Revisiting Mass Effect 3 (with DLCs)

It’s easy to imagine how much pressure BioWare was under as they were making the closing act of the Mass Effect trilogy after the success of the previous two entries. With the first game they’ve established the universe, with the second they’ve refined the gameplay and characters. Third game was supposed to somehow top this and bring the story to a closure. And that’s where they faltered, got confused about how all of this should end. After the incredible scope of Mass Effect and stylish cinematic action of Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3 had an identity crisis that it couldn’t quite resolve.

Right from the very beginning things feel off. The opening scenes look… well… ugly. Lighting looks horrible, character faces and animations are terrible, the script feels rough and unfinished and the setup for the whole thing feels somewhat ridiculous. After the amazing quality and attention to details of the previous game this feels unexpected and shocking. Yet, quite quickly the game introduction brings us to the familiar places from the previous games and everything becomes more refined. The locations and scenes look good again, characters, while still often ugly and out of place, are more often found in locations where the surroundings compliment the technological roughness of the game made for aging platforms and things seem to be slowly getting back on track. Yet, from the very start, until the very end, it’s hard to brush off the feeling that something is somewhat wrong about it all.

It all seems to be due to the main plot of the game and how everything is built around it. Mass Effect 1 is a game about a space cop and their small team fixing the wrongs of the galaxy and hunting a rogue ex-space cop while discovering that an alien race is coming to destroy all life in the galaxy. Mass Effect 2 is a game about an ex-space cop going rogue (but in a good way) and building a small crew of exceptional people to stop another alien race that serves those big bad aliens “Reapers” from abducting entire human colonies. Mass Effect 3 is a game about a military person doing military things and also occasionally being a space cop again and winning the war against the Reapers. Who arrive in the opening bringing complete devastation, yet are somehow not victorious months after that by the time the controversial and poorly written ending happens. So you have a game that sometimes feels like you’re playing Mass Effect, but actually wants to be Gears of Halo Duty Field. A game that knows that its strongest points are the meaningful connections with interesting characters you’ve made in this mysterious galaxy that’s fun to explore, but is ready to throw that under a bus at a heartbeat to insert an “oorah!” or a most uninteresting possible turret section.

It’s a good thing then that at least in terms of gameplay Mass Effect 3 understands what it wants to be. Perhaps the otherwise unnecessary addition of multiplayer helped here, but this is the most fun Mass Effect game in terms of the third person shooting. You can run as much as you want (in combat and out of it), you can roll, you go in and out of the cover very fluidly, every character class finally feels truly fun and unique, with skills rebalanced and redesigned to be a joy to use and ammo so plentiful it’s hard to understand why they didn’t just switch back to the heat dissipation from the first game. Shepard can use any weapon, instead of being locked into specific weapon types, though some classes benefit more from specific weapons. And the weapon weight system is introduced that slows down your skills the more/heavier weapons you have on yourself. Skill combos that were somewhat easy to miss in the second game are expanded, so you can, for example, hit a burning enemy with a biotic skill to cause a large explosion for bonus (and area) damage. Out of my 3 characters, in ME1 none were truly fun to play, in 2 only Vanguard was really fun, but in 3 all of them were fun in their own unique ways. And the only notable “downgrade” this part of the game got is the inability to hide your weapon at will (so in action areas you always have your weapon out).

If only this kind of change was as consistently good in other mechanics of the game… Dialogue system, for example, was changed for both better and worse. On one hand, now most of the one-off and not player input requiring dialogue just happens realtime, with no reply wheel, making it both feel more natural and also helping with checking if anyone has anything new to say quicker. Dialogue also almost completely avoids the line looping issue and lines tend to be one-off and unique with no way to go back and ask again. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of dialogue with player input to start with, and what’s left tends to be very simplistic and binary – Shepard replies mostly on their own, with no player input, and when player input is needed it’s less about varied different replies and more about a “Yes/No” or saying the same thing but with one choice counting as Paragon and one as Renegade. I’d assume this was done to better fit the idea that the narrative choices can be completely removed from the game in the options menu, with dialogue always picking replies for the player. This was a novel and curious idea and I was always totally cool with it. But as good as it is in concept, perhaps it wasn’t worth downgrading the dialogues to such a primitive state.

Also the Paragon/Renegade system in ME3 is often incredibly weird, and vague as if the studio wanted to completely remove it and make everything just “Reputation”, but then decided to add back the “morality” because it was in the previous games. These don’t really have any gameplay influence anymore however – the ability to Charm or Intimidate now depends solely on the overall Reputation level. I find the change good and better fitting the world logic, but yet you still have the “morality” points that simply show if your Reputation column has more red or more blue, but otherwise do nothing. With this change, even the idea of “interrupts” introduced in the second game became more or less plain QTEs and the fact that it still clings to the Paragon and Renegade system makes even less sense than before.

It seems like by this point BioWare wanted to lock down what Shepard is more than before. While your Shepard still gets to make several very important choices that will shape the possible futures of the galaxy, they will also say, feel and think a lot of things without your say. It gets really bizarre at times, as some of the moments are clearly there to allow the player freedom similar to the one they had in previous games. You still have an ability to play as a rather unpleasant kind of Shepard, who’d rather see all aliens burn, and pretends to be nice as long as they get what they want to save Earth. Yet, whenever your Shepard was the best friend of everyone, or treated the crew badly, whenever you were welcoming of the united future or were xenophobic throughout the series, whenever you have never been to Earth before, or were an Earthborn hero, the Shepard in Mass Effect 3 will react to the events the same way. They can ensure genocide of several races and shoot people in the back, yet will be devastated at seeing an alien world destroyed by Reapers. They will never accept the suggestion of building the last defense not on Earth, which really should be lost already, but in a less affected system, because they care about Earth – a place that we, as players, have never even visited before and have no meaningful connections to (in the game world). And this Shepard will be infamously devastated by a death of the only child shown in the entire trilogy so much that they will start having nightmares about it every time they try to sleep.

Pretty much all of the game problems are evident in the most celebrated piece of content Mass Effect 3 received after launch – the Citadel DLC. It’s a really over the top, really silly, really “feel good” story about hanging out with all the memorable characters from the trilogy in the most entertaining way possible. You get to learn all characters better, even ones that were seriously underdeveloped before (mostly new characters added in this game), you get to hear truly funny jokes that often poke fun at the series as a whole and you get a to say goodbye to the universe of Mass Effect in a really memorable way. I loved this DLC a lot, even if the action bits tend to get boring, yet couldn’t help but notice how it just doesn’t fit Mass Effect 3 at all. Not just because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, sometimes going into bizarre and reminding of some good bits of Saints Row 4 (which was also a fantastically written goodbye to the series). But because it tries to be what people loved about Mass Effect 2 – stylish fun adventure with amazing characters to hang out with. What most people probably expected Mass Effect 3 to be, just with the threat of Reapers looming even closer. But instead, Mass Effect 3 is a game with a different tone, with a different pace and whatever time you pick to start this DLC – it doesn’t fit the mood of the story and the events at all. It’s as confused about itself as the main game, just more fun to experience and easier to forgive.

But, of course, there are far bigger problems with the game than just lack of defined identity. There’s some actually terrible storytelling. That very first cutscene that looks like butt is also full of confusing decisions like introducing new characters in the way as if the players should know them. A decision that will be constantly repeated in the game. While Mass Effect 1 and 2 had additional franchise materials in other forms of media, like books and comic books and such, you never needed to check any of them, or even read the codex, to get a full experience and understanding of what is happening, with whom and why. Mass Effect 3 just throws things in casually, often without a logical introduction. You start with a new companion who gets a proper introduction only after few hours into the game and then never gets properly developed from there until the Citadel DLC. Some characters are shown with a lot of fanfare as if you should squeal with excitement when you see them even if that’s their first appearance in the series. Even one of the key villains is a stupid looking ninja dude who is given a lot of attention in the cheesiest possible ways, but to know why he’s given so much attention you must use materials out of the game. Materials that, based on most reviews, are mostly trash and not worth the time.

Lots of previously established characters get simplified to much less interesting and nuanced versions of themselves. Some characters are completely excluded, despite their previous involvement, and some have anything important to say only if you romance them, otherwise they’re there as decorations. Hell, some of the characters only appear in the game if they were romanced, despite the romance having nothing to do with their mini-stories. And, of course, this whole thing ends with one of the worst written and put together final acts to be found in an otherwise well made game. While I’ve often found complaints about the ending itself, or some even just about the fact that everything in the end boils down to very silly choices, the problem is far deeper than that. The whole closing act of the game past of the point of no return is terribly paced, terribly put together and the storytelling of the game just continuously degrades to the point where it sounds like a rough overview draft of a scene which somehow made it in the final script. While the game constantly throws in stupid “cinematic” moments before that, including horrible turret sections or idiotic “boss battles”, it is here where it stops trying to cover it with good bits. Events on Earth are rushed, all action is lower in quality and fun than most of the copy and paste levels from the first game and is “spiced up” with story bits awkwardly inserted in the middle. It’s tiring, stupid, badly made and gets progressively worse as it goes on. And ends on such a terribly put together ending section that barely makes any sense unless, as the most popular theory goes, it’s treated as a hallucination. If taken at face value, absolutely nothing in that scene makes sense and it constantly contradicts whatever happens in the same scene a few seconds earlier.

Fixing the ending writing and pacing wouldn’t have fixed the core game issues, of course. To do that, BioWare should’ve started from a different starting point and told the essentially same story, but on a different pace, with a different focus, with the ability to have the Citadel DLC as an event that makes sense in the timeline of ME3. To have Leviathan DLC events as a cool addition to the lore that can actually somehow help you (it’s mostly dismissed until the very end of the game in the released version). To have Omega DLC, not just as a forgettable one-off action packed adventure, but as an additional hub with its own stories. To have Mass Effect 3 feeling like a Mass Effect game, and not a weird spin-off in the same universe. But you know what? Fixing the ending parts of the game would’ve at least not left us with a game that has an ending of such a quality, it might not have an ending at all. Legacy of Kain series final game didn’t solve a lot, but at least it left the players with hope and desire for more. Mass Effect 3 leaves you with shock and disappointment that, for many people, might completely spoil all those amazing hours they had with the game before that.

While we’re on topic of “fixing”, the whole “Galaxy at War” thing in the game, that was shoehorned to promote multiplayer and different mobile apps which aren’t available anymore, is still dumb. And while with the “Extended Cut” free DLC (that attempts to fix the ending by breaking it even further, but also does fix some of the things so should be installed) the Galaxy at War is of less importance, since you can indeed get the best possible results with the story events without ever touching it, it was impossible without the DLC and might be needed for those who were playing as Shepard who skips some quests. As a “fix” you can now simply do the grind for the system in your browser, but it’s still dumb and will go offline someday. An issue that was never addressed at all is that playing on PC in resolutions higher than 1080p without mods is pretty much impossible – all HUD elements are locked at 720p and never scale with the resolution. So all the dialogue options, the quickbar, the subtitles and all the other important information at 4k without mods is tiny and barely visible. Luckily, there are good mods for that, but it is incredible how this latest entry in the series is the only one with such a problem.

Going back to Mass Effect 3 felt weird, especially right after the first two titles. It doesn’t know what to do about itself, it’s fully of ugly looking scenes and characters, it’s full of questionable decisions, it ditches the exploration entirely and cuts down on the player involvement in shaping the story and the main character and a lot of its moments, including all the key points of the story, are terribly written. Yet, it also has some of the best moments and writing in the series, it knows how to look good when it tries, it has a lot of really smart overhauls of the mechanics that mix the best ideas from both previous games and it makes the third person action extremely fun no matter what character class you’re playing as. Out of all the games in the trilogy I was revisiting, this was the only one I’ve completed 3 times in a row (with all my characters) and despite all of the game issues, I was ready for another go.

Mass Effect 3 manages to be both weakest and strongest game in the series. Replaying it is still enjoyable and while this isn’t the end to the trilogy that should’ve been, it’s not a bad game. It has some of the most memorable character-driven moments in videogames (especially with Citadel DLC) that are absolutely worth suffering through some of the worst writing to come from BioWare. Should you go for it? Yeah. If you go for the whole trilogy, no point in stopping now. And if you’re starting with 3 and are interested in the gameplay you can make narration simpler and play it as a really fun third person shooter/action RPG. Just as it was in 2012, the game is a case of a confused and somewhat lost identity. Yet, like in 2012, I like it a lot anyway. Just not as much as the other two games.

P.S. I’ve also made a quick (as quick as I could) video retrospective of the entire trilogy you can watch: