The Ten Most Exciting 2012 Releases (And The Five Least Exciting)

I liked the moment-to-moment stuff in the main story, the little interactions that made things feel a bit more alive, but the main plot itself failed to resonate with me.  I was not really concerned with the arrival and threat of the Collectors.  They felt sudden and tacked-on and their mysteries were rather lacking in wonder.  One of the more interesting themes in Mass Effect is the relationship between organic life, virtual intelligences, and artificial intelligences.  Throughout Mass Effect you fight the Geth who have a number of moments that are rather touching in their exposure of the fact that they aren’t just dumb robots, like their worship of what appeared to be an idol and their study of human music.

Then there’s the rogue VI on Luna, which provides one of the more haunting moments in the original game.  You conclude the quest by shutting down the VI, and it spits out a seemingly random collection of binary at you.  You go and type that binary into a translator on Google, and what do you get? “HELP.”

Simply put, the Collectors weren’t interesting.  That was kind of the intent of their design: they’re *SPOILERS* the genetic descendents of the Protheans, albeit raped by the ill-intent of the Reapers.  Once that is out of the way, there’s no real emotion put into their tragic plight, no moments where you feel for them.  They’re bugs for you to put down, GI Joe style.  Considering that they’re your main foe in ME2, it doesn’t really mesh.  They felt rushed out the door, a stop-gap.  The Geth have their fascinating dynamic throughout ME1 and ME2, and the Reapers are Lovecraftian and monolithic.  The Collectors are pretty much just bugs who have a fetish for altering bodies.  And it’s not just a bad enemy that you fight once or twice.  No, they feed you this insipid foe for the main plot of the game, and make no illusion to hide the fact that they’re just half-baked, boring, bit players in a bigger plan.  Just like the main plot of ME2, in my opinion, was a half-baked, boring, bit player in the trilogy, offering neither the colorful machinations of the Geth or the daunting Herculean foe of the Reapers in any meaningful capacity.

I will concede the notion that the concept of Cerberus and its machinations were fairly lofty, BioWare as a developer simply didn’t and hasn’t nailed the writing for shades of grey.  You see a very interesting concept in how Cerberus acts, but at the end of the day, the game paints you as the bad guy for following through with them, and now ME3 is copping out and just makes them full-bore bad guys for you to blast.  In the end, the shades of grey prove to be little more than permutations on the good/evil dynamic BioWare has struggled to shed over the years.  Comparing the moral depth of Mass Effect 2 compared to what you could accomplish in say…Fallout: New Vegas is like comparing the moral breadth of Star Wars to Old Boy.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being shallow, but BioWare has constantly presented itself to be on the cutting edge of such things, when they in fact, have yet to match the moral gradient (as opposed to the binary BioWare) of Planescape: Torment or Deus Ex.  Just because the plot pretends to pander the options of grey morality doesn’t mean it actually lets you engage in it, and that alone infuriates me.  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim pulled the same stunt off with the Civil War questline and it marred my enjoyment with much of the rest of the game.

The resurrection plot-point was interesting, but it never came to the point of where it fundamentally altered my perception on who my Shepard was.  He just woke up and started shooting things again.  There’s no real way to voice appreciation for the character’s moral and physical “reset”, the character never reacts to having been awoken from the dead in a meaningful way (at most, he/she has a Terminator moment when leaning towards the renegade and drops one-liners pertaining to his resurrection; “You’re dead!” “I got better.”)

The scene with the Collectors was admittedly classy and well-done, but it didn’t break new ground or excite me like it could have.  It felt more like an action game’s level grafted into something that was trying to be more.  Considering that that was pretty much the height of the game’s delving into Collector “culture” and methodology, it felt truncated and weak.

And then there was Joker’s scene, which I enjoyed…but. All it did for me was to serve an example of how action games have lagged behind horror games in setting up tense situations.  I didn’t really feel threatened because it boiled down to largely being an interactive cut-scene.  The only time I ever failed it (coming from someone who has played the game to completion on the hardest difficulty several times) was when I did it on purpose just to see what happened.  With no threat of real failure, the scene loses its edge real fast.

Sadly, most of what they have shown for Mass Effect 3 look to be taking that set-piece and turning it to dial eleven.  Yes, a Reaper fighting a Thresher Maw is cool…but it’s just that.  A set-piece meant to appeal to the eyes, not the mind or heart.

I don’t support Fallout 3, first of all.  It was insipid and far more shallow than Mass Effect.  I said New Vegas, and there’s an ocean of a difference between what the two games will allow you to accomplish, morally speaking.

Secondly, with no options to really do self-exposition, it detaches your view of Shepard from the game’s view of you.  It’s all introspection.  None of the party members wonder if your resurrection affected your sudden change in morals, no one seems to care.  It’s a charade of depth.  I could pretend that Luigi in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time was secretly plotting to kill Mario due to the fact that it’s revealed that he is not a pure soul in slightest during the game, but that doesn’t make it true to the game, does it?  It’s ultimately extremely lazy on the part of the developers to set up the situation where you can set the role of YOUR character in your head, but you can’t act it out in game more fully.  In New Vegas, I woke from the dead as a complete retard once, with only one point invested in intelligence.  And you know what?  The game presented an entirely different atmosphere, giving me all the dialogue options to be a complete idiot.  I was able to run into a power plant and encounter some NCR troops who weren’t privy to my arrival.  They asked me what I was doing there.  You know what I said? 

“I IS SCIENTISTICAL.”

Then I proceeded to butcher all of them with a blunt object.  That’s role-playing.  That’s a developer with the gumption and care to help a player actually live out his bizarre fantasy scenarios, rather than building what is little more than an interactive set-piece that KIND OF gives you a glimpse into the character you want to play, but not really.  There’s never a point where I feel that the game gives me the option to play my Shepard to how I perceive him in more depth.  No game is going to be able to give you everything you want, but Mass Effect is filled with gaps where you have to leave it to your own imagination.  There’s nothing wrong with that to a degree, but considering role-playing games have gone further with how they allowed you to bring life to your character, it ultimately comes off as contrived and overly limited.

If BioWare at least added a segment where your opinion, your view on your own RESURRECTION (a pretty big deal, yeah) weighed in on your character’s morality, I would have been happy.  But it comes down to you have to write that in yourself, with no way to express it as a character.  Comparing that to how I was able to play a revenge obsessed NCR dog in New Vegas, gearing all my quests and dialogue towards burning Benny’s ass down, it’s not even a matter of night and day in terms of what you can do.  It’s a mountain to a molehill.

That said, none of the moral questions in Mass Effect are hard to solve.  You just keep pressing up on the dialogue wheel, and you’re a good guy.  Press down, and you’re a bad guy.  Paragon and Renegade are about as subtle as Light Side and Dark Side, the only real distinction being that the former gives you a bit more wiggle room.  There are really only three quandaries that require a more intensive look in Mass Effect, and they all deal with the races.  The Genophage, the Geth, and the Rachni, and all of them are fairly obvious to solves because none of them take their core concept of shaded morality far enough.  We know that that helping the Rachni wasn’t a mistake, because their ravaging of the galaxy was a mistake brought on by Reaper manipulation, so it’s cool you played to the tenants of good-guyism.  They’re more than likely going to help you in ME3 for it.  Same situation with the Geth.  They were being manipulated and one part is good, the other bad.  In an admittedly cool quest, you get to set that bit off, too. 

The writing on the wall for Mass Effect is obvious.  It comes down to being a modern Star Wars: obvious, obtuse, and predictable, but classy and well-executed despite its lack of depth.  Pretending that ME is deep is foolish.  It’s shallow and could very easily be bettered on the writing side of things.  But you know what?  It’s still fun.  I’m not really knocking it for that, but people who pretend it’s god’s gift to role-players might need to reevaluate the genre they’ve been playing into.   It is simple, to a point where it’s almost too simple, but that’s ultimately why Mass Effect 3 is going to sell very handsomely.  It’s an RPG for those who don’t really want the extra, tangible, depth of an RPG. 

An RPG for the “masses”, if you will.  I’ll argue against it, and I will hold my opinions, but I’ll still be picking up the last chapter in this story arc just to see how it ends, because it will probably still do what BioWare is good at pretty well; cool characters and kick-ass climaxes.

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Its funny when the comments get all narrow like this and the wordsget all effed up.