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Eh. I don't intend to challenge your feelings / say that your enjoyment was in any way wrong, but I feel ME1's writing was in many respects emblematic of the problems the trilogy had a hole, which is to say a clear lack of planning.
In RPGs like Mass Effect, the 'critical path' refers to the series of must-make choices that the player cannot avoid. Sidequest choices may never be seen if you don't take a side quest, but you can't complete the main story and reach the sequel without the critical path. And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
And there was no plan- as seen in how ME2 picked up these choices- for what would follow if you actually killed someone (in several contexts, literally no content vis-a-vis a cameo of the surviving person), even as at the same time anyone who could be killed could no longer be relevant to the plot. As soon as you had the option to kill Wrex, every story arc Wrex could touch if he survived had to be carried forward if he was dead (because game development resources are limited if you weren't the Witcher 2 of the era), and this applied to everyone and everything. Later ME started to learn that not all choices needed to kill people off to suggest a difference- ME Andromeda actually had a good dynamic for its planets, like what sort of hive and scum and villainy would be the criminal underworld's dominant player- but from the start, ME1 didn't know how to build a choice structure to provide meaningful content contrasts. Especially with a penchant for choices too big to mutually co-exist as narrative drivers: the hyper-expansive rachni could only matter as much as they could exist in a narrative where they didn't exist at all, while the saved Council and the all-Human council could only lead to the same general location. No understanding that bigger choices aren't better.
Nor did it really understand how to do an ideology-morality system. Paragon was internally consistent in ME1- just defer to the Council when it's not literally the end of galactic civilization- but Renegade was just a mess. It couldn't decide whether it was human-first, Council-skeptic, xenophobic, utilitarian, sociopathic, or if it could tell a difference between them all. ME2 got even worse, as it would have the same argument positions flip sides of the morality wheel in the same conversation, but ME1 was the one to get to define a morality curve, and it couldn't.
I do agree that the writing strictly went downhill immediately after- the second game spent about a third of the trilogy introducing or reintroducing a character cast who could be dead by the end of it (thus guaranteeing they couldn't be plot-carrying characters for a game that didn't move forward the meta-plot)- and the ending of the trilogy is practically a case study for why you need to know how your story will end from the start so that you can work towards it.
Black sheep opinion as it is, but from a writing perspective my favorite games of the series were not quite ME3- which aside from the ending was actually quite solid as an apocalypse story- but actually Andromeda. While I fully accept and respect people who didn't like Andromeda's choice of tone for being campy, and the mechanical issues in presentation were real, the writing was trying to be both a deliberate sort of campy and a 'new introduction' spiritual reboot, and I honestly thought it worked better at that than ME1 did. There was enough deviations so that it was a spiritual reboot rather than a clone, even as it wrote itself out of the corner that the ME trilogy painted itself into with choices too big to ever properly reflect. Andromeda was much more judicious with its choices, leaning more on emotional relevance than 'massive geopolitical differences'- the sort of thing like which person is the hero-figure to a nation, rather than whether the nation would die or not- and these were things that were much better set up for being reflected in a sequel than the ME trilogy did. As far as writing for a trilogy, it was much better founded.
But, alas, it seems the next one will be in the Milky Way.
I can't stand Sanderson's work, for, well a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that he has really bought into the idea that culture is arbitrary and I am really bought into the idea that culture is contingent and so whenever he brings up some arbitrary cultural practice it brutally murders any interest I might have had in the setting. I can very easily imagine people who do not care about this at all, and hate Sanderson for totally different reasons.
Talking about writing being good or bad is really weird because people want and enjoy different things, and people are sucked out of a story for different reasons. You seem to be very fixated on the extent to which the story was well planned to function as a trilogy, where as that rates pretty low on the totem pole for me. I assume this is why you do not actually talk about the companions or world-building, when those are the two things @urquan brought up specifically as being their favorite parts (I agree with them). If I had to pick between a story that had perfect planning to create an overarching narrative structure for a trilogy, or a book with good characters, it is not even close. They are not even playing the same game. I would burn the narrative structure book just to read the good characters book for the handful of minutes that the fire burned.
Moving on,
Mass Effect is a military sci-fi story about a judge dread spy, hunting down a rogue judge dread spy. I feel like within that milieu it is not necessarily an indication of bad writing if the most pivotal scenes are situations where the main character has to make life and death choices. I actually don't really see what ideals of good writing this is supposed to be violating even outside of the military sci-fi genre.
You are obviously correct that there was no plan(or at least not a good one), and that between poor planning, clumsy execution, and format related limitations, the overarching narrative structure as a whole is not good. However I think you go too far when you say this is all locked in by ME1. Kaiden or Ashley die, and it sticks with that. They absolutely could have de-emphasized Wrex's importance to the wider galaxy while simply keeping him as a companion, or not, this would not have been difficult. They could have totally cut the side mission with the Rachni if you killed the queen in ME1. The whole mission is a complete stand alone that takes like 30 minutes. The reasons the Mass Effect trilogy is so disappointing (at least for me) is that it could have easily been better.
Paragon and Renegade get way too much hate. My Tav is 99% head cannon, because even though I have seven responses to every question there is no consistent characterization to any of them. Sometimes I can joke, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can be a hero paladin, sometimes I am a craven coward shuddering in fear (thanks cutscene). It turns out something like 75%+ of people just want to play some variation of Paragon, in literally every single-player RPG, lean into that and you can make better stories.
I agree on ME3, I like it and I think it gets too much hate because of the ending.
I feel like Andromeda has pretty glaring writing problems, the story constantly strains credulity because the world-building totally fails to support the narrative they wanted to tell. A quick breakdown.
There is no reason for you to be operating as a small team. There is no reason for you to ever even step foot on a planet outside of the Ancient Vaults, because your ability to manipulate vault technology is the only thing that is actually special about you. If you do step foot on a planet, there is no reason for you to do so without a shuttle to ferry you from place to place. There is no reason for 2/5ths of a 500,000 person colony mission where 80% of the population is still in cryo-sleep to terraform multiple planets, when they could and should be focusing their efforts on one for at least the next hundred years. The whole setup is horrible for a first person shooter single-player RPG. The vault tech stuff should all be long term research projects. Clearing out the Kett and securing objectives should all be large squad military actions. Honestly, the world-building and setup for Andromeda is wildly more compatible with a base builder game, you could make a reasonable Andromeda mod for Rim world and it might actually be good.
Culture is both arbitrary and contingent. It seeks plateaus of local minima. Which plateau you happen to be on is historically contingent, but can be otherwise arbitrary relative to other disconnected plateaus. And where exactly you sit in the plateau is arbitrary. The rest is contingent.
I can't speak for Sanderson's work though. I take it he builds cultures with significantly less environmentally contingent structures than you find realistic.
I don't understand most of your comment, I am not a Less Wrong reader.
To try to explain what I said, imagine a person who says that men wearing pants is 'arbitrary'. I think that person is trying to communicate that men wearing pants is random, without underlying reason or cause. I think that person is wrong.
So, I wouldn't go with "Men wearing pants" as an explanatory example, I would go with something more absolutely limiting, such as the state of the art of our food crops.
Corn is a great crop at least partially because we chose to spend thousands of generations selectively breeding. There was an original reason why corn was chosen over other available crops at the time- that's the historical contingency, and then there's the modern fact that corn is a better crop than other similar plants that we never modified. But- Some of those plants might be able to produce better outcomes- might have produced better outcomes- had we known about them and chosen them all those epochs ago when we chose corn.
Our Plateau here is the different species of corn. They are different, but many are all relatively similar. You can take your pick of corn based dishes, choose different species of corn to make different varieties of those dishes, and you can selectively breed our current corn to get other, slightly different varieties of corn. We are in a sense, married to these historical choices now. Not to a single point, a single species of corn, but to the general area of the state of the art of corn that we currently occupy. A 'plateau' of viability.
But purely hypothetically, there may well be a viable food crop 100k generations down the line of, say, parsely. If we run into a civilization that bred parsely into a different supercrop, that would be a different plateau. But to get to the world where we are using that supercrop from this world, would be a 100k generation ordeal. Similarly, to those in that world, it would be an ordeal to produce our supercorn.
So this is the sense in which the plateau is arbitrary. There are other hypothetical stable ways of life out there. But we are stuck on a metaphorical island. Cultural Nomadism could get us to these 'islands' of culture, but the journey may be hard and costly and uncertain, and in many cases is inordinately expensive.
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I don't have anything approaching a retort, just a smile and appreciation.
Yes, I do value the trilogy structure and design more than the worldbuilding (in part because worldbuilding is easy to find, but good series are hard). I find that good story structure is indicative of good writing more than a good character dynamic, but that's because I've seen far too many movies or shows with an interesting premise fall apart for lack of planning after winging it. Good character writing can exist regardless, but good narrative design will elevate. (I will stand by that Mordin's Tuchanka arc was one of the best moments of the series, as it was simultaneously against part of his theme in ME2 but also a natural progression of his obvious guilt, and a natural integration into how to recruit allies into the war.)
I also agree that ME2 could have absolutely evaded the pitfalls ME1 set up for lack of planning. I personally view them as one and the same and that the onus is on ME1 to write for the sake of the sequel if it was designed as a trilogy to start, but the nature of that is that nothing required tethering the sequels to a trilogy character arc. Rather, a personal favorite proposal I once read was one that every ME game in the trilogy have a separate focus character: Commander Shepard in ME1 as the 'public face' of Humanity for what it does as a galactic hero, but then PC!Jacob Taylor could have been the ME2 player character for a 'what Humanity is in the dark' thematic contrast, while not!Vega in ME3 could have been the Rising War Hero for the Reaper War. Each player character an independent character with reflections observing differences rather than 'hey, remember me Shepard?!' cameos, and in each game the previous player character is their own character characterized by the key decisions of the previous game.
I don't disagree with your criticisms of Andromeda on a lore-technical level, but I just smile and wave vaguely to the deliberately campiness of what was, at heart, a sort of first contact story. When comedy is a deliberate goal, I can overlook a lot of functional-efficiency things, and I suppose I just accept that as part of the buy-in.
(If I wanted to pick at realism, the role of Spectre as a shooting-game protagonist also doesn't make sense as presented in the trilogy. Council Space doesn't need it when legal violence is so readily available, and non-Council space doesn't respect it. Spectre status Soldiers wouldn't be useful in a setting where legally-sanctioned blackops are everywhere and legal violence is so common- the real benefitors of Spectre status would be a Volus tax-accountant who can use the status to cut through bureaucratic red tape to unroot financial crimes threatening the galactic economy, and using that Spectre status to keep a band of mercenaries as his muscle.)
(Give me biotic god pencile pusher, doom of tax evaders and counterfeit e-zero smugglers!)
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