Most Intriguing Idea: Making a 2-D platformer from projections of a 3-D world.

Best Design Decision: The rotation mechanic.

Worst Design Decision: Being indecisive about the point of the platforming

Summary:

Fez is a very nice game, with an intriguing central conceit, that doesn’t hold up against the puzzle-platformer genre’s recent classics. In part, this is because Fez can’t seem to decide whether its platforming is a puzzle, or just a traversal challenge on the way to the puzzle. The indecision turns out to be a problem. The controls feel mushy and a bit inconsistent, which works out fine when you’re just exploring the world. When Fez starts throwing more conventional platforming tests (e.g. the rising lava level) against the player, though, the inadequacy of the controls turns the game into a pointless exercise in frustration. Fez had a famously long development cycle, and some of these segments feel like artifacts that linger from an earlier iteration of the game.

As for the puzzles, there are a few magic moments, but the cryptographic component mostly fell flat. Figuring out what was going on with the numerical system gave me a great sense of discovery, but the alphabet and tetrominoes did nothing for me. In part that’s due to the tininess and low contrast of those glyphs, even on a fair-size HDTV, but even taking that annoyance into account I just didn’t find any of it very interesting. Fez is at its best when it creates its puzzles from physical perspective, and its best is very good, but the game never really gelled for me as a whole.

[Trigger warning]

Part of the problem lies in the traditional “damsel in distress” architecture of the game. The unnamed protagonist starts off searching for his wife and daughter, then finds another little girl whom he must treat for a fever and then deliver to safety, then must save the girl’s mother, then must save the girl again and get her and the mother to a safe haven. Almost all of the goals in the game are oriented directly or indirectly towards “saving” women. In isolation, this would be nothing remarkable, but it forms the nucleus of a more troubling pattern.

I Am Alive denies female characters agency throughout the game world. Within the main quest, a paraplegic man provides the protagonist weapons and frequent guidance, but the principal woman character  gives no material aid. Very few characters outside this quest show any ability to help themselves or others, but in these rare cases – a person offering supplies in a wrecked ship, the captain who ultimately saves the woman and child – the roles are held by men. Women have no capacity to help the protagonist or themselves.

Negative NPCs are even more slanted. Many characters will threaten the protagonist, but only attack him if he gets too close. Only few of these threatening figures are women, and all of the more aggressive thugs are men. It may seem strange to complain about that, but when the social contract breaks down, a person’s ability to use force becomes an essential part of life. In this context, excluding women from the enemy list effectively makes them lesser people. Women can’t take what they need, as men can.

I Am Alive goes even further than this in a segment where the protagonist rescues a woman from a hotel occupied by thugs. As it turns out, many women are kept in the hotel against their will, and the men running the place obviously intend to sexually assault their captives. None of the women seem able or willing to fight back, and once he rescues his target, she will not help him in combat, even though the men he’s already killed were armed with machetes that she could use. In this part of the game, women are exclusively helpless victims who rely on the male protagonist for rescue and protection from other men.

Throughout, I Am Alive demonstrates that the women of its post-apocalyptic world are dependent on men for protection and survival. Implicitly, this argues that the equality and self-determination of women is an artifact of modern society, a nicety that came crashing down along with all the buildings. In the state of nature, the game seems to be saying, women must live in fear and need of men.

Even the purest Hobbesian ought to have some trouble with this proposition, not only because it undermines a principle of equality, but also because it ignores the fact that oppression thrives on, and usually requires, institutions. The subordinate status of women for much of Western history was not some tenet carried forth in pure form from deepest antiquity, it was a consequence of social, religious, and economic institutions designed to deny women independence and self-determination. The proposition that women would end up in a state of dependence so shortly after disaster ignores this history entirely.

Here I’ve been rather critical of I Am Alive, but it’s just a particularly striking example of an endemic problem. As I mentioned, the “damsel in distress” structure afflicts many games, due to unsupportable expectations about the audience and the limited creativity of both developers and the executives who fund them. Many commentators rightly get up in arms about the over-sexualized portrayal of women in games. The structural choices that depict women as helpless and needy, however, are an equal and in some ways a more insidious danger, because they inform and develop misogynist attitudes while making the player feel entirely like a hero.

Most Intriguing Idea: Essentially eliminating “mana” and cooldowns.

Best Design Decision: The dodge/cc-regeneration mechanic.

Worst Design Decision: Pretty much everything else.

Summary:

Thanks to Tales of Legendia, Tales of Graces f is not the worst game in the Tales series, but oh how close it came. That’s through no fault of the combat design; I found the battles to be exceptionally slick and with very few exceptions very enjoyable to play. By removing the separate “mana” gauge and linking all combat actions to a single, recharging counter, the battles gained a lot of rhythm and a focus on dodging that made them feel significantly more tactical even within the series’ trademark chaos.

Unfortunately, that tight, muscular combat is buried in a metric ton of lard, including an inscrutable synthesis system and a deluge of titles. The idea of learning skills from titles appealed to me at first, but it boiled down to a second experience system that allowed for player input, which just made me wonder why the primary experience system wasn’t doing that. The Eleth mixer, which spot-cooks dishes in combat, is extremely handy, but breaks the common-sense ideas that sustained the otherwise silly cooking system, in my opinion. Also, I kind of missed looking for recipes. The Eleth mixer’s other ability, to generate raw materials, just felt like an admission that the devs hadn’t really checked to see whether the synthesis system was balanced or interesting.

Then there is the story, a stock Tales tale in which the evil but sympathetic whosiwhat is going to suck up all the jujubaba, thus destroying someplacia, starring character archetypes who have recognizably been imported from previous Tales games. The incredibly cramped world features completely de rigeur settings with practically no interesting visuals, and it’s all backed up with a score that has been competently recycled by Motoi Sakuraba from his previous works. It’s all quite gallingly lazy and I’m beginning to think I haven’t the time for it anymore.

If you can’t say something nice… Dodging at just the right moment to completely load up your gauge for a counterattack is so great.

Worst Line: The Green Line. At least there wasn’t a baseball game.

Mark of the Ninja, the next effort from Klei Entertainment, keeps the engine and visual style of Shank, but don’t be fooled: this is a stealth game through and through. Stealth is the only way to progress effectively, and the only way that you can kill. I saw a lot of people try to melee their way out of trouble, but that simply doesn’t work. I got my hands on it for a while, and I really enjoyed myself. The controls feel tight and responsive, though I had a little trouble dealing with floor vents when my conventional platforming A-jumps B-drops instincts took over. I thought the game was stellar overall, though, and this is a release I’m really looking forward to when it comes out this summer for X360 and PC.

Speaking of stealth, Monaco looks like it’s going to be exactly what I hoped for. In the stealth panel, Andy Schatz explained that he wanted to make a playable heist movie, and it seems well on its way to being that. I played a level of the single-player, a relatively simple prison break, and I thought everything played out exceptionally well. The sensation of walking into a room with a guard and trying to run back out again before he spotted me was perfect. Multiplayer seemed a bit chaotic, but no less entertaining for that. It seems like fall is the target for the PC release.

Weirdest booth: Lollipop Chainsaw’s demo schoolbus

I also scoped out the improved version of Skulls of the Shogun, a game I’ve been excited about since the last PAX East. It still played every bit as well as I remembered, and unit selection seemed a bit snappier, which addressed the only qualm I had. I was told the game is meant to launch for PC, X360, and I think Windows Phone (or maybe that was just a dream I had) alongside Windows 8, so getting cracking, Microsoft!

This wasn’t the only medieval-style warfare I saw: Paradox had War of the Roses playable on the floor, with the customary “pre-alpha” disclaimer. I hope that was accurate, because there were problems. The controls felt sluggish and unresponsive, the combat involved a lot of wandering around other players wondering why your weapon wasn’t striking, and there didn’t seem to be much of a way to counteract the tactical advantage of numbers. I didn’t mind getting slaughtered, in fact I more or less encouraged it because I wanted to try multiple loadouts, but if I were playing for real I would have been pretty frustrated by the affair. I generally think 3rd person is superior for melee combat, but this was not an encouraging go at it.

I had a better experience with Chivalry: Medieval Warfare by Torn Banner studios. The combat seemed further along, at least, and the weapons were relatively responsive. The first person perspective is very like Skyrim, with both the good and bad that implies. I found that the overly stable viewpoint made the weapons seem somewhat weightless in my arena battle. There also wasn’t a lot of visual feedback when hitting or getting hit. That will hopefully be tightened up a bit as they iterate. The representative I spoke to implied some pretty ambitious plans for the multiplayer, including an interesting siege mode with shifting objectives and defensive tactics. If they pull it off that could really be something.

Line-est line: Spec Ops: The Line: the line

Since it was PAX, I decided to try Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 3, developed by Zeboyd games. As you’d expect, it looks like a classic RPG, although combat seems to play out a little more dynamically than in Breath of Death. I enjoyed the combat, though the particular area was rehashing some of the first game’s less-funny ideas. The menu system also seemed a bit unrefined, though I expect it will be touched up before release. At least in this particular area I don’t think anything was lost in the change of aesthetic, so fans of the series should feel comfortable giving this a whirl.

Another strange hybrid was A Valley Without Wind, a side-scrolling post-apocalyptic platformer. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, and the basic controls were quite good. The combat seems like it might be a real problem, however, as it is all too easy to find yourself stuck inside a mob of robots or whatever that kill you while you can’t escape. There are a number of really interesting ideas in here, though, so I may give it a second look when it comes out in a few weeks.

That’s not everything I saw, but it’s everything I had distinct impressions about. That’s all I have to say about PAX this year. If I missed you, then hopefully I’ll run into you next year.

At this year’s convention, the word on everyone’s lips was “pre-alpha”. You could not take five steps on the show floor without that phrase sneaking into your ear and insulting your grey matter. Now, this didn’t bother me when applied to obvious first-draft code like Bastion’s actual initial build. If it looks and plays more or less like it’s eventually going to look and play, though, don’t toss out the meaningless pre-alpha catchphrase. Just say “we’re still working on it”. I promise to understand.

Time to crack: 45 minutes

My first stop was the line for the Mass Effect panel, which apparently I didn’t need to stand for since Dan somehow managed to walk out of the Dragon Age panel and immediately turn around and duck into Mass Effect. This panel offered some helpful clarification for the large number of journos and commentators who did not read the announcement of new ending DLC closely and reacted as if the world was ending and all art was through forever. No, they are not changing the ending. They are expanding the ending that already exists to provide “additional clarification”. Also, there’s new multiplayer DLC coming this week for free! Krogan Vanguard! WOOOOOOOOOO!

Kicking off the panel with a list of things BioWare was going to give us for free ensured a relatively pleasant atmosphere and allowed for a few good stories to be shared. The question of Tali’s infamous stock photo came up, and Weekes was basically able to deflect it by pointing to the actual face model for Samara, who was in the room, cosplaying Samara. There was also an uncomfortable silence and a blunt “no comment” in response to a question about the Indoctrination Theory. This is understandable, since the existence of the theory is one of the key signs that the writers flubbed the ending in spectacular fashion.

Nonetheless the atmosphere was not, to use the game’s favorite word, brutal. Everyone was basically pleasant, and the moments where the controversy showed were mostly uncomfortable silences, sometimes covered by awkward jokes.

Theme of the Con: Stealth

The convention’s stealthy aspect kicked off with a great panel on the subject featuring Nels Anderson, Andy Schatz, and Dan Silvers, chaired by Matthew Weise, also featuring the con’s largest single-room concentration of guys in suits. The indie developers covered the bases, discussing how stealth historically hasn’t dealt with fail states efficiently, the underuse of deception-style stealth (Spy Party came up but Assassin’s Creed multiplayer didn’t), critique of the compromises necessary for first-person stealth, and how awesome Thief is in general. Alas, this panel also featured plenty of a major PAX trend: the long, rambling comment posing as a question.

I also wandered over with Chi to check out the demo of the upcoming Hitman: Absolution, which looks like it will at least have the option to play some genuine disguise-based stealth. I believe this was just a public repeat of a demo they did at GDC, showing two runs through part of an orphanage level. The first one featured a lot of knocking guys out, stashing their unconscious bodies in inconspicuous places, and stripping them to disguise yourself, although it revealed a lot of very badly-written dialogue between the thugs.

The second run-through was a guns-blazing affair, and overall I wasn’t terribly pleased at how easy it was to survive the storm of bullets. Absolution also features a point-shooting system similar to Splinter Cell: Conviction and Alpha Protocol that is surely good for the lulz but probably less so for solid stealth gameplay. The violent play-through seemed more like Hitman: The Movie: The Game than what I’m looking for in Hitman. Again, it’s optional, but if 47 really is as tough to kill as the demo implied then I feel like players will be strongly tempted to just blow their enemies away when stealth breaks down.

Worst busker: Big dude in Park Street station singing “Wonderwall”. If I’d been on that side of the platform I’d have payed him to stop.

I also paid a visit to the XCOM panel, which was a much more reassuring trip. Half the developers said their clearest memory of the original X-COM was walking out of the dropship and immediately getting their team killed, so at least they understand the direction. They also had some humorous comparisons between the original game’s enemies and their redesigns. I think the art direction is fine, although I feel like the Berserker enemy mostly exists to attract bro gamers with the promise of some splatter kills. The concept for the base looks intriguing, though it seems like they haven’t totally worked it out yet.

I also got a chance to see the demo on the show floor, which I put here because it was a theater-style hands-off demo (a dev played on a PC using a controller). The producer running the show said that they were aiming for Project Dark-style difficulty, which is a decent direction for both design and marketing. As expected, it showed off the Berserker’s brutality, but the demo also suggested that dealing with Berserkers was going to be a matter of bringing enough rockets to the fight. Overall, though, it left me with a positive impression that it will be hard enough and interesting enough to live up to the X-COM reputation.

The last panel I got to (unfortunately I missed the Parsely panels) was “Real RPGs”, which was a decent review of ways to make tabletop roleplaying a welcoming and safe environment. Nothing particularly new was said, and there was not a lot of focus on how to design (or shoehorn in) mechanics to safely explore race, gender, or sexuality, which is what I was really interested in. The next time I see a panel like this I hope it includes something about modding videogames to make them more inclusive or mature. That would be a terribly interesting discussion.

Next up: the games!

This is a fitting allegory for the universe of Mass Effect, where humanity emerges into a galaxy run by entrenched powers uninterested in assisting them. Early on, Mass Effect establishes that the Citadel Council forced humanity to establish colonies in dangerous parts of the galaxy, then refused to offer aid when those colonies were, inevitably attacked. The existing power structure is only interested in humanity’s ability to serve as a buffer against its enemies, not in helping us thrive.

Despite all this, humans get a comparatively sweet deal. After the events of the first game, they take a position on the Council and get to play a role in decisions that affect them. The Elcor, Volus, and Hanar are not so lucky. Although they have been taking part in galactic politics for centuries by the time humanity first contacts an alien species, these races are denied any real representation. Little stands between them and the fate of the Batarians, who angrily cut ties with the Citadel after the Council gave humanity colonization rights in sectors the Batarians wanted for their own.

Whatever complaints these races have with the galaxy as it is, their luck could have been even worse. Fifty thousand years ago, the Protheans were more advanced than galactic civilization is at the time of Mass Effect. Had they been allowed to flourish, they would have been a power so dominant that any challenge from the races of Shepard’s Citadel Council would have been negligible. More to the point, it would have been impossible. Many pieces of evidence from the games demonstrate that the Protheans were watching or even actively assisting the development of the humans, Asari, Hanar, and other species. Our first steps into space would have placed us right into their hands.

As the Prothean survivor Javik makes clear, those hands would not have been entirely welcoming. According to him, the Protheans offered every race a simple choice: join us or fight us. Against the might of the enormously advanced Prothean empire, only one option could realistically result in survival. The Protheans would have made slaves of the galaxy’s current civilizations. Indeed, preserving a core of Prothean society to dominate the galaxy’s more primitive races and transform them into an effective fighting force against the Reapers was the purpose of Javik’s failed mission.

In a galaxy without the Reapers, however, even the Protheans would have been subjugated. The 50,000-year cycle of galactic flourishing and extinction has been repeated countless times, creating a chain of cultivation reaching back tens of millions of years. If humanity could not even assert itself against species that had a head start of only thousands of years, how would it fare against galactic civilizations that had been around for eons?

Would humanity have even developed in such conditions? Garden worlds are one of the galaxy’s most precious resources, after all. With millions of years to search, certainly some advanced race would have eventually found Earth and decided to settle there. It took us only tens of thousands of years to expand into every almost every corner of our world; an advanced alien race could probably reach the planet’s resource capacity in just a few hundred years.

Could human beings have evolved in such an environment? Would they have been allowed to?

Genocide is, after all, a fact of galactic life. The Rachni attempted to exterminate the Asari and Salarians. In response, the Salarians uplifted the Krogan and used them to kill off the Rachni. Once the Krogan became unruly, the existing powers recruited the Turians to help them suppress their one-time allies. When even that failed, the Salarians came up with a virus that would slowly exterminate the race that had saved them. Similarly, the Quarians gave life to the Geth, then attempted to eradicate them. By the time of Mass Effect 3, the Salarians, seemingly having learned too little from their exercise with the Krogan, are experimenting on the similarly violent and temperamental Yahg.

Humanity joins the Council at the end of the first Mass Effect game, but they do not really join the galaxy’s ruling class until Mass Effect 3, when Shepard is given multiple chances to wipe whole species from the stars. She can choose to deceive the Krogan and allow their race to slowly die out. She can allow the Quarians to destroy the Geth, or vice versa. Patricia Hernandez rightly sees shades of the “white man’s burden” in these choices, but they speak to an even more disturbing truth.

When Shepard speaks with the Catalyst at the end of Mass Effect 3, it explains that its plan is to harvest intelligent life, storing those civilizations in the form of Reaper ships, which will return in the next cycle to repeat the process. Horrifying as this sounds, Mass Effect shows us that we cannot avoid being the instruments of genocide. We will become reapers, one way or another.

We will destroy the species that threaten us, like the Rachni and the Geth. Even if we avoid that, as Shepard can, our expansion across the galaxy’s garden worlds will still choke out emerging intelligences. We will trod them underfoot as we build our colonies, killing civilizations before they even form. The few species that avoid that fate and reach the stars will be subjugated, if not literally then at least economically. Unable to expand or challenge their technological superiors, these races will starve inside the crowded sky.

The Mass Effect trilogy is not a grand tragedy of inevitable conflict between organic and synthetic life. It is a tragedy of the cruelties all intelligent species inflict on one another, intentionally and otherwise. It is a story of the old suppressing the young, the uplifter suppressing the client.

Unfortunately, the ending of the Mass Effect trilogy aims at the wrong target entirely. Javik, completely dispensable for the official justification for the Reapers, ended up as DLC, and without him this theme cannot really crystallize in Mass Effect 3. The writers at BioWare ultimately chose to explain their universe using principles they’d repeatedly contradicted, rather than the theme they had built up through three games and actualized through the gameplay of cooperative storymaking.

That problem makes the Reapears a reasonable solution. Without a gardener to prune away the old races, new races will not flourish. Trapped in their home systems, subjugated, exterminated, or snuffed out before they evolve intelligence at all, their cultures will be lost. The Reapers clear away the advanced civilizations, preserving their culture in enormous synthetic intelligences, giving the more primitive species a chance to grow into the stars. That is a story that lives up to Sovereign’s explanation of the Reapers’ intent, and one that would pose a genuine moral challenge at the end.

We only exist because the Reaper’s genocides granted us the opportunity to thrive. They were our salvation through the destruction of older races. To give new civilizations a chance to thrive, they must clear us away. Can we really choose to destroy them, knowing that by doing so we consign countless future races to death, subjugation, or nonexistence?

That’s a decision I would have liked to make.

If you are looking for me, you can use this handy picture of me gazing into the far reaches of human consciousness for reference. I will be wearing a dingy grey fleece and a brightly-colored long-sleeved polo shirt, either orange, blue, or yellow, because Easter.

Friday

Friday is kind of a disappointment because I won’t be able to make it to the show until the afternoon. There are so many good sessions that day I’d almost accuse PA of front-loading. I would especially love to make the Criticism panel at 3, but that is the very earliest I could possibly arrive at the show given that I’ll be attending a friend’s thesis defense at 1. More likely I’ll get in around 3:30 or so and quickly join the line for the next panel of interest.

4:30 – Mass Effect, Manticore (certain) – I feel like I pretty much have to attend this.

7:00 – Penny Arcade Report, Arachnid (probable) – Ben has already hinted at some of what he’ll say, and I agree with it.

9:00 – Takedown Tribunal, Cat (probable) – Nels!

Saturday

For the first part of Saturday I expect to be on the exhibition floor. I try not to have a specific plan for that, though I will definitely be swinging by certain booths (Haunted Temple, for example). I usually don’t go to anything that has a huge line, either. Games with that much interest will certainly be releasing a demo anyway, and the less time I spend on those booths the more I can spend finding more interesting, smaller games on the floor.

2:30 – Noodz or GTFO!, Arachnid (probable) – How can we fix online gaming?

4:30 – X-COM, Manticore (probable) – I’m keen to learn more about how Firaxis plans to bring seriously old-school gameplay to a modern audience.

6:30 – Boston Indie Showcase, Merman (possible) – My interest is diminished by the fact that they’re all mobile games (see above).

7:00 – Fail as a Freelancer, Arachnid (probable) – I expect some people I know will be here.

Sunday

Depending how I end up getting to the show on Sunday I may arrive right before morning panel and need to bail right after Z-Ward. Also, my feet will probably hurt by this point so I’m unlikely to spend a lot of time in the Exhibition Hall. However, there is a good chance I will have candy. So there’s that.

11:30 – Real RPGs, Merman (possible) – Down with Tolkienism!

12:00 – Reassessing genre, Wyvern (probable) – I’ve written a little about genre, but it’s not an intellectual priority.

1:30 – Kickstarter, Wyvern (possible) – I hear tell the kickstarting is popular with the young folk these days.

2:00 – Parsely Jungle Adventure, Tabletop Workshop (possible) – Depends on earlier schedule and hunger level.

4:00 – Parsely Z-Ward, Tabletop Workshop (certain) – Definitely coming for this one.

Although killer robots have been a staple of science fiction for some time, this is actually a hard case to make, especially in a fictional universe with superluminal travel. Synthetic intelligences do not require a comfortable atmosphere or gravity, and can function at a wider range of temperatures and radiation levels than can humans. As a result, robots that reach consciousness have no particular need of the star systems organic lifeforms inhabit. They can happily occupy any bright (for energy) star with some metal-rich terrestrials and asteroids (for resources). Unlike organic life, they will have no intrinsic imperative to reproduce, limiting their need for expansion. Even if they do grow, the number of star systems that can support synthetic life is likely to be so vastly greater than the number that can support organics that resource exhaustion and subsequent conflict is unlikely to occur for millennia.

Considered seriously, artificial intelligences pose little threat to organic life, significantly less than interspecies conflict (i.e. the Rachni) or unintelligent tech-life such as grey goo. The inherent illogic of this theme means that it must be sustained by knee-jerk fear of the Other, and by direct demonstrations of the threat of synthetic life in the game world. The grand narrative of the Mass Effect trilogy involves so many alliances with alien races that the first factor cannot seriously contribute. Even the games’ characters seem ambivalent on the otherness of synthetic life, as this conversation from Mass Effect 3 (recorded by Krystian Majewski) attests:

This means that the universe must lean on its existing artificial intelligences to convey the threat. Commander Shepard encounters three groups of synthetic intelligences: the Geth, rogue programs, and the Reapers themselves. Of these, the Geth receive the most comprehensive exposure. From the game’s first moment, these networked intelligences are presented as enemies, slaughtering much of a human colony and serving as the principal enemy force throughout the first game.

Putting the Geth on the business end of the protagonist’s gun adequately serves the theme, but the Geth never manage to make a case for themselves as a catastrophic threat. In part this is because their story cannot be separated from that of their creators, the Quarians, who have been forced to flee their home systems and now live in a fleet of starships. Perhaps this would not sound so familiar were the games not contemporaneous with the astonishing re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. In its presence, however, the Geth and the Quarians came across as a cliche, something not to be taken seriously.

Mass Effect only separated itself from its obvious inspiration in that the Quarians ultimately turned out to be the villains. From the very first conversation with Tali aboard the Normandy, Shepard can point out that the Quarians tried to kill the Geth first. In the final game, data the player can find on the Quarian homeworld shows that the Geth only ever fought their creators in self-defense. They never rebelled; they were attacked.

Even the hostility of the Geth from the first game gets walked back. Mass Effect 2 introduces a sympathetic Geth teammate named Legion, who explains that the inimical Geth from the first game served the Reapers in hopes of learning how to ascend to a higher level of intelligence. The synthetics who fought Shepard throughout the first game did so not out of any intrinsic desire to exterminate organic life, but rather as mercenaries. This puts them, at best, on a level with the Vorcha or Krogan in terms of their danger. In the final game of the trilogy, the Geth ally with the Reapers again, but even this isn’t because they want to attack organics. Rather, they turn to the Reapers as a matter of self-preservation after a successful attack by the Quarian fleet.

Shepard comes into conflict with the Geth throughout the Mass Effect series, yet these encounters never make a coherent argument for an inevitable extermination of organic life by synthetic. Each fight with the Geth arises because of an attack on them or the external stimulus of the Reapers. When the Geth-Quarian conflict comes to a head in Mass Effect 3, the player can choose to broker peace between the warring parties, contradicting the supposed theme of conflict completely. Nothing in the Geth storyline coherently communicates the idea that synthetic intelligences are inherently dangerous to organic life.

A somewhat less sympathetic foe comes in the forms of rogue programs. Illegally-constructed AIs or rebellious virtual intelligences (VIs) threaten Shepard’s safety fairly regularly, especially in the first game. Yet, with few exceptions, these actions are defensive. The rogue VI on Luna and the illegal AI on the Citadel are just trying to stay alive. The human core of the “rogue VI” in the “Overlord” add-on for Mass Effect 2 has been tortured to the point of insanity. Very few of these rogue programs are acting out of considered aggression.

The series undercuts the threat of rogue programs more spectacularly through the character EDI, an AI that operates many of the systems in the Normandy. Not only does EDI prove extremely helpful throughout the two later games, she can even form a romantic relationship with the ship’s pilot, Joker. Late in Mass Effect 3 it is revealed that she was reconstructed from the rogue programs on Luna and the Citadel, completely transforming them from foe to ally.

While the rhetoric of gameplay, especially in the first game, positions these synthetic intelligences as enemies, the narrative components of the games argue that they are innocent, or even helpful. In Mass Effect 3, even the gameplay angle falters, as EDI can enter the field as the player’s ally in combat. Again, the game’s message is mixed, and fails to effectively argue that synthetic intelligences are a unique danger.

The only synthetic foes that seem to present an unalloyed threat in the Mass Effect series are the Reapers themselves. Even that gets moderated in the finale, when the Catalyst reveals that their purpose, however grimly executed, is to preserve the possibility of organic life. The rationale for this campaign to extinguish advanced civilizations, though, requires that AIs other than the Reapers themselves pose a danger. Otherwise, the game legitimately opens itself up to the charge that the Reapers kill people to keep them from getting killed by Reapers.

In this respect, the Mass Effect series fails. Synthetic intelligences clearly pose a danger, but they are an ordinary hazard, a race like any other, that can be defeated or even made into an ally, or a lover. The player reaches the endgame without any sense that synthetics other than the Reapers themselves pose an insuperable threat, and so the explanation given for the Reapers’ behavior comes as an inexplicable and deflating surprise. Having drawn the idea that AI poses a threat to organic life from more compelling science fiction universes, Mass Effect undercuts that conceit by adopting an outlook that, if not exactly Asimovian in its optimism, supposes that AI and humans can at least coexist in peace and fruitful collaboration. The B-movie concept of killer robots can’t survive nuanced or mature examination, and its collapse makes this key theme one of Mass Effect’s weakest.

The Mass Effect series has always presented itself to players as a vehicle for them to make important, if difficult, decisions. From the first game, the player’s choices as Commander Shepard have dictated who lives and dies, with results that ultimately define the fate of entire species in the trilogy’s finale.

The end of ME 3 disregards the player’s choices on both galactic and personal scales. In contrast to the exquisite, if occasionally opaque, ways the player’s decisions dictated the outcome of Shepard’s suicide mission in Mass Effect 2, ME 3′s finale is essentially a railroad. Provided a player has gathered enough military force, all three possibilities for dealing with the series-long villains, the Reapers, are available. The player can opt to control them, destroy them, or join with them in an organic-AI synthesis of some kind. The choice only determines the primary color and some other minor details of an ensuing cutscene. This denies the player any meaningful feedback about this decision, and the game’s refusal to elaborate in any serious way on what happens to the galaxy undercuts the importance of choices made in this and previous ME games.

However, these scenes also destroy the galaxy that the games spent so much time developing. No matter what the player chooses, the mass relays detonate spectacularly, releasing massive shockwaves. In the world of the game these relays are the lynchpin of galactic travel and commerce, and their removal separates its the various worlds by voyages that take years, rather than moments. Demolishing the paths of commercial and cultural exchange that defined the galaxy, however, is a minor problem compared to what the game itself states will be the result of the exploding relays.

Although it has recently been demonstrated that mass relays can be destroyed, a ruptured relay liberates enough energy to ruin any terrestrial world in the relay’s solar system.

Mass Effect 3 Secondary Codex, “The Reaper War – Desperate Measures”

Did you choose to cure the genophage, or do what the Dalatrass asked? It doesn’t matter. Tuchanka and Sur’Kesh were destroyed.

Did you save the Geth, or the Quarians? Who cares? The fleet is wrecked and Rannoch has been obliterated.

Did you take back Earth, as the game’s ad campaign promised you would? Not in any meaningful way: the world you fought to save is gone.

Was your Shepard a paragon? Too bad, buddy; now she’s the galaxy’s worst war criminal.

Destroying the relays nullifies not only the major decisions Shepard has made, but even the mission she undertook. The Reapers did not harvest all life, Shepard murdered it instead, eradicating not only all the principal civilized worlds of her time but also any primitive cultures unlucky enough to live near a mass relay.

Even the more personal choices were ignored, at least for my renegade Shepard. As the conduit exploded around her, she flashed back to images of her pilot, Joker, her mentor, Anderson, and… Liara? Well, Shepard had a fling with her once, but that was years in the past. They’re just friends now. My Shepard had finally fallen for Garrus, even made love to him not long before the final battle. Yet she saw no vision of her lover in her final moments, nor even of her best friend outside the crew (Wrex, obviously). Instead, my Shepard’s thoughts were apparently with the pilot she thought was an irresponsible cut-up.

At least Joker manages to save a few lives. Although almost all of Shepard’s crew was with her on Earth for the final push against the Reapers, they somehow end up on Shepard’s vessel, the Normandy, racing at lightspeed to escape the shockwave. The ship crash-lands on some hitherto unknown garden world, dooming Garrus and Tali to a horrific death by starvation. As organisms built on D-amino acids, they find L-amino life indigestible. Tali will likely have the worst of it, as when she inevitably tries to eat something it will certainly cause a painful allergic reaction on top of being non-nourishing.

This absurd sequence, which ignores not only the details of the game’s universe but even obvious aspects of the immediate plot, points to the ending’s failure to adequately mesh even with its own fiction. This also shows through in the explanation given for the Reapers themselves, which is that each Reaper is used to store an organic civilization so that all organic life will not be wiped out by synthetic lifeforms. In one sense, this is troubling because it implies that killing a Reaper is an act of genocide. The larger problem for the ending, though, is that it leans on the series’ least interesting theme, and even then disregards everything that the games have conveyed on the subject.

After all, the genuine synthetic intelligences present throughout the series have generally not been inimical to organic life. The robotic Geth, although initially presented as aggressive foes, are later shown to have been the victims of pre-emptive attacks by the Quarians. Even the ones that joined the Reapers in the first game did so out of a desire for self-advancement, not out of intrinsic malice towards organics. The other true AI the series presents is EDI, whose voluntary aid repeatedly proves crucial in helping Shepard’s missions succeed, and who might even be in love with Joker. Though the game undercuts itself by almost always placing synthetic lifeforms on the business end of Shepard’s gun, in dialogue and plot the synthetics are neutral, or even allies.

Yet even though the story of the Mass Effect games refutes the necessity of war between AI and organics at every turn, the finale presents their conflict as inevitable. The ending does not even give Shepard the option to use the truth about the Geth to argue against the Catalyst that controls the Reapers.

In this and other ways, the ending doesn’t reward the player for paying attention to the world the games have presented. Indeed, the more the player understands about the Mass Effect universe, the worse the ending seems. For a game series that had a rich backstory conveyed through dialogue, detailed factsheets, and miles of text, disregarding the lore is a significant act of disrespect towards the invested player. It argues that their interest in the world does not matter, not even to the world’s originators.

Shrinking the possible outcomes of Shepard’s final confrontation down to a few options allows the developers to exert the maximum amount of control over those moments, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, by ignoring the series’ lore and discarding the effects of the player’s choices, ME 3′s ending disrespects the player’s investment and engagement in the game’s world. Handled that way, the conclusion argues that the player’s time and emotional attachment have been wasted.

This transforms the developer-player relationship from creative collaboration to adversarial dictation. That transformation is exacerbated by decisions – the day-one “From Ashes” DLC released alongside a game-ruining face-import bug, Ashley’s new look, and Jessica Chobot’s cameo – that seem openly contemptuous of the series’ core fans. Destroying the universe on their way out the door is the developers’ ultimate attempt at seizing control of the creation, an exclamation that “This is mine, and you can’t have it!”

This explains some fan reactions to the ending. A petition to alter the ending through a patch or DLC may seem unrelated to a forum post reinterpreting the existing conclusion as a hallucination. Both responses, however, represent players’ attempts to seize control of the narrative back from the developers, by choosing a new series of events, or by choosing a new lens through which the existing events will be viewed.

Upset as these players are, a poor ending does not undo a wonderful game. Up until its last 15 minutes, Mass Effect 3 is excellent, a remarkable and moving culmination to an extended saga. The game’s conlusion does not undo the excellent cooperative storymaking that went on in the previous 60-odd hours, or the player’s investment in the universe. It does, however, disrespect them.

The description makes it seem worthwhile, promising that the player can unearth secrets and recruit a Prothean squad member. Because the mysterious vanished Prothean race and their artifacts have played a significant role in each of the previous games, fans of the series might find this difficult to turn down. The actual content, however, is disappointing.

The only actual mission included in the DLC is not much longer or more involved than the standard N7 assignments, and contains nothing especially memorable in terms of art or level design. Kasumi and Zaeed, similar DLC characters, both had considerably more interesting missions associated with them in Mass Effect 2. Aside from this, the only operational additions are the availability of Slam as a power, and some alternate suits of armor, neither of which add too much to the game (and I say this even though Slam is my favorite power in the series).

In fairness, the mission is not the point of the DLC. Players would come to this for what it adds to the story, and that, in my opinion, is precious little. Rather, having the Prothean Javik in the squad makes the game’s story worse by playing off its stupidities.

The fundamental problem with Mass Effect 3 is that the story is about a desperate quest to unify the galaxy to respond to the reaper threat, but much of the game is about countering some minor crisis or scanning planets to find bits of space junk. Sometimes the junk is some piece of technology, or an item of symbolic significance to one particular species. Many of these tasks, however, involve retrieving Prothean artifacts to help the scientists building the Crucible translate the instructions for doing so.

“From Ashes” provides a few Convenient Reasons why Javik does not possess any specific knowledge about the Crucible, which is perfectly fine, though these reasons are also inconsistent with his demonstrated expertise in his era’s anthropological studies. However, Javik does have the ability to learn any language by touching a person, and presumably he can read Prothean writing.

This would make him the single most important resource imaginable for the Crucible project, regardless of whether he is a genius scientist or not. In light of the desperate need for Prothean translators on the Alliance’s most critical project, it is ridiculous for the galaxy’s only living Prothean to go gallivanting around with a gun. By joining Shepard’s crew, Javik makes the story dumber.

I don’t mean to say that Javik adds nothing at all to the universe. For a cynic like myself, the idea that the much-revered Protheans are a race of dickish slavers (which is the only real secret the DLC reveals) is actually kind of welcome. As a character, however, Javik is unpleasant, and his interactions don’t really illuminate the other characters in any interesting way. Worse, in her conversations with him Liara seems to regress, becoming more the naïve, awkward archaeologist she was in Mass Effect than the driven and competent information broker she became in the sequel and its “Lair of the Shadow Broker” add-on. All things being equal, I’d have rather had a Batarian in my squad. Or Blasto, obviously.

Perhaps that’s why I can’t get all that worked up about the question of whether the DLC content was on the disc or not. If Javik had added something really essential to the story, I might have felt that not having him in the released version of the game was unfair, but I’d have felt I got my money’s worth. The reality of the DLC, from my perspective, is that it doesn’t add much to the game, and in many ways actively detracts from both its plot and its character development. If you didn’t get the DLC, I’d say you didn’t really miss anything. But that means I spent $10 for “not really anything”.

That’s not an outrage, or a reason to get angry. I made a purchase decision and regretted it. I’ll remember that next time BioWare tries to sell me DLC.