Why use a word like "meaning" when you can shoehorn in some inscrutable philosophical concept like "daesin" instead. It sure does make you sound smarter. That is the goal right?
@@StratEdgyProductions but he's right. there's no point in using a special term without explaining why you decided to use it, without giving it meaning. and even if you had explained it, it's better to put things in a more straightforward manner, rather than obscuring everything behind opaque terminology. speak precisely, leave nothing in the shadow.
Thank you for hitting on the illusion of choice. By the time the Tell Tale games came out I couldn't help but seeing them for what they are. Linear experiences with a sprinkle of choices that only affect characters you have no attachment too. Kinda like the actual TV show, the Walking Dead.
Unfortunately this is indicative of games in the last decade, action rpgs have been slowly dumbed down, to Skyrim and Fallout 4 where decisions only matter within their quest lines. I hope that Cyberpunk 2077, with their promised approach to quest decisions being meaningful will challenge the industry again. I know game development is difficult and lengthy, but I miss the days of Stygian Abyss.
Skyrim hit gold, Fallout 4 only showed us Bethesda themselves didn't realize what gold they'd hit. Skyrim wasn't an RPG, it was a looter, same genre as Diablo III. And yet they tried to create Fallout 4 by making it... Like Skyrim, except more RPG and with a game play world that didn't have any love or effort put into it beyond the bare minimum.
@@kkplx A lot of Europeans hate when people get their language wrong. I've noticed this, and I'd like to know what we Americans can do to take the massive stick out your asses, especially when in conjunction with topics such as: your language, your strawman of us, your obfuscation of points we make against them and our country itself.
In ME2 I've always liked Kelly, I truly enjoyed the jokingly flirts we had and the ball busting, she felt like one of my bois, only with a psychology degree. When the crew was kidnapped I treated ME2 like a game, "oh boy, looks like i'm about to finish the game, better do all the side stuff", the ship felt empty but I'll get em back, I'm fucking Shepard. Note, i played the trilogy alongside the dlc at the same time, meaning that I still remembered which faces were put from 1 to 2 in the ship crew. Imagine my suprise when they killed most of my crew. The remaining ones thanking me, but I knew the truth. I killed them. Then in ME3 YOU GET A NEW CREW AND NOBODY BATS AND EYES. No are we going to die like your last crew sir? One of the most impacting moments in my gaming life, completely wasted. Same as not revealing Tali's everything. So much wasted oportunity.
*Spoilers ahead* The three choices at the end of ME3 pissed me off to no end! I spend three games preparing for and fighting the Reapers just for them to give me a those stupid choices. The "control-option" is simply annoying (I don't want to control the giant genocide-robots, who murdered entire star-systems, I want to blow them back to the "Nicht") but the "Bio-Machine-Fusion" really took the cake, because it is the embodiment of forced, magical feel-good-bullshit, which is so beloved by producers who fear nothing more than to challenge their fans in the slightest. The red destruction-choice should have been the default, because it achieves the goal by destroying the reapers but also comes at an unexpected cost by also destroying all artificial life (i.e. Ede and the Geth). This would have been a great, bitter-sweet ending to a bloody war for survival. Also I hate to be that guy, but finally there is ONE time where I can help someone with pronounciation: - The "ch" in "Nicht" is a fucked up sound we germans invented to make every foreign, who is learning our language as miserable as possible and comes closest to the english "sh" - The "ei" in "Dasein" is pronounced exactly like the english pronoun "I" :) *fliesAway*
I loved the control ending. My Sheppard always was an uncompromising guardian to the galaxy. He acted on his perception of right and wrong. And he defended the galaxy even though the galaxy wouldn't want his help or wouldn't believe him about the dangers. In control of the reapers he becomes the supreme omniscient Guardian. He has to listen to no one. He can take action if he feels he must. In the meantime he should be more than capable of producing a body to live through should he desire to. My Sheppard was never strictly Renegade or Paragon. And this ending gave him what he needed.
They wrote themselves into a corner with three.... The whole game is a dark existential crisis, it's been a long time but if IIRC it was all urgency and watching worlds fall to the reapers, there is no room for choices, there was no room your previous choices. The sense of wonder/exploration was gone, ME2 cheesed up the reaper lore too much, the only real reason to play ME3 was to learn more about the Protheans (which AE put behind day one DLC). ME1 had the best writing/world, it was immersive and new and had the star trek idealism and thoroughly examined every sci-fi trope that it used. ME2 had the best game play (at least in the main loop) but the writing was showing signs of deterioration and when driving around alien worlds was replaced with that goddamn scanner that was the beginning of the end. ME1 was an RPG-shooter, ME2 was a cover shooter with RPG elements and ME3 was just a cover shooter.
Perhaps it's Stockholm Syndrome, but since the Mass Effect 3 endings are all we have, I've learned to be satisfied with and embrace them, and enjoy them a lot.
16:33 My favorite part, is when you run so fast you're like 6 inches behind her, and then she starts speeding up like she's the flash till she's like 12 feet away. I usually always play Vanguard, so it's just comical, because I should be able to charge at her to knock her right off her feet lol. 20:20 Yes, thank you. It's where all of your previous choices should coalesce, you shouldn't be forced to pigeonhole all of them. I could go on a rant but I've said my peace about the 3rd game, I'm not too much of a fan of everything in and past third act; but as far as the trilogy itself, it will always be my favorite game trilogy. Edit: Ok, I'm gonna stop editing my comment before I DO end up going on a rant and making 3 paragraphs on why the ending still bothers me, what my ideal ending would be, ect lol.
Appreciated the low key counciling for my ongoing existential dread. The ME3 critique was also satisfying. I'm a little disappointed that I need prompting to think of things with more depth.
@@cyberninjazero5659 Finished it for the first time and waiting for some other mods as for now New California is mechanicly broken. You end first part of the game with tons of skills and there are quests with unlimited enemies (XP, ammo and weapons). Sidequests are almost non existant and quickly you get high quality gear with armour that makes you almost immune to bullets.
@@38procentkrytyk hmm I did indeed find it odd that I've been playing for just a couple hours and already am skilllevel 100 guns and speech while my other skills are doing just fine that said, I feel like hostile engagements are challenging enough to keep me invested
Also, let's be clear, the finale being a "choose your ending" ending was something that happened due to the constraints of development and because it wasn't planned out in advance. You're pressed for time and you still haven't figured out which way to end your RPG video game trilogy. What do you do in this short time? Take the extremely risky route and figure out how assembling the Crucible or losing or gaining allies can factor in, in various ways which will require extensive bug-testing and crossexamining choice scenarios OR do you take the safest-to-produce route of making an ending which itself offers choice and focus on finishing the story? Ideally we would want the former kind of ending but they chose the other because there was no time to plot multiple different scenarios.
The thing is, the rough groundwork *should* have been put in place in conjunction with Mass Effect 1's plotting. Obviously not a full script complete with cinematic and dialogue but a rough tree of the whole saga and where all the various choices are going to branch and intersect and how the endgame was going to play out. It was clear with Mass Effect 2 this was not the case. Bioware was blatantly making the story up as they went along. They had absolutely no idea what they were going to do for the middle entry and went on a irrelevant tangent like a kid trying to fill a wordcount on an essay. Then they have to develop Mass Effect 3 and their sin of sloth comes to roost. They have all this choice data they've been recording, they've promised different endings, they've promised consequences. And they do not have the writing chops to deliver on their promises and tie it all together. Bioware is to blame 100%, not EA, not time constraints, they were incompetent. And I will be happy when EA finally shuts their ass down.
Although I played the whole trilogy back in the day, I never finished ME3 (because of a bug near the end) until the recent Legendary Edition. I watched the cutscene, chose the ending I wanted and proceeded to be confused as fuck. There were two ways to go. Which was what? Nothing in the journal but long-abandoned and broken side-quests. The button to bring up which way to go did nothing. I went left. The button said "make a choice". I pressed it. That's how Shepherd accidentally joined with the Reapers and became an immortal deity despite intending to wipe out all artificial life in the galaxy. How embarrassing.
Hence the need for a GOOD ending for any game or movie or story as a whole. If we get 'oh but the geth dies cuz fuck you' if you go destroy cuz stupid-plot contrivances are stupid, or that you become spacejizz that fuse biological and synthetic galaxy-wide, or you just roast yourself into soulash and take control of the reapers... I'd like to ask where in the hell is the effect of my choices that'd allow us to just say 'fuck you reapers, hundred of cycles of sentience has finally finished a weapon that can STOP you. But Nah, Crucible just have to be ghost-space-child-retardation that talks stupid philosophy that makes no sense about synthetics will eventually destroy biologicals when we have LITERALLY just finished brokering peace with between the Geth and the Quarians and allowing the Geth to truly become individuals which HELPS them be able to understand biologicals as well. But nah something-something Reapers are Synthetics that save biological from Synthetics wiping them out by... wiping out advanced sentient biologicals.... WHAT!? That's why I do not care what an author thinks is the correct ending (or game devs thinks is the right ending) when they royally fuck that up - hence the EHEM mod or the LE version of it is canon to me, especially because it lets your choices matter in that you can have a good ending if you did not just rush through the game and fire some half-assed Crucible that either blows up in your face, is badly calibrated and kills EVERYTHING, not just the reapers.... or actually fire correctly and targets JUST the reapers.
This is an interesting take on the notion of the ending, but I can't help but question the use of an existential philosopher to argue the method the game should use to provide meaning. I understand your point: if earlier actions had a more direct, and limiting, effect on the end of the game, by definition, within this constructed reality, we can draw direct lines of *consequence* if not ethical or moral meaning. But this also evades the fundamental questions that plague our existence as Dasein: how do we grapple with the limitations of our facticity? How do we ensure we make full use of our existentiality? How do we know if we are being authentic? To what degree is fallenness responsible for our interests and the way we interpret things? Is this to be embraced? Heidegger certainly made that argument: we are of a place and a time, if we are to find meaning it must be in each other. You cannot be a saint in the ancient world any more than an epic hero in 1282. Then again, is this what led to his wholesale embrace of Nazism, viewing the holocaust as an acceptable trade off for National Socialism's promise to restore that Of A Time, In A Place sense of *meaning*. I am digressing - what I wanted to say was that I think Satre and Nietzche provide a better philosophical basis for an existentialist reading of the finale of the game. The Catalyst promotes Hegelian ideology. Sartre spent a good while trying to reconcile his positive views of Marxism with its fundamentally Hegelian view of inevitable progress. The game spends 90 hours teaching you the meaning of its structures, what top right and bottom right mean, how x action led to y consequence, and then, at the end, it sets you adrift. The only meaning you will find is in yourself, the player. Forget the Extended Cut - that was a band aid on a wounded fanbase. The original endings tell you nothing about the consequences of your choice, because you are dead. We all make choices we cannot know the consequences of, we all *ignore* this until we are forced to acknowledge it (for instance, by death, a topic also of interest to Heidegger). The ending of the game, by giving us these choices, asks, devoid of external consequence, do our choices matter? Do we believe we can imbue them with meaning if we are not in control of how they will be perceived? Do we *feel* that even if we believe it? Do we embrace Sartre's philosophy? Do we fall into nihilism and decide that it is fully and truly meaningless? This works only because of the medium. It is experienced more viscerally than in text or film. What happens is separated from *what your choice means*. And that is something the game cannot tell you because the meaning exists in you, and stems from the experience and cumulative choices of the previous 90 hours. A Shepard who chooses to control the Reapers because it is the safest way to maintain something closest to the status quo is different to a Shepard that chooses to control the Reapers because they wish to rule. To return to Heidegger, to interpret the final choice in line with his care structure, I think is again fascinating. It engages with facticity, the unchangeable. With fallenness - with *why* we may view some outcomes as inherently more or less acceptable because of our surroundings - and it calls to our existentiality: make the choice, act on the possibilities open to you because you ARE Dasein and are capable of choosing. Your critiques of the roleplay elements are not something I feel qualified to argue with because I don't see that the third game is qualitatively different to the first two in that regard. ME2 disregards almost everything about ME1. They have always been games that allow you big choices in the moment that are written around to cohere into broadly similar narratives later. The choices you make are small shifts in a river, and - for the player - shifts in perspective and opinion that feed into *why* you choose to engage with things in the way you do, more than driving vastly different results. In a world where much is out of control, you can still choose who you are, how you approach things, and what your actions *mean*. But I would argue that there is a reasonable view that this adds to, rather than subtracts from, an existentialist reading of Mass Effect 3 and its finale.
On-topic critique: Rachi queen choice is an exercise in ethics - therefore the payoff in ME3 can't be being awarded more or fewer War points~ The ME1 choice of freeing or killing the Rachni queen is an exercise in ethical and philosophical reasoning. You have to make a choice between only 2 options, one of which carries with it a possibility of great harm to conscious beings in the galaxy as a consequence. To make decisions (both IRL and as a player) you have: (1) knowledge and (2) your personal code of ethics. You have to make the choice on-the-spot and can't choose to not decide, or postpone the choice. Therefore in the terms of knowledge you have immediate dialogue wheel options in the accompanying conversation and the info gathered from the main quest storyline on Noveria. Additionally, from being curious about the game world and talking to optional NPCs around the galaxy, reading "datapads" and Codex entries you are awarded with slightly more information to base your decision on. Based on your knowledge you are forced to make some presumptions upon which you make plausible predictions about the future consequences of either option. Naturally these predictions are flawed and possibly highly inaccurate, but they are the best of your ability at the moment of choosing. Not only will the predictions of the future fluctuate among players based on how much they get involved with the game and learn history about the Rachni and Krogan wars, but by the general ideas and opinions the player has about the real world such as war, conflict, races, genocide, justice etc. Now you have 2 predictions about the future which you can compare using ethical frameworks to decide which one is better. Now the tricky part begins! (I'm not an academic in the field of philosophy or such, so I might make simplified arguments but they are, to the best of my understanding, valid). We can start at negative utilitarianism, meaning seeking to minimize harm universally is good. If my prediction of freeing the Queen is that (1) for one reason or another the chances of a new war between the Rachni and other races are high, or maybe even close to certain, and, my prediction of killing the Queen is that (2) she suffers until death and her offspring possibly suffer for missing their Queen until their death. Then I would conclude that killing the Queen is what's right. But there are other ethical frameworks to consider! What about individual ~human~ rights? The Queen has a right not to be subject to violence and death doesn't she? We'd be killing her without a fair trial, and that's generally an ethical necessity before enacting some punishment, like death. Oh yeah um, the Queen is a queen and has some form of telekinesis contact and control over the "workers", "drones", or "soldiers", so does that carry over to her being one "person" at all? Assuming she is the last of her kind, which is heavily implied, then killing her would result in an effective genocide of her race, and that's not a thing we want to encourage at the very least. About that fair trial again, is she even guilty of any crime at all? From history we learn that her race all fought in an aggressive war on the other races, but can we use that to predict future behaviour and justify guilt? But that's like the definition racism, and racism is bad right. She says herself that she has no intention of harming anyone and wants to go far away and raise her children. But she is also in a position of struggling to save her own life, and so might be considered to do anything, including lying to preserve her own life. So her own reliability in this question is low. Next we might consider either choice to be implemented into law. So how would society be if we asked and enforced from every person to always kill a conscious being under similar circumstances and uncertainty? Well, that might lead to a very violent and short existence for any new species attempting to make first contact with the galactic society. So, not necessarily a clear cut answer. Same thing for the other option. Then we'd expect persons to always free dangerous rare beings into the wild per every time. I can think of scenarios where you would not want that behaviour, like in laboratories hosting extremely dangerous viruses or pathogens. Perhaps even something similar to releasing circus animals. So using this framework didn't give very salient conclusions in this case, I would think it's so because of the detailed scenario. How do we weight the different frameworks against one another? The question of 'what is good' is one of the hardest questions to solve in the history of mankind. Ultimately persons will consider some values as more important than others. But thinking using philosophy let's us explore our own mind, pick apart difficult issues and find what fundamental values are in conflict and make better decisions as a consequence. No one persons reasoning will be exactly the same, they don't have the same information, nor the same ethics. Others will judge you for your decision and you have to be able to look them in their eyes. There is no "correct" answer available, you have to make the call and be able to stand up and defend why you think you did the right thing. This is why science fiction is interesting. To wrap up. The "payoff" from this decision is not getting more or fewer soldiers to fight the reapers with. That's not why you made your decision. It wasn't even an issue to consider since you don't have any knowledge of an incoming reaper army threat, nor that the best solution is recruiting as many soldiers, ships, races, weapons as possible at this point in the story. ME1 didn't provide a "right" answer and that's by design. If you know that one decision leads to a better reward (in video game terms), let alone know which option is the best one, then the player will disassociate from the game world and instead try to figure out what option the developers are more likely to reward with the preferred outcome. Meaning you miss the whole making the "right" decision part! The game wants you to THINK using your brain. It's trying to make you grow as a human being. From just playing a video game. Being told any answer is correct only serves to forever spoil the exercise being repeated. This is why Bioware makes bad games now. And you normal people (90%+), it's all your fault for not seeing through EA selling you bullshit and you pre-ordering. Fuck all of you.
Great job describing the trilogy, Paul! Your videos always teach me more about what goes on in an RPG, and your analysis on these videos is no exception. Keep it up, man! :D
Great video with some interestng ideas. Thanks Strat. I think Mass Effect 3 was undone by it's own brands success. The ending we get (note the lack of a plural there, because in effect they are all the same) is one that is the product of "continuation" as oppossed to "conclusion" I think it was clear Bioware and EA had come to regard the franchise as marketable and thus, something they would wish to develop and cash in on, further. Rather than have a definative conclusion, they needed to leave enough room for sequels. For continuation and as such, we have endings that can't risk precluding anything going forward. I think that is why the endings were so sparse upon release. They didn't want to close the creative or narrative door, that the series deserved and demanded, for fear it might limit potential development later on. This leads into the complete lack of catharsis and impact, that players were expecting and hoping for. From a design perspective, over the course of three games, it's understandably difficult to implement diverse and highly divergent branching paths for each major decision and I think alot of players understand that. Theres alot of financial risk too, to potentially cutting out content to players, based upon choices in previous games, that dictates just how impactful, meaning and substantative the choices players make, can realisticly be. I get why a developer or publisher would balk at that prospect, knowing it might impact sales. But in order to really capatilise on what they had built, to deliver something powerful evocative and fulfilling, thats really what they had to do. Bioware missed the mark in so many ways. The Rachni, Genophage, Council and to a lesser extent Geth/Quarian choices, are rendered inert, by the desire to appeal to and be available to, all players, all the time, regardless of prior choices. Bioware played it safe. When it comes to dialogue and narrative structure, the linearity in which the stroy unfolds in the third installment, I don't mind the fact the game took more of a movie inspired, rail guided approach, I think it worked or atleast, could have and most people would have been behind that direction but for the lack of variation, based upon previous player choices. We would have come back to explore different decisons had branching been a thing, Mass Effect, already a much loved franchise, I think, would have gone down as one of the most well crafted and inspiring pieces of interactive story telling, had it done so, instead, it's regarded now, as something of an Icarus. Dragon Age 2 did one thing I liked and that was character tone. Hawke adopts a character based upon how often you choose particular demeanours in your dialogue responses. Use the snark response enough and eventually, all of Hawkes non-player chosen responses become snarky, choose agressive and the same happens for that. Bioware didn't develop that further and port that to other titles and I think thats a shame. Possibly because it would have been exhorbitantly expensive to narrate and write all those different lines of dialogue in a game like Mass effect [pick a number] This would have addressed some of the "out of character" conversations in Mass Effect 3. If nothing else, Hawke, eventually becomes a consitant character, whether you love him (or her) or hate him, you felt like his character was consistant and while I despaired of, again, not getting the chance to make blindingly obvious choices, that really ought to have been possible atleast I felt like the character and demeanour of the character I played, was adhered to. Sheperd can sometimes lurch from being the cool, calm, heart on his shirt sleeves hero, to a deranged emotional sociapath at the press of a button and that is jarring. As you rightly hit upon, those choices in previous games should have had greater meaningful outcomes, closing off branches or options in the final story, while opening up others, dependant on your previous choices. Sure, your then talking about Mass Effect 3 being potentially several games rolled into one, with perhaps, less content per playthrough and decision branch, than the single homogenised whole we get in reality, but the variance is what would have made the choices of past games playthroughs, have susbtance and meaning. It's wat would have pulled people back, time and again. Instead, we get a game, that, depite the choices we made before, they all play out the same way, with perhaps, some differences in window dressing. i think thats the heart of the let down. I think thats why less inspired ideas, like the star child, fall so flat. (I didn't mind the star child or the leviathans, I know alot of people hated those additions but I could live with it.)
I have many issues with this video. Mostly about you referencing philosophical concepts of potentially profound meaning in respects to ME, making one comment on it, then moving on to mention another huge concept. Pick one, or at least fewer, and dig down deep. Otherwise you come across as way pretentious, or worse not capable, which I don't believe or else I wouldn't spend this time commenting.
@Tesla-Effect I'd actually go the other way and suggest putting the script through another 2 rounds of editing. I think most writers should be cutting up to 40% of their work.
See, here's the rub. No matter what I post, I get people complaining. The video is too long, the video is too short, you don't talk about this, you don't talk about that. I can't please everyone so instead of chasing the ever changing goal post of audience expectations, I am going back to what I used to do before I had one. Which is basically whatever I want. It's an issue of you not being able to please everyone, so why try?
@@StratEdgyProductions I completely agree with your point of view. As a viewer the only way I feel like I can have some impact, ideas, critique, praise, input etc is by posting a good comment, and even then rarely get replies obviously. That and "liking" is what I can do. I mostly try to leave some kind of idea that I have for improvement. What the creator does or doesn't do with it is none of my business. I hope you do whatever you feel good about doing. If my comment helps, I'm happy. That's all. Take care of yourself. =)
I would enjoy talking about the Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger with you someday. I feel like you would dig it. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever read. Love your philosophizing and your videos. And I’ve never even played mass effect.
Interesting video. I definitely agree with you on how the ending should have played out based upon the choices already made, and not upon some last free-floating option. It was anti-climatic. I do not, however, find the Heideggarianism all that illuminating a tool in the video.
Thank u man thank u. People are losing touch and u c it too I'm talking ab9ut ur insidious design of modern fallout games that video is about so much more than video games thank and I'm so glad I found your channel
These persistent sequels where we play as the same character continuing the adventure each new game should feel like the end of the first act in The Witcher 2. If you don't know, in W2 act one you decide to run side with one of two major allies which completely changes the second ac location and much of the quests. It revolves around the same cursed battlefield but you are either on one side or the other of the battlefield based on whom you choose: Iorveth or Roche. Cant wait until A.I. in games can actually mimic virtualy programmed characters with an actors voice but a characters dynamic idiosyncrocies that goes beyond scripting.
Oh yeeeeaaaah. I enjoyed the Rachni bit in this. The Mass Effect Games aren't RPGs, though. They're choose your own adventure games where you can pick the face of your character. The dialog has never been meaningful. You've never gotten meaningful choices from Mass Effect. They're long shooters for RPG fans and short RPGs for shooter fans. They're action games with a team tactical element. I came to Mass Effect after finishing the Dragon Age trilogy, so I guess I wasn't surprised that BioWare doesn't make RPGs - they make choose your own adventure games. All of my choices from previous games went through in an enjoyable way as well. And you have always observed Mass Effect's gameplay. But I've always played by maxing Paragon or Renegade as quickly as possible, then just doing whatever I feel like. I had fun with them. I prefer the Tao method of gaming - I just go with the flow and play the game I'm playing rather than asking it to be something else.
Fuck that two choices system in my RPGs, I hate it. And you're damn right saying that an ending should come as a result of our choices throughout the game(s), not just "a choice" at the finish line.
I highly recommend staying away from Heidegger and going to some analytics. Tbh all philosophy should begin with a thorough understanding of Aquinas and why the moderns failed to understand him, and all that came from them is a butchering of philosophy. Love Your vids, super thought provoking. I love looking at the depth analysis of games.
I really appreciate your explanation of what an RPG is. By your definition, what would you call games like the typical JRPG where you play as pre-existing characters in a set story with little to no choice? Are these not RPGs? Or do they actually provide lots of choices, but not in the traditional sense?
JRPGs are not RPGs. They are more like story driven games or adventure games. You have a main character, usually with his group, that you must push through the story in order to succeed, anything else is a filler and not meant to help you define who you want to be. You don't get to truly make your own character, your choices are limited if you have any, and usually have barely any real incidence. JRPGs have some of the bells and whistles of what is a RPG but they don't have its essence.
I know the video is old but it astounds me that mass effect messed up it's ending so horribly, whereas when I beat Dragon Age: Inquisition and it's DLC's the other day, I actually did get to see the outcome of the choices I made over the course of the game
Anyone who highlights the lack of choice as the primary problem of ME3's ending piss me off, I'm sorry. The story itself still comes first, though I agree Mass Effect was particularly special as video games due to their dialogue system. But the setting was too precious and too consistent, despite this and that problem, until ME3 to come to that ending in particular and have it all be projected onto "Organics vs Synthetics". That will always be the issue that superseded everything else to me, that apparently the developers misred the primary conflict of ME's story as being fundamentally about "organics vs synthetics". This is what isn't true, and this is where all meaning was lost to me.
The whole me3 is an ending to me, genofage, the ethics of IA, and all the different arcs from the previous games were solved in a good way. Synthetics VS organics is just the ending one more topic, and it was viewed in a chaos VS order way which made sense to me.
Me, a person who has already went down the rabbit hole that is the opening question: it don matta, none a dis mattas. But who cares it really doesn't change anything.
I think you make great points, especially about how we shouldn't have a final choice, the ending should be the culmination of our choices. It wasn't a reflection on your desperate efforts to shape the galaxy. Not sure how you feel but I think this is something the Witcher 3 did well with. What happens to Ciri depends on how you treated her, did you take her to her father? Same with the result of the Northern Empires. The save imports for the Witcher between the games and the connection between the 3 games is pretty bad, but that is sort of the result of what was essentially a niche indie game turning into a smash hit that eventually evolved into an AAA game.
You'd be real proud of me if you knew how much this video moved me to take action. Yeah they were just messages to people but my choices and actions still have plenty of meaning. I'm heavily in control of situations and it's frightening but it's a purpose.
Our purpose in life is to evolve through conflict, maybe not our purpose but it is what we do, everyone and every living thing strives to survive by being the best, and humans take it one step further past just survival and try to be the best at anything we can imagine. Human beings naturally seek conflict because conflict is the most powerful motivator to be the best.
“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content." - Conan the Barbarian, from Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast
The instances where your previous choices would have mattered more, for example the Rachni situation? I believe they wanted to do it more meaningful, but they had no time. EA was at the top of their greedy habits at the time, and forced an early release, the studio didn't have time to flash out everything. They did the best they could. No wonder many key Bioware developers left the studio. What remains now, it's not even the same, just the puppet of EA. Anyways, as for your decisions, and role playing in the game, I wouldn't even consider too many options there, what we got are more than it should be. The goal, from the start of Mass Effect 1 was to defeat the Reapers, and that's how it should end. You either win or you lose. What shape you are after the war should be decided by your choices. More or less they did that, (with the addition of Extended Cut). What you forgot to elaborate more on (maybe intentionally, for your narrative?) is the key story points that were part of the game from the start, and are indeed impacted on your previous choices. The Genophage and the Quarian-Geth war. Both has an outcome that depends on your previous choices. And these are the most impactful for the galaxy after the war has ended. Who leads the krogan and how, are they really cured? Did the Geth survive or the Quarians, or both? And these are the more important things for the players because they can relate to the situation, they know the characters involved, and it's outcome is important for them. The Reaper war? They need to be defeated or everyone dies. You can't relate to that really. As Mordin said in ME2: "Hard to imagine entire galaxy. Too many people. Faceless. Statistics. Easy to depersonalize. Good when doing unpleasant work. For this fight, want personal connection. Can't antropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favourite nephew." Even so, we got 3 different endings there by the way of how strong your collected army is. (how well they protect the Crucible until it's ready), there is a scenario where you have so low EMS at the end your only option is destroy, and even then the blast will wipe out the entirety of earth and probably more. But for that, you intentionally need to play bad from the start, really hard to achieve. What is a problem is the lack of impact of whether you kept the Collector Base or not. IMO, that should have been the condition for the Control ending. But it only lowered the needed EMS for that. I firmly believe if the devs had more time, say a year, the game would have been way better. But it still is a great game.
What also annoyed me is how we had fewer options in speech. I felt like the character was no longer my own: simply a mouthpiece for Bioware's faulty concept of good and evil.
I loved the video! The framing & punchline is wonderful; Bravo! However, your entire video was (among other things) pointing out how "Mass Effect 3" is a poor RPG. It may intrest you to know (and *cough* talk about in future videos *cough* ) that "Mass Effect 3" is a Character Action Game. A Role Playing Game is a game where you play a "role", define for yourself what that role "means", & commonly define "who" you are. Think of the Fallout 1 though New Vegas, Mass Effect 1 & 2, most tabletop DnD games, & so on. A Character Action Game is where you are given a role to fulfill, must act properly to satisfy that role, and occasionally get to define who the role is. Think of the Monkey Island series, the CoD series, superhero games, the Halo series, the Devil May Cry series, the Witcher series, the Dark Souls series, the Jak & Daxter series, the Gears of War series, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, & so on. In "Fallout: New Vegas" we are a Courier, but we define who we are & what that means. (RPG) In "Mass Effect 1" we are a Specter named Shepard, but we define who we are & what that means. (RPG) In "Halo" you play as the Spartan Master Chief, and the MC just fights enemies. (CAG) In "Devil May Cry" we play as Dante, and he just fights enemies. (CAG) In "The Secret of Monkey Island" we play as Guybrush Threepwood, and we just try to become a Pirate. (CAG) In "TES: V Skyrim" we play as The Dragonborn, and they just fight enemies. (CAG) In the Witcher series we play as the witcher Geralt; where we get to define what it means to "kill monsters" but not who Geralt is (we do, but that's a long story). (CAG; debatably) In "Red Dead Redemption 2" we play as the gangster Arthur; where we get to define what that means but not who Arthur is. (CAG) Most JRPGs are actually CAGs, most CAGs have RPG elements, & RPG elements are in most modern games. In summary, I hope this information was communicated clearly & is of benefit to you while also proves my ultimate point. Your (and my own) dissatisfaction with the Mass Effect series comes from the series transitioning from a RPG into a Character Action Game (specifically, the many problems that transition caused to the narrative & the change of values in gameplay). As you know, folks commonly have a faithblind zeal regarding icons of worship. Their narcissism blinds their senses unless the right framing devises are used. All of this, Motherfucker, to prove (as best I can) that I think this video series of yours was a great idea & that your writing is improving dramatically. (you have a habit of not valuing vague compliments) Your mind is impressive! Bravo! ;D Ha! How's that for a compliment?
I believe the rushed schedule caused this writing mess to occur. The "Bioware Magic" (Trademarked copied right) of being a black company [it's an Asian term, look it up.] caused so many issues. Shoot, I write poetry and when I try to force it, I can tell the quality drops. I also write and develop programs, so same applies. The big point, I remember, from a clip, is a writer explaining how much story must be developed for a single multiple choice decision. Even with the binary of good and evil, you end up not doubling but squaring the work load. So, each possible decision causes this sort of knock down effect of more work. However, if a player only goes down a single path, then the game will be too short. In other words, allowing player choice means creating a wider game, where as a fixed linear narrative creates a longer game. That is to say, the writers basically said screw it, and forced things back into a linear narrative, to meet deadlines.
Ehhhh. Seems like a typical Strat-Edgy decision to throw some highfalutin postulate into the subject matter for no real reason than to make it appear of higher brow.
The flaws in the story arc, negating what your previous choices, were due to laziness and the "need" to make each game playable to those who are newbies to each one. Your choices in ME1 are partially negated or ignored in 2 so that neophytes who never played 1, and who doesn't intend to, to play the current game gratis. It builds up and gets worse with each part of the trilogy. Mass Effect 3 was the worst on this. The creators were setting up the game so neophytes can play it without having to play 1 and 2.
It wasn't due to laziness. Not at all. Bioware didn't have the time they needed to make the game they wanted. They only got 22 months to make mass effect 3, which isn't nearly enough time for them to do what they wanted. They got about 4 years for mass effect 1, 3 years for mass effect 2, and 22 months for mass effect 3. If you wanna know why the end only came down to 3 choices, thats why. They didn't have time to do more than that and they knew it wasn't what fans wanted but bioware had no choice in the matter. If you want to blame something, blame EA for not giving them enough time.
@@tastefulavenger Exactly. Blame EA. This was the title that needed the most time but got the least amount of it. Bioware tried to make the most of their situation, and knew it wasn't going to be enough.
@@demongrenade2748 Apparently the shit game disease caught hold in bioware because they did not correct course with Andromeda. They managed to take the decline of Mass Effect over time and lawn dart that suck deep into the shitpile with Andromeda, unless the conclusion is that all the good guys at the dev bailed out because of the EA's interference.
@@BooDamnHoo Well yeah. That's actually what happened with Andromeda. The people that made mass effect great were long gone when andromeda was in development. And andromeda did so poorly that bioware went and rehired Casey Hudson (the lead designer of the original trilogy) to salvage the series for the future. Whether or not they succeed is yet to be determined.
Ur are so right about fallout new Vegas and fallout 3 I love Morrowind and new Vegas way better than any other rpg5 and now I know thank u for being u and real.
My own definition of "roleplaying game" is derived from roleplaying exercises, concluding that it's a game where the players affect the story through the actions of their characters. Here's the video for my reasoning (and transcript in its description): ua-cam.com/video/8_pAcAQAPRI/v-deo.html
Good stuff. I think that games in which you are playing a particular set character are not really RPG’s. They have RPG elements perhaps, but the player ends up operating within a set of parameters that prevent one from playing with the role so to speak. Geralt of Rivia might choose speed over heavy armor, or put more emphasis on using this sign or that - but he is still Geralt, monster killer for hire, caught up in the affairs of a war-torn region. Maybe there ought to be another term?
They're still RPGs if you can define who this person becomes through a number of choices. Don't know about the Witcher games (never played them) but it is still an RPG if your choices still matter. Spoilers: you don't set the starting point in Mass Effect either, Shepard is just as much Shepard in ME1 as Geralt is Geralt in Witcher 1. In ME1 the only non-combat based choice which truly matters to the story-based RPG systems, before the start of the game, is male/female and only because it affects romance options. Therefore it is a predefined character, if you could choose if Geralt were female it'd be the literal same thing. Just because you have a role to play doesn't mean you can't define how you play that role. If you can play out your role any way you wish (within reason) it is still an RPG by my own definition.
I think that people like me, who played the entire trilogy with the dlcs (of course extended cut too) without waiting years between each game and didn't even knew about all the drama about the ending actually can value the final work in a better way. I love this trilogy and I find most of mass effect 3 as a satisfying conclusion, to me it is the last good game by bioware. Said this, I can see the mistakes in the trilogy and how the intrusion of EA made it very difficult for ME3 to develop its potencial: The ending was not that bad, it just seemed forced, and leviathan, an excellent part of the story which solves that problem was a Dlc, from ashes, which adds an actually interesting character as the ones in previous games is another dlc, and the citadel DLC besides being a homanage to the entire series, makes the me3 citadel as awesome as the me1 one which is actually a more important thing to me. In my perspective, this game has the best version of the citadel, it is long, it has a good conclussion and also a well presented one, and its different endings actually feel different and impactfull. In someone's who played it day one perspective, it was way too rushed, shorter than the rest, filled with good moments which lead to a disappointing conclusion, an ending which seems forced and not even presented, a cerberus sub plot which is less interesting than leviathan dlc... I'm glad I got the entire trilogy three years after me3, because it clearly got a lot better with time. Good or not, it is my favorite game series and Sci-fi universe, and as much as I try, I don't seem to find anything I like more.
20:20 You... you actually managed to sum up, from this point, why I hate the ending of Life is Strange, in the most eloquent way I've seen done. Yes, that's why these endings suck, it's because the result should be the CULMINATION OF YOUR CHOICES and the effect of 'cause and effect' of EVERYTHING you've done up til then, _not_ a sudden and new choice you haven't had time to be invested in. It's like throwing in a brand new antagonist in the last five minutes of the game and forcing a player to fight them, then expecting them to feel good about that victory--why expect us to even care?
Meh, I was more pissed off in Dragon Age Origins. Basicly whole game NEVER gave option I wanted to say. Bunch of Farmers attack me because they are desperate of money. Can I give them my own gold? Nope... Can I give up and say my head is more worth alive? NOPE! They attack me I slaughter them and my companions ignore it like lifes of those farmers didn't matter at all. Whole game is focused on killing people who could be persuased to join campaign against main enemy but nope... Contract killing which is exact opposite of what my character should do in this game.
You won't belive it but DAO actually put me into dark place where I started to belive (IRL) that my my choices don't matter as I belived I'm inferior human being.
Is it truly worth playing over all, after going through the greatness of Mass Effect and the still rather amazing playable narrative of Mass Effect 2? Or does the story end there, and the third title should be left out and forgotten?
I'm saddened to see him not address how Extended Cut fixed the thing he ranted about. If you got the extended cut the aftermath of the final choice reflects the total worldstate you got from all other choices. It didn't affect the plot itself but it does feel like choices mattered to me. The issue is still just the ending and what it is in the story it's being shoved into. That is the fundamental problem that makes everything related to it, including what choices it revolves around or the way we got to it meaningless.
I wasn’t that invested in the choices of the game. I just liked the story and how we dealt with it. Too me everything I enjoyed the most from Mass Effect was left to my imagination. Taking everything at face value in this game probably won’t please you.
Tesla-Effect Don’t be too obsessed with control or you will end up like the illusive man. The passenger has control, I could do lots of things in the passenger seat like look at my phone safely, grab the wheel so we both fly off the road, and maybe even just play patty cake by myself. The perception that you are in control in the drivers seat is kind of dumb. Also no such thing as free will btw.
Right. Trying to examine the philosophy behind the game is just going to leave ones self disappointed. It's not a philosophy book, it's a game. People are not going to play Mass Effect to contemplate the meaning of life or question why they are making the choices they are. That's the point and the attraction of escapism; you don't *need* to think about that stuff! I commend Strat-Edgy for to trying to deconstruct the franchise's philosophical meaning, but it comes across as a pretty shallow destruction because you can basically say what he's saying about any game.
Toyoka Philosophy is in everything, you can ignore it all you want but it’s certainly not non existent.(I’m aware that’s a double negative) Philosophy is always interesting to me at least and it’s only depressing if you let it.
Hear me out.... The choice to play the game is your only choice. As soon as the game begins, you are watching this cascade of events play out to the ending.
man what does Heidegger have to do with anything. His membership in nazi party as well as hate racial hate makes me question that he has anything constructive to offer to society.
The point is that ME 3s' endings doesn't get close to the impact of Heidegger realizing that being a Nazi was a dumb life decision. Being a nazi was the culmination of a life of bad decisions, after all. A theme in the series is genocide. Of the Rachni, of the Krogan, of the Geth, of All Organic Life, of the Reapers. Heidegger made a series of decisions so dumb he'll be remembered for it forever; did Shepard?
You should read more into what was going on during the Nazi regime. People didn't "just become Nazis" all of a sudden. It was a gradual transformation and subsequent deconstruction of ones own moral compass through constant exposure to propaganda and controlled thought. It started out harmless, and grew from there. This happens with any governing political power that has gone out of control (whether authoritarian or totalitarian, it does not matter).
@Toyoka Who the fuck are you writing to? Neither CccpEntertainment Kraftz or myself wrote anything close to what you claim! Did to comment while half asleep, Silly? I've been there!
Ah, nice. A clear and relatively short explanation of why some people weren't satisfied with the mass effect trilogy. And I find it true, that when you stop asking questions or taking an interest in your interactions within a game, that the game has lost you. This may also be true for any stories, that when you no longer care that it's the end of a meaningful experience. All your previous choices and experiences lead you to where you currently are, in life. It could be considered some kind of wish fulfillment to be able to make 1 other choice that drastically overwrites your previous choices in a way that's clear to you but in most cases that's jarring to how we know things to work.
I have always said that if they truly were running out of time they should have instead given us "the Mega Reaper" as a final boss battle and cut out the Star Child bit, skipping over straight to the ending cutscene. Would've been a much more impactful game.
A lot of people say that the ending invalidates your choices. That the last ten minutes are the only blemish on the game. I agree somewhat. However this is a problem from the entire game. The destroy option should be your only choice. The impact it makes and the aftermath should be determined by the series as a whole not just the final choice. Mass Effect has excellent combat but I still miss the pause based strategic combat from the original. This game has the shortest development time but it really should of had the most.
Leaving invested players hanging and seized by the realization that video games cannot come as close as we might wish to truly branching and free-form narratives and interactions with the characters populating a setting, Mass Effect 3 spawned roleplaying circles & multiple forums dedicated to roleplaying. For myself, its disappointing, Fountain-esque, logic-defying ending led me to pick up pen-and-paper rpgs, starting with DnD 3.5. Tabletop not only replaced Mass Effect for me, it eclipsed.
About Kaiden .. me and all my male friends saved Ashley. The one female friend that finished the games and I asked, saved Kaiden. There's this youtube channel I watch (tvgrypl) that has this guy (Jordan) which looks and sounds gay, but claims he has a girlfriend and he saved Kaiden to :) . I wonder if in your case this means multiple playthroughs and saving Kaiden was just your last choice, or maybe you did it against yourself? Or not?
That intro was really something else. It's a shame that you had to fall under the spectrum of what was once a wonderful video game, onto something that is basically useless now. I really wish your intro was the intro to a more meaningful video about yourself, life, nature, etc. Nevertheless, this was a fantastic video. Keep up the good work.
I started playing this game for the first tome today and…I can’t believe they turned a truly unique game series into something that feels generic as fuck. I honestly don’t know if I’ll finish this game. I stayed up all night finishing mass Effect 2 and while playing this game…I find myself wanting to restart ME1 again instead of playing this game.
As a German your pronouncing of „Dasein“ let me think of a asian word somehow for most of the Video even though you were talking about a German philosopher before
shit,barely 3 minutes in and it's already,well,i want to say "too deep for me" or something similar, but it's not tho. it's just....shit bro....damn. already gettin into the thick of it in just 3 minutes, looks like i'm in for quite the ride.
ME3 needs the EHEM, or it's an absolutely vile game... because the ending of the game itself is more important than the rest. If just about any game can perfect the landing, so to speak, then a lot of stuff prior to that can be forgiven by those that outlasted the bullshit and reached the ending point. ME3 ending(s?) is about as awful as if we took the LotR movies, but the ending just utterly failed to end well. Imagine going through nearly 3 whole movies that is rather lengthy in terms of time, but the series that we have an expectation towards just ends with good guys doing, Sauron wins, or have some other bullshit 'woman power cuz only females can win the battle' bullshit. Btw I have to disagree that ME3 takes away all 'choice value' from prior games, cuz for example the Genophage Cure, if we do not have Mordin and the prior research, then the Female Krogan 'Eve' will die, and that'll have an effect on the Krogan's post-ending result (same if Wrex is dead, which will also affect that). Yes I agree that a lot of prior choices that were important was rather moot and wishywashy. Like Udina suddenly being where Anderson had been prior with the Council, how the ending choices is 3 flavors of gatorade with varying levels of stimulant effect on endgame cutscenes.
I agree and/or like a lot of the things mentioned in this video except for 1 thing: your idea of what constitutes "Role Playing" is really flawed. DnD is just as much about dialogue as it is about min-maxing stats (and some would argue leans even more in the favor of numbers/abstractions). Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy are both RPGs, despite having very little in common. Playing a role, in the context of video games, is just as much creating an self-insert avatar as it is embodying a character that someone else created or piggybacking on someone else's adventure with little say on how it develops.
I did the first time i played, my line of thinking back then was "Kaiden is a specialist, Ashley is just some dumb soldier, so he should handle arming the bomb" and then when the choice was presented i thought "Of course i need to go.closer to the bomb, it is my main mission after all"
i think you are a bit harsh with the game, agree past actions should matter but sometimes control is an ilusion, no matter what you do things go that way like a river. I think that was what they wanted to end the trilogy, specialy in war, you really dont have much of a choice.
I love your videos, but with all the work you put into them I was kind of surprised to hear you put zero effort whatsoever into the pronunciation of those German words. It's not even that you butchered them; they would have been entirely unrecognisable without the philosophical context, lol. Anyway, yeah, it's a nit-pick, yes, it bothered me more than it should have, and yes, you should definitely continue putting philosophy in your analyses. Edit: Looking through the comments, there's an irritating amount of misinformation. Nobody mentions that the word isn't "nicht" ["not"]; it's "Nichts" ["nothing"], as in the opposite of something (btw, why did you silence the s?), the "Dasein" ["existence", roughly]. People have given you the wildest pronunciation advice but haven't pointed out that "Dasein" has its stress on the first syllable. As I'm writing this I'm asking myself why I care. I guess it feels disrespectful for someone to so aggressively get foreign words wrong. People apologise profusely for the smallest deviations from standard pronunciation or for a heavy accent, or what have you, and it's never really necessary because any viewer/listener can already tell they're at least trying on some level. When it feels like the person had some bias against looking things up for ten seconds before putting something out there, that's when it starts to rub me the wrong way, I guess. Feel free to ignore this as insignificant, it's not like I'm going to unsubscribe over such a minor gripe.
Why use a word like "meaning" when you can shoehorn in some inscrutable philosophical concept like "daesin" instead. It sure does make you sound smarter. That is the goal right?
Always the goal. It's how I measure my dick. Is this how you measure your dick?
@@StratEdgyProductions but he's right. there's no point in using a special term without explaining why you decided to use it, without giving it meaning. and even if you had explained it, it's better to put things in a more straightforward manner, rather than obscuring everything behind opaque terminology. speak precisely, leave nothing in the shadow.
@@arsenii_yavorskyi Next time, just ask him to put the word on the screen with it's definition. It's better than the advice you gave.
@@TheSpiritsLease why?
Daesin isn't "meaning". Its being in the present moment or in the zone, or flow.
Thank you for hitting on the illusion of choice. By the time the Tell Tale games came out I couldn't help but seeing them for what they are. Linear experiences with a sprinkle of choices that only affect characters you have no attachment too. Kinda like the actual TV show, the Walking Dead.
Unfortunately this is indicative of games in the last decade, action rpgs have been slowly dumbed down, to Skyrim and Fallout 4 where decisions only matter within their quest lines. I hope that Cyberpunk 2077, with their promised approach to quest decisions being meaningful will challenge the industry again. I know game development is difficult and lengthy, but I miss the days of Stygian Abyss.
Skyrim hit gold, Fallout 4 only showed us Bethesda themselves didn't realize what gold they'd hit. Skyrim wasn't an RPG, it was a looter, same genre as Diablo III. And yet they tried to create Fallout 4 by making it... Like Skyrim, except more RPG and with a game play world that didn't have any love or effort put into it beyond the bare minimum.
thats because games have to appeal to everyone even people who do not like to play games. we know them as casuals
Zachary Foster hello police? I would lime to report a rape of German language.
the main reason i wait for this game and got meself a new 2000$ gaming PC
@@kkplx A lot of Europeans hate when people get their language wrong. I've noticed this, and I'd like to know what we Americans can do to take the massive stick out your asses, especially when in conjunction with topics such as: your language, your strawman of us, your obfuscation of points we make against them and our country itself.
Dasein is pronounced so that the is the same as "I" or "eye".
In ME2 I've always liked Kelly, I truly enjoyed the jokingly flirts we had and the ball busting, she felt like one of my bois, only with a psychology degree.
When the crew was kidnapped I treated ME2 like a game, "oh boy, looks like i'm about to finish the game, better do all the side stuff", the ship felt empty but I'll get em back, I'm fucking Shepard.
Note, i played the trilogy alongside the dlc at the same time, meaning that I still remembered which faces were put from 1 to 2 in the ship crew.
Imagine my suprise when they killed most of my crew. The remaining ones thanking me, but I knew the truth. I killed them.
Then in ME3 YOU GET A NEW CREW AND NOBODY BATS AND EYES. No are we going to die like your last crew sir?
One of the most impacting moments in my gaming life, completely wasted. Same as not revealing Tali's everything. So much wasted oportunity.
*Spoilers ahead*
The three choices at the end of ME3 pissed me off to no end! I spend three games preparing for and fighting the Reapers just for them to give me a those stupid choices. The "control-option" is simply annoying (I don't want to control the giant genocide-robots, who murdered entire star-systems, I want to blow them back to the "Nicht") but the "Bio-Machine-Fusion" really took the cake, because it is the embodiment of forced, magical feel-good-bullshit, which is so beloved by producers who fear nothing more than to challenge their fans in the slightest. The red destruction-choice should have been the default, because it achieves the goal by destroying the reapers but also comes at an unexpected cost by also destroying all artificial life (i.e. Ede and the Geth). This would have been a great, bitter-sweet ending to a bloody war for survival.
Also I hate to be that guy, but finally there is ONE time where I can help someone with pronounciation:
- The "ch" in "Nicht" is a fucked up sound we germans invented to make every foreign, who is learning our language as miserable as possible and comes closest to the english "sh"
- The "ei" in "Dasein" is pronounced exactly like the english pronoun "I" :)
*fliesAway*
Sorry for fucking up your language. Mispronouncing names and foreign languages is basically my thing now.
@@StratEdgyProductions No reason to apologize, just wanted to help out :)
I loved the control ending. My Sheppard always was an uncompromising guardian to the galaxy. He acted on his perception of right and wrong. And he defended the galaxy even though the galaxy wouldn't want his help or wouldn't believe him about the dangers. In control of the reapers he becomes the supreme omniscient Guardian. He has to listen to no one. He can take action if he feels he must. In the meantime he should be more than capable of producing a body to live through should he desire to. My Sheppard was never strictly Renegade or Paragon. And this ending gave him what he needed.
I'll probably never find love because Bioware has given me deep trust issues.
"Let's assume you saved Kaiden on Virmire"
That's quite the assumption. No one saves Kaiden.
Fully😂😂I found him so boring I just never saved him
Surprising, most people I know would rather save Kaiden just because they didn't like Ashley.
@@g.s.651 Don't lie, nobody likes Mr. "Sorry I have a headache"
*hides most of my save files* Yeahhhh...no one saves Kaiden...no one leaves the xenophobe to die... certainly...
They wrote themselves into a corner with three.... The whole game is a dark existential crisis, it's been a long time but if IIRC it was all urgency and watching worlds fall to the reapers, there is no room for choices, there was no room your previous choices. The sense of wonder/exploration was gone, ME2 cheesed up the reaper lore too much, the only real reason to play ME3 was to learn more about the Protheans (which AE put behind day one DLC).
ME1 had the best writing/world, it was immersive and new and had the star trek idealism and thoroughly examined every sci-fi trope that it used. ME2 had the best game play (at least in the main loop) but the writing was showing signs of deterioration and when driving around alien worlds was replaced with that goddamn scanner that was the beginning of the end. ME1 was an RPG-shooter, ME2 was a cover shooter with RPG elements and ME3 was just a cover shooter.
Unlike Mass Effect 3, the third installment of your trilogy brought a satisfying conclusion.
Perhaps it's Stockholm Syndrome, but since the Mass Effect 3 endings are all we have, I've learned to be satisfied with and embrace them, and enjoy them a lot.
16:33 My favorite part, is when you run so fast you're like 6 inches behind her, and then she starts speeding up like she's the flash till she's like 12 feet away. I usually always play Vanguard, so it's just comical, because I should be able to charge at her to knock her right off her feet lol.
20:20 Yes, thank you. It's where all of your previous choices should coalesce, you shouldn't be forced to pigeonhole all of them. I could go on a rant but I've said my peace about the 3rd game, I'm not too much of a fan of everything in and past third act; but as far as the trilogy itself, it will always be my favorite game trilogy.
Edit: Ok, I'm gonna stop editing my comment before I DO end up going on a rant and making 3 paragraphs on why the ending still bothers me, what my ideal ending would be, ect lol.
Appreciated the low key counciling for my ongoing existential dread. The ME3 critique was also satisfying. I'm a little disappointed that I need prompting to think of things with more depth.
I see I'm not the only one who went back to New Vegas after seeing Failout 76. I hoped you took the time to enjoy getting the footage :D
Reminder the New California is in open beta
@@cyberninjazero5659 Finished it for the first time and waiting for some other mods as for now New California is mechanicly broken. You end first part of the game with tons of skills and there are quests with unlimited enemies (XP, ammo and weapons). Sidequests are almost non existant and quickly you get high quality gear with armour that makes you almost immune to bullets.
@@38procentkrytyk hmm I did indeed find it odd that I've been playing for just a couple hours and already am skilllevel 100 guns and speech while my other skills are doing just fine
that said, I feel like hostile engagements are challenging enough to keep me invested
Was playing New Vegas last night. Bethesda has lost any credibility these days.
Oh thank you so much, I wanted to listen a podcast that analyses videogame, and accidentaly got myself into existentail crisis.
Subscribed.
This whole video is exactly how I felt every time I tried to finish ME3. I never could, I felt on a guided tour bus, and a bad one to boot.
Also, let's be clear, the finale being a "choose your ending" ending was something that happened due to the constraints of development and because it wasn't planned out in advance. You're pressed for time and you still haven't figured out which way to end your RPG video game trilogy. What do you do in this short time? Take the extremely risky route and figure out how assembling the Crucible or losing or gaining allies can factor in, in various ways which will require extensive bug-testing and crossexamining choice scenarios OR do you take the safest-to-produce route of making an ending which itself offers choice and focus on finishing the story?
Ideally we would want the former kind of ending but they chose the other because there was no time to plot multiple different scenarios.
The thing is, the rough groundwork *should* have been put in place in conjunction with Mass Effect 1's plotting. Obviously not a full script complete with cinematic and dialogue but a rough tree of the whole saga and where all the various choices are going to branch and intersect and how the endgame was going to play out.
It was clear with Mass Effect 2 this was not the case. Bioware was blatantly making the story up as they went along. They had absolutely no idea what they were going to do for the middle entry and went on a irrelevant tangent like a kid trying to fill a wordcount on an essay.
Then they have to develop Mass Effect 3 and their sin of sloth comes to roost. They have all this choice data they've been recording, they've promised different endings, they've promised consequences. And they do not have the writing chops to deliver on their promises and tie it all together.
Bioware is to blame 100%, not EA, not time constraints, they were incompetent. And I will be happy when EA finally shuts their ass down.
I STOPPED WATCHING BLIZZCON FOR YOU, PAUL
That must have been difficult. Did they announce another expansion?
@@StratEdgyProductions no but here a new mobile game for you.
@@StratEdgyProductions yeah, exactly what we've been waiting for:
Diablo Mobile
Ho, boy... Is this the switch thingy they were talking about or an actual diablo phone app?
@@StratEdgyProductions phone app!
Although I played the whole trilogy back in the day, I never finished ME3 (because of a bug near the end) until the recent Legendary Edition. I watched the cutscene, chose the ending I wanted and proceeded to be confused as fuck.
There were two ways to go. Which was what?
Nothing in the journal but long-abandoned and broken side-quests.
The button to bring up which way to go did nothing.
I went left.
The button said "make a choice".
I pressed it.
That's how Shepherd accidentally joined with the Reapers and became an immortal deity despite intending to wipe out all artificial life in the galaxy.
How embarrassing.
Hence the need for a GOOD ending for any game or movie or story as a whole. If we get 'oh but the geth dies cuz fuck you' if you go destroy cuz stupid-plot contrivances are stupid, or that you become spacejizz that fuse biological and synthetic galaxy-wide, or you just roast yourself into soulash and take control of the reapers... I'd like to ask where in the hell is the effect of my choices that'd allow us to just say 'fuck you reapers, hundred of cycles of sentience has finally finished a weapon that can STOP you.
But Nah, Crucible just have to be ghost-space-child-retardation that talks stupid philosophy that makes no sense about synthetics will eventually destroy biologicals when we have LITERALLY just finished brokering peace with between the Geth and the Quarians and allowing the Geth to truly become individuals which HELPS them be able to understand biologicals as well.
But nah something-something Reapers are Synthetics that save biological from Synthetics wiping them out by... wiping out advanced sentient biologicals.... WHAT!?
That's why I do not care what an author thinks is the correct ending (or game devs thinks is the right ending) when they royally fuck that up - hence the EHEM mod or the LE version of it is canon to me, especially because it lets your choices matter in that you can have a good ending if you did not just rush through the game and fire some half-assed Crucible that either blows up in your face, is badly calibrated and kills EVERYTHING, not just the reapers.... or actually fire correctly and targets JUST the reapers.
I felt so lucky discovering this channel today, in times like these. Came for the games, stayed for the feels.
This is an interesting take on the notion of the ending, but I can't help but question the use of an existential philosopher to argue the method the game should use to provide meaning. I understand your point: if earlier actions had a more direct, and limiting, effect on the end of the game, by definition, within this constructed reality, we can draw direct lines of *consequence* if not ethical or moral meaning. But this also evades the fundamental questions that plague our existence as Dasein: how do we grapple with the limitations of our facticity? How do we ensure we make full use of our existentiality? How do we know if we are being authentic? To what degree is fallenness responsible for our interests and the way we interpret things? Is this to be embraced? Heidegger certainly made that argument: we are of a place and a time, if we are to find meaning it must be in each other. You cannot be a saint in the ancient world any more than an epic hero in 1282. Then again, is this what led to his wholesale embrace of Nazism, viewing the holocaust as an acceptable trade off for National Socialism's promise to restore that Of A Time, In A Place sense of *meaning*.
I am digressing - what I wanted to say was that I think Satre and Nietzche provide a better philosophical basis for an existentialist reading of the finale of the game. The Catalyst promotes Hegelian ideology. Sartre spent a good while trying to reconcile his positive views of Marxism with its fundamentally Hegelian view of inevitable progress. The game spends 90 hours teaching you the meaning of its structures, what top right and bottom right mean, how x action led to y consequence, and then, at the end, it sets you adrift. The only meaning you will find is in yourself, the player. Forget the Extended Cut - that was a band aid on a wounded fanbase. The original endings tell you nothing about the consequences of your choice, because you are dead. We all make choices we cannot know the consequences of, we all *ignore* this until we are forced to acknowledge it (for instance, by death, a topic also of interest to Heidegger).
The ending of the game, by giving us these choices, asks, devoid of external consequence, do our choices matter? Do we believe we can imbue them with meaning if we are not in control of how they will be perceived? Do we *feel* that even if we believe it? Do we embrace Sartre's philosophy? Do we fall into nihilism and decide that it is fully and truly meaningless? This works only because of the medium. It is experienced more viscerally than in text or film.
What happens is separated from *what your choice means*. And that is something the game cannot tell you because the meaning exists in you, and stems from the experience and cumulative choices of the previous 90 hours. A Shepard who chooses to control the Reapers because it is the safest way to maintain something closest to the status quo is different to a Shepard that chooses to control the Reapers because they wish to rule.
To return to Heidegger, to interpret the final choice in line with his care structure, I think is again fascinating. It engages with facticity, the unchangeable. With fallenness - with *why* we may view some outcomes as inherently more or less acceptable because of our surroundings - and it calls to our existentiality: make the choice, act on the possibilities open to you because you ARE Dasein and are capable of choosing.
Your critiques of the roleplay elements are not something I feel qualified to argue with because I don't see that the third game is qualitatively different to the first two in that regard. ME2 disregards almost everything about ME1. They have always been games that allow you big choices in the moment that are written around to cohere into broadly similar narratives later. The choices you make are small shifts in a river, and - for the player - shifts in perspective and opinion that feed into *why* you choose to engage with things in the way you do, more than driving vastly different results. In a world where much is out of control, you can still choose who you are, how you approach things, and what your actions *mean*.
But I would argue that there is a reasonable view that this adds to, rather than subtracts from, an existentialist reading of Mass Effect 3 and its finale.
On-topic critique: Rachi queen choice is an exercise in ethics - therefore the payoff in ME3 can't be being awarded more or fewer War points~
The ME1 choice of freeing or killing the Rachni queen is an exercise in ethical and philosophical reasoning. You have to make a choice between only 2 options, one of which carries with it a possibility of great harm to conscious beings in the galaxy as a consequence. To make decisions (both IRL and as a player) you have:
(1) knowledge and
(2) your personal code of ethics.
You have to make the choice on-the-spot and can't choose to not decide, or postpone the choice. Therefore in the terms of knowledge you have immediate dialogue wheel options in the accompanying conversation and the info gathered from the main quest storyline on Noveria. Additionally, from being curious about the game world and talking to optional NPCs around the galaxy, reading "datapads" and Codex entries you are awarded with slightly more information to base your decision on.
Based on your knowledge you are forced to make some presumptions upon which you make plausible predictions about the future consequences of either option. Naturally these predictions are flawed and possibly highly inaccurate, but they are the best of your ability at the moment of choosing. Not only will the predictions of the future fluctuate among players based on how much they get involved with the game and learn history about the Rachni and Krogan wars, but by the general ideas and opinions the player has about the real world such as war, conflict, races, genocide, justice etc.
Now you have 2 predictions about the future which you can compare using ethical frameworks to decide which one is better.
Now the tricky part begins! (I'm not an academic in the field of philosophy or such, so I might make simplified arguments but they are, to the best of my understanding, valid). We can start at negative utilitarianism, meaning seeking to minimize harm universally is good. If my prediction of freeing the Queen is that (1) for one reason or another the chances of a new war between the Rachni and other races are high, or maybe even close to certain, and, my prediction of killing the Queen is that (2) she suffers until death and her offspring possibly suffer for missing their Queen until their death. Then I would conclude that killing the Queen is what's right.
But there are other ethical frameworks to consider! What about individual ~human~ rights? The Queen has a right not to be subject to violence and death doesn't she? We'd be killing her without a fair trial, and that's generally an ethical necessity before enacting some punishment, like death. Oh yeah um, the Queen is a queen and has some form of telekinesis contact and control over the "workers", "drones", or "soldiers", so does that carry over to her being one "person" at all? Assuming she is the last of her kind, which is heavily implied, then killing her would result in an effective genocide of her race, and that's not a thing we want to encourage at the very least. About that fair trial again, is she even guilty of any crime at all? From history we learn that her race all fought in an aggressive war on the other races, but can we use that to predict future behaviour and justify guilt? But that's like the definition racism, and racism is bad right. She says herself that she has no intention of harming anyone and wants to go far away and raise her children. But she is also in a position of struggling to save her own life, and so might be considered to do anything, including lying to preserve her own life. So her own reliability in this question is low.
Next we might consider either choice to be implemented into law. So how would society be if we asked and enforced from every person to always kill a conscious being under similar circumstances and uncertainty? Well, that might lead to a very violent and short existence for any new species attempting to make first contact with the galactic society. So, not necessarily a clear cut answer. Same thing for the other option. Then we'd expect persons to always free dangerous rare beings into the wild per every time. I can think of scenarios where you would not want that behaviour, like in laboratories hosting extremely dangerous viruses or pathogens. Perhaps even something similar to releasing circus animals. So using this framework didn't give very salient conclusions in this case, I would think it's so because of the detailed scenario.
How do we weight the different frameworks against one another? The question of 'what is good' is one of the hardest questions to solve in the history of mankind. Ultimately persons will consider some values as more important than others. But thinking using philosophy let's us explore our own mind, pick apart difficult issues and find what fundamental values are in conflict and make better decisions as a consequence. No one persons reasoning will be exactly the same, they don't have the same information, nor the same ethics. Others will judge you for your decision and you have to be able to look them in their eyes. There is no "correct" answer available, you have to make the call and be able to stand up and defend why you think you did the right thing. This is why science fiction is interesting.
To wrap up. The "payoff" from this decision is not getting more or fewer soldiers to fight the reapers with. That's not why you made your decision. It wasn't even an issue to consider since you don't have any knowledge of an incoming reaper army threat, nor that the best solution is recruiting as many soldiers, ships, races, weapons as possible at this point in the story. ME1 didn't provide a "right" answer and that's by design. If you know that one decision leads to a better reward (in video game terms), let alone know which option is the best one, then the player will disassociate from the game world and instead try to figure out what option the developers are more likely to reward with the preferred outcome.
Meaning you miss the whole making the "right" decision part! The game wants you to THINK using your brain. It's trying to make you grow as a human being. From just playing a video game.
Being told any answer is correct only serves to forever spoil the exercise being repeated.
This is why Bioware makes bad games now. And you normal people (90%+), it's all your fault for not seeing through EA selling you bullshit and you pre-ordering. Fuck all of you.
I absolutely adore your videos. They are awesome
Great job describing the trilogy, Paul! Your videos always teach me more about what goes on in an RPG, and your analysis on these videos is no exception. Keep it up, man! :D
I would love to see an analysis like this for the witcher too, you're very good at this :)
"das sein" means "to be" and "nicht" means "not", so to ask if some thing 'is' "das sein" or "nicht" is affectedly say "to be or not to be" .
Great video with some interestng ideas. Thanks Strat.
I think Mass Effect 3 was undone by it's own brands success. The ending we get (note the lack of a plural there, because in effect they are all the same) is one that is the product of "continuation" as oppossed to "conclusion"
I think it was clear Bioware and EA had come to regard the franchise as marketable and thus, something they would wish to develop and cash in on, further.
Rather than have a definative conclusion, they needed to leave enough room for sequels. For continuation and as such, we have endings that can't risk precluding anything going forward. I think that is why the endings were so sparse upon release. They didn't want to close the creative or narrative door, that the series deserved and demanded, for fear it might limit potential development later on. This leads into the complete lack of catharsis and impact, that players were expecting and hoping for.
From a design perspective, over the course of three games, it's understandably difficult to implement diverse and highly divergent branching paths for each major decision and I think alot of players understand that. Theres alot of financial risk too, to potentially cutting out content to players, based upon choices in previous games, that dictates just how impactful, meaning and substantative the choices players make, can realisticly be. I get why a developer or publisher would balk at that prospect, knowing it might impact sales. But in order to really capatilise on what they had built, to deliver something powerful evocative and fulfilling, thats really what they had to do.
Bioware missed the mark in so many ways. The Rachni, Genophage, Council and to a lesser extent Geth/Quarian choices, are rendered inert, by the desire to appeal to and be available to, all players, all the time, regardless of prior choices.
Bioware played it safe.
When it comes to dialogue and narrative structure, the linearity in which the stroy unfolds in the third installment, I don't mind the fact the game took more of a movie inspired, rail guided approach, I think it worked or atleast, could have and most people would have been behind that direction but for the lack of variation, based upon previous player choices. We would have come back to explore different decisons had branching been a thing, Mass Effect, already a much loved franchise, I think, would have gone down as one of the most well crafted and inspiring pieces of interactive story telling, had it done so, instead, it's regarded now, as something of an Icarus.
Dragon Age 2 did one thing I liked and that was character tone.
Hawke adopts a character based upon how often you choose particular demeanours in your dialogue responses. Use the snark response enough and eventually, all of Hawkes non-player chosen responses become snarky, choose agressive and the same happens for that. Bioware didn't develop that further and port that to other titles and I think thats a shame. Possibly because it would have been exhorbitantly expensive to narrate and write all those different lines of dialogue in a game like Mass effect [pick a number] This would have addressed some of the "out of character" conversations in Mass Effect 3. If nothing else, Hawke, eventually becomes a consitant character, whether you love him (or her) or hate him, you felt like his character was consistant and while I despaired of, again, not getting the chance to make blindingly obvious choices, that really ought to have been possible atleast I felt like the character and demeanour of the character I played, was adhered to.
Sheperd can sometimes lurch from being the cool, calm, heart on his shirt sleeves hero, to a deranged emotional sociapath at the press of a button and that is jarring.
As you rightly hit upon, those choices in previous games should have had greater meaningful outcomes, closing off branches or options in the final story, while opening up others, dependant on your previous choices. Sure, your then talking about Mass Effect 3 being potentially several games rolled into one, with perhaps, less content per playthrough and decision branch, than the single homogenised whole we get in reality, but the variance is what would have made the choices of past games playthroughs, have susbtance and meaning. It's wat would have pulled people back, time and again.
Instead, we get a game, that, depite the choices we made before, they all play out the same way, with perhaps, some differences in window dressing. i think thats the heart of the let down. I think thats why less inspired ideas, like the star child, fall so flat. (I didn't mind the star child or the leviathans, I know alot of people hated those additions but I could live with it.)
I have many issues with this video. Mostly about you referencing philosophical concepts of potentially profound meaning in respects to ME, making one comment on it, then moving on to mention another huge concept. Pick one, or at least fewer, and dig down deep. Otherwise you come across as way pretentious, or worse not capable, which I don't believe or else I wouldn't spend this time commenting.
@Tesla-Effect I'd actually go the other way and suggest putting the script through another 2 rounds of editing. I think most writers should be cutting up to 40% of their work.
See, here's the rub. No matter what I post, I get people complaining. The video is too long, the video is too short, you don't talk about this, you don't talk about that. I can't please everyone so instead of chasing the ever changing goal post of audience expectations, I am going back to what I used to do before I had one. Which is basically whatever I want. It's an issue of you not being able to please everyone, so why try?
@@StratEdgyProductions I completely agree with your point of view. As a viewer the only way I feel like I can have some impact, ideas, critique, praise, input etc is by posting a good comment, and even then rarely get replies obviously. That and "liking" is what I can do. I mostly try to leave some kind of idea that I have for improvement. What the creator does or doesn't do with it is none of my business. I hope you do whatever you feel good about doing. If my comment helps, I'm happy. That's all. Take care of yourself. =)
This has more to say about you the commenter than the video itself.
@@JML689 Thank you that's very kind.
I would enjoy talking about the Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger with you someday. I feel like you would dig it. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever read.
Love your philosophizing and your videos. And I’ve never even played mass effect.
I will wait for your video on Dying Light 2, it should be interesting comparison with this one. Choice-wise.
it's simultaneously hilarious and endearing how this channel has become just as much a philosophy channel as it is a video game channel
Interesting video. I definitely agree with you on how the ending should have played out based upon the choices already made, and not upon some last free-floating option. It was anti-climatic.
I do not, however, find the Heideggarianism all that illuminating a tool in the video.
despite the issues I still enjoy mass effect 3
Thank u man thank u. People are losing touch and u c it too I'm talking ab9ut ur insidious design of modern fallout games that video is about so much more than video games thank and I'm so glad I found your channel
These persistent sequels where we play as the same character continuing the adventure each new game should feel like the end of the first act in The Witcher 2. If you don't know, in W2 act one you decide to run side with one of two major allies which completely changes the second ac location and much of the quests. It revolves around the same cursed battlefield but you are either on one side or the other of the battlefield based on whom you choose: Iorveth or Roche.
Cant wait until A.I. in games can actually mimic virtualy programmed characters with an actors voice but a characters dynamic idiosyncrocies that goes beyond scripting.
Oh yeeeeaaaah. I enjoyed the Rachni bit in this.
The Mass Effect Games aren't RPGs, though. They're choose your own adventure games where you can pick the face of your character. The dialog has never been meaningful. You've never gotten meaningful choices from Mass Effect. They're long shooters for RPG fans and short RPGs for shooter fans. They're action games with a team tactical element.
I came to Mass Effect after finishing the Dragon Age trilogy, so I guess I wasn't surprised that BioWare doesn't make RPGs - they make choose your own adventure games.
All of my choices from previous games went through in an enjoyable way as well. And you have always observed Mass Effect's gameplay. But I've always played by maxing Paragon or Renegade as quickly as possible, then just doing whatever I feel like. I had fun with them.
I prefer the Tao method of gaming - I just go with the flow and play the game I'm playing rather than asking it to be something else.
Jesus Christ, way to blow it out of proportion with some ass philosophy.
Fuck that two choices system in my RPGs, I hate it.
And you're damn right saying that an ending should come as a result of our choices throughout the game(s), not just "a choice" at the finish line.
I highly recommend staying away from Heidegger and going to some analytics. Tbh all philosophy should begin with a thorough understanding of Aquinas and why the moderns failed to understand him, and all that came from them is a butchering of philosophy.
Love Your vids, super thought provoking. I love looking at the depth analysis of games.
I really appreciate your explanation of what an RPG is. By your definition, what would you call games like the typical JRPG where you play as pre-existing characters in a set story with little to no choice? Are these not RPGs? Or do they actually provide lots of choices, but not in the traditional sense?
I'd say the Western RPGs are like improv and JRPG are like scripted roles.
JRPGs are not RPGs. They are more like story driven games or adventure games. You have a main character, usually with his group, that you must push through the story in order to succeed, anything else is a filler and not meant to help you define who you want to be. You don't get to truly make your own character, your choices are limited if you have any, and usually have barely any real incidence. JRPGs have some of the bells and whistles of what is a RPG but they don't have its essence.
I know the video is old but it astounds me that mass effect messed up it's ending so horribly, whereas when I beat Dragon Age: Inquisition and it's DLC's the other day, I actually did get to see the outcome of the choices I made over the course of the game
Anyone who highlights the lack of choice as the primary problem of ME3's ending piss me off, I'm sorry. The story itself still comes first, though I agree Mass Effect was particularly special as video games due to their dialogue system. But the setting was too precious and too consistent, despite this and that problem, until ME3 to come to that ending in particular and have it all be projected onto "Organics vs Synthetics". That will always be the issue that superseded everything else to me, that apparently the developers misred the primary conflict of ME's story as being fundamentally about "organics vs synthetics". This is what isn't true, and this is where all meaning was lost to me.
The whole me3 is an ending to me, genofage, the ethics of IA, and all the different arcs from the previous games were solved in a good way. Synthetics VS organics is just the ending one more topic, and it was viewed in a chaos VS order way which made sense to me.
Me, a person who has already went down the rabbit hole that is the opening question: it don matta, none a dis mattas. But who cares it really doesn't change anything.
I think you make great points, especially about how we shouldn't have a final choice, the ending should be the culmination of our choices. It wasn't a reflection on your desperate efforts to shape the galaxy. Not sure how you feel but I think this is something the Witcher 3 did well with. What happens to Ciri depends on how you treated her, did you take her to her father? Same with the result of the Northern Empires. The save imports for the Witcher between the games and the connection between the 3 games is pretty bad, but that is sort of the result of what was essentially a niche indie game turning into a smash hit that eventually evolved into an AAA game.
You'd be real proud of me if you knew how much this video moved me to take action. Yeah they were just messages to people but my choices and actions still have plenty of meaning. I'm heavily in control of situations and it's frightening but it's a purpose.
The point of life is to live. That's it. Live until you stop living, like every single other living thing in the universe.
Live, not just survive... hedonism not necessarily the intended answer or wrong one however XD
Our purpose in life is to evolve through conflict, maybe not our purpose but it is what we do, everyone and every living thing strives to survive by being the best, and humans take it one step further past just survival and try to be the best at anything we can imagine. Human beings naturally seek conflict because conflict is the most powerful motivator to be the best.
There's probably no purpose to Life but there is certainly one for *your* life with little "l".
I red that in Mordin's voice. :D
“I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."
- Conan the Barbarian, from Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast
I found it satisfying what happened to Kaidan/Ashley in 3 after their holier-than-thou bullshit in 2.
The instances where your previous choices would have mattered more, for example the Rachni situation? I believe they wanted to do it more meaningful, but they had no time. EA was at the top of their greedy habits at the time, and forced an early release, the studio didn't have time to flash out everything. They did the best they could. No wonder many key Bioware developers left the studio. What remains now, it's not even the same, just the puppet of EA.
Anyways, as for your decisions, and role playing in the game, I wouldn't even consider too many options there, what we got are more than it should be. The goal, from the start of Mass Effect 1 was to defeat the Reapers, and that's how it should end. You either win or you lose. What shape you are after the war should be decided by your choices. More or less they did that, (with the addition of Extended Cut).
What you forgot to elaborate more on (maybe intentionally, for your narrative?) is the key story points that were part of the game from the start, and are indeed impacted on your previous choices. The Genophage and the Quarian-Geth war. Both has an outcome that depends on your previous choices. And these are the most impactful for the galaxy after the war has ended. Who leads the krogan and how, are they really cured? Did the Geth survive or the Quarians, or both? And these are the more important things for the players because they can relate to the situation, they know the characters involved, and it's outcome is important for them. The Reaper war? They need to be defeated or everyone dies. You can't relate to that really. As Mordin said in ME2: "Hard to imagine entire galaxy. Too many people. Faceless. Statistics. Easy to depersonalize. Good when doing unpleasant work. For this fight, want personal connection. Can't antropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favourite nephew."
Even so, we got 3 different endings there by the way of how strong your collected army is. (how well they protect the Crucible until it's ready), there is a scenario where you have so low EMS at the end your only option is destroy, and even then the blast will wipe out the entirety of earth and probably more. But for that, you intentionally need to play bad from the start, really hard to achieve. What is a problem is the lack of impact of whether you kept the Collector Base or not. IMO, that should have been the condition for the Control ending. But it only lowered the needed EMS for that. I firmly believe if the devs had more time, say a year, the game would have been way better. But it still is a great game.
What also annoyed me is how we had fewer options in speech. I felt like the character was no longer my own: simply a mouthpiece for Bioware's faulty concept of good and evil.
The meaning of life is just that, give it some meaning.
That was the biggest mind fuck intro
God I love MrBtongue!
a small hint: German [ch] sound is closer to English [h] than [k].
I loved the video!
The framing & punchline is wonderful; Bravo!
However, your entire video was (among other things) pointing out how "Mass Effect 3" is a poor RPG. It may intrest you to know (and *cough* talk about in future videos *cough* ) that "Mass Effect 3" is a Character Action Game.
A Role Playing Game is a game where you play a "role", define for yourself what that role "means", & commonly define "who" you are.
Think of the Fallout 1 though New Vegas, Mass Effect 1 & 2, most tabletop DnD games, & so on.
A Character Action Game is where you are given a role to fulfill, must act properly to satisfy that role, and occasionally get to define who the role is.
Think of the Monkey Island series, the CoD series, superhero games, the Halo series, the Devil May Cry series, the Witcher series, the Dark Souls series, the Jak & Daxter series, the Gears of War series, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, & so on.
In "Fallout: New Vegas" we are a Courier, but we define who we are & what that means. (RPG)
In "Mass Effect 1" we are a Specter named Shepard, but we define who we are & what that means. (RPG)
In "Halo" you play as the Spartan Master Chief, and the MC just fights enemies. (CAG)
In "Devil May Cry" we play as Dante, and he just fights enemies. (CAG)
In "The Secret of Monkey Island" we play as Guybrush Threepwood, and we just try to become a Pirate. (CAG)
In "TES: V Skyrim" we play as The Dragonborn, and they just fight enemies. (CAG)
In the Witcher series we play as the witcher Geralt; where we get to define what it means to "kill monsters" but not who Geralt is (we do, but that's a long story). (CAG; debatably)
In "Red Dead Redemption 2" we play as the gangster Arthur; where we get to define what that means but not who Arthur is. (CAG)
Most JRPGs are actually CAGs, most CAGs have RPG elements, & RPG elements are in most modern games.
In summary, I hope this information was communicated clearly & is of benefit to you while also proves my ultimate point.
Your (and my own) dissatisfaction with the Mass Effect series comes from the series transitioning from a RPG into a Character Action Game (specifically, the many problems that transition caused to the narrative & the change of values in gameplay).
As you know, folks commonly have a faithblind zeal regarding icons of worship. Their narcissism blinds their senses unless the right framing devises are used.
All of this, Motherfucker, to prove (as best I can) that I think this video series of yours was a great idea & that your writing is improving dramatically. (you have a habit of not valuing vague compliments)
Your mind is impressive! Bravo! ;D
Ha! How's that for a compliment?
Pretty accurate
I believe the rushed schedule caused this writing mess to occur. The "Bioware Magic" (Trademarked copied right) of being a black company [it's an Asian term, look it up.] caused so many issues.
Shoot, I write poetry and when I try to force it, I can tell the quality drops. I also write and develop programs, so same applies.
The big point, I remember, from a clip, is a writer explaining how much story must be developed for a single multiple choice decision. Even with the binary of good and evil, you end up not doubling but squaring the work load. So, each possible decision causes this sort of knock down effect of more work. However, if a player only goes down a single path, then the game will be too short. In other words, allowing player choice means creating a wider game, where as a fixed linear narrative creates a longer game.
That is to say, the writers basically said screw it, and forced things back into a linear narrative, to meet deadlines.
You think like I do. I respect you, I love your content. Keep it up, you make the world better, although, I’m sure you know this already. :)
Love your content, post more videos please
Typo in title, word is "nihilates".
Great merging of game analysis and philosophy
Ehhhh. Seems like a typical Strat-Edgy decision to throw some highfalutin postulate into the subject matter for no real reason than to make it appear of higher brow.
The flaws in the story arc, negating what your previous choices, were due to laziness and the "need" to make each game playable to those who are newbies to each one. Your choices in ME1 are partially negated or ignored in 2 so that neophytes who never played 1, and who doesn't intend to, to play the current game gratis. It builds up and gets worse with each part of the trilogy. Mass Effect 3 was the worst on this. The creators were setting up the game so neophytes can play it without having to play 1 and 2.
It wasn't due to laziness. Not at all. Bioware didn't have the time they needed to make the game they wanted. They only got 22 months to make mass effect 3, which isn't nearly enough time for them to do what they wanted. They got about 4 years for mass effect 1, 3 years for mass effect 2, and 22 months for mass effect 3.
If you wanna know why the end only came down to 3 choices, thats why. They didn't have time to do more than that and they knew it wasn't what fans wanted but bioware had no choice in the matter. If you want to blame something, blame EA for not giving them enough time.
They were rushed dude. Go look at Rayevick's video and see how EA's time limit literally ruined extended dialogue and complex choices.
@@tastefulavenger Exactly. Blame EA. This was the title that needed the most time but got the least amount of it. Bioware tried to make the most of their situation, and knew it wasn't going to be enough.
@@demongrenade2748 Apparently the shit game disease caught hold in bioware because they did not correct course with Andromeda. They managed to take the decline of Mass Effect over time and lawn dart that suck deep into the shitpile with Andromeda, unless the conclusion is that all the good guys at the dev bailed out because of the EA's interference.
@@BooDamnHoo Well yeah. That's actually what happened with Andromeda. The people that made mass effect great were long gone when andromeda was in development. And andromeda did so poorly that bioware went and rehired Casey Hudson (the lead designer of the original trilogy) to salvage the series for the future. Whether or not they succeed is yet to be determined.
"Nicht" is not pronounced 'nicked'
It is pronounced 'Nee-shh-t'. Its german.
Also, the "ein" in "Dasein" is pronounced the same as the "ine" in "nine". Doesn't detract from the quality of the video, but it's worth noting.
Lol imagine Fredrick Nicked-eh lol (I know it’s not the same spelling but still)
Well, in French "niqué" means fucked sooo...
pretty sure the 'shh' sound is inaccurate. 'ch' is supposed to be a form of 'g'
I hate all of you, but I hate myself more so it's almost like I love you.
Ur are so right about fallout new Vegas and fallout 3 I love Morrowind and new Vegas way better than any other rpg5 and now I know thank u for being u and real.
There's a lot going on in this vid, imo it being split into 2 parts would've conveyed your philosophy in a more impactful way
Although I agree with you, I still love this game.
My own definition of "roleplaying game" is derived from roleplaying exercises, concluding that it's a game where the players affect the story through the actions of their characters.
Here's the video for my reasoning (and transcript in its description):
ua-cam.com/video/8_pAcAQAPRI/v-deo.html
Good stuff. I think that games in which you are playing a particular set character are not really RPG’s. They have RPG elements perhaps, but the player ends up operating within a set of parameters that prevent one from playing with the role so to speak. Geralt of Rivia might choose speed over heavy armor, or put more emphasis on using this sign or that - but he is still Geralt, monster killer for hire, caught up in the affairs of a war-torn region. Maybe there ought to be another term?
They're still RPGs if you can define who this person becomes through a number of choices. Don't know about the Witcher games (never played them) but it is still an RPG if your choices still matter. Spoilers: you don't set the starting point in Mass Effect either, Shepard is just as much Shepard in ME1 as Geralt is Geralt in Witcher 1. In ME1 the only non-combat based choice which truly matters to the story-based RPG systems, before the start of the game, is male/female and only because it affects romance options. Therefore it is a predefined character, if you could choose if Geralt were female it'd be the literal same thing. Just because you have a role to play doesn't mean you can't define how you play that role. If you can play out your role any way you wish (within reason) it is still an RPG by my own definition.
oh shit I didn't know Noob Saibot had a channel
5 ads in 24 minutes. Nice one.
I think that people like me, who played the entire trilogy with the dlcs (of course extended cut too) without waiting years between each game and didn't even knew about all the drama about the ending actually can value the final work in a better way. I love this trilogy and I find most of mass effect 3 as a satisfying conclusion, to me it is the last good game by bioware. Said this, I can see the mistakes in the trilogy and how the intrusion of EA made it very difficult for ME3 to develop its potencial: The ending was not that bad, it just seemed forced, and leviathan, an excellent part of the story which solves that problem was a Dlc, from ashes, which adds an actually interesting character as the ones in previous games is another dlc, and the citadel DLC besides being a homanage to the entire series, makes the me3 citadel as awesome as the me1 one which is actually a more important thing to me.
In my perspective, this game has the best version of the citadel, it is long, it has a good conclussion and also a well presented one, and its different endings actually feel different and impactfull.
In someone's who played it day one perspective, it was way too rushed, shorter than the rest, filled with good moments which lead to a disappointing conclusion, an ending which seems forced and not even presented, a cerberus sub plot which is less interesting than leviathan dlc...
I'm glad I got the entire trilogy three years after me3, because it clearly got a lot better with time. Good or not, it is my favorite game series and Sci-fi universe, and as much as I try, I don't seem to find anything I like more.
20:20 You... you actually managed to sum up, from this point, why I hate the ending of Life is Strange, in the most eloquent way I've seen done. Yes, that's why these endings suck, it's because the result should be the CULMINATION OF YOUR CHOICES and the effect of 'cause and effect' of EVERYTHING you've done up til then, _not_ a sudden and new choice you haven't had time to be invested in. It's like throwing in a brand new antagonist in the last five minutes of the game and forcing a player to fight them, then expecting them to feel good about that victory--why expect us to even care?
Meh, I was more pissed off in Dragon Age Origins. Basicly whole game NEVER gave option I wanted to say. Bunch of Farmers attack me because they are desperate of money. Can I give them my own gold? Nope... Can I give up and say my head is more worth alive? NOPE! They attack me I slaughter them and my companions ignore it like lifes of those farmers didn't matter at all. Whole game is focused on killing people who could be persuased to join campaign against main enemy but nope... Contract killing which is exact opposite of what my character should do in this game.
You won't belive it but DAO actually put me into dark place where I started to belive (IRL) that my my choices don't matter as I belived I'm inferior human being.
I think I prefer to be told in person that I have no option, instead of feeling sorry for illusion of the choice.
Dude, if you want to be edgy about Heidegger, at least look up how to pronounce Dasein. :/
Mispronouncing words is basically my schtick at this point. I don't do it on purpose, but yeah.
At least try to pronounce stuff correctly
I'm American. We don't do that.
I'm gonna give you a fuckin wedgie
But i have to say, i really like the way you pronounce nicht. It's... not how you say it, but your way is almost better.
Is it truly worth playing over all, after going through the greatness of Mass Effect and the still rather amazing playable narrative of Mass Effect 2? Or does the story end there, and the third title should be left out and forgotten?
Firestarter Thing is it can’t, since ME1 it’s has been implied that Mass Effect will be a trilogy and that the final battle is with the Reapers.
I'm saddened to see him not address how Extended Cut fixed the thing he ranted about. If you got the extended cut the aftermath of the final choice reflects the total worldstate you got from all other choices. It didn't affect the plot itself but it does feel like choices mattered to me.
The issue is still just the ending and what it is in the story it's being shoved into. That is the fundamental problem that makes everything related to it, including what choices it revolves around or the way we got to it meaningless.
more like METH EFFECT amirite?
ua-cam.com/video/pRHhdc53Od8/v-deo.html
That is the Meth Effect.
The Wanderer Jacob you volunteered, you’re up.
@@danyo10 Exactly, LOL 😂
*Existential crisis Intensified*
I wonder what would he say about ELEX?
I wasn’t that invested in the choices of the game. I just liked the story and how we dealt with it. Too me everything I enjoyed the most from Mass Effect was left to my imagination. Taking everything at face value in this game probably won’t please you.
Tesla-Effect Don’t be too obsessed with control or you will end up like the illusive man. The passenger has control, I could do lots of things in the passenger seat like look at my phone safely, grab the wheel so we both fly off the road, and maybe even just play patty cake by myself. The perception that you are in control in the drivers seat is kind of dumb. Also no such thing as free will btw.
Right. Trying to examine the philosophy behind the game is just going to leave ones self disappointed. It's not a philosophy book, it's a game. People are not going to play Mass Effect to contemplate the meaning of life or question why they are making the choices they are. That's the point and the attraction of escapism; you don't *need* to think about that stuff! I commend Strat-Edgy for to trying to deconstruct the franchise's philosophical meaning, but it comes across as a pretty shallow destruction because you can basically say what he's saying about any game.
Toyoka Philosophy is in everything, you can ignore it all you want but it’s certainly not non existent.(I’m aware that’s a double negative) Philosophy is always interesting to me at least and it’s only depressing if you let it.
Kaidan is in ME3????? Never found him through 5 playthroughs. Must be an easter egg.
I really like ur fallout 76 video watching flies fuck lol a little George Carlin ur videos are so deep and u really explain things deeply
Hear me out.... The choice to play the game is your only choice. As soon as the game begins, you are watching this cascade of events play out to the ending.
man what does Heidegger have to do with anything. His membership in nazi party as well as hate racial hate makes me question that he has anything constructive to offer to society.
The point is that ME 3s' endings doesn't get close to the impact of Heidegger realizing that being a Nazi was a dumb life decision. Being a nazi was the culmination of a life of bad decisions, after all.
A theme in the series is genocide. Of the Rachni, of the Krogan, of the Geth, of All Organic Life, of the Reapers.
Heidegger made a series of decisions so dumb he'll be remembered for it forever; did Shepard?
You should read more into what was going on during the Nazi regime. People didn't "just become Nazis" all of a sudden. It was a gradual transformation and subsequent deconstruction of ones own moral compass through constant exposure to propaganda and controlled thought. It started out harmless, and grew from there. This happens with any governing political power that has gone out of control (whether authoritarian or totalitarian, it does not matter).
@Toyoka
Who the fuck are you writing to?
Neither CccpEntertainment Kraftz or myself wrote anything close to what you claim!
Did to comment while half asleep, Silly?
I've been there!
Ah, nice. A clear and relatively short explanation of why some people weren't satisfied with the mass effect trilogy.
And I find it true, that when you stop asking questions or taking an interest in your interactions within a game, that the game has lost you. This may also be true for any stories, that when you no longer care that it's the end of a meaningful experience.
All your previous choices and experiences lead you to where you currently are, in life. It could be considered some kind of wish fulfillment to be able to make 1 other choice that drastically overwrites your previous choices in a way that's clear to you but in most cases that's jarring to how we know things to work.
19:40 Anyone know why there is Hungarian here? does Strat speak the mother tongue?
German "das Sein" means "the existence" or "the being"
I have always said that if they truly were running out of time they should have instead given us "the Mega Reaper" as a final boss battle and cut out the Star Child bit, skipping over straight to the ending cutscene. Would've been a much more impactful game.
16:47 can't he come back to the party later on?
A lot of people say that the ending invalidates your choices. That the last ten minutes are the only blemish on the game. I agree somewhat. However this is a problem from the entire game. The destroy option should be your only choice. The impact it makes and the aftermath should be determined by the series as a whole not just the final choice. Mass Effect has excellent combat but I still miss the pause based strategic combat from the original. This game has the shortest development time but it really should of had the most.
Leaving invested players hanging and seized by the realization that video games cannot come as close as we might wish to truly branching and free-form narratives and interactions with the characters populating a setting, Mass Effect 3 spawned roleplaying circles & multiple forums dedicated to roleplaying. For myself, its disappointing, Fountain-esque, logic-defying ending led me to pick up pen-and-paper rpgs, starting with DnD 3.5. Tabletop not only replaced Mass Effect for me, it eclipsed.
About Kaiden .. me and all my male friends saved Ashley. The one female friend that finished the games and I asked, saved Kaiden. There's this youtube channel I watch (tvgrypl) that has this guy (Jordan) which looks and sounds gay, but claims he has a girlfriend and he saved Kaiden to :) . I wonder if in your case this means multiple playthroughs and saving Kaiden was just your last choice, or maybe you did it against yourself? Or not?
That intro was really something else. It's a shame that you had to fall under the spectrum of what was once a wonderful video game, onto something that is basically useless now. I really wish your intro was the intro to a more meaningful video about yourself, life, nature, etc. Nevertheless, this was a fantastic video. Keep up the good work.
I started playing this game for the first tome today and…I can’t believe they turned a truly unique game series into something that feels generic as fuck. I honestly don’t know if I’ll finish this game. I stayed up all night finishing mass Effect 2 and while playing this game…I find myself wanting to restart ME1 again instead of playing this game.
As a German your pronouncing of „Dasein“ let me think of a asian word somehow for most of the Video even though you were talking about a German philosopher before
good analysis
shit,barely 3 minutes in and it's already,well,i want to say "too deep for me" or something similar, but it's not tho. it's just....shit bro....damn. already gettin into the thick of it in just 3 minutes, looks like i'm in for quite the ride.
ME3 needs the EHEM, or it's an absolutely vile game... because the ending of the game itself is more important than the rest. If just about any game can perfect the landing, so to speak, then a lot of stuff prior to that can be forgiven by those that outlasted the bullshit and reached the ending point.
ME3 ending(s?) is about as awful as if we took the LotR movies, but the ending just utterly failed to end well. Imagine going through nearly 3 whole movies that is rather lengthy in terms of time, but the series that we have an expectation towards just ends with good guys doing, Sauron wins, or have some other bullshit 'woman power cuz only females can win the battle' bullshit.
Btw I have to disagree that ME3 takes away all 'choice value' from prior games, cuz for example the Genophage Cure, if we do not have Mordin and the prior research, then the Female Krogan 'Eve' will die, and that'll have an effect on the Krogan's post-ending result (same if Wrex is dead, which will also affect that). Yes I agree that a lot of prior choices that were important was rather moot and wishywashy. Like Udina suddenly being where Anderson had been prior with the Council, how the ending choices is 3 flavors of gatorade with varying levels of stimulant effect on endgame cutscenes.
I agree and/or like a lot of the things mentioned in this video except for 1 thing: your idea of what constitutes "Role Playing" is really flawed. DnD is just as much about dialogue as it is about min-maxing stats (and some would argue leans even more in the favor of numbers/abstractions). Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy are both RPGs, despite having very little in common. Playing a role, in the context of video games, is just as much creating an self-insert avatar as it is embodying a character that someone else created or piggybacking on someone else's adventure with little say on how it develops.
Dude...no one saved Kaidan in Virmire... :P :P
I did the first time i played, my line of thinking back then was "Kaiden is a specialist, Ashley is just some dumb soldier, so he should handle arming the bomb" and then when the choice was presented i thought "Of course i need to go.closer to the bomb, it is my main mission after all"
@@Dimovuha222 Typical man-thinking...Ashley is a woman, i'm gonna save her so i can bang her later lol. Poor Kaidan...he never had a chance :P :P :P
If you want to use German words again just hit me up and i can show you the pronounciation if you care
I wanted some rambling about videogame, not to question the meaning of life
i think you are a bit harsh with the game, agree past actions should matter but sometimes control is an ilusion, no matter what you do things go that way like a river.
I think that was what they wanted to end the trilogy, specialy in war, you really dont have much of a choice.
I love your videos, but with all the work you put into them I was kind of surprised to hear you put zero effort whatsoever into the pronunciation of those German words. It's not even that you butchered them; they would have been entirely unrecognisable without the philosophical context, lol.
Anyway, yeah, it's a nit-pick, yes, it bothered me more than it should have, and yes, you should definitely continue putting philosophy in your analyses.
Edit: Looking through the comments, there's an irritating amount of misinformation. Nobody mentions that the word isn't "nicht" ["not"]; it's "Nichts" ["nothing"], as in the opposite of something (btw, why did you silence the s?), the "Dasein" ["existence", roughly]. People have given you the wildest pronunciation advice but haven't pointed out that "Dasein" has its stress on the first syllable. As I'm writing this I'm asking myself why I care. I guess it feels disrespectful for someone to so aggressively get foreign words wrong. People apologise profusely for the smallest deviations from standard pronunciation or for a heavy accent, or what have you, and it's never really necessary because any viewer/listener can already tell they're at least trying on some level. When it feels like the person had some bias against looking things up for ten seconds before putting something out there, that's when it starts to rub me the wrong way, I guess. Feel free to ignore this as insignificant, it's not like I'm going to unsubscribe over such a minor gripe.