I’m also spoiling other stuff: The Sopranos, Lost, Hamlet. This is rant about story consistency.

Then I explain how ME3 should have ended.

Short review: If you liked the previous games, pick this one up. Play it, get enraged at the ending, and then come back here. I have candy for you.

Spoilers from here on.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 has been called “controversial” in a lot of places because, frankly, nearly everyone hates it. These people are gamers who have invested possibly hundreds of hours into the storyline of the universe and the trilogy – a fact that speaks to the overall awesomeness and engagement of the world and the story (thus far).

The background and events approach Tolkien-level obsession to depth and detail. The developers crafted a grand space opera:

In the future, humanity discovers it is not alone. The galaxy is riddled with alien species, and, for the most part, the various species co-operate with each other, despite histories of war and tension.

All of these alien races are inheritors of grand, almost magical technology that was left behind by a long-dead spacefaring empire. This empire, the Protheans, were wiped out some 50,000 years ago by the Reapers, who are basically the Borg as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.

The overall arc of the trilogy is this: the Reapers have returned. They are destroying everything. They are taking all living creatures and turning them into borg zombies. They are “glassing” planets. We don’t know why: it’s one of the great mysteries.

There are several factions with different ideas as to what we should do but basically there’s the Alliance (which wants to fight the Reapers) and then there’s Cerberus, which is a kind of shadowy, human-centered (and racist) cabal who think that the Reapers should be controlled. Cerberus is led by the Illusive Man (read: Martin Sheen).

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s storyline is that of tolerance. All the species learn to tolerate each other, to make peace, to work together to raise the floor of all societies.

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s gameplay is that of player choice. Decisions you make in the first or second game radically alter the story in later games. Characters may be killed. Your choices – even from the first game – have an effect on everything.

One of the reasons I played ME2 so many times was because I wanted to see what different choices led to. The ending of that game was heavily dependant upon the choices I made as a player.

Not so much with Mass Effect 3.

Without going too much into the minor changes that can happen, there are really only three endings, all of which are a choice that happens in the last 10 minutes:

1) You decide to control the Reapers, or
2) You decide to destroy the Reapers (and all synthetic life, including your AI friends), or
3) You decide to create some sort of synthesis beteween organic life and synthetic life.

Regardless of which choice you make, the following things happen:

1) Your character, Shepard, dies, and
2) The Mass Effect relays are all destroyed, ending any kind of galactic travel, and
3) Trillions of people die (because of said relay destruction)

To make matters worse, the ending is sewn up in the most awful way possible: we are introduced to a new character, some sort of god-like alien, who controls the Reapers. This alien takes the form of a little human boy to communicate with you (we aren’t even given the stupid cliche from Contact where the alien says “I chose a familiar form to speak to you with”).

This alien tells you why he sics the Reapers (a synthetic lifeform) on the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Here’s his reasoning:

After a certain point, every galactic society creates artificial intelligence that rebels against its creators and causes wars. That, in its mind, is a bad thing. What’s its solution? To send a fleet of artificially intelligent, synthetic constructs to annihilate everyone. So that they don’t get destroyed by synthetic lifeforms.

Yo dawg! I put some world-eating synthetic lifeforms in your galaxy so you can be destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms while you get destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms!

Now, I’ve got no problems with uncompromisingly bleak endings. Especially if they are consistent with the story as it has been told.

For example, the ending to The Sopranos has Tony Soprano, the main character, presumably getting shot in the back of the head while eating dinner at a restaurant with his family. We see him smiling and laughing with his family while Journey plays on the jukebox. In the background, there’s a man wearing a Members Only jacket – a subtle nod to a previous episode about mob killings.

Suddenly, the screen goes black and the audio cuts out, mid-song. We get the blackness for a long, long time until finally the credits roll.

That ending? Perfect. It’s exactly how Tony lived. It’s completely consistent with all the storytelling that they had done. It was uncompromising and brutal but that’s what The Sopranos was about.

Some will argue: “Well, who killed Tony? That’s unresolved.” Those people miss the point entirely: Tony killed Tony. That was the major theme throughout the entire show: that Tony’s lifestyle was self-destructive.

Compare that to the ending of Lost, which was just a muddled mess of conflicting, under-edited ideas. Further, new concepts were introduced at the end, concepts that are brand new, things that we, as an audience, should probably have been aware of before (I wrote a thing about this previously).

The only person who has been able to introduce characters in the final act and have it work was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet, and that was essential because we need someone to explain what happened because everybody dies. Pro tip: If your name is not, in fact, “William Shakespeare”, you should probably try to avoid this storytelling trick.

So, adding a new alien species at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy is cheap and amateurish. There are better ways. There are always better ways than hail-mary deus ex machina plots. It felt tacked on because they ran out of ideas.

BEGIN TANGENT

Here are other things that don’t make sense:

First, the “synthesis” ending is just fucking stupid. Seriously? A pulse of energy can suddenly add circuitry to all living creatures? Are you shitting me?

Second, how the fuck did all those characters who I just saw on the planet Earth not five minutes ago get aboard a starship that crashes on an alien planet? I know that they wanted me to see that those characters survived but let’s not break the story with Fridge Logic. Show them celebrating on Earth.

Third, now that the Mass Relays are destroyed, well. Whupz? All those aliens are now stranded in the Earth solar system. They probably didn’t bring enough food to eat (you know, alien biologies and all), nor did they probably bring the stuff to settle planets with, so, uh, good luck?

That’s to say nothing about the trillions of people stuck in other star systems that depend on shipments of things from other star systems to survive. Scarcity of resource creates war, so I guess the entire “trying to save the galaxy from war” bit gets thrown out, too.

END TANGENT

So, here’s my “rewrite” of the ending:

Make it all about the Illusive Man. He was set up as the bad guy from very early on. An ambiguous bad guy, a complex bad guy. A bad guy who had a motivation: he wanted the human race to be the top dog. He nominally wanted to protect humanity, which is why he sought to control the Reapers.

Make the Reapers just what they were: Borg-like things who just rove the universe. Every 50,000 years they make their way back to the Milky Way. That’s fine. They don’t need deep motivations.

But then let’s say that the endgame has it that the Illusive Man has succeeded: he figured out how to control the Reapers (presumably during the time between ME2 and ME3). Rather than ordering the Reapers to fly themselves into a star, though, the Illusive Man decides to use them as a weapon to eliminate all other advanced species from the galaxy.

He has to elminate the current human alliance, of course, because they won’t understand and they traffick with aliens too much. Thus, the Illusive Man is a threat to everyone.

The final showdown is then about him, and how corrupt he’s gotten, and how wrong he is. The overall theme of the story remains about tolerance and growth, about co-operation and sacrifice. It remains consistent.

So that’s how I’m going to say it went down in my mind.

A couple years back, I wrote a “browser-based multiplayer role-playing game” called Nexus War. Don’t go looking for it on Wikipedia; the article was deleted (again) a couple weeks ago for being “non notable”.

(Fuck you for that, by the way. I play lots of “free to play” games from time to time to see what they do, and so many of them integrate gameplay elements that I fucking invented so fuck off with your entire “not notable” shit. The game was mentioned in fucking Playboy but whatever I guess people who don’t know dick about the subject at hand know more than me.)

Anyways.

Nexus War was fun for me to build. It started as a small hobbyist thing that my friends could play and that was cool. That was my only reason for doing it for a long, long time. Later, it got popular and it started requiring Real Cash Money to manage.

I never designed the game with the intent to make money and it showed. Any monetization principles were clearly bolted on after-the-fact.

After a time, the output for the game overran the input for the game and I had to kill it.

Those of you who have been in the situation where you had to murder your own children may understand the emotions I dealt with in this.

Given that I am a communist bastard at heart, playing the game was free. Everyone could play. You got to have three characters for free and that ended up to anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes a day that you could play. For free.

I really only ever wanted to break even.

If you wanted to play more than a half hour, you could buy “character slots” at a one-time cost of about five bucks per slot. That gave you an additional dude that you could have running around. But buying slots didn’t create any advantage for you: you still couldn’t work your characters in tandem, nor could you “slip time” to other guys. So a one-time drop of five bones gave you another 10 minutes a day for the life of the game.

Later, I added the ability to buy small tokens. These things were not game-affecting; they were the equivalent of “cool clothes”. 25 cents and you could have a rare type of clothing. That sort of thing. It was a credits system, where one US cent equalled 1 credit.

I also ran ads in sidebars and such not. Mostly text ads, but some were images.

At it’s peak, Nexus War had 40,000 unique players at a time (80,000 over its life). Games like this have a rotational user-base. The lifecycle of a player is about 3 to 4 months, after which they move on. I guess it was costing me about 700 dollars a month to run on multiple servers, before the entire “cloud computing” thing happened. I was coding this in my spare time.

There was exactly one month that I made a profit and two months that I broke even. The ad revenue was key, actually. The introduction of ads pushed me into the green for the initial 30 days I had them turned on.

You cannot imagine my emotions at this. I could do this! I could continue running the game and not compromise any of my principles. Holy smokes, I was in the green.

Then someone made a post on the game forums about how to best disable the ads using various adblocker techniques.

I briefly thought about killing the post. I could do it. No one would really complain. But I would be censoring someone and I couldn’t abide that. They weren’t being racist or homophobic or any other kind of hateful. I had to let it go. So I did.

And the advertising revenue halved itself in the next month. And yet again in the month after, with no appreciable loss in players.

At that point I was deep in the red. It continued to get worse, until my ad revenue checks were along the lines of “ten dollars”. The playerbase hadn’t really decreased, either.

I ran the game at a heavy loss for another eight months before I had to close it. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

So.

Every time I visit a site and it throws an advertisement at me? I know what that means. And I don’t block it. I reckon there’s somebody on the other side of that http request who is hoping that my visit will earn him 1/100th of a penny.

Remember that when you decide that you love something and want to kill its ability to make money.

I want to start with some history to edumacate those of you who may never have even heard of a ten-year old game or understand its importance.

In August of 1999, Irrational Games and the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios released System Shock 2, a first person shooter with heavy role-playing elements. It was critically acclaimed and yet never managed to find an audience.

System Shock 2 is widely regarded as one of the best games ever made. I’m not kidding: it has a handful of “Game of the Year” trophies and consistently hits the top ten in all the lists by all the publications. It has a place in the hallowed halls with Pong, Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, and even modern classics like Portal (which really wouldn’t exist without SS2).

I played System Shock 2 for the first time in the year 2000. Now, ten years later, I have finished it again. It was – and remains – The Scariest Game I Have Ever Played.

After a decade, the gameplay shows some wear and tear. Time has proven a few gameplay elements to be poor experiments (the massive level of weapon degrade, some of the ways that context switching is handled) while others have become staples of first-person RPG games.

The interface itself feels a tad clunky. Default keybindings are sometimes awkward. The triggers feel wrong. The inventory screens feel inverted. Ten years of usability studies have occurred since the game was released, however, and it could be (and likely is) that my irritation at the controls comes from a decade’s worth of handling more intuitive systems.

However, I don’t want to talk about the game’s mechanics. I want to talk about the experience of playing the System Shock 2. About how the simple concept of granting the player choices makes the game scarier than anything I’ve ever played.

It’s pretty fuckin’ scary, my friends.

This concept alone tells me all I will ever need to know about whether or not “good graphics” make a game better. A good game makes the game better. When there’s a phase spider chittering towards you and you’re down to only one bullet, you don’t really give a shit so much about the visual fidelity applied to its fangs.

(Ditto for the cryokinetic monkeys with cybernetic brains.)

One of the most important engines generating SS2’s nightmare fuel is the sound design. You nearly always hear what is going to eat you before it makes itself known. This gives your lizard brain enough time to simmer in the understanding of the Big Suck That Is About To Happen.

When Doom III was released, it was claimed to be the “scariest game ever made”. That was bullshit: the game’s fear factor was artificially generated by the fact that your character, a marine, could not figure out how to duct tape a flashlight to his gun. Monsters didn’t inhabit the game world; they lived in secret closets and jumped out at you

RARRRAHGHGH!

without warning. After this happened the fourth time it was expected – and once something is expected, it can’t be startling. “Oh, the bad guys will be coming out of the floor over there as soon as I’m past this trigger point.” There’s no fear because there’s no tension. There’s no tension because you don’t have to make any decisions.

A typical System Shock 2 “Decision Time” goes like this: You’re crouched in a small alcove on the personnel deck. The walls are smeared with blood. Between you and your goal, around the corner (a first-aid station), you hear the shuffling feet and psychotic whispering of a demented, possessed crew member. He probably has a shotgun and you’ve only got five hit points. If he hits you, you’re dead.

Four of your weapons – the ones you have plentiful ammo for – are broken and useless. You do have three shotgun rounds but you want to save those for a real emergency. Normally you might just run in there and smack the guy’s skull with your space wrench, which doesn’t break and doesn’t use ammunition. But seriously: if he hits you at all it’s game over, load an old save.

What do you do?

It is moments like this that create the tension in the game. In Doom III, your options are pretty much “just shoot everything” since you can’t really find alternate routes and you can’t formulate a plan for a room since it’s nearly always going to be “the super silent monsters are going to drop from the ceiling without warning”.

If, as a player, you are not required to make choices there’s no reason to be afraid. Why bother? You’re just on a train-ride. If you fail, you fail. Might as well watch a movie at that point.

Decision time: You have one repair tool. You have two weapons that are broken. One of them is pretty effective against robots but shitty against fleshy targets. The other is excellent at pulpifying dudes but just dents machine entities. Which one do you repair? What’s the likelihood of there being robots in the area I’m heading into? What if I fix the pulperizer and then run into a combat mech? Ugh ugh ugh.

This focus on player choice crops up everywhere. Even from the very beginning, during character creation: Are you going to be a soldier, a hacker, or someone with mental powers? Okay, now make some further choices. And whenever you get the game’s equivalent of experience points (cyber modules), how are you going to spend them?

You’ve been getting your ass kicked pretty hard lately. Maybe you should invest in some more hit points? But, you know, you’ve almost got your hacking skill maxed out, and that’s super useful. Maybe you should up your heavy weapons skill? You don’t have much call for them very often but when the Big Monsters come running, being able to bazooka one is pretty awesome.

I love the game Half-Life. It’s got some scary moments in it (partly because it, too, uses sound to start the terror engines). However, it doesn’t have many choices: you are going to go from point A to point B. You never have to decide what abilities to grow and which ones to allow fallow. It’s far more twitchy; success or failure in the game ultimately comes to clicking the buttons at the right time.

Half-Life doesn’t really serve as a “horror” game. I think in order for a horror game to be successful, the player has to be injected with self-doubt. Is this the right thing to do? Or that one?

2007’s Bioshock (my review) tried to capture this and failed. This is disheartening as the guys who made Bioshock? Same guys who made System Shock 2. In fact, it is almost the same game.

Except for the entire “not being scary” bit: while Bioshock forced you to make choices (not many of them, mind you), there are no real consequences for making a choice, good or bad. The meticulous balancing of the game protects even the worst skill choices, leading to the same tepid boss fights having the same tepid difficulty.

Sure, you can choose to eat the little kids instead of rescuing them. However, no one who understands even rudimentary game theory is going to do that: the reward for saving them is so much better than for eating them.

In System Shock 2, a bad build choice will result in extreme difficulty for everything. Better: you won’t know how badly you’ve screwed yourself until you can’t go back.

There is a strong argument to say that is bad game design – that the enjoyment of the player is of paramount importance, all other priorities rescinded. It doesn’t matter how great a game becomes if the player quits in frustration early on. This is a true statement but makes several assumptions about the target market which may or may not be accurate. Sometimes, people want difficult games. They want to be afraid.

Players want to feel like their choices matter. If I make a choice and it is the right one, I feel elation. If it is not, then disappointment. I fear disappointment. I hope for elation. It’s that simple.

Reduce or eliminate that tension and there’s no point to even playing the game.

Shock 2 is long out-of-print but you might be able to find copies on eBay for a small handful of ducats. Once you’ve got a disk, you’ll need to do some magic to make it work in modern hardware. This can be frustrating but ultimately is worth it. there are several mods that update the graphics, even.

And some mods that make the game harder.

(For real this time – the Escapist reported him prematurely dead yesterday.)

Dave invented Hit Points and Armor Class, and could be credited with the first ever “dungeon crawl”. He was a game design legend, and while most of his developments have been superseded by modern gaming standards, that makes his contributions no less important.

I’m gonna roll 20s for you, Dave.

DM: Okay. You guys head to the temple. Outside of it, you see several stalls where there are merchants who operate money-changing services. The rules of your faith say that coins with faces on them are bad – you know, that entire “graven image” thing. So they charge 20% to change coins for offering.

Paul: Wow. They make some bank.

Jesus: Hrm. That sucks. I don’t like them taking advantage of people like this. I’m going to try to convince them to move away from the temple.

DM: Okay. That’s a Diplomacy check. Uhm, DC 25.

Jesus: Lucky for me, that’s a core skill. [rolls a d20]. Shit. I got a 5.

DM: Oops. That’s a failure. You, uh, you try to tell them to move, but an argument ensues. It’s very tense.

Jesus: Well, I’ve screwed it up. Let’s try to calm it down.

DM: ‘Kay. Roll another Diplomacy check.

Jesus: [rolls a d20. The result is a ‘1’]. Fuck. Botched.

Paul: Oh crap.

DM: Okay. So, rather than calm everyone down, you freak out and flip over a table. Paul, you see Jesus grab one of the money changers and throw him to the ground. The ‘changers are now yelling and freaking out.

Judas: Do I see this happening?

DM: Yes.

Judas: Screw you guys. I’m leaving.

Jesus: I have an “at will” power to walk on water. Is there a river or something nearby? Because I think I need to get the fuck out of here.

Despite the fact that I never actually met the man, he, out of all individuals, had possibly the greatest impact on my life and personality (with the obvious exception of my parents).

It is a near impossible to task to describe how much Dungeons and Dragons changed the course of the mighty river that is my life. I have played that game – or one of its various descendants – since I was ten years old. I was given the Red Box for Easter the year I was in fourth grade, and for the twenty-five years after I have slain goblins and rolled Bend Bars/Break Doors/Lift Gates.

The idea that I could not only tell a story that involved other people but actually be a part of that story was life changing. Instead of reading something like The Hobbit, I could be a part of it. An actor in a play.

Always a smaller child, the Game took the place in my life that would normally have been reserved for sports such as baseball or football. I was never good at those. However, I understood stories; I understood statistics; I understood fantasy and imagination. At one point in my life I had compiled a mental index of every rule in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Player’s Handbook. I knew where everything was. Pages of esoteric tables fluttered through my brain, instantly recallable.

As I got older, the actual system of the game became. . . quaint. A relic. Other games came and went. Gygax’s D&D became “old and busted”, replaced by the “new hotness” of GURPS or Vampire or Warhammer. But these things – the new hotness – they were carried forward by Gygax’s Bigby’s Grasping Hand, and share common DNA.

It is from Gygax that I was given the love of game design, and why I make my own games. Why I provide places for gamers to gather. Why I still, even to this day, play games with 20-sided dice (a thing he pretty much invented).

The fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons is being published soon. They call it version four, but it is really version seven (Chainmail being number one, the White Box being number two, the “Basic” rules being version three, and then the four “Advanced” rulesets). I sincerely hope that the publishers include the proper dedications.

So. I’m going to pour a potion of healing on the curb for him.