Earned Endings

I had a nice chat with some game designers, some of whom may have been from Bioware, about the controversy about the MASS EFFECT 3 ending.

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So, the hero, Shepherd, does what Buffy does at the end of seasons 1 and 5: sacrifice herself for the good of everyone else. And some players object to that. Even though, y'know, Shep has been dead at least once in the series already.

And the whole 39 hours of gameplay are all about loss and sacrifice.

But maybe the issue players are having isn't that Shep dies. It's that you have no choice about Shep dying. You are given up to three endings at the end of the game, but in each of them, Shep has to sacrifice her life for the good of all, at the end of a long sequence of cut-scene after cut-scene in which you have barely any choices to make or even anything to do.

I think the problem is that the player doesn't own Shep's sacrifice. He doesn't choose to sacrifice his life for the good of all. He has the controller taken out of his hands by the designers.

Sid Meier famously says that there are games where the computer is having all the fun, games where the designer has all the fun, and games where the player gets to have the fun. At the end of ME3, the designers are having the fun.

What if there had been an option for Shepherd not to sacrifice himself? But in that ending, only Earth survived, not the whole galaxy? Or there would have been some other sort of qualified victory? Then most of the players would have chosen to sacrifice Shep, but they would have chosen it. And then they would have owned the sacrifice. They would have got to have the fun.

I had the same issue at the end of RED DEAD REDEMPTION. Marston sacrifices himself to save his family, but the player doesn't get a choice. Suppose the player could choose to send his family to safety, or fight it out with his enemies, his son at his side. If he brings his son, his son dies. And then, bitter, sad, he goes to take revenge for his family. Most players would choose to save the family, if the game made it clear that there were real risks for the son. But they would own that decision. They would feel the redemption mentioned in the title.

I think it would also have helped ME3 if there were a bit more of an epilog. Bioware really saved a lot of money on the alternate endings. They're all about Joker and the Normandy racing to outrun the shock front of Shep's decision. If I choose to control the Reapers, I want to see a hideous giant fleet of Reapers heading out from Earth, with "United Federation of Earth" painted on their sides, so I can wonder if I've given humanity too much power. If I choose to destroy all synthetic life, I want to see the Geth die. Otherwise each winning choice doesn't really feel different. Either way the Reapers stop fighting and Joker fails to outrun the shock wave, and crashlands on a planet with some crew members on board.

It seems a shame that the ending of such a well-crafted game comes up so short. I can see why Bioware made its choice. The end-game cut-scenes are already expensive. It's a game; they wanted to maximize their efforts on levels and gameplay. But if you want your game to tell a story, a weak ending can really spoil an otherwise successful story.

(See all my Mass Effect posts.)

Review: Mass Effect Datapad

You can't "win" Mass Effect 3 without playing an online game. Either you have to play many, many bouts of ME3 multiplayer, or play many, many bouts of Infiltrator, or play Datapad. Datapad is the free iPhone/iPad app that Bioware is releasing so no one can say you have to pay extra in order to win ME3.

Datapad is a Farmville-style app, where you send space fleets on "missions" to raise galactic readiness. You quickly find out that in any of the five quadrants there are 3 missions that never change. Yep, same star systems, same description, same rewards. You have to send your fleets to do those missions over and over to get galactic readiness points. And when I say over and over, I mean literally dozens and dozens of times to get your galactic readiness to where you can get the best ME3 ending.

Which means, of course, that you have to check your iPad or iPhone constantly in order to make sure fleets aren't sitting still. Just like Farmville, the game intrudes into daily life. It will take days of playing Datapad constantly to get your readiness up. I've been playing constantly for two days and I've improved my galactic readiness by 5%.

This is not a game. No one would actually play Datapad if they weren't trying to avoid having to play Infiltrator or ME3 multiplayer. Datapad is a chore.

It could have been given a little flavor with trivial effort. Just write different missions for different star systems. And with a tiny bit more effort, there could have been jeopardy. (Your starfleets can be "crippled" but they fix themselves in an hour, which is tedious but hardly alarming.) But they didn't want to. Bioware/EA don't really want you to play Datapad. They want you to buy Infiltrator for $7, or play ME3 multiplayer (which requires an Xbox LIVE Gold membership). But they want to pretend that they're not forcing you to buy something.

So Datapad is free. And it's worth every penny you pay.

PS Aside from the Galaxy at War "game" on Datapad, you can also access the game's codex, in case you didn't read it in-game, and you can check a Mass Effect twitter feed.

PPS The programming itself is terrible. It keeps losing login information. It keeps claiming that my iPhone is not connected to the Internet. You have to hit the touchscreen repeatedly to get it to respond. No pinch-to-zoom. Incredibly slow to reload. It is a badly, badly made app. .

PPPS It's only free if you're playing the game on your first profile. You'll need to buy a second online pass if you're playing the game on a second profile.

PPPPS: Increasing "bonus readiness" seems to be the fastest way to increase readiness.

Mass Effect 3: A Broken Single Player Game

I have now played through every mission available to me in Mass Effect 3, accumulating allies for the big fight against the deadly galaxy-obliterating Reapers.

Unfortunately, due to really cheesy marketing ploys by Bioware or EA, I haven't actually "won" the game. To get a semi-happy ending, I have to boost my "galactic readiness." This can only be accomplished by:

a. Playing lots of battles in multiplayer mode. This requires a Gold membership in Xbox LIVE. Also, you have to use the online access code you get in the game box, which means if you kid wants to play on his profile, he has to buy another access code. And, of course, you have to like multiplayer. I don't.

b. Buy an iPad game called Infiltrator and play it lots. This costs $7, plus you have to have an iPad. And it's a pure shooter. If I wanted a pure shooter, I'd play CALL OF DUTY.

c. Play an iPad game called Datapad. Datapad is free, but boring. You send out missions and they complete in real-time, hours and hours later. Not a lot of work, but not a lot of fun, either. I figure it will take at least 10 days of attending to Datapad to get my galactic readiness up.

All of these methods require you to invest hours in them in order to get your galactic readiness anywhere near where it needs to be.

Boo, I say. If I buy a single player game, I don't want to have to play multiplayer. I don't want to play online. Bioware/EA are basically selling a broken single player game that can only be repaired by playing online. I feel betrayed and angry. Boo.

Mass Effect 3

I'm about a ten hours into Mass Effect 3, the latest in the hit third-person RPG/shooter franchise from BioWare, and I'm a little frustrated. The shooting is fun. The story has twists and turns.

It's the characters that bug me. They're not a lot of fun.

Okay, granted, Earth has just been attacked by the Reapers, a race of superpowerful robots intent on destroying all organic life in the galaxy. That does tend to make everyone a tad sad, and a tad focused on fighting for survival.

But isn't there room for a few surprises?

Where's the guy who's just broken up with his girlfriend, and is crushed by that, even though she's still alive? And he knows his loss doesn't compare to the millions who are dead, but damn it, it still hurts?

Where's the girl who's inexplicably happy, because her massive Ponzi scheme was about to collapse, and now that everything's life or death, one con that got out of control doesn't matter any more?

Or the dude who is just a wee little bit happy that his ex-wife was incinerated along with New York?

Where's the character who really, really wants to get himself killed, because life is not worth living, and, if you take him on a mission, he does?

We care about characters because of their flaws, as I said in my MIGS talk. The people you spend most of the time with have no flaws.

Look, I love shooting evil spider cyborgs as much as the next guy. But BioWare is known as a game writer's (relative) paradise. Do all the conversations have to be this sad and grim? Couldn't they be a little less predictable and a little more, well, human?

Not the Pinnacle of My Existence

If I may grouch a bit about doubleplusungood programming in games ... MASS EFFECT was telling me that my Pinnacle Station downloadable content is corrupt and has to be deleted. Then when it's deleted, it tells me I can't play my game without it. I need to download it again. Then when I download it again, it only works when I'm signed into Xbox LIVe.

My Xbox LIVE connection is flakey. Unclear why. I thought it was an ethernet jack problem. (Q. How many programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A. That's a hardware problem.) But it wasn't, because if I use a workaround to connect my Xbox to Xbox LIVE through my computer via Ethernet cable, rather than directly to the router, it works fine, if slowly.

Point being, I can't play my game.

Here's why this is stupid: at no point has my character gone to Pinnacle Station. Pinnacle Station is utterly irrelevant to the game. If the game were cleverly programmed to take into account the possibility of corrupt content and flakey Xbox LIVE connections, it would simply wait to see if you tried to fly to Pinnacle Station, and then tell you to sod off. Instead of invalidating my ten hours of gameplay, which I can't access now.

But ultimately, I find out what I suspected all along: this is some idiotic evil Microsoft problem.

You see, this is not my original Xbox. It's a refurbished Xbox after the first one died under warranty.

It turns out that you can't use your downloadable content from your original Xbox. Not unless you manually transfer the DLC licenses.

WTF? The content is all on your hard drive, not the Xbox. Why should it matter what Xbox your content is on? It should only matter what hard drive it's on. I suppose this is some arcane way of making sure you can't pirate free DLC.

Why would you do that? Why do I feel like an abused wife every time I use a Microsoft product?

UPDATE: Good technical point, Greylocks. But then why doesn't MS transfer the DLC licenses automatically when they swap the consoles? Rather than requiring the owner to figure out what has gone wrong with his DLC when his game doesn't work? If I migrate from one Mac to another, iTunes simply says, "Hey, this is a new Mac, do you want me to transfer your iTunes account?"

Conversational Combat

I'm currently playing MASS EFFECT 2. Although there's a neat dialogue engine that lets you choose how the conversation goes, I'm feeling something's missing.

For one thing, there's an issue of optimization. Certain dialogue options net you "paragon" or "renegade" points. You need those points to unlock missions. So whatever your inclinations, you're wise to go with the paragon or renegade options 100% of the time.

But my main problem is that the dialog is all exposition. I ask a question, I get an answer, or the NPC will say "I can't tell you." If I'm looking for info, all I have to do is keep clicking options until I've covered all of them.

Real investigative dialog is elliptical. I ask about this, I find something out about that. It's also emotional. You might have to piss someone off in order to get them to talk about something. Or butter them up.

I'd be interested in a conversational game engine that made dialog into a puzzle. Just as you have to figure out a boss's weakness to, say, fire, you have to figure out your conversation opponent's weakness. Get him talking about dogs and he'll warm up to you. Call him a traitor and he'll lose his cool and say something he didn't intend to.

How do you know when you've cracked it? When you complete a combat mission, it's obvious. There are no enemies left, or you picked up the doodad or rescued the guy or whatever. But there's no reason you couldn't do that with conversation. Once you get the info you're looking for, your "been a pleasure talking with you" option opens up. There's no reason a game can't flag an important bit of dialog so the gamer remembers it -- the game flags everything else you pick up, doesn't it?

Have any of you ever run across a game with this sort of conversational combat?