Mass Effect 3

The Greatest Story Ever Told

No, I’m not trolling you with that title. Nor is it click-bait. In fact, I’ve been wanting to discuss ME3 since it came out and The Greatest Story Ever Told is the perfect platform for it.

I was not a big gamer throughout most of my life. But out of curiosity, I bought Mass Effect 2^[1] a year or so after it came out to grand acclaim. Playing it was a huge turning point for me because it showed me what the medium of video games was capable of, both for interactive engagement and for storytelling. This article will jump between the Mass Effect series as a whole and the particular effects of Mass Effect 3^[2], the series’s conclusion^[3].

Backstory

The Mass Effect series of video games are shooters with a heavy emphasis on story. They take place in a science fiction future where humans have become part of a galactic community.  This community is connected by a network of structures that allow faster-than-light travel, left behind by a now vanished civilization. Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 follow the career of Commander Shepard, a member of the human military, who encounters a mysterious race called the Reapers who are bent on wiping out all sentient races from the galaxy.

The game is so story-focused that the ‘shooter’ aspect of the game is almost an afterthought.  The majority of the time, the player is walking around various locations talking to people to advance the plot, gain supplies, bolster allegiances and make game-changing decisions.  No pun intended, your decisions literally alter the course of the game, changing what you experience later on and how you interact with the game, world and characters.

Commander Shepard is whoever you want them to be. There are two ‘canonical’ versions of Shepard’s appearance, one male and one female, but the character can be customized to whatever race/appearance one may choose^[4]. And the focus on decisions in the game allows you to customize ‘who’ Shepherd is down to their morality, political views, allegiances, leadership style and even sexual preference. Indeed, the various romantic story lines formed a huge part of the series’s popularity.

Mass Effect 2 is particularly beloved for the depth of its choices, characters and story. It maintained and deepened the best parts of the first game^[5] while smoothing out the clunky aspects of the game play and interface.

Mass Effect 3 was less well received. Due to its predecessor’s popularity, it was fiercely anticipated and held to almost impossible expectations. The public reception was a firestorm of criticism, mostly focusing are a few particular game design decisions, rather than the general quality of the game.

So Why Mass Effect 3?

This article is part of a series called ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ covering stories that show great use of storytelling techniques^[6]. Mass Effect 3’s most unique storytelling aspect is its ending ^[7].

The ending is special because it is an interaction of user-participation and death.  Throughout the three games, the player is the protagonist.  The player defines how Shepard looks, how they act, the kind of decisions they make, what kind of world they live in, who they love, who they hate, on and on. The effect is that the audience identifies as the protagonist, something that is only possible with interactive fiction like video games.  In books, movies and other forms of fiction, we can identify with a character but not as the character.  Some readers may see aspects of themselves reflected in Harry Potter but Harry is still his own character and his decisions are defined by the plot and words of the book. In narrative forms of fiction, we can resemble a character but we cannot be the character.

Our decisions are possibly the most profound expression of who we are and so interactive forms of fiction allow us to directly experience a story rather than indirectly view it.

The second aspect of the ending is death. Shepard, and the player, must sacrifice themself in order to deal with the threat of the Reapers. As choice is important is important in the game’s design, the player may select from a set of options for how the Reaper invasion is addressed but must die in every case ^[8].

Once the die is cast, Shepard (the player) dies and the game ends.

Through three games totaling more than 60 hours of being Shepard, making decisions, choosing morality, pursuing relationships, overcoming an onslaught of despair-ridden obstacles, the audience has thoroughly identified as the main characters. And then Shepard is gone.  Friends remain, the world goes on, humanity must rebuild, but the player is gone.

This is what makes the Mass Effect series and Mass Effect 3 so unique. The game allows its audience to experience death in a way that hasn’t been possible with previous media. One could argue the experience isn’t even possible in reality, as we are not left alive to ponder and feel after our own deaths. It is one thing to watch a character die whom we identified with, but quite another to die ourselves and be left with so many questions:

• Did I choose correctly?
• Was I a good person?
• What did I get out of all this?
  
• How can the world just go on when my story feels so final?

And so many truths:

• There’s nothing I can change now.
• I can’t fix anything I messed up.
• I can’t finish anything left undone.
• I can’t help those I love.
• I can’t tell them any more how I feel about them, how much I feel about them.

Of course, narrative fiction could address these thoughts but only in very obvious, very forced ways.  But we can never experience these thoughts without interactive fiction. The ‘I’ in those sentences is unique.  And that is a triumph for the medium.

Additionally

Of course, the Mass Effect series has many other notable aspects to its story. First and foremost is the Setting/Plot connection. The setting is a civilization dependent on the technology of a dead civilization that has left an entire set of structures behind, mysteriously perfect for future species to live in. In the Mass Effect universe, the economy, social structure, and political relations reflect the base setup of the world in a very natural way. The plot too develops seamlessly from these realities.

A beautiful result is the character of Shepard.  The Commander is not a chosen one, someone who destined to be the hero usually for less than narratively satisfying reasons.  Given the general situation, it is completely expected that someone from a military background might be charged with investigating the Reaper threat. And Shepard continues to be central to the events, not because they have a magical ability or special connection to anything, but because the Commander is just doing their job, overcoming each obstacle through hard work and the support of a believable team.

In addition, character motivations in Mass Effect are highly realistic. It’s not a story filled with unreasonably noble heroes. Political leaders and factions can be well-intentioned, bickering, sacrificing and self-serving. A recurring theme is the unwillingness of politicians to face the impending danger out of fear, inflexibility and in-fighting^[9]. Even Shepard’s team is not always willing to do the right thing out of moral concerns but often purely based on necessity or selfish motivations.

Conflicts are often nuanced, with the various sides having good reasons for their points of view and their actions. These conflicts can leave the audience in a moral quandary with no perfect solution.

Lastly, story contain thoughtful examinations of hope. We find those who have lost hope, those who force themselves to find hope and those who continue fighting even when all hope is lost.

My Experience

When I finished playing Mass Effect 3, I felt sadness, profound loss and, importantly, simple unpleasantness.  I did not enjoy what I was experiencing. But I felt all these reactions deeply, along with all the emotions I had been feeling throughout the rest of the story: the enjoyment, connection, engagement, satisfaction and joy of experiencing an affecting story.

Before finishing, I had seen a few headlines referencing the angry reaction many players had to the game.  I told myself that I would do my best to not let my judgment be swayed by others and to try and just enjoy the game for what it was.

So I took a deep breath and tried to think through why I was experiencing such powerful and conflicting emotions. My conclusion was that, as stated above, the experience of death generated the negative emotions.  They were not a negative reaction to the work but rather negative emotions about what the game was depicting. The difficult feelings were not a sign that the game was bad but rather spoke to how powerfully the game creators had used storytelling techniques.

I had been prepped for this reaction by a scene just before the end. The fight against the Reapers seems impossible and the characters are preparing for one last attempt, a mission they will surely not come back from.  Shepard, on the way to begin this final mission, passes each of the team members, some of whom have been part of the story for three games now, and they exchange their final goodbyes. These are conversations where characters know there will never be another chance to say how they feel, to impart hope when they have no hope, to express how proud they are to know one another and to show just how much they love each other having no way to save or help one another. This moment, when the knowledge that an inevitable, final end has come for you and your loved ones, broke my heart.

Remembering this, I knew that the negative emotions I felt when it was all over were a sign of the story’s mastery, not it’s failure.

Wider Reactions

Critically, Mass Effect 3 received a positive though restrained response. The reaction of the wider public began there and then quickly descended into a fury of disappointment.  For a series that relied so heavily on player choice, fans claimed, the possible endings gave little variation and made the players’ previous decisions meaningless. One player even attempted to lodge a false advertising claim against the developer, BioWare.

As I remember it, complaints largely focused on the lack of decisions that meaningfully affected the end of the game and disappointment with the plot’s ending. The response was so strong that BioWare ended up patching the game several weeks later with small videos extending the various endings to show the impact of each of Shepard’s decisions.

Regarding the first complaint, I believe the game does do the player’s choices justice.  Mass Effect 3 not only has an ending, it is an ending.  It is a complex and varied ending for the series. The state of the world is profoundly different depending on the player’s choices.  But Shepard’s death is inescapable. This juxtaposition bring us back to the power of the player death in ME3. Depending on how the audience plays, whole species face hopeful or hugely painful futures. But this fades to the background when one is watching one’s own death.

Some players may have wished for completely different end plots. Such a game would possibly have required twice^[10] as much work to create for the developers.  And to be honest, it does not fit with the plot portrayed. The Reapers represent an inevitability and Shepard’s purpose in the story is to be the sacrificial lamb who continually puts themself second for the good of the galaxy. Shepard could have jetted off to some forgotten planet to live out the rest of their life before the Reapers found them. But the Commander continually puts off living their own life, their relationships, their desires and professional advancement because someone has to step up and few people in this universe^[11] seem willing to make that sacrifice.

Thus, Shepard’s dark, inescapable end becomes the only possible outcome.

Low Points

All that said, Mass Effect 3 is by no means perfect. The foremost issue is, in fact, the ending.  But not the mechanics of the ending, the plot of the ending. Considering the series's dark, complex plot line, the ending comes off as a bit cliché, meta and convenient. The Reaper’s motivation for galactic genocide makes sense to a degree but can’t really be called satisfying. It reads more like the conclusion to a 70’s science fiction short story meant to make a point rather than be moving or believable.

According to an ex-writer for BioWare, the selected plot ending was one of many considered^[12]. At the time, I read a theory that the so-called ‘Dark Energy’ ending was the original ending but it was scrapped when fans came up with the same ending on a forum^[13].  Others attribute the change to BioWare writers moving from Mass Effect to other projects.

All these possibilities remind us how important it is to plan your ending. To be fair, the chosen ending ‘fits’ narratively, in a plot that doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room in terms of satisfying possibilities.  The ending was maligned as being ‘shallow’ in terms of how it handles player choice. One of the more interesting aspects of the reaction was the variation in people’s responses to the possible endings.  The ending allows for three major philosophical choices. Each person I heard from had a different idea of what the ‘obvious’ or ‘natural’ choice was, which one they assumed the writers thought was correct. That is a sign that the end choice speaks to something fundamental about how people see the world.  

If anything, the ending suffers most from being somewhat cliché for a science fiction story and being a bit of a tonal mismatch with the rest of the story.

One major success of the first two games is the pacing of the conflict. The sense of conflict is present early on but the details surrounding the conflict and who the antagonists are is left mysterious. In ME3, the conflict is clear early on, which is good for grabbing the audience’s attention and creating stakes, but there is no sense of mystery which maintains audience attention.

Additionally, the third installment of the series is a bit darker than previous episodes. Each game has a set of morality options called Paragon (‘taking the high road’) and Renegade (‘ends justify the means’). A popular set of YouTube videos called ‘Commander Shepard is a Jerk’ shows how the Renegade options in Mass Effects 1 & 2 make Shepard a sort of action hero with one liners and usually have an underlying sense of humor.  In the Renegade options for ME3, Shepard is cruel and sociopathic.

One complaint I heard about ME3 was from a person who stated that they had a hard enough time in their real life and that they played games to be the hero, to lift up their mood and to experience something fun.  Thus Mass Effect 3 was just the wrong product for them. I think that is a completely fair way to look at game or any other piece of media. Too often we are focused on finding someone to blame because we did not enjoy something rather than accepting that some products are not meant for us.

Why The Hate

I believe buried in all the firestorm of responses is a basic unwillingness of audiences to engage with negative emotions. There are some exceptions like being an underdog, being a victim of injustice, etc, but these instances bring about a self-righteousness and anger^[14] that excites and engages audiences.  The feelings that come about at the end of Mass Effect 3 are loss, despair, hopelessness, powerlessness, a lack of clean closure, finality and the linger question of “Was it all enough?” These emotions don’t get our blood moving, they don’t call us to action. They are instead deeply uncomfortable, like a joint pain we can’t shake or sooth no matter how we move or what remedies we take.

I believe the standard response in modern culture to discomfort is to find someone to blame. If we are feeling uncomfortable or unhappy, something must have gone wrong. And the consumerism of modern life calls on us to rally against the product creator, to view the product itself as an injustice against us.

But Mass Effect 3 is a game, not a human rights violation. What about it could have possibly justified the vitriol laid against it and its creators? The complaints in forums and on social media were not mere criticisms. They contained vicious insults and a self-righteous rage that has been the hallmark of internet culture and since bled into our general rhetoric. All over a piece of fiction.

As someone who’s written about storytelling and has put creative works out into the internet void, I can never understand vicious nature people take when issuing their complaints about a work. No creative work can be perfect, if there is such a thing. And no work will align exactly with what the audience wants^[15].  It’s a creative work, not a technical work. One knows that when one buys it. And when we vilify the creators of something you love because of its human imperfections, the unfortunate consequence is that fewer people will want to create the next thing you could come to love.

And often the parts that make us uncomfortable are the whole point of the work. So-called serious fiction or literature routinely forces us to look at the most uncomfortable and hard to watch aspect of humanity and life. In the last post, I wrote a bit about how genre fiction is often considered of lower artistic worth than traditional literature. I suspect the unwillingness to engage with negative emotions is another aspect in this trend. Art, often, is meant as a means to explore all aspects of the human experience. If every story has a happy ending, no matter what difficulties we find in the beginning and middle, we deny ourselves a huge portion of the human experience. Thus, entire genres can seem like childish escapism because they refuse to take themselves and their potential seriously.

As stated earlier, the exploration of negative emotions as seen in Mass Effect 3 highlights the potential storytelling power of the video game medium. There are things possible that have never been possible in other media and we’ve only scratched the surface.

In the End

The controversy surrounding Mass Effect 3 shows, I believe, that the world is not ready to take video games seriously yet^[16]. We aren’t ready to take ourselves seriously, in some respects. Of course, the world needs uplifting and entertaining stories as much as it does darker ones.  But equating a negative emotional experience with bad art is a dangerous precedent.

Mass Effect 3 is a AAA title in the video game world, akin to a big-budget, blockbuster movie. In these types of works, large sums of money are put on the line to create the product. Thus, the producers tend to stick to very safe formulas to ensure they make their money back and live to see another day, etc. Same as we see in blockbuster movies which are designed to be enjoyable for everyone, even if they don’t have special meaning for anyone in particular.

The fact that the creators at BioWare dared to end their massively popular series with such an emotionally difficult experience shows a boldness and artistic daring that few other studios could claim. They should be applauded for that, not derided.

I love this series and this game. I still get choked up just hearing the first couple notes of the main piano theme by Clint Mansell and Sam Hulick. This series transformed how I saw games and the power of the medium. It can fill out minds with so many ideas and our hearts with so many emotions, even difficult ones. Of course, one of the most difficult emotions we all dealt with in Mass Effect 3 was saying goodbye, to reach the end of a journey that meant so much to everyone who played it.

To those creators who worked on Mass Effect 3 and the rest of the series, who put innumerable hours and immense effort into a creative work only to see it torn apart by the mercilessness of our modern public discourse, I’d like to say thank you. You provided me with an amazing, moving and inspiring experience. I hope you know that despite all the hyperbole and vitriol expressed in the digital world, the real experience people had at home was meaningful and valued.

Thanks so much for sharing your creation with us.

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And for fans of the series, here are a few pieces of silliness.

Footnotes:

• ^[1] Released 2010
• ^[2] Released 2012
• ^[3] Not the franchise’s conclusion, but this story arc’s
• ^[4] Within the bounds of late-2000s character creation, which is lacking for non-whites
• ^[5] Released in 2007
• ^[6] not necessarily the greatest stories
• ^[7] again not trolling
• ^[8] through a very specific set of decisions throughout the game, the player can reach an ending where they miraculously survive the sacrifice, but the sacrifice must be made all the same.
• ^[9] Climate change much?
• ^[10] I'd actually guess far more.
• ^[11] As in our own world
• ^[12] Source
• ^[13] To be honest, I can’t find this article anymore and I doubt if it’s true.
• ^[14] And anger is addictive
• ^[15] That’s often the point
• ^[16] Fans as much as critics