By Nicholas Battjes
: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ENTIRE MASS EFFECT SERIES
Mass Effect has portrayed love more effectively than any other game series. Not only do I love it, but I have fauxfallen in love in it. Unfortunately, that love remains unrequited not by my choice of in-game mate, but by the game studio that birthed her.
The love mechanic (if that’s not a pornographic film it should be) didn’t quite work in the first Mass Effect game as there weren’t enough potential suitors to match the variety of tastes people have in other people. For me, a male Shepherd, there were only two options (Ashley and Liara), neither of whom I found particularly appealing. Ashley is sexy, but racist, and she drops you like a dubstep wobble when you join Cerberus regardless of whether or not you romanced her in the first game.
Liara is also sexy, an exotic alien, and a much better person than Ashley. But she’s also dour and serious, utterly committed to her work. I would never put my real self in a relationship with either of these people, and felt little inclination to do so in-game.
In Mass Effect 2 Bioware gets rid of both as love interests. Ashley 86’s poor Shepherd because apparently saving her and everyone else everywhere just isn’t enough to earn a girl’s trust anymore. Liara has also leaves to pursue her own goals and doesn’t totally trust Shepherd anymore. Perhaps the Mass Effect brain trust realized that neither of their first two potential females were particularly effective so they’d better work up some new ones.
Enter the first digital love of my life: the previously unromancable Quarian Tali-Zorah vas X, where X depends on how far along one is in the plot.
How many female characters stick with Shepherd for the entire series? One. How many of them ever even try to make jokes, let alone make good ones pretty consistently? One. Which one is independent, strong, and moral without letting it strip her of her joie de vivre? One. Tali is the woman every man dreams of: one who will cheer him up when the world is too much without allowing him to become complacent. Plus we both use shotguns. AND she can tune up the engine on my spaceship. AND has a great ass. She’s all that I’ve wanted from a fake alien girl.
By the end of ME2 my version of Shepherd and Tali had a pretty deep bond, capped off with a tryst in the captain’s cabin. Tali’s mask finally comes off, the ultimate sign of trust in Quarian society, but through camera trickery her face remains obscured. I was still left to wonder what my digital lover actually looked like beyond the shiny eyes and humanoid silhouette visible through her ever-present helmet. The player, but not Shepherd, is forced to remain outside Tali’s circle of trust, and their immersion suffers for it.
In Mass Effect 3 I was almost certain that I would see Tali’s face if I saw our relationship through. So I ignored Ashley and Liara’s advances in the early game, my love armor of white. Finally I got Tali back on my crew about halfway through the game, and went after her as early and often as possible. Our relationship was rekindled. Sex was had rather quickly and more than once this time around (minus the artistic, groundbreaking, and congressionally reviled sex scenes from the first two games). All tolled, the mask came off four times while I was playing.
One scene in particular would have been perfect for the face reveal. Tali and Shepherd are standing on a cliff overlooking her long-lost home planet of Rannoch. Shepherd has just helped her achieve the dream of her entire race by winning the planet back after centuries of exile in deep space. She removes her mask to take her first ever breath of the air there, her face surely rhapsodic and as beautiful as it will ever be at this once-in-a-lifetime moment of cooperative triumph with her true love and long-suffering people? Would the face I had yearned to see for so long finally appear atop Tali’s beautiful (minus the weird fingers and toes) body?
Nope.
I could have accepted that if it was an artistic decision. If the designers had decided that showing Tali’s face would ruin some sort of mystery, I could have halfheartedly gotten behind it. But they didn’t do that. They just copped out.
The player gets to see her face. After they have sex for the first time in Mass Effect 3, Tali tells Shepherd there’s a present waiting for him in his cabin. My friend Caleb who was watching at the time predicted exactly what would happen next and I knew before I had even gotten on the elevator to go check that he was right. By Shepherd’s bed there was now a framed picture of Tali, which the player can inspect at any time. It has a photo of a real woman with weird blue lines drawn on her face and the sun so strong in the background she’s nearly impossible to make out. To make matters worse, Shepherd’s shadow covers the picture for almost half of the ten second cutscene where he looks at it, making it even harder to discern Tali’s features clearly. She is beautiful, I think, especially having seen the cleaned up picture online. But the picture’s inclusion seems to make clear exactly what the designers, artists, and bureaucrats involved in making this game were thinking, and it was not about preserving mystery.
There are no short people in Mass Effect. Nor fat people. All the bodies of all the members of each individual race are almost identical, minus the obligatory wide range of hip and breast sizes for the women. That would have been forgivable by itself, and is all but standard in the game industry right now for better or worse. But to not take the time and effort to render the head of one of the series most important characters, when it only has to be visible during at most three or four cutscenes, would be called lazy by many. But it wasn’t.
It was cowardly.
I can’t believe that modeling a head for her, especially a humanoid one like the one in the photo, for those cutscenes would have been too resource-intensive for a team with the means that Bioware has. More likely is that they knew gamers like me had quested to see Tali’s face for so long that anything they could come up with was going to be mocked. Maybe they mocked up some graphics and it weren’t happy with them. Whatever happened first, ultimately Bioware seems to have considered the challenge of creating a head for Tali not worth the risk and copped out.
That is disappointing. But what is even more disappointing is that it isn’t even Tali’s visage that gets the short shrift in ME3: our love itself was apparently not what the design team had in mind.
During ME3’s ending a series of images flash through commander Shepherd’s mind as he dissolves into the contrived electronic nether of the game’s controversial ending cinematic. These are ostensibly the people he loved and valued the most in his life. Joker shows up. Kaidan Alenko, whom I never gave a crap about and sacrificed two games ago. And finally, the last thing Shepherd sees before he dissolves, the most important thing in the world to him: Liara T’Soni. I wanted to calmly set my controller down, pick up my couch, and throw that at the TV.
In the end, we players all meet much the same fate at the top of the Citadel. Whatever our loves and losses, no matter how deeply we might feel that we are Shepherd, we are not. He is a character in someone else’s story. We can affect him, but can never be him.
Shepherd’s creators may not have felt that he could love Tali, that Liara was his soul mate regardless of player choice. But I did. And the fact that Bioware could inspire someone to care this much about the facial features and emotional gratification of a NPC speaks to the magnitude of their achievement with Mass Effect, whatever its problems. I will miss Tali, whether I’m supposed to or not.
Further Reading: “Free Will and Entitled Gamers: Choice and Mass Effect” (Medium Difficulty)
Nicholas Battjes is a freelance games journalist, most recently employed as creator and proprietor of
Indie Games Ichiban
. He strives to make games as human and interesting to people as more traditional art forms. He currently resides in sunny Los Angeles with a small cactus Rupert, his car Betsy, and his gaming PC Bertha.
