The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Two last things that bug me about Mass Effect

Okay, last two. I promise.

The first one’s about the game’s alignment system — there are a few points in the game where it’s just entirely out of whack. The most notable is during a particular side-quest, when you have to deal with a blackmailer. If you elect to scare him into leaving the lady alone by threatening to kill him, you get evil points. That’s fine; makes sense. Where it gets weird is that if instead of threatening to kill him you just outright do kill him, you get good points. Am I the only one that doesn’t make any sense to?

The second one is such a big thing, but, at the same time, such a complete nitpick that I’ve been hedging on whether or not to post it. But, hell with it. Here’s the deal. There’s a major plot point in the game that hinges entirely on the people of the galaxy not knowing anything about the Keepers or the inner workings of the Citadel. It’s quite literally the case that if anybody ever studies these subjects, this whole sweeping plan will come to absolutely nothing. It is imperative for the success of this plan that nobody ever learns about the Keepers and the Citadel.

The people of the galaxy live on the Citadel. Where the keepers are. It is the absolute centre of galactic civilisation. This was also part of the same plan. And all races of the galaxy — the humans, the asari, the salarians, the turians, the volus, the elcor, the hanar, on and on and on — are united in their abject lack of intellectual curiosity as to the nature and function of the giant space station they live on and the mysterious bug creatures that maintain it.

I’m sorry, but that is completely unreasonable. I won’t speak for asari and such, but I’ve met me two or three humans in my day, and if there’s one thing I can say about humans it’s that they are curious about the nature of things almost to a fault. One of the very earliest pursuits in human history was the study of the Earth — what it is, how it operates, what its purpose is. We study even the tiniest and least significant of the creatures around us, trying to understand everything we can about their role in the cosmos. I refuse to believe that the humans — to say nothing of all these other species — never, in all the time they’ve lived on the Citadel, even so much as bothered to figure out the architecture.

Especially since the game’s setup relies upon the idea that all these different species previously discovered other, similar pieces of alien technology and investigated them to find out how they work. That’s what united the races of the galaxy in the first place.


November 20th, 2009 Posted by | Games | no comments

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