Mass Effect's Ending

Between the Olympics and preparing to move out of this country, some time ago I actually managed to finish Mass Effect 3. I want to talk about it a little, while trying not to spoiler it, even if by now most people have seen it/have heard enough about it.

So, the ending....when the game was released, and the complains about its ending started to be heard everywhere, there was a comment that Bioware was going to release some kind of expansion, or epilogue or something. Since I didn't have that much time to play anyway, I waited for a while...and when they finally released the expansion, I started to seriously play. Therefore, I never saw the original ending, but I did search for it afterwards, and yeah, it was really really bad...

The reason that it was bad it's that in the original one, they don't show anything. This game has a huge detailed mythology around it. The universe where things happen has a huge backstory, you could literally spend hours reading about it in the in-game encyclopaedia.  The attention to detail is impressive. Therefore, if you finish the game with a big explosion, a couple of characters surviving it, and a fade to black, that's really an insult. It clearly shows that whoever did the 3 games did not participate in this ending. It has no explanation whatsoever of the consequences of your choice.

That said, the expansion is much better in my opinion. Things make slightly more sense, and you get a little epilogue, where you can see the effects of your last actions. If that was the original ending, there would have been some muttering about the lack of sense, but I doubt it would have reached the levels that the original ending created. And while watching this ending, one gets the real impression that some company directives tried to sell the ending as a DLC, and when the shitstorm hit them they backed away and offered it for free.

Nevertheless, the expanded ending is still...lacking. To explain that, I'll use the review and article made by Yahtzee. For those who do not know him, he's a games critic that always shows the negative points of a game. I like his reviews, even if I disagree with several of them. He did not like Mass Effect, for example, and I believe that he misunderstood the point of the game. But it's still a good article.

In his article, Yahtzee mentions that Mass Effect gets an ending, even if you don't like it, and that the ending serves to finish a story. And no matter what you did before, this way everybody gets the same ending, and the story has a clear beginning, centre and end, which is the same for everybody. He mentions that that was the ending creators wanted, and the fanbase should not be able to change it, because it would create a bad precedent

I disagree with that. Games are interactive storytelling, which is a very modern storytelling technique, that can be approached in very different ways than traditional storytelling. Mass Effect shows a perfect basic example in its ending: Instead of one ending, you have 3 of them. That's something really innovative, that you cannot do in a book or a movie (there have been books that tried to do it, but it doesn't work really well with them). Well, it's innovative in the sense that game are innovative, because almost since they had more complex plots than "eat yellow pills, avoid ghosts", games offered multiple endings.

The problem with that comes when the difference in the ending is like the one in Mass Effect: You have a couple of options, each one gives a different ending. This causes the feeling that no ending is really the true one, because with a simple load you can get back there, choose a different one, and see what happens. It's a lazy basic mechanic, to show off the "interactivity" of a game compared with a movie.

There are games that go further than that and really explore the storytelling capabilities of interactive media. Let's put as an example Silent Hill 2, a Yahtzee favourite. The game has a number of different endings, I believe that there are 3 normal ones, a joke one, only available after clearing the game once, and a 5th one that only appeared with an expansion. Let's focus on the original 3....

Each ending depends on how you played. I don't mean a decision you took, but literally how you played. Did you receive a lot of damage and didn't heal often? Did you spent lots of time checking on a character and trying to talk with them? Did you check certain objects a lot, and ignored others? That's how the game decides the ending.

The effect this makes is that the story is consistent with your gameplay. You can argue that it's actually 3 different stories. Your different gameplay shows a different story. And when you reach the end, there's not a damm thing you can do to change it. That's the one you chose, voluntarily or not. Do not try to reload, it won't change. To see a different one you would have to replay whole sections of the game, or start a new one directly.

This is what games offer when telling stories. The option to have a lot of different stories. You start from a common point, and then each branch goes somewhere different. Maybe some branches cross each other later on, but in the end they do not, each one going their separate way.

Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the first 2/3 of 3, follow this logic. Depending on your choices in the 1st and 2nd game, there's entire characters and plots that some people will never have. And this is awesome. That's what games offer. It's very complex to pull off, and programmers will  have nightmares thinking about how to do it. But it has been done, and it's possible to do it.

Mass Effect 3 should not let you choose and ending. It should not translate decisions into little points that showed how close or far you were from completing the game. It should have taken all these  plots and subplots, and offer you N different endings, each one depending on who you saved, who you killed, and who you met. But I guess it would have been too brave to do that and tell players that if they wanted a different one, they better started Mass Effect 1 again....and that was an incredible missed opportunity to show games' true potential.

Sturgeon's Law

Olympics are almost done, and the systems are holding amazingly well, all considered. This translated to the fact that today and tomorrow, when I have night shift giving support to the systems, we won't have anything to do.

After the work done, it's nice to see that for the moment things are easier, but the nights become really really long. Tonight I took the chance of having "free time" to see a couple of Salvados programs. This show is one of the best things that are done nowadays in the spanish TV.

We do not usually watch TV, becasue most of the time we think it's crap. If we want to watch series or movies, it's mutch better to see them when you have time and want to do so, and without interruptions for advertising. I think TV will die pretty soon in its traditional format, since it's so much better to decide for yourself what to watch and when to watch it. We do not have a sintonized TV here in England, and we do not miss it at all.

Anyway, Salvados is a program done by a smart group of reporters. True reporters, that scratch and dig information, make uncomfortable interviews and ask questions that are actually important and nobody dares to ask. Most episodes are very political, and they expose and criticise a certain topic. Even if it's based on spanish problems, with the current economic crisis there is lots of common ground with different people. I would recommend to watch it to anyone who understands spanish (maybe some version has english subtitles, but I do not know).

The result of watching it is the realisation that Spain is currently shit. There are no jobs, the services will become private, everything is going to be more expensive while salaries will drop, and all this crap. There is no apparent solution, and polititians are only offering money to the banks, who do not care about making sure people also gets it. You can watch a couple of the Salvados programs to get the picture....

Spain's problem is quite deep and complex, but part of the cause is the obscene amount of polititians we have, and the system to select them. The main two parties are as corrupt as it gets, and plenty of times I'm under the impression that when they fight, it's just theater, becasue they're quite happy with each other exchanging governments every 4-8 years. I once heard a polititian from another party saying that in Madrid, you could insult a perosn form another party, and when the day finished you could take a coffee with that person in a friendly way. The topics that are treated in there should not allow for that. If you really believe in some political idea, somebody else doesn't, and you reach the point of insults, it's not possible to just have a coffee with them....unless of course you didn't care that much on the first place.

Every time there is an election, I'm expecting people to react to all the stupidity and greediness that the central parliament shows....and every time, milions of people keep voting the 2  main parties only. Even eliminating the tricks that are in place to guarantee that the 2 main political parties win, you would end up with the fact that near 40-50% of the spanish people voted for one or the other. This is extremely depressing, and it's just a reminder of Sturgeon's Law applied to persons. While we have that many people who do not care, or do not think, we'll be in deep shit.

To add insult to injury, one of the parties are the heirs of fascism, and they basically mantain the same ideas, just without adding a dictatorship to it and only using police violence. And they still get 20% of the votes.....this is the type of thing that makes me want indepence for Catalunya. Sure, we have our 90% of shit in here as well, but at least 50% of it is not fascist bastards....

Sorry for the long rant....but people's stupidity always makes me angry....