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King Doom posted:I remember ban reason in the lepers colon that was basically 'Lets plays are art and also serious business and we do not appreciate your kind here sir good day'. Sounds like typical mod power abuse. If archives were up, I'd love to see the thread. I can't even remember the last time archives worked.
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Aug 15, 2014 22:56
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I don't intend "derivative" in a negative sense. Bioware is using other sci-fi properties in order to make a comment (largely: that sci-fi is really good and cool) and that's fine by me, I like that. What baffles me is when people have a particular attachment to the Mass Effect setting in particular. It's a summary of sci-fi from 1979 through to the present day, and the setting changes massively from game to game in order to encompass the breadth of genre. But I'm getting on to a topic for the next video. Koopa Kid posted:Are you referring to the Prothean mono dominant society and (apparent) oppressive/violent regime? Or the act of helping along living weapons as tools only to have them come and bite people in the rear end like the Rachni/Krogan situation? Yes.
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Aug 15, 2014 22:59
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Hah, searching google the Dragon age 2 thread shows up on the first page. It went into the comedy gas chamber, all 160 pages of it. The OP was Shadow Isaac and it wasn't the lepers colony ban reason I was remembering, it was the last post in the thread:Zoolooman posted:This thread is no longer acceptable. Link to the thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3449674&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Okay, Derail over. Back to Mass Effect.
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Aug 15, 2014 23:11
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Lt. Danger posted:What baffles me is when people have a particular attachment to the Mass Effect setting in particular. It's a summary of sci-fi from 1979 through to the present day, and the setting changes massively from game to game in order to encompass the breadth of genre. But I'm getting on to a topic for the next video. "Breadth of genre" would be the key part there. I love the setting of Mass Effect because it does a bit of everything. Lots of diplomatic solutions, lots of undiplomatic solutions. Some hard science, some cool technomagic. Delightful speeches and badass one-liners. Corruption and hope. Space opera and cosmic horror. I love the setting because it feels more complete than those other ones from which it is derived.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:17
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I actually think there's something to be said about Mass Effect's setting that is unique. Yes, it borrows a lot of tropes of modern scifi. It has super-aggressive bumpy-forehead aliens. It's got blue space-babes. Mystical energy sources. Space-magic. Robots. AI. But it also does a couple of things all its own on top of all that. Humanity isn't evolved (a la Star Trek) nor is it oppressively dystopian (a la Blade Runner or Total Recall). Humanity is essentially the same as the present only with its technology advanced by alien tech. Secondly, humanity is also placed on equal footing with the rest of the galactic races. And while, as a game, it occasionally strays into "humanity is #1!" territory, the setting never really sets humanity as "the one true awesome race that is better at everything" that you often see in Star Trek. Even in ME3, the game where a human becomes the key to everything, it could've easily starred a Turian and told the same story. That's something that, while not uncommon in scifi, wasn't mixed together with everything else that came before. It shouldn't be a surprise how this new mix appeals to people (the new but familiar). And that's before getting into all the little changes to tropes that appeal to different people (immortal space elfs that are blue and all female, a BSG-esque fleet of survivors who spent so long on their ships they can't live outside protective suits, etc).
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Aug 16, 2014 02:02
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Covok posted:Well, I will say this to that argument. Later on, a scene is played widely differently if Javik is in the party and gives insight into the history of one of the core races. I believe a few others are as well, but my memory is hazy. I know there are some sidequests that only Javik can do that are fun in a setting sense. But, you are right, Javik is underwhelming at times with how little the game plays up the whole "first prothean in 50,000 years" thing. Is this ``Thessia?``
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Aug 16, 2014 02:10
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Just wanna say I think your deconstruction of the game is well done and fascinating. I find myself agreeing with many of your points as well as seeing things in a way I wouldn't have otherwise. Thanks for doing such a nice job showing off a pretty under-appreciated sequel.
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Aug 16, 2014 04:39
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The thing is that Mass Effect is derivative to the point where it's completely oblivious to having any substance. The reason it doesn't work thematically is that it doesn't have real themes, only "homage". Of course nerds love "homage", but when most genre fiction (let alone in video games) has nothing to say about anything that's not other genre fiction you start to understand why anyone who reads real books looks down on it.
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Aug 16, 2014 09:20
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BioMe posted:oblivious I don't think that word means what you think it means. Would you also criticize Mass Effect 2 for being obsessed with fathers? Because fathers are not limited to genre fiction as far as I'm aware. Your whole post was pretty much garbage honestly.
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Aug 16, 2014 12:29
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Thwomp posted:But it also does a couple of things all its own on top of all that. Humanity isn't evolved (a la Star Trek) nor is it oppressively dystopian (a la Blade Runner or Total Recall). Humanity is essentially the same as the present only with its technology advanced by alien tech. A la Star Wars?
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Aug 16, 2014 12:38
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Lt. Danger posted:A la Star Wars?
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Aug 16, 2014 12:49
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Arglebargle III posted:I don't think that word means what you think it means. Would you also criticize Mass Effect 2 for being obsessed with fathers? Because fathers are not limited to genre fiction as far as I'm aware. Your whole post was pretty much garbage honestly. It's obsessed with tropes.
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Aug 16, 2014 12:57
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The Mass Effect setting was the first Sci-fi setting I really experienced and got invested in. I never really got into Star Wars or Star Trek as much as I did with Mass Effect.
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Aug 16, 2014 16:07
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SgtSteel91 posted:The Mass Effect setting was the first Sci-fi setting I really experienced and got invested in. I never really got into Star Wars or Star Trek as much as I did with Mass Effect. My one big hope for the upcoming Mass Effect games (aside from removing themselves from everything remotely related to this game's crappy ending) is that they drop the galaxy threatening menace angle and just work on letting the player experience the setting more. When you go to all the trouble to create a complex setting with varied races and issues, it's better to let people see what's going on instead of rushing straight into the old "save the world" plot.
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Aug 16, 2014 16:29
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BioMe posted:It's obsessed with tropes. What does this even mean?
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Aug 16, 2014 16:33
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Geostomp posted:My one big hope for the upcoming Mass Effect games (aside from removing themselves from everything remotely related to this game's crappy ending) is that they drop the galaxy threatening menace angle and just work on letting the player experience the setting more. When you go to all the trouble to create a complex setting with varied races and issues, it's better to let people see what's going on instead of rushing straight into the old "save the world" plot. yes this please
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Aug 16, 2014 17:20
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Arglebargle III posted:What does this even mean? Design by checking off a list of Things That Happened In Stuff We Liked, regardless of how they fit (or don't fit) into the experience as a whole. Mirandasass.jpg.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:27
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Ze Pollack posted:Design by checking off a list of Things That Happened In Stuff We Liked, regardless of how they fit (or don't fit) into the experience as a whole. Mirandasass.jpg. You're pretty good at criticism.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:47
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Shamus young's got a big column up on ME3 and why the discussion just. won't. stop. This particular segment highlights perfectly why I'm done with the series: they moved the genre in a direction I didn't desire, and moreover built their biggest audience in this new genre. Since this doesn't interest me at all, I'm done with the whole thing. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...-Debate-Won-t-D quote:2. The story changed genres
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Aug 16, 2014 17:48
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ZenVulgarity posted:yes Besides the fact that it would invalidate the effort you made just to get to that lovely ending. It's like the post-RotJ books for Star Wars: every single enemy is eviler and more powerful than the Emperor and his Death Star. It makes the sacrifices we witnessed in the movies worthless if there was an even bigger bad guy just waiting around the corner. To put it in Mass Effect terms it would mean that the Reaper's near destruction of the galaxy was chump change compared to whatever showed up next.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:52
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if that whatever showed up next turns out to be more interesting than the reapers, go for it (spoiler alert: it won't be)
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Aug 16, 2014 18:02
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Besides the fact that it would invalidate the effort you made just to get to that lovely ending. It's like the post-RotJ books for Star Wars: every single enemy is eviler and more powerful than the Emperor and his Death Star. It makes the sacrifices we witnessed in the movies worthless if there was an even bigger bad guy just waiting around the corner. Did you... did you even read geostomp's post? He was asking for the opposite of that, to not have a galactic destroying enemy and focus on smaller scale stories. Or am I misinterpreting your post?
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Aug 16, 2014 18:03
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Earnestly posted:You're pretty good at criticism. The problem is there in pretty much any piece of media explicitly founded in homage, but ME2's episodic structure exacerbated it. Making the character missions a bigger focus allowed Bioware to build each episode in isolation to get across the feeling they wanted to get across, and give you a better sense of the characters in question- unequivocal goods! The unfortunate price paid for that (and the massive revisions ME2 went through during development) was that they ended up with a severely weakened overall narrative. There's no common thread between Jacob's Dad's Zombie Movie, Mordin Ruminates On Genocide, Garrus Plays Batman, and Zaeed Wants To Kill A Guy, so the resulting experience is not so much a single story as it is the player shooting through a Nerd Media's Greatest Hits collection to kill time while they wait for the game to trigger the ending sequence.
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Aug 16, 2014 18:34
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I wouldn't mind a "save the world"-plot in a series that had previously run "save the galaxy"-plots. Set in a small, new colony on a planet the size of Earth with maybe 1 million people living on it. Tensions with native life/interference by mega corporations running an indentured servants scheme with colonists/amoral scientists manipulating survey records to get people to settle on the planet because of reasons, whatever. Something that wouldn't even matter to the galaxy at large, but matters every much to the people there.
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Aug 16, 2014 18:50
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Before ME3 came out I was looking forward to post-Reaper games with a smaller scale. They had enough background stuff like the geth-quarian war that they could totally have made a full game about just settling that issue once and for all. Part of what disappointed me about ME3 was that they shot their load on all of that stuff so now they have to make up a bunch of other stuff for the next game to be about.
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Aug 16, 2014 19:14
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Ze Pollack posted:There's no common thread between Jacob's Dad's Zombie Movie, Mordin Ruminates On Genocide, Garrus Plays Batman, and Zaeed Wants To Kill A Guy Actually, there is. 
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Aug 16, 2014 19:20
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I'll be interested to hear your argument regarding that! I enjoyed my play experience, but there came a point I realized "Shepard kills time until TIM calls with the next bit of the plot" describes an easy 80% of the game's runtime.
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Aug 16, 2014 19:37
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Ze Pollack posted:I'll be interested to hear your argument regarding that! All 4 of your examples are essentially just saying "dude get's hosed over by their past".
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Aug 16, 2014 19:51
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Even if some random sociopath wanders over and decks you in the face for no reason, it's possible to characterize the decisions that lead you up to the point as getting hosed over by your past. I think I can see what you're trying to get at, but there is no such thing as a rootless conflict; something has to have happened to set forces in opposition. It doesn't have to have been sensical, it doesn't have to be understood, but it has to have already happened. Otherwise there's nothing that needs to be resolved.
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Aug 16, 2014 20:20
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Ze Pollack posted:Even if some random sociopath wanders over and decks you in the face for no reason, it's possible to characterize the decisions that lead you up to the point as getting hosed over by your past. You're trying as hard as you can to miss the point, aren't you?
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Aug 16, 2014 20:22
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Flytrap posted:Fine, how about 'can't let go'. ...yeah, that's a lot more like it, actually. Grunt doesn't have anything to not let go of, but Okeer, Wrex, and whoever that guy you kill in his loyalty mission is sure as hell do. Zaeed and Garrus are both nursing dreams of revenge, Mordin and Jack have both tried to let go of their pasts but have failed, Samara and Thane are defined by adherence to an oath and mistakes they can't forget, the whole Geth/Quarian thing is one big case of it... only gap is Jacob, really, and you can see they were trying to make him fit, it's just that in their attempt to continue fleeing from Carth Onasi they had to make an extra-big deal over how Jacob totally isn't defined by this thing that's bugged him for most of his life, he'd just like to know for sure. Flytrap posted:You're trying as hard as you can to miss the point, aren't you? No need for that.
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Aug 16, 2014 20:41
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Ze Pollack posted:Even if some random sociopath wanders over and decks you in the face for no reason, it's possible to characterize the decisions that lead you up to the point as getting hosed over by your past. So would you say that every text is about the past? Every story can be characterised as 'a sequence of events causes the current difficulty', so every story has a theme of the past, right? Obviously not. What's different is that Bioware places specific emphasis on the past and how these conflicts are rooted in events long-gone, be it a neglectful dad or cultural imperialism. All that said, it wasn't entirely what I was thinking of! But that's an update for another video (soon).
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Aug 16, 2014 20:57
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Every mission in Mass Effect 2 is about daddy issues, and also there is no common thread that connects the missions in mass Effect 2.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:45
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2house2fly posted:Every mission in Mass Effect 2 is about daddy issues, and also there is no common thread that connects the missions in mass Effect 2. sweet glad we cleared this up forever, goodbye
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Aug 16, 2014 22:19
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2house2fly posted:Every mission in Mass Effect 2 is about daddy issues, and also there is no common thread that connects the missions in mass Effect 2. So Samara was the father?
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Aug 16, 2014 22:19
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double nine posted:Shamus young's got a big column up on ME3 and why the discussion just. won't. stop. Obviously it's a matter of individual taste, and there are certainly people (maybe including myself) who preferred Mass Effect 1 over everything that came after, but it doesn't really account for the anger about ME3 when you consider just how well-received ME2 was. I particularly remember an awkward moment at some gaming convention right after ME3 came out when the Bioware team asked the audience which of the trilogy they preferred (at an event ostensibly to discuss ME3) and two-thirds of the audience raised their hands for ME2. And almost all of the significant changes that happened in the trilogy happened between the first and second games. I think there's a conversation that we'll have further down the line about video games not being movies which in turn aren't books, but I'm actually watching through the Shamus Young playthrough that was linked earlier in the thread, and for as much as I want to talk about player agency, I do feel that if Bioware really wanted to do something where you're shuttling the player through a very strict story with complex sci-fi themes, it could actually have been good. A big change, but good. The problem is that it's done really badly, and with lovely, nonsensical plot. If you decide you really want to make John Madden's International Diplomacy Simulator, you can't then have it just be "press X to talk smack about the French ambassador" because it turns out you only really know how to make NFL games, and that's basically what happens here. About another eight hours further into the game than we are now, I noticed one single line of renegade dialogue where Shepard actually chews someone out for being a self-serving rear end in a top hat (I'll point it out in, like, six weeks), and it became really conspicuous how little Shepard actually does that in a meaningful way throughout the entire game. Shepard is deliberately written to emote very, very little, even when Jennifer Hale is doing the voice (and she does it moreso than Mark Meer). This works within the framework of a choose-your-own-adventure story, but if you want to write a story about how Shepard has gone full-PTSD while the galaxy slowly falls apart, then he or she should be running around blowing up fuel depots while screaming, "THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD", not doing an impression of an Elcor for 90% of the time. Ironically, I think this is another one of those "player agency" issues. Everyone in this game has Aria T'Loak syndrome. You've saved the galaxy. Twice. You're basically Steve Austin with a spaceship. Yet in order to advance the plot, half of them spend their entire lives doing stupid bullshit and then talking down to you about it. The game then gives you the options of *smile and nod politely* or *smile and nod while making a face*. Occasionally you get a call from one of your buddies from the first two games, who hasn't spoken to you in six months but wonders if you could come over and help them move a couch. Also, Cerberus will be there and try to steal the couch for no reason. None of it feels like it's supposed to. The emotions are all wrong and the actual story elements aren't properly explored because they're not given enough time or depth because they're trying to do too many things at once. I think that's why there's still the big discussion about it. They went in expecting payoffs to these huge 100-hour story arcs, and it ends up just being "Dr. Sam Sheppard Never Returned Home. Buy DLC." instead of a real climax or conclusion. ArchangeI posted:I wouldn't mind a "save the world"-plot in a series that had previously run "save the galaxy"-plots. Set in a small, new colony on a planet the size of Earth with maybe 1 million people living on it. Tensions with native life/interference by mega corporations running an indentured servants scheme with colonists/amoral scientists manipulating survey records to get people to settle on the planet because of reasons, whatever. Something that wouldn't even matter to the galaxy at large, but matters every much to the people there. I always had this idea in my head of a prequel where you play as a young Zaeed on some dystopic planet in the Terminus systems, full of Blade Runner bits and film noir cliches. Recruit a team of mercs, chase after dames, run down corridors while looking at skyboxes, that sort of stuff. Wouldn't work in practice for about a dozen reasons, not least that Zaeed's voice actor passed away shortly after ME3, but they could definitely make some expanded-universe stuff out of that for me to completely not read.
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Aug 16, 2014 23:07
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Watching the latest video reminded me as well: everyone is such dicks to the rachni, and it annoyed me. All this talk of "we let you go only on condition that you would vanish forever" didn't match at all with my fairly chill and friendly memories of letting the queen go in the first game, though that might just be me remembering wrong. But then even when you find the queen Shepard demands to know how dare she be captured and enslaved by monsters, and only agrees to let her live because she's a "valuable asset". Meanwhile we ask the krogans for help saving the entire universe from certain doom and their response is "NEVER UNLESS YOU PERFORM FOR ME THESE PERSONAL ERRANDS THREE" and we just shrug and say "welp, guess we'd better do as they say"
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Aug 16, 2014 23:27
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double nine posted:Shamus young's got a big column up on ME3 and why the discussion just. won't. stop. Which brings me to the second issue, which is that ME1 is far more overt about humanity's place in the galaxy than ME2 and ME3. Shepard being appointed a Spectre is made out to be a huge deal, and Udina is constantly fretting over the Council's attitude toward humanity because he wants the Council to take humanity seriously and to award them a position on the Council - which is precisely what happens after Sovereign's defeat. ME1 is only concerned with the condition of other species in an abstract sense, i.e. to the extent that it would suck for them too if the Reapers aren't stopped. It tells you that being a quarian or krogan kind of sucks, but for the purposes of the game, it doesn't matter. In fact, it goes so far as to force Shepard to tell Wrex "your guys are hosed, sorry" when he finds out that Saren appears to have found a solution to the genophage. ME2 and ME3 devote much more time to the affairs of the other major species, and point the finger at humanity more than once (cf. Mordin's recruitment, the turian arms dealer on the Citadel if Shepard sacrificed the Council in ME1, your run-in with the Batarian from ME1 if you let him go). In light of the above, then, I think the difference between ME1 on the one hand and ME2 and ME3 on the other is more one of style than substance. 2house2fly posted:Every mission in Mass Effect 2 is about daddy issues, and also there is no common thread that connects the missions in mass Effect 2.
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Aug 17, 2014 00:34
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The father thing in ME2 was more of a motif than anything. I mean yeah, fathers show up a lot, but what did all those subplots as whole actually have to say about fathers? They certainly weren't long enough to count as some general exploration of fatherhood, especially when the one thing they had in common beyond that was that none of the fathers really acted like fathers.Arglebargle III posted:What does this even mean? The writing is way more fascinated with the building blocks than constructing anything cohesive. Really the problems is more with ME1, but obviously it leaves some baggage for the rest of the series. The "homage" or "intertextuality" or whatever the nicer word you want to call just plain ripping off other series in itself isn't really the issue. It's that such huge chunks of the story are purely intertextual that it starts to override plain old textuality. To the point where you are supposed to ignore stuff that looks like it serves some narrative purpose and just assume it's another meaningless reference, or a trope that was put there just for the sake of having that trope. So unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of scifi series from the past couple decades, you'll be really confused by what the writer is after by having the space gypsies also have created the evil robots, or who or what the turians are supposed to represents, until someone takes pity and explains the references for you. BioMe fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Aug 17, 2014 |
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Aug 17, 2014 02:20
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Lt. Danger posted:A la Star Wars? Somewhat. It's more today's society still dealing with having been given advanced technology. Humanity in Star Wars grew up along side it so everything isn't new and shiny and scary. And then there's the whole issue of humanity in Star Wars isn't Earth and its history.
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Aug 17, 2014 03:16
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