Mass Effect 3 Halfway Point (Spoilers)

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Mass Effect week continues…

I don’t know how far into Mass Effect 3 I’ve gotten at this writing (March 29th), but I’ve just gotten the Quarrians on board the Normandy. Percentage-wise, I have no idea where that is in the game. I’m just guessing it’s the half-way point.

I have some initial impressions which I’ll write down, and as usual, I’ll follow it up with another post when I finish the game.

It’s pretty clear that there was a big game engine update for Mass Effect 3. (I don’t know that for a fact, but I can’t think of any other reason for these obvious changes.) I guess this was because of the newer generation of consoles? I don’t know. The rendered cut scenes are still 30 fps though, which I find annoying. It looks lame to go from 1440p 60 fps game video to lower res 30 fps rendered video.

The point is that because of the game engine update, I guess they added a lot of bugs, which still aren’t ironed out 5 years later. I’m seeing a lot more quirks than I did in Mass Effect 2. There’s this one spot at the front of the Normandy, right behind Joker’s seat, where you can get stuck so bad you have to re-load your game. I’ve gotten into a habit of hitting Quick-Save on the way up from the CIC to talk to Joker.

They did some horrible things to the hair. With ME2, I imported my Jane Shepard character from ME1 and accepted the defaults. The hair changed a bit but it was otherwise pretty similar. (Depending on the angle, she looked like one of Lena Heady, Felicia Day, or … I can’t remember the other one she looked like.) But when I imported my character from ME2 to ME3, they selected a hair style that I think was supposed to look like Jennifer Anniston from late-era Friends, but actually looked like some weird animal had been glued to Shepard’s head. I tried to play it but had to abandon it and re-start with a different hair style after about 5 hours. I just couldn’t get used to it.

Unlike the previous games, I started out trying to play on Normal difficulty. I figured I would take my time with it and really get into the game mechanics, because surely ME3 would represent the pinnacle of gameplay in the series (so far). (I played The Witcher 3 on Hard difficulty and it was a very satisfying experience.) Also, the longer I take with ME3, the more likely Andromeda will be discounted by the time I’m ready to play it.

Sadly I only got to the Turian planet before abandoning Normal difficulty and resorting back to Casual. Dying is a super annoying experience in Mass Effect, and I wasn’t too fond of how everything was a bullet sponge. At least on Casual, a head shot actually kills people (usually).

There’s been yet another re-design of The Citadel for ME3. I didn’t like the change in ME2 but at least it made some sense, story-wise, because of Sovereign’s attack in ME1. This time it’s a change for no apparent reason.

The story of Mass Effect 3 picks up about six months after the end of ME2, and makes every effort to erase ME2 out of the timeline. Shepard is back with the Alliance after a mild slap on the wrist, and The Reapers are attacking in force. It’s kind of like picking up at the end of ME1. Story-wise, this is fine, considering that, as I wrote before, most of the events of ME2 are meaningless from a galactic perspective.

I said that ME2 was a bit darker than ME1. Well, Mass Effect 3 is pretty grim as well, but for entirely different reasons. ME2 was dark because Shepard seemed like a fundamentally darker character, perhaps as a result of dying and being rebuilt by the hated Cerberus. (I can see how that might ruin one’s day.) This time, the tone is dark because the galaxy is at war and everyone is miserable.

At the time of this writing, I don’t know how the game is going to end. All I know is that there was a big controversy when the game launched about the ending, and I did and still do suspect that Shepard doesn’t survive. From what I’ve played so far, everything is pointing to that. There’s a fatalistic attitude that pervades everything, from not only Shepard, but all the other characters and plots around him. There is also very much a sense of “wrapping things up.”

I’ll now discuss some major, major spoilers, so feel free to skip.

Many of the characters from ME2 return in ME3, though most in supporting roles. I’ve already met Miranda, Jacob, Mordin, Grunt, Jack, Thane, and Samara.

Kaiden (and presumably Ashley) and Liara return from ME1 as selectable squad-mates. Wrex returns, but not as a squad-mate. Tali returns as a squad-mate, at least temporarily. (I don’t yet know whether she will stay with the crew or not.)

As far as new characters, the first new guy is James, a steroid-pumped beefcake marine who for some unknown reason tags along at the beginning of the game. I can’t remember ever hearing an explanation of how he got on the Normandy, but presumably he was under Kaiden’s command. (Kaiden apparently captained the Normandy after Shepard was “grounded.")

Later we meet EDI, the Normandy’s AI, who becomes a selectable squad-mate. She’s kind of a cliche but I think she and Joker make a funny pair, and their humorous interactions from ME2 continue into ME3.

I’ll now get into why I get a fatalistic, things-are-winding-down vibe from the game, and it has to do with the mortality rate of the ME2 characters.

As I said, Mordin returns, but he dies, and it was a heart-breaking but perfect story moment. I could not decide whether to cure the genophage or not, so I let him decide, and he sacrificed himself to cure it. It was pretty much a complete reversal of his character to go from fighting to preserve the genophage in ME2 to dying to cure it in ME3, but I let it slide because it was so well played. (They threw a few lines of dialog in there to try to smooth that over but basically he changed his mind.) Anyway it was such a huge relief to hand off that decision to him, and he bore that terrible burden with immense grace and professionalism. I can’t say enough about how much I loved that character.

(My instinct was to “pretend” to cure the genophage and leave it in place, but it was hinting that I would have had to kill Mordin to do that, and I don’t think I could have.)

Thane died a bit later, and it wasn’t quite as sad (I mean, we knew he was dying when we met him in ME2, and he might as well have been wearing a neon “I’m going to die to serve the story” sign when we first saw him coughing in ME3) but it was still very poignant and I really appreciated the spiritual twist there at the end.

Grunt almost died, but I had to commit genocide on the Rachni to save him. I wanted to let the queen live, for the same reasons I saved her in the first game, but it was clear Grunt would have to die to save the queen, and the Reapers were using the Rachni against us. Because I was tired of all the ME2 characters dying, I decided to save Grunt, and then the game went and almost killed him anyway, and man was I mad about that. But then he staggered back covered in gore and I celebrated. I never really liked him much but that was a good story moment.

Those three events, and their laser focus on death and sacrifice, not to mention the recurring dream about the kid, lead me to be 100% certain Shepard is going to have to sacrifice himself for the galaxy at the end of the game. It makes playing the game a bit grim. At least Jack and Jacob seem to be doing well.

As if the grim events of the main characters weren’t enough, most of the little vignettes played out by the “extras” standing around on The Citadel are pretty depressing too. There’s an asari suffering from PTSD in the hospital, a human solider losing his legs, an old demented woman trying to find her son, etc. The voice acting in those tiny little background stories are some of the best in the game, by the way.

Speaking of which, Jennifer Hale has stepped up her voice acting in ME3. In the previous two games, her tone was mostly flat, but there’s a lot more nuance and range in her voice in the third game. It’s a big improvement.

(I don’t like the sound mix in ME3 though. With the voice volume level set at 100% the speaking voices barely reach -21dB in my OBS recordings.)

There’s a baffling story twist where Counciller Udina betrays The Citadel and lets Cerberus in to attack. I have literally no idea where that came from. It seemed totally out of character for him. He was always kind of a jerk, but I never saw him as actively hostile or subversive. And I haven’t yet seen any explanation for that behavior. (I did sort of kill the guy, so I guess I can’t interrogate him.) It was an interesting twist in the game, but it just didn’t make any sense coming from Udina. I guess the point was to throw Shepard and Kaiden into direct conflict.

I’m also pretty baffled about the Illusive Man’s general behavior in ME3. I’m assuming that there will be some kind of resolution and explanation for that toward the end of the game. I can only guess his goal is to take over control of the Reapers so that humans can rule over the other races. (As opposed to just destroying the Reapers.) I imagine there will be some decision points later in the game revolving around that. (I can’t help but wonder how the game would have started if I’d decided not to destroy the Collector ship in ME2-I almost decided to keep it, because it seemed like a good idea to study it, but my whole squad was like, “Oh hell no” so I gave in to peer pressure.)

More later when I finish the game. It might take a while, because after every mission, I have to walk around the whole ship and talk to everyone, and every time I go to The Citadel I have to check every floor for new things. In ME3, the crew moves around to different places all the time, and they go on shore leave too, so it takes a lot of methodical wandering to experience all of their incidental dialog. [Ed: It did not take a while, as it turned out.]