The mass effect of Mass Effect

A little while back I purchased a copy of the new SimCity game when it was released.  We all know by now what a debacle that release was and I won’t go into it again here.  Part of EA’s peace offering was to offer people who had purchased it before a specific date a free game.  I ended up choosing Mass Effect 3 as I’d heard good things about it and the only other one that even piqued my interested was Need for Speed, and I already have a few racing games to get me through the F1 off season.

So, choice made, I eventually got round to downloading and installing it, and it sat on my hard drive for about a week before one Friday night I thought that it was about time I gave it a run.  I’ll just create a character and have a quick walk around, I thought, then I’ll log into GuildWars2 and play that.  This was at 9pm.  At 2:30am I finally stopped playing.  My “quick look” had turned into 5 and a half hours of playtime.  And it had gone passed in the blink of a digital eye.

After that initial play, I realised (to an extent) why people had gotten so up in arms about the ending.  Already, I was totally engaged with the world, the characters, and most importantly, the story.  Unlike pretty much every MMO, and to a large extent single player RPG’s that are on the market, the hook in this wasn’t getting a level so I was more powerful, or able to use that cool new ‘insert weapon/armour here’ that they seem to use.  Instead, the hook with Mass Effect 3 (ME3) was simply what is going to happen next?  The story is a powerful narrative, and it’s something that we don’t see a lot of in games anymore.  

Instead, what we seem to get more and more often is a game with amazing graphics, high resolution textures and high poly models, smooth and fluid animations, and a distinct lack of intelligent story.  It all seems to have gone down the path of give the players something bright and shiny that plays smoothly with few glitches and you can just throw in any old veneer or a story to link things, no matter how incongruous, together.  Thankfully, Bioware didn’t do this, and instead gave us a story with some meat, something that you are invested in as a player.

This lead me to an interesting series of thoughts last night and this morning.  I don’t think I’m going to drop any spoilers by now given how long ME3 has been out, but, you have been warned.  

During the story, you head to a planet where there is a Krogan scouting party.  During your exploration of some catacombs, you encounter first some webbing, then what look like giant eggs, all of which lead you to conclude that there are Rakni on this planet.  A conclusion that very soon proves to be correct.  This comes as quite a shock to Commander Shepard as back in ME2 you believed that you wiped them out and killed the last queen.  Some may call this genocide of the highest order, others, a fight for survival.  What gives this the real twist in the tail is that once you reach the final part of the catacombs, you find a queen.  The last queen.  A queen who has been subjected to horrific and heinous experiments by Cerberus, that shadowy organisation you worked for/with in ME2 and managed to escape from.

At this point you have a conversation (of sorts) with this Rakni queen and are left with a decision to make.  Do you kill the Rakni queen, completing your mission of genocide against them and exterminate the species completely?  Or do you release the Rakni, who has been abused and broken by Cerberus, and gain their assistance against the Reapers who you are currently in a war of survival with, a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend to a degree?  A weighty decision indeed.  I won’t say I “agonized” over this, but it did stop me in my tracks and I did spend a few minutes weighing up each option before I made my choice.

I have to say at this point that I have not played ME2.  And while I know (basically) the back story through reading the codex entries and conversations had with various members of my crew, I, as a player, have not lived through that particular storyline.  So while I had the knowledge of what had gone before, I didn’t have the emotional investment in that particular arc.  Did that affect my decision?  I don’t know is the simple answer, but I suspect it did.  And this suspicion then made me wonder how other people had responded to this same situation.  I asked a colleague this morning how he’d resolved it and he responded that he’d done the same thing I had, but in discussing it, we found that while our final decision was the same, our approach and reasons for that decision were quite different.  

His reason was that we were at war with a species who was trying to wipe us out, just like the Rakni were before, and back then, killing them was a matter of survival.  Killing this one now, consigning the species to the annals of galactic history was an act of genocide and wasn’t something he felt he could do in good conscience.  I was a little more sympathetic to the Rakni’s plight.  The creature had been harnessed by Cerberus as a troop machine, nothing more.  In my mind it was a slave to an entity that I was fighting, and I needed all the help I could get, not only against the Reapers, but any thorn I could stick into Cerberus’ side was also of benefit.  My gut told me that I would probably pay for this later on, but I too freed the Rakni queen and gained their assistance against the Reapers with their help on the Crucible.

This led to a discussion of how other people would have responded who also had not played ME2 versus those who had played it.  I believe that those who haven’t played ME2 would be split pretty evenly between freeing the Rakni and killing it.  But what of those people who had played ME2, would they have considered releasing the Rakni, or would they have killed it dead with little or no thought, considering it the finale of something that should already have ended?

Which leaves me with this little survey.  Let me know if you played ME2 before playing ME3 and how you responded to that particular situation.  The results should make for interesting reading.