- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
This post was inspired by two things I saw recently: The connection between these two items is not obvious, but it is interesting. The lemon problem WeFunder, for the uninitiated, is a crowdfunding platform for (primarily) technology companies. It allows community-oriented startups to sell a small % of ownership to their users and supporters.
The environments. ME2 and ME3 felt like everything was in a long hallway, just very much funneling you down a path you didn’t have a lot of exploration choices in. Mass Effect had grand and large environments to explore in the Mako, and MEA was the first entry in the series since that had large open areas for exploration on planets. Whatever you feel about weak story, the environments were beautiful and well designed.
The Mako sections in ME1 weren’t really “open world”, they were just bigger hallways in many cases. IMO none of the core Mass Effect games was particularly open world, since they were based on missions. They were all more of a “hub and spoke” design, where you travelled from one hub to another and then those hubs would have local missions you could go on.
At the end of the day, all of the ME games have pretty environments, but the pretty environments aren’t the thing that keeps me coming back to the series over a decade after its launch, the writing is.
And their writing has, very unfortunately, really fallen off. Just compare Saren as a villain to, say Corypheus, or whoever that completely forgettable dude was in Anthem. Even in Andromeda, all the characters felt kinda one-note or like ME characters with the serial numbers filled off.
Saren was such a fantastic villain. I originally played the Mass Effect games out of order, so I already knew what was supposed to happen with him when I played ME1, and yet I found myself trying to convince him to shake off the indoctrination anyway. It just felt so compelling to believe that he might be redeemable, or at least that I as Shepherd would want that for him. Sovereign and Harbinger were also fantastic villains in their own right.
And then the heroes, oh my god the heroes. It’s tragic that the BioWare that could write Liara, Wrex, Mordin, and Tali is dead.