective pieces on an almost daily basis.

A Facebook group with more than 26,000 [03/14/2012] members has sprung up almost over night. There is even a charity drive for the Child's Play charity (donating to which is a good deed no matter your stance on Mass Effect) to which more than $34,000 USD [03/14/2012] have been donated within 24 hours!

The general feelings there echo mine: this isn't what I invested more than a hundred hours for, this isn't what the franchise has stood for, this isn't what we were promised. It's not even about getting a "happy" ending. It's about closure, which this doesn't even begin to offer. That being said, Hitler - of all people - sums it up real good.

This ending is a potential franchise killer. It's that bad. I may speak for me, but after seeing the endings my enthusiasm for a replay has completely diseappeared. What for!? Just so my Shepard can take one of three stupid option offered by that Star Child which correlate in no way to the decisions I took over the past three games? There's nothing left to get back to!

So, will the enthusiasm/love of fanfics writers wane too? I fear the answer is "yes". A franchise like Mass Effect lives from the dedication of its fans, and despite its generally superb writing Bioware has taken a couple of decisions that have greatly alienated their core Mass Effect fanbase. The endings is one, the need of using the multiplayer to attain a certain degree of "readyness" for your SP campaign is another.

Bioware has squandered a lot of customer goodwill during the past couple of years. Maybe they still have a few aces up their sleeves. For their sake I sure hope they do. Maybe it's not all said and done yet. For example, The Escapist has a good case for why the endings might, just might be an halucination. Either way it'd be one hell of a dickish move by EA and Bioware. After this episode here many gamers - this author included - will certainly think twice about giving EA and Bioware more of their money. Which is a shame, but may be the only way to get our voices heard in the end.