Structurally Mass Effect 2 is built around the concept of recruiting a team to participate in a ‘suicide mission’. Each new character recruited has their own specific quest line, a part of their lives they feel compelled to resolve before committing fully to a task that may lead to their own demise. These loyalty quests become available after a character has been with the player’s crew for a predefined length of time and their successful completion causes that character to be considered ‘loyal’ to the player; unlocking new abilities along with a palette swap costume change.
Personally I find the former a useful addition, and the latter a little difficult to swallow, it does not help that the costumes changes lead to your party looking like the Halloween Goth Power Rangers.
Conceptually these loyalty quests offer some of the most interesting situations in the game, and in some cases their implementation pushes against the traditional boundaries of a BioWare title. Though one loyalty quest in particular seems full of unfulfilled potential. One of the last characters it’s possible to recruit, the asari Justicar Samara, is on the trail of an Ardat-Yakshi, a serial killer who murders her victims during what is for all intents and purposes sexual intercourse. Samara’s loyalty quest involves the player agreeing to act as bait for the Ardat-Yakshi, Morinth. As thematically dubious and clichéd as the concept of a female serial killer who literally uses sex as a weapon is, the concept of the player acting as bait for a dangerous predator is one loaded with possibility.
Entering a club unarmed and alone, the player, as Commander Shepard, is tasked with attracting the interest of Morinth in the hope of being invited back to her apartment where the trap can be sprung before the Shepard herself becomes the next victim.
Unfortunately the dramatic and gameplay potential of such a sequence is quickly undermined, it doesn’t take long to realise that failure is unlikely. A player would need to go out of their way to create a situation where they could fail absolutely. I’m not actually sure failure is a possibility, it would take a concerted effort to select the wrong option and it might simply just delay success even if the player tried.
As rich with potential as the concept of serving as bait to trap a predatory serial killer is, the manner in which it is implemented and its resolution leave it feeling shallow and rushed. It could have become a much more meaningful aspect of Mass Effect 2‘s narrative if it had been possible for Morinth to spot the trap and escape. Shepard had put themselves in mortal peril to help Samara and therefore would have shown they were worthy of Samara’s loyalty, and so the quest line itself would be completed, if not resolved as Morinth would have escaped to kill again.
The lack of impact this loyalty quest has on the rest of the game is more disappointing because Mass Effect 2 already uses a variety of techniques to track changes in the state of the world. News reports, emails, and the reactions of characters help to keep the player informed of the consequences of their actions; the structure is already in place for the player to hear about other murders committed by Morinth after escaping the player’s trap. The possibility of Morinth surviving her encounter with Samara and Shepard could also be carried through into Mass Effect 3 adding to the already strong sense of investment players have in Shepard through the continuity of choices made throughout Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.
A founding principle of the design of Mass Effect 2 seems to be the concept that the player’s choices must be the final deciding factor in any situation. Resolution of a quest is not about a player’s ability but about which choice the player makes: Paragon or Renegade. I can understand why this is desirable for the main quest, I can’t honestly condemn anything that keeps people playing when they might otherwise abandon a game unfinished. However Samara’s loyalty quest is optional, allowing the player to fail and yet continue with the main quest seems to have more dramatic potential than simply required the player to select between the standard Paragon and Renegade options once again.
Several years ago I played the FMV adventure game Spycraft: The Great Game, despite the obvious flaws of such a format there was at least one specific incident that stays with me. During the final few hours of the game, the player is presented with what appears to be a side quest (At the time I my understanding of game design wasn’t well formed enough for me to realise that the inherent nature of FMV games means very few non-essential elements can be included) to locate and recover a stolen nuclear warhead due to be traded to a terrorist organisation.
There are several parts to this side quest: the player is required to capture an arms dealer; obtain the information necessary to persuade him to divulge the location of the trade (Including information about the names and location of his family); and finally to attend the trade and either through force or guile recover the nuclear warhead. At each of these stages it’s possible to fail, and though you are reprimanded for your inability to recover the warhead, the main plot continues and you are told that another team will be sent in to recover the warhead. The assumption is that this mission was secondary to the main plot which involves the assassination of the President of the United States, and that failure of the player’s part is problematic but that eventually the warhead will be recovered by other means.
However this assumption is one that comes back to haunt the player at the end of the game regardless of how the player resolves the main quest; which in a similar fashion to Mass Effect 2 comes down to a binary choice. If the player has failed to recover the warhead, during the closing sequence a news report from outside the United States Capitol is interrupted when a nuclear device is detonated in Washington D.C. dramatically undercutting whatever success the player may have felt upon resolving the main assassination plot.
The consequences of failing to trap Morinth do not need to be as abrupt, but certainly it could be powerful to hear reports of further victims, and her presence as an active force in the galaxy could carry forward into a dramatic confrontation in Mass Effect 3.
There is narrative and ludic power in requiring players to live with the consequences of their actions, it seems a waste for this potential to go unfulfilled. Will Wright has said, justifiably, that video games can actually make players feel guilty, and surely fundamental to that sense of guilt is having to live with your mistakes.
7 replies on “Living with your mistakes.”
Have you seen the alternate “Renegade” resolution to Samara’s loyalty quest, where you secretly recruit Morinth on your team? She can even kill you on your ship.
Slightly off-topic but I never really understood the final mission to be a “suicide mission”. I read a spoiler that said your actions determine whether they live or die. I was confident enough in my ability as a player understanding the mindset of the designers that I never felt like I would lose anyone. And sure enough they all lived.
Did you know your decisions at that point could result in your teammates dying? I think it would have been more powerful if the idea of mortality existed throughout the game. I should have been making life or death decisions alongside paragon or renegade the entire time. The Samara loyalty mission is actually what I wanted to see more of. She can die! I want all my characters to be able to die on their loyalty missions. If it’s important to them they should be risking their lives and I should be given the opportunity to feel guilt/regret for letting them get killed.
The character dialogue where they ask if we can go on the loyalty side mission was excruciating every single time. Of COURSE we’re doing it–it’s a side mission with huge rewards and the game has shown us we can take as long as we need to get prepared. Now, if there was actually a decent chance they would die during this loyalty mission I would be more tempted to say no. I would have to think about it like it was an actual, god forbid, meaningful choice.
This reminds me of the debate Manveer and Clint had a while back regarding ethical decision making.
I worry that if a player failed your hypothetical Morinth mission, they would just reload rather than dealing with the consequences, thereby missing out on any narrative and ludic ramifications.
It is entirely possible for Morinth to spot the trap, offer to go get drinks, and then escape. I only came upon this in the playthrough when I was deliberately skipping dialog and never choosing blue/red dialog options. If you never find out that Morinth likes Expel 10 (by chatting with the guy at the door), Hallex (by chatting with her last victim’s mom), or Forta (by reading the optional entries of the last victim’s diary), you are denied dialog options that would further the conversation with Morinth, and have to talk your way out of things by relying on a high Paragon or Renegade score.
Also, as has already been pointed out here, you can indeed recruit Morinth yourself, even as a high-Paragon character. To some extent, I could see why Shepard would choose not to keep Samara around; after all, further conversation will reveal that she even tried to kill Nihilus, a Spectre from the first game, because she deemed one of his actions “unlawful” (and any somewhat-Renegade Shepard will probably do something just as bad at some point or another). It’s very hard for me to wrap my brain around recruiting a psychic serial killer rapist, however, and fans around the official Mass Effect forums appear to feel likewise in most cases.
Damn, personally I am totally for recruiting a psychic serial killer rapist but I got sucked through the use-case vortex that led me to have her destroyed.
@Michel: I was never entirely sold on the concept of it being a “suicide mission” though I was willing to accept the premise, even if the ending didn’t entirely justify it. I wish the sense of danger and risk had been more prevalent, I think being able to save everybody was a mistake and it should have been impossible to get everybody out alive. The first Mass Effect had a clear example of the way to do this, on Virmire, where it was necessary to choose which character would die.
@Scott: I was thinking about that while I was writing, that’s why I felt it would make sense for the player to have succeeded in gaining Samara’s loyalty even if Morinth escaped, as that would hopefully discourage a desire to replay until they could “get it right”. I’m much more interested in a plurality of choices than in a singular optimal solution. That’s also why I feel at least one character should have died at the end of the game, because the knowledge that it was impossible to save everybody might have encouraged players away from repeatedly attempting the ending until everybody lived.
With the loyalty quests in particular the concept of failure is a difficult one; often it’s all but impossible to fail the explicitly stated objectives though you can fail the contextual objective of gaining a particular character’s loyalty. Even for those few that offer the possibility for failure, actual failure would require an active attempt to do so. The game is constantly reinforcing the idea that players should be making Paragon or Renegade choices so when offered the option to do both, as occurs frequently during the conversation with Morinth, it would take a particularly contrary player to avoid using either of them.
The same is true of the final mission itself, what should be the prime example of dealing with the consequences of your actions is nullified by the presentation. It’s clear from the moment you are first given the opportunity to upgrade your ship that each upgrade is going to be important and so not pursuing all of them makes little sense. When it comes to deciding which characters should perform each task the character descriptions are written in such a way that often the optimal character is clear, and even if that’s only a subjective assessment, it’s utterly illogical given the game’s structure for any player to select a party member who wasn’t loyal for a specific task.
@scott juster
“I worry that if a player failed your hypothetical Morinth mission, they would just reload rather than dealing with the consequences, thereby missing out on any narrative and ludic ramifications”
No gamer cares about this kind of crap, only the fringe group of gamers do, and I mean FRINGE. I always go to “maximize” the best options, and only on alternative playthroughs (like being renegade) do I ever try to go out of my way to get everyone killed. I like to have my “good guy” game and by “bad guy game”
It still comes down to players maximizing and minimizing, you forget that in a video game – the player is god, he has control, the “consequences” for moral actions are irrelevant since this is a game and you can reload your savegame or try again, else there would be whining.
How much whining was there over Aeris death in Final fantasy 7? Players talked about rumors of being able to bring her back. Gamers do not want their favorite characters to die they will always maximize the “right choice” and see it coming a mile away on one playthrough and then do the evil guy thing the next.