Mass Effect 3: The Story

This post will almost certainly contain spoilers.

Bioware, above all other game developers, are heralded for their narratives. They have an undeniable knack for telling tales that can capture the imaginations of their fans. Between Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and the most important series for this week Mass Effect, they've built a reputation as well as become a sort of posterboy for the potential that video games have as vehicles for narratives. Why? What makes them so different from the rest of the competition? Mass Effect 3 is the perfect opportunity to explore what Bioware does well, and what they do poorly in terms of story. It also gives us the chance to ask what it is that makes video games so compelling to the people who play them.

Before I get into the specifics, I suppose I should give a very brief overview of what happens in the game. The Reapers have finally nutted-up and decided to start wiping out organic life in the galaxy. They start with Earth, and Shepard is forced to leave in order to gather an army and defeat the synthetic bastards. That's basically it. You get two new squadmates, although only one is actually a new character. His name is James and he's one of the worst characters I've ever encountered in the Mass Effect universe. He's too cliche and too voiced-by-Freddie-Prince-Jr. for me to like him. Also, I'm pretty sure he takes steroids. It's terrifying. The story is still set up in that fairly open style in which you can play the missions in almost any order that you want, with the exception of one mission that makes it impossible to finish a bunch of others that I didn't know about until I did it and lost about five hours of game time which was just dandy. I spent about forty hours playing it, although I've heard of people somehow putting upwards of ninety hours in. I don't know how that's possible, but there you have it.

The best way to sum up what is great about Bioware's ability to spin a story is an anecdote. I was playing Mass Effect 3 and was very depressed about something big that had just happened (I know that I warned about spoilers, but I just can't say what that thing is.) As the cut-scene played and particles fell from the sky around the characters, the music from the title screen of the first Mass Effect started to play. It's a beautiful score; sort of techno, but the kind of awe-inspiring techno that shares more with the opening harmonics in the "Star Trek" theme song than Deadmau5. As I sat there watching this cut-scene, I started to get a little choked-up. This generally doesn't happen with me in a video game, no matter how good the game. I loved Bioshock, but I didn't feel a lump in the back of my throat during the ending cut-scene. This scene did that. I was amazed and couldn't stop thinking about why I'd had that reaction. I've decided that the reason for this emotional response is Bioware's uncanny ability to make the gamer feel attachment, not only to characters but to entire universes. A few people have joked derisively about the amount of dialogue in Bioware games, but that dialogue forces the gamer to connect to the game in a way that few others do. Even Skyrim, which is one of the conceived games in one of the best conceived universes in gaming history, couldn't come close to the emotional resonance of these games because of the amount of freedom that players have to not chat with NPC's. Everything is too expansive and too spread out to have any kind of emotion at all. I remember beating Skyrim and feeling next to nothing, partially because I still had a bunch more missions and partially because it just kind of happened. Bioware forces to player to talk to the people in their universe, and by way of their dialogue wheel the player is actually talking to those NPC's (albeit through pre-programmed responses.) The NPC's then talk about their views, their lives, and the qualities of their people, expanding the universe and forcing the player to pick a side. That is the strength of Bioware's storytelling; they force you to engage in the conversation and, in the process, find out about this vast universe their engineers have created. It's a mix of interactivity and depth that few have quite gotten right.

I was going to write here about what Bioware does wrong in their storytelling. For instance, their characters can be extremely wooden. The lines they deliver sound unnatural and awkward. Their voice actors aren't always the best and sound like they're reading the ingredients on a cereal box instead of worrying about the end of the universe. This is especially true of the male Shepard, who is excruciatingly hard to listen to sometimes. The structure of their stories is very loose and unconnected sometimes. Then I realized that I really didn't care. I think they need to fix the dialogue and hire better voice actors, sure, but the stories they tell are still intense and interesting. We still connect to these characters even if they are occasionally written with the subtlety of a fat ninja. Again, it has to be that mix of interactivity and deep personal histories that connects us to these characters. Let's look at an example: why do fans love Liara besides her propensity for lesbian sex scenes? Well, of course there is manipulation. Bioware made her smart and adorably awkward like a blue Zoe Deschanel.    

The Same Person

She's essentially the girl-next-door type. However, though she is a good person, she also has a mother who almost helps destroy organic life. She becomes the Shadowbroker as well, which adds some danger and depth to her character. There is also all that you learn about her people, and eventually about her father. She becomes interesting because she doesn't necessarily fit into any traditional archetypes. She's not the whore or the mother, and while she is likable and essentially a good person, she is no madonna. She can be a cold-blooded killer, in fact. She is a really good blend of prototypical and atypical. We need that archetypal foundation of the good, approachable girl so that we can relate to her and become invested in all of the exposition/backstory she will have to deliver, but we also need that edge to keep an interest. In the grand scheme of things, it's actually quite skillfully done. However, again, on a line-by-line basis, the quality of the writing suffers. This leads to something interesting I've noticed about narrative in video games; the detailed skill of the writing doesn't matter.

In terms of narrative, video games share just as much with books as they do with film. Yes, they are visually oriented, but they are also long-form and take anywhere from six hours to infinity to finish. Therefore, I would like to do something a little odd and compare Mass Effect 3 to the Harry Potter series. How closely have you read those books? If you've taken any time to actually read them, it becomes apparent that they aren't particularly well-written. JK Rowling's dialogue is often very unwieldy, the structures of the stories can be nearly non-existent and calling some of the characters flat is an understatement. However, they are some of the best-selling and most-beloved books of all-time. I love them. The reasons for this is the same reason that Bioware and other game developers can succeed in telling a great story without necessarily having the best writing. The number one most important thing is building a universe that the characters inhabit. The world Harry and his friends live in is, for lack of a better term, magical. There's fantastic creatures, imaginative inventions, and whimsical/nightmareish adventure around every corner. It's a fully realized realm that people would love to explore. The same is true of Mass Effect, Dragon Age or The Elder Scrolls if we're going to leave Bioware canon. Hell, Star Wars and "Star Trek" could be included in here as well as a bevy of other sci-fi and fantasy titles. Beyond a world, they also have characters that are enjoyable, if not always deep. Who doesn't love Aberforth, even if he probably had sex with a goat? The gruffer, disillusioned Dumbledore is interesting not because he's such an interesting character, but because of how he fits into the mythos and how differently he acts from Albus Dumbledore, the beloved and complex character we miss throughout the seventh book. A good equivalent to Aberforth in Mass Effect 3 would be the Asari barmaid in the Presidium Commons. Asari are wise and generally aloof, but this lady is gruff and harshly-spoken. Again, this is using the player's knowledge of this universe they set up to make characters engaging and entertaining. Then, of course, there's the length. Both Mass Effect and any Harry Potter book are too long to remember the specifics of each conversation. If you say that Ron said something, I can assume it was probably something incredibly stupid and possibly funny. If you say Garrus said something, I can assume it was badass. I couldn't tell you what either of them actually said, though, which allows the player to fill in the blanks themselves. I choose to believe these characters were well-written because I liked them and can't remember specific reasons to believe anything else. 

So what am I trying to say in this vast, tangled weave of text? The writers at Bioware aren't William Shakespeare. They aren't even Christopher Nolan. They use a lot of cliches and manipulation, their dialogue is awkward, and a lot of stuff feels disconnected or doesn't really make sense. However, they are pioneers. They are attempting to write deep storylines and build interesting characters in a medium that doesn't always pride itself on its storytelling abilities. Writing in video games is a deep, unmapped lake in the middle of nowhere and Bioware is just dipping a toe. They are laying groundwork for what will eventually be a medium that could rival all others before it in terms of emotional power and narrative complexity. You have to applaud them for that.