by Karl Parakenings
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mass Effect 3 is a deeply, deeply flawed game.
While the game does a few things well, it mostly suffers from the same resource and vision conflicts that have plagued the last several releases from BioWare. Much like Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Awakening, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and the DLC for all of the above, Mass Effect 3 offers a sprawling world filled with fully-voiced conversation and motion-captured animation. When this combination works, it _works_; unfortunately, any given achievement is outweighed by the stilted awkwardness of the rest of the game.
Which is not to say that you should not buy ME3. On the contrary, you should buy and play it, because it is probably the most important game released in the last ten years. In Mass Effect 3, we have the last gasps of an obsolete way of thinking about game design coupled with the fresh gestures of a new age in video gaming.
That all sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? And rightly so – this game embodies the advantages and dangers of the hype machine that has become the only way anyone promotes an upcoming release. Mass Effect 3 WILL BLOW YOUR MIND, AND PERHAPS YOUR GENITALS AS WELL. Mass Effect 3 WILL BRING MEANING TO YOUR LIFE BY REFLECTING YOUR VIDEO GAME DECISIONS AND CREATING A LIVING WORLD WROUGHT FROM YOUR PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY AND LIVING BRAIN. How do you write a sane response to insane claims, or an even-handed response to a marketing department that thinks it’s representing a Modern Classic For The Bros Too? The most disastrous elements of ME3 emerge when it tries to live up to these promises — I am writing this review without spoilers, but those who have finished the game are probably convulsing in their seats with all the problematic moments in the game flashing before their twitching eyes, faces red with Internet Rage and fingers spasmodically clutching for the nearest keyboard.
My apologies to you.
For the rest of our readers who had to wait for a paycheck or, heaven forbid, save up: Mass Effect 3 will try to live up to what you want from it, but it will rarely succeed. Fortunately, when it does it is stellar, bringing all of the player’s emotional and temporal investment in the series to a satisfying climax. Unfortunately, those moments were all too rare in my 30+ hour playthrough.
I’m being an asshole, I admit. The major problem with writing this review is that I gave myself time to reflect on the game. One of the oddest things about the publisher-reviewer dynamic as it exists currently is how time-sensitive it is. I bought Mass Effect 3 on release day, and by the time I’d finished watching the introductory cutscene, the internet was awash with opinions and professional reviews. A day and a half later, I was already avoiding spoilers about the ending from people who finished the game on the hardest mode possible.
It struck me at the time as pretty damn silly, and still does. Review embargoes and review copies alike encourage this factory-floor model of game writing, where one gets the game, tries to finish it AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, and then dashes off a review to beat the other game sites to the punch. I tried doing that, writing several thousand words in the passenger seat of an SUV speeding down I-75, but when we stopped for dinner I read it over and didn’t like what I produced. If playing a game is a kind of participatory authorship, as some critics claim, then reviewing a game immediately after completing it is like sending the first draft of your novel to your mother. Two things are certain: one, the review is going to be positive, and two, you have discovered a fantastic new way to masturbate. Let’s all pause a moment so that the commenters can reverse my masturbation metaphor to refer to this article.
When I finished Mass Effect 3, I liked it a lot. I even liked the often-maligned ending, and still am somewhat fond of its boldness, in the same way that I had a friend in high school who I was fond of despite his Munchausen syndrome . I’d hang around Mass Effect 3, but I wouldn’t invite him over, because the only time I did he took a joke too far, insinuated that he was going to stalk my best friend’s sister, and blew up at some minor slight, insisting that he was going onto bigger and better things than any of us. After he stormed out, everyone quietly wondered if access to a car and weed was really that important.
Yes, Mass Effect 3 is indeed that fairweather friend – the one that unwittingly points out how lucky you are to have real, decent friends, who only occasionally take advantage of you, and simultaneously evokes pity, because in another setting he could be someone wonderful. ME3’s shitty beater car is the root of its inability to form real friendships with its peers: with one hand, it tries to live up to AAA game design and the expectations of the Console Generation With High Speed Internet, while with the other, it tries to reject all that and attempts to place Story and Character over Gameplay. As in most empires’ autumnal years, BioWare has begun to believe its own sycophantic followers: they’re renowned as The Best Story People In Gaming, the ones who Make People Care, and almost all of ME3’s faults can be traced to the impetus to live up to that ideal.
Again: there are brilliant, exquisite moments in the game, symphonies of cinematography and delicious morsels of writing, where the huge amount of work and people necessary to make a video game come together for a brief instant to form a beautiful whole. The problem is that the game that was released is so piecemeal and uneven that every shining moment is immediately followed by a squadmate failing to load in time for their bon mot or a dead-eyed Commander Shepard staring into the middle distance, automatically flapping her mouth to the voice-over file like a demented Muppet. I find myself remembering the stilted opening, where I couldn’t tell what was going on because the cutscene framing insisted on cropping out the head and legs of everyone in the scene while the soundtrack tried to convince me I was watching Ben Hur. Once I gained control of Shepard, Captain Anderson incessantly coached his special-ops protege to jump over a short gap while I watched the stunningly executed backdrop of Earth’s ruin.
To BioWare’s credit, they make several innovations and improvements over the previous game’s main loop. The tedious graph-based mineral scanning is gone, replaced with tedious scanning at a distance; the sidequests and planetary exploration of the first game are back, in the form of tedious scanning and probe-launching from orbit; and the D&D-esque character and weapon customization returns from the first game, improved with a mildly tolerable interface. The anemic and surreal conversations with random bystanders in ME2 are replaced with the best eavesdropping simulator ever produced: Commander Shepard will automatically acquire quests from overheard conversations, and they’ll show up in your journal so you can go scan a planet and find the MacGuffin. Thing is, as Partrick Klepek, of Giant Bomb noted, it comes across as Commander Shepard, Interplanetary Stalker; you have _never spoken with these characters_, and yet you wander up and push their religion’s only surviving relic into their hand and mutter “I heard you wanted this.”
It may seem like I’m being harsh. This is because I am being harsh. I, personally, am very fond of BioWare; it’s a rare company that gets acquired by EA and proceeds to make some of the boldest experiments in interactive cinematic narrative yet produced. I know people who work at BioWare. They are wonderful people, very hard-working and dedicated to their craft. It takes bravery, skill, and a shitload of work to make these games, and by no means am I diminishing the team’s accomplishment in producing a series of this caliber. Compared to the rest of the game industry’s output, Mass Effect 3 is a shining star of quality and craftsmanship, and it’s a fucking miracle it got released at all.
Thing is, it is also a half-broken mess. It crashed my PS3 repeatedly and forced it to chug like a frat party at all other times. Texture pop-in is so apparent that I had more than one cutscene where I could not tell what was supposed to be happening. Conversation cinematography is at turns excellent and excrable, as is the animation. Combat is fun, as showcased in the multiplayer mode, but it often feels like a slog in the single-player, which lacks the structure and flexibility of its counterpart. The Antagonist Threat is introduced in terms of the direst importance and utmost urgency, and yet the Excel formula for War Asset Readiness requires Commander Shepard to dither around scanning every planet in the galaxy for every cultural artifact and N7 team possible in order to Save The Galaxy The Space Jesus Way.
I love BioWare, because I respect creators who are willing to experiment with established forms. Mass Effect 3 is clear proof of the development team’s vision and ambition, and those qualities are well worth lauding in an industry addicted to grey-brown Modern Shooters. They’re the best of what we’ve got, as Ben Kuchera tweeted. That doesn’t mean that they’re exempt from criticism, however. I am harsh, in other words, because I believe in what BioWare is trying to do with Mass Effect 3. The series deserves to be capped off with a meaningful, impressive game, one which reflects your career as Shepard in a nuanced way. ME3 is not that game, and BioWare’s games will continue to fall flat unless someone fucking says something.
The good thing is that Metacritic will ignore our review, because we don’t use a rating system. That means I can give an honest critique without the fear that my vitriol will affect my friends’ salary, a consideration to which I am not immune. My hope is that someone will look at this review, which attempts to be well-thought-out and cogent, and consider BioWare’s mistakes when beginning to make a game of their own. These are sins that are completely understandable, particularly within the blasted landscape of game development: on creating the studio’s first science fiction franchise, those in charge wanted to recapture the sense of wonder that they experienced when they encountered the books and movies which shaped them. As the series grew in success, it also grew in scope: from a cat-and-mouse game among the planets, Shepard’s mission eventually encompassed the entirety of known space. Like any experimental creator, BioWare’s ambitions just plain got bigger than they could deliver, and every game since the first has shown the strain placed on their resources. All of the flaws that I found in Mass Effect 3 are clearly the result of project management that tried to do too much with the resources available.
If there is one phrase you can count on appearing in any developer interview, it is “we only had so much time and resources.” It’s an understandable statement; after all, these games are made by people, and a person can only work so much overtime. Especially if, as is more and more the case, that person is also trying to support a family, a situation which is entirely incompatible with crunch mode. (Crunch mode tooltip: that state of extended overtime which characterizes game development’s final phase.) The mistakes that led to Mass Effect 3 extend well beyond the studio itself: many of these are effects of an unhealthy and unsustainable culture of software production that was fossilized twenty years ago. Unfortunately, they are no longer new mistakes and they cannot serve as justification for a product that is so wildly uneven. If one knows that one only has so much time, energy, and cash, attempting to outdo the previous game in every respect is probably an untenable goal.
If there’s one thing I got from Casey Hudson’s appearance on the Giant Bombcast, it’s that developers always want to improve upon their previous work. This is definitely a goal I understand from my own writing and art practice. The difference is, while I can dither around and revise the same manuscript endlessly, game production is such a collaborative work that real focus and confidence is needed to create a polished and successful end product. Do otherwise, and you risk releasing a game like Mass Effect 3: a game which has as many pitfalls as it does peaks, a game which infuriates as much as it impresses.
Happily, in so many cases the developers succeed. The often ill-used ambient conversation system is put to moving and understated use by Patrick Weekes, who wrote the PTSD Soldier in the Citadel’s hospital. She is the most accurate and empathetic depiction of mental illness that I have seen in video games to date, and the “easter egg” for that character remains the only time a menu screen has given me cause to reconsider my worth as a human being.
In a similarly impressive way, one pre-release Twitter campaign involving Alliance News reporter Emily Wong was a great use of the form’s limitations to tell a story with limited scope. It also managed to be more emotionally resonant than large swathes of the game’s self-consciously epic story. He is also responsible for a throwaway line from the ship’s computer, EDI, that made me laugh so hard I had to pause the game. (Head’s up: it’s in the Citadel.) Jennifer Hale’s performance as the female Shepard is her best to date, and her battle to wring pathos from a script that is too often transparent in its attempted emotional manipulation is worthy of its own heroic cycle. Freddie Prinze Jr plays an excellent James Vega, one of the only video game companions I have met who felt like a real person. Martin Sheen does a good Martin Sheen. Dusty Everman creates a compelling and grounded support character in Cortez, notable for his depth and complexity given his comparatively minor role, and also for being the LGBT character I’ve wanted for years — someone who happens to be gay as opposed to his sole raison d’etre being non-hetero, as in Dragon Age: Origin’s Zevran.
I wish I had more specific credits for all the sequences I loved: the return of a dead asari commando’s last words to her loved one, the ultimate fate of the krogan poet, the Turian ambassador’s evocation of a truly alien culture, the DLC squadmate’s expressions, backstory, conversations, combat barks, and character arc, Tali’s canyon-side monologue, Garrus’ stiff upper lip and final hurrah, the Shroud, the kindness of the Turian immigration official, the brief moment of calm before the final sequence of the game… all these moments and more. The creators and editors of these events deserve recognition for their work, which evoked a depth of emotion that matches most from other media and makes me excited for the future of video games as a medium. It’s just a shame that they had to be included with the baggage of the past as well.
Postscript:
Due to both platform limitations and a personal desire to retain some element of distance from the text, I played through Mass Effect 3 with the default story settings, without importing any save file. It’s certainly one reading of the game, and explicitly one which calls to the fore the game’s mechanics over its writing, but it’s hard to argue that it’s entirely representative of the majority’s experience – how many people bought Mass Effect 3 without playing one or both of the previous games? To speak to this, I’ll be writing an ongoing series where I play through the Mass Effect franchise and critique it planet by planet. It’s modelled after the Onion AV Club’s reviews of TV shows like The Twilight Zone and the Simpsons. It’s a high bar, and I’d like you to watch while I try to reach it.
Full disclosure: Patrick Weekes is one of the developers at BioWare who I know. This doesn’t have any bearing on my opinion of his writing, which he has earned through dedication to his craft and hard work.
