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Post by Shinobu on Jun 30, 2020 16:36:53 GMT
I had not heard about ludonarrative dissonance before today, when this article from Polygon popped up. It focuses on The Last of Us 2, but gives a good overview of the topic and is an interesting read.
Basically, ludonarrative dissonance is the disconnect between the plot of the game (narrative) and the gameplay itself ("ludo" apparently means "play" in Latin). The core gameplay in many games is "shoot people, it's fun!" while the story centers around the protagonist being a hero who isn't acknowledged to be a psychopathic mass murderer. An example used in the article is the Uncharted franchise, where funny and charming Nathan Drake nonchalantly guns down hundreds of people with zero consequences (psychological or legal).
Reading the article crystallized something that had been bothering me about Andromeda from the start. I think the OT did a better job of justifying the shooty bits than Andromeda did.
Firstly, the OT understood that most gamers feel okay about killing zombies, N*zis, robots and bugs and accordingly gave us Reapers, Cerberus, Geth and Collectors. Cerberus and the Collectors were further dehumanized by the alterations made by the Reapers. ("No soul, replaced by tech. Whatever they were, gone forever." as Mordin said.) We did spend some time killing mercenaries and pirates, but most of the game time was spent on the main four factions. Secondly, as a Spectre, Shepard basically had a license to kill with impunity. In ME3, some nod to the psychological toll all of the killing was having on Shepard was made. ("There's only so much fight in a person. Only so much death you can take before...") Finally, even if Shepard wanted to stop killing, the narrative didn't allow it because the fate of the galaxy was literally at stake. (Cue the infamous "We fight or we die" line.)
In contrast, in Andromeda we are mostly killing Kett, Roekaar, Remnant and ex-Initiative members. These factions are not dehumanized enough for me personally to feel okay about slaughtering them wholesale, and the narrative itself argues against the morality and utility of killing them. During the mission to rescue the Moshae we find out that the Kett are actually genetically altered and brainwashed Angara prisoners. Although Lexi doubts they can be reverted, there is no definitive statement like Mordin's that it is impossible. The Roekaar are seen to be misguided and redeemable during Jaal's loyalty mission. The Remnant aren't aggressive murder-bots like the Geth, but are peaceful (armed) Roombas that are just trying to keep the place tidy while the Master is away. On Elaaaden, Lexi finds out the former Initiative members are suffering from cryo-psychosis, which she then immediately synthesizes a treatment for. After this point, shooting them feels like I'm murdering the mentally ill when it's the Initiative's fault they are unstable in the first place. To top it off, killing outcasts makes zero sense narratively speaking if the Initiative wants to keep a large enough genetic pool to make colonizing Heleus possible. Each species has approximately 20K colonists and can't afford to lose many because there are no replacements coming. (Yes, the human race went through a bottleneck of about 14K during our evolution and we did okay, but one pandemic could wipe the Initiative out even without adding Ryder's kill count to the problem.) Ryder is a Pathfinder, not a Spectre, and as such should not be legally immune for killing, nor should s/he or the crew be psychologically immune to it. Jaal cries once, but then goes happily back to sniping Kett.
I think many of the narrative choices in Andromeda ("They are us") were done intentionally to try to make the game more nuanced and morally gray than the OT, but the unintended side effect was increasing the ludonarrative dissonance to an unsupportable level. The second time I played the game, I drove past all of the Kett jumping out of shuttles, non-vault Remnant sites, and outcast firefights without stopping, because engaging them in combat felt pointless and immoral. It increased my enjoyment of the game quite a bit.
To be clear, I liked Andromeda and hope for a sequel. I am not hating on the game. However, I feel that Andromeda 2 needs to better align the story and the gameplay. I'm all for exploring "no one is really bad" if the game gives me the option of not killing them. Shepard was given nonlethal gas grenades on Feros. I think it would be interesting if Ryder had the task of distributing Lexi's antipsychotic on Kadara. What would s/he do if a pirate band refuses to take the medication -- kill them, incapacitate them and administer the drug without their consent, or find some way to persuade them? What if the treated groups get wiped out by the untreated groups if Ryder doesn't get everyone treated fast enough? Would s/he cut corners to save lives? What if taking the medication reduces Ryder's ability to kill efficiently -- does s/he take it? Why can't Ryder reprogram or stun the Remnant instead of destroying all that valuable tech? Then Ryder has to protect this limited resource from treasure hunters that just want to loot the vaults. What if the Angara scientists (not the Initiative, please) find a way to reverse the transformation of the Kett? This could be an opportunity to introduce stealth to the game, where Ryder has to neutralize a Kett commander either through assassination or kidnapping and deprogramming. Or maybe another faction that really deserves being murder hobo'd shows up. What if the Jardaan return and turn out to be Jardaan-supremacists that want to wipe Heleus clean and start over, forcing the Kett, Angara and Initiative to cooperate in order to stop them?
Andromeda had some of the best combat gameplay in the franchise. It really needs a better justification for engaging in it.
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Post by Unicephalon 40-D on Jun 30, 2020 16:49:21 GMT
Same here and also in the beginning on insanity one doesnt want to go near enemies.
Andromeda has easily the best combat gameplay in the franchise.
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Post by Serza on Jun 30, 2020 23:14:37 GMT
Yeah, this was always the case.
Ryder and squad never killed more than a few dozen Initiative people, in my opinion - well, never in terms of the kills recognized by narrative.
As for Kett, Roekaar and Remnant, same thing. There simply wasn't a whole lot of killing done when you compare narrative and gameplay.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 1, 2020 5:41:32 GMT
Yeah, this was always the case. Ryder and squad never killed more than a few dozen Initiative people, in my opinion - well, never in terms of the kills recognized by narrative. As for Kett, Roekaar and Remnant, same thing. There simply wasn't a whole lot of killing done when you compare narrative and gameplay. I just checked the stats for my first completionist playthrough and it says the squad (I guess that includes Ryder?) killed 5004 enemies, ~1500 of which were outlaws. I think even sticking with just the main missions and loyalty missions there would be at least a few hundred of each faction killed.
I don't need Ryder to be wracked with guilt or anything, but if the game is going to tell us that the people we are fighting are innocent, it should give us the option of not killing them during main missions. Shepard was able to kill or spare the Geth during Legion's loyalty mission, for example.
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Post by AnDromedary on Jul 1, 2020 20:41:22 GMT
Well, in general, they fired first.  Honestly though, I don't think Andromeda is the worst game out there in terms of ludonarrative dissonance. (If you are wondering which one is the worst, that the Tomb Raider reboot btw.  ). I don't have any trouble killing Remnant (that's just dismantling robots) and Kett (who we are effectively at war with). So I can even justify raiding their outposts and landing sites in the open world When it comes to Roekaar it depends on the situation but since really, they do fire first (obviously due to game mechanics but still), I just asume that they are raging fanatics and I have every right to defend myself. The trickiest ones are probably the outlaws because those guys have mostly just been screwed over anyway, so you gotta go with the carzy murderer theorem on that one. I usually leave outlaws and Roekaar alone unless I have to fight them for a quest. But honestly, to me, Andromeda has much more egregious lore problems then a few random enemies I get to fight. So overall ludonarrative dissonance is not really an issue I associate with this game.
EDIT: Oh, one mission in particular comes to mind where this actually was an issue. Peebee's LM on the volcano planet. I always thought that mission and the motivations for killing dozens of people during this mission were extremely far fetched. The violence there was in no realation at all to the petty conflict between Peebee and her rival asari chick there. I always felt like Ryder should have at the very least commented on this at some point or ideally should have had the option to downright refuse to start killing over this juvenile squabble.
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Post by Gileadan on Jul 2, 2020 4:56:17 GMT
I think the worst bit of Andromeda's ludonarrative dissonance is how the Ryder twins talk and act like inexperienced teenagers outside of combat and then play like N7s once the bullets start flying. It's not the number and type of people they kill, it's the expertise with which they do it despite supposedly being young greenhorns.
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Post by Sanunes on Jul 3, 2020 5:46:46 GMT
Its a common problem in all video games that expect to be part of a larger audience of players. The smaller games that try to aim for something that doesn't have a lot of killing are normally marginalized by a large swath of gaming cultures such as the "walking simulators". When players are willing to accept that a good game might only be 10 hours long and not be non-stop action you will see changes I think.
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Post by Pounce de León on Jul 3, 2020 7:07:44 GMT
I remember myself playing a lot of ME3MP - because it was fun. I found myself craving for more when playing the story. Is it a good thing to load the story side with more and more combat? Probably not. The MP mode was perfect for that. Compared to MEA the trilogy had less combat in a more meaningful employment. Is the amount of combat too much in MEA? Not neccessarily - but the pacing in between was. The maps just didnt offer enough diverse points of interest like a Bethesda world e.g. It's harder to make an interesting world in scifi when you can't recreate historical sites and use well-known references. Fallout is perfect for building worlds.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 5, 2020 3:31:02 GMT
Well, in general, they fired first. Honestly though, I don't think Andromeda is the worst game out there in terms of ludonarrative dissonance. (If you are wondering which one is the worst, that the Tomb Raider reboot btw. ). I don't have any trouble killing Remnant (that's just dismantling robots) and Kett (who we are effectively at war with). So I can even justify raiding their outposts and landing sites in the open world When it comes to Roekaar it depends on the situation but since really, they do fire first (obviously due to game mechanics but still), I just asume that they are raging fanatics and I have every right to defend myself. The trickiest ones are probably the outlaws because those guys have mostly just been screwed over anyway, so you gotta go with the carzy murderer theorem on that one. I usually leave outlaws and Roekaar alone unless I have to fight them for a quest. But honestly, to me, Andromeda has much more egregious lore problems then a few random enemies I get to fight. So overall ludonarrative dissonance is not really an issue I associate with this game.
EDIT: Oh, one mission in particular comes to mind where this actually was an issue. Peebee's LM on the volcano planet. I always thought that mission and the motivations for killing dozens of people during this mission were extremely far fetched. The violence there was in no realation at all to the petty conflict between Peebee and her rival asari chick there. I always felt like Ryder should have at the very least commented on this at some point or ideally should have had the option to downright refuse to start killing over this juvenile squabble.
It was also weird that at the end of PeeBee's loyalty mission everyone happily jumped into a shuttle together after having tried to murder each other for an hour.
The game really seemed to be pushing "it's ok to kill outlaws" as well. While driving on Kadara, SAM comments on a firefight Ryder is driving past with something along the lines of "these people aren't associated with either the Collective or Outcasts; they are likely criminal class." I wanted to say "First, if they're not associated with either group of asshats they are obviously persons of taste and refinement, and I want to make friends with them. Second, why are you trying to make me murder people, SAM? Is this that AI uprising I've been hearing about? Also, since when is extrajudicial killing of criminals a thing?"
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 5, 2020 3:46:05 GMT
I think the worst bit of Andromeda's ludonarrative dissonance is how the Ryder twins talk and act like inexperienced teenagers outside of combat and then play like N7s once the bullets start flying. It's not the number and type of people they kill, it's the expertise with which they do it despite supposedly being young greenhorns. This didn't bother me so much since they had some training from Alec, but it might have been nice to acknowledge that they hadn't actually killed anyone before. The Ryders progressed similar to other RPG protagonists -- at least they didn't start out killing giant rats/spiders in a basement like every fantasy protagonist since the beginning of time. I think Bioware brought home how much the protagonist had developed by putting us in the shoes of the twin -- trying to kill kett with one grenade and a phalanx pistol with minimal points in skills was eye opening after getting used to mowing them down as the Pathfinder.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 5, 2020 4:24:59 GMT
Its a common problem in all video games that expect to be part of a larger audience of players. The smaller games that try to aim for something that doesn't have a lot of killing are normally marginalized by a large swath of gaming cultures such as the "walking simulators". When players are willing to accept that a good game might only be 10 hours long and not be non-stop action you will see changes I think. Yeah, it seems as though the main ways of aligning the story and gameplay are:
1) Have a story without much violence and don't have violence be part of gameplay -- as you said this tends to be the indie game route, for example Disco Elysium, although some popular games of the past like The Secret of Monkey Island did well with this formula. Since Mass Effect has up until this point been an action/RPG hybrid it's unlikely Bioware would go this route for the franchise.
2) Have killing be part of the narrative, but make sure the enemies "really deserve it" without making the player engage in too much introspection. I think the OT did this fairly well, especially since the linear gameplay made each fight work in the context of the story instead of being some random encounter.
3) Have the narrative actually be about killing. It sounds as though TLOU 2 went this route. I think to do this justice the story would just be way too dark for Mass Effect. I play mostly for fun, so I don't really want a Ryder with PTSD.
4) I guess the route I'm advocating for is to give the player a narratively acknowledged choice whether or not to kill, not just by allowing me, the player, to ignore parts of the game I find morally questionable. OT examples include killing/sparing Saleon, Sidonis, Feros colonists, Shiala, Rana Thanoptis, Geth heretics, Geth/Quarian fleets.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 5, 2020 4:32:04 GMT
I remember myself playing a lot of ME3MP - because it was fun. I found myself craving for more when playing the story. Is it a good thing to load the story side with more and more combat? Probably not. The MP mode was perfect for that. Compared to MEA the trilogy had less combat in a more meaningful employment. Is the amount of combat too much in MEA? Not neccessarily - but the pacing in between was. The maps just didnt offer enough diverse points of interest like a Bethesda world e.g. It's harder to make an interesting world in scifi when you can't recreate historical sites and use well-known references. Fallout is perfect for building worlds. Quoted for truth.
Going the open world route made the problem bigger, I think, because all that space needs to be crammed with stuff to do and so we get filler combat to go with filler collectibles and filler tasks. None of it really advances the story and just serves to pad the game time. I really enjoyed the game more when I lost my completionist tendencies and skipped everything I didn't find fun (crafting, mining, tasks, random encounters). I pretty much played Andromeda the second time as a 30 hour story focused game instead of a 120 hour open world resource collection simulator and found it so much more enjoyable. Instead of juicy story interspersed with long interludes of shooting dudes to get worthless sludge packs and sprouted seed vials it was all story all the time. Making the game story focused also reduces the kill count from ridiculous to mildly implausible, which decreases the "ludonarrative dissonance" problem. This is another way the OT had an advantage over Andromeda.
As you said, I wish the franchise would go back to 30 hour high impact story games with associated MP to act as the time sink/money generator a la ME3. (I'm working on my second and third manifests in ME3MP currently -- I think I've got over 1500 hours in it.) The open world stuff in DAI and MEA just made everything less meaningful, IMO, and had the unfortunate effect of making the game feel boring at times.
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Post by Unicephalon 40-D on Jul 5, 2020 7:43:14 GMT
As you said, I wish the franchise would go back to 30 hour high impact story games with associated MP to act as the time sink/money generator a la ME3. (I'm working on my second and third manifests in ME3MP currently -- I think I've got over 1500 hours in it.) The open world stuff in DAI and MEA just made everything less meaningful, IMO, and had the unfortunate effect of making the game feel boring at times. I dont remember me3mp being fun at all, more like a chore even with people from here playing with me, but also would not like to have such cramped corridors like in 2 and 3 all the time. I liked the open world in both DAI and MEA but both had places that we could've skipped a bit, though many of them had actually meaningful side missions that builds the world for me. So as usual I'm advocating hybrid solution, what ever that is  I mean there are multiple ways it could be done.
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Post by Gileadan on Jul 5, 2020 8:17:22 GMT
I think the worst bit of Andromeda's ludonarrative dissonance is how the Ryder twins talk and act like inexperienced teenagers outside of combat and then play like N7s once the bullets start flying. It's not the number and type of people they kill, it's the expertise with which they do it despite supposedly being young greenhorns. This didn't bother me so much since they had some training from Alec, but it might have been nice to acknowledge that they hadn't actually killed anyone before. The Ryders progressed similar to other RPG protagonists -- at least they didn't start out killing giant rats/spiders in a basement like every fantasy protagonist since the beginning of time. I think Bioware brought home how much the protagonist had developed by putting us in the shoes of the twin -- trying to kill kett with one grenade and a phalanx pistol with minimal points in skills was eye opening after getting used to mowing them down as the Pathfinder. I thought the hard time the Pathfinder's twin had fighting the Kett with that Phalanx pistol were due to the debilitation they suffered from the damaged cryopod, not a general lack of experience in gunfights. But yes, it would have been nice to show that the Ryders never actually killed anyone before... especially not a bunch of never before encountered aliens, who for all they knew could be part of some galaxy spanning empire which might immediately become aware of their deaths and send in a warship to blow up the Nexus in return. It should be a terrifying thought. But it apparently isn't - just another part of the dissonance, between the characters and the story this time, not story and gameplay. I found Andromeda to be full of dissonance like that.
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Post by Serza on Jul 5, 2020 9:56:31 GMT
Honestly though, I don't think Andromeda is the worst game out there in terms of ludonarrative dissonance. (If you are wondering which one is the worst, that the Tomb Raider reboot btw. ).
Oh, hell yes.
Lara kills the first guy, has a bit of a breakdown. When she climbs up a ladder, she has to kill two more, and you can tell from her expression, when she gets in there she is shocked, scared and going on instinct. Add to that the nice simple detail that at that precise part of the game, your crosshairs shake (just like Lara's hands probably did). She's completely fucked up at that point.
As you said, she never actually kills the amount she does for gameplay, but she kills enough that by the time she arrives at the bridge below the radio tower, she is fucked up enough to shout at them to "come get her"
If you just go along with the gameplay kill number, you don't bat an eye. If you consider the dissonance and think about it a little bit, it becomes extremely scary, because you just witnessed a young woman go through something so fucked up she doesn't think twice about killing people. She just had to, them or her - shit, but might as well be them.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 7, 2020 23:05:45 GMT
I think my first brush with the disconnect between gameplay and narrative was my kid's Pokemon game. Me: So you are capturing wild creatures that are minding their own business, keeping them in cramped quarters with no sunlight, and forcing them to fight to the death for you in a kind of monster pit fight? Kid: Mom! They're not dying, they're *fainting*. Me: Oh, well, I guess that makes everything okay?  So I guess the 6th route Mass Effect could go is the Pokemon route where we shoot everyone a lot but they've actually just fainted. |
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Post by Buckeldemon on Jul 8, 2020 0:02:04 GMT
I think my first brush with the disconnect between gameplay and narrative was my kid's Pokemon game. Me: So you are capturing wild creatures that are minding their own business, keeping them in cramped quarters with no sunlight, and forcing them to fight to the death for you in a kind of monster pit fight? Kid: Mom! They're not dying, they're *fainting*. Me: Oh, well, I guess that makes everything okay?  So I guess the 6th route Mass Effect could go is the Pokemon route where we shoot everyone a lot but they've actually just fainted.  Don't forget that all these kids never seem to attend school and hang around on the roads, challenging each other to these pit fights to determine who gets to keep the others' pocket money. Besides, the 1. Generation games do have a death case: a Marowak mama who died defending her young from Team Rocket and serves as a literal spiritual roadblock. . In the same area (pet graveyard in a tower), there's also one of the obligatory fight with the players' rival. His team at this point is short one perculiar 'mon (a Radicate) compared to the last encounter, which took place on a ship that is basically a point-of-no-return dungeon for the player. There's a quite popular creepy fan theory out there, that the rival could not get aid for his 'mon quickly enough after it was defeated, so it passed away and that's the reason for Mr. rival visiting the graveyard. 
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Post by alanc9 on Jul 8, 2020 1:51:59 GMT
The second time I played the game, I drove past all of the Kett jumping out of shuttles, non-vault Remnant sites, and outcast firefights without stopping, because engaging them in combat felt pointless and immoral. It increased my enjoyment of the game quite a bit. Ludonarrative dissonance aside, those activities aren't actually very rewarding in the first place. ME:A's loot and XP gameplay loops strike me as being almost as broken as Anthem's
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Post by AnDromedary on Jul 9, 2020 20:48:57 GMT
So I guess the 6th route Mass Effect could go is the Pokemon route where we shoot everyone a lot but they've actually just fainted. So ... set your magic element assisted railguns that propel projectiles to a perceptible fraction of c to stun I guess?
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Post by Hanako Ikezawa on Jul 9, 2020 22:03:29 GMT
So I guess the 6th route Mass Effect could go is the Pokemon route where we shoot everyone a lot but they've actually just fainted. So ... set your magic element assisted railguns that propel projectiles to a perceptible fraction of c to stun I guess?  Why not? Maybe have there be another setting where it fires different ammo that locks up armor systems or tazes exposed flesh or something. Also, always think of this when I hear "Set to stun".
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Post by smilesja on Jul 9, 2020 22:35:25 GMT
Here's an interesting video about Ludonarrative Dissonance. It uses GTA V specifically Trevor to analyze how some developers are trying to get around this.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 13, 2020 11:57:57 GMT
So I guess the 6th route Mass Effect could go is the Pokemon route where we shoot everyone a lot but they've actually just fainted. So ... set your magic element assisted railguns that propel projectiles to a perceptible fraction of c to stun I guess? Huh, the more I think about it, this could actually be possible. Mass Effect already has concussive rounds which Garrus uses to take down Shepard's shields on Omega in ME2 and during the bottle shooting competition on the Citadel in ME3. There are also less-fatal powers like stasis, throw, concussive shot, and overload with neural shock. Vorn could also make gas grenades using that fruit he incapacitated Aroane with. I think in ME 1 Shepard could also incapacitate colonists by punching them.
So Ryder could go the non-lethal route using any of these if s/he chose and still get to engage in a firefight. Not sure how to deal with armor, but maybe that could somehow be the handicap Ryder has to overcome in order to subdue without killing.
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Post by colfoley on Jul 14, 2020 0:13:41 GMT
I had not heard about ludonarrative dissonance before today, when this article from Polygon popped up. It focuses on The Last of Us 2, but gives a good overview of the topic and is an interesting read.
Basically, ludonarrative dissonance is the disconnect between the plot of the game (narrative) and the gameplay itself ("ludo" apparently means "play" in Latin). The core gameplay in many games is "shoot people, it's fun!" while the story centers around the protagonist being a hero who isn't acknowledged to be a psychopathic mass murderer. An example used in the article is the Uncharted franchise, where funny and charming Nathan Drake nonchalantly guns down hundreds of people with zero consequences (psychological or legal).
Reading the article crystallized something that had been bothering me about Andromeda from the start. I think the OT did a better job of justifying the shooty bits than Andromeda did.
Firstly, the OT understood that most gamers feel okay about killing zombies, N*zis, robots and bugs and accordingly gave us Reapers, Cerberus, Geth and Collectors. Cerberus and the Collectors were further dehumanized by the alterations made by the Reapers. ("No soul, replaced by tech. Whatever they were, gone forever." as Mordin said.) We did spend some time killing mercenaries and pirates, but most of the game time was spent on the main four factions. Secondly, as a Spectre, Shepard basically had a license to kill with impunity. In ME3, some nod to the psychological toll all of the killing was having on Shepard was made. ("There's only so much fight in a person. Only so much death you can take before...") Finally, even if Shepard wanted to stop killing, the narrative didn't allow it because the fate of the galaxy was literally at stake. (Cue the infamous "We fight or we die" line.)
In contrast, in Andromeda we are mostly killing Kett, Roekaar, Remnant and ex-Initiative members. These factions are not dehumanized enough for me personally to feel okay about slaughtering them wholesale, and the narrative itself argues against the morality and utility of killing them. During the mission to rescue the Moshae we find out that the Kett are actually genetically altered and brainwashed Angara prisoners. Although Lexi doubts they can be reverted, there is no definitive statement like Mordin's that it is impossible. The Roekaar are seen to be misguided and redeemable during Jaal's loyalty mission. The Remnant aren't aggressive murder-bots like the Geth, but are peaceful (armed) Roombas that are just trying to keep the place tidy while the Master is away. On Elaaaden, Lexi finds out the former Initiative members are suffering from cryo-psychosis, which she then immediately synthesizes a treatment for. After this point, shooting them feels like I'm murdering the mentally ill when it's the Initiative's fault they are unstable in the first place. To top it off, killing outcasts makes zero sense narratively speaking if the Initiative wants to keep a large enough genetic pool to make colonizing Heleus possible. Each species has approximately 20K colonists and can't afford to lose many because there are no replacements coming. (Yes, the human race went through a bottleneck of about 14K during our evolution and we did okay, but one pandemic could wipe the Initiative out even without adding Ryder's kill count to the problem.) Ryder is a Pathfinder, not a Spectre, and as such should not be legally immune for killing, nor should s/he or the crew be psychologically immune to it. Jaal cries once, but then goes happily back to sniping Kett.
I think many of the narrative choices in Andromeda ("They are us") were done intentionally to try to make the game more nuanced and morally gray than the OT, but the unintended side effect was increasing the ludonarrative dissonance to an unsupportable level. The second time I played the game, I drove past all of the Kett jumping out of shuttles, non-vault Remnant sites, and outcast firefights without stopping, because engaging them in combat felt pointless and immoral. It increased my enjoyment of the game quite a bit.
To be clear, I liked Andromeda and hope for a sequel. I am not hating on the game. However, I feel that Andromeda 2 needs to better align the story and the gameplay. I'm all for exploring "no one is really bad" if the game gives me the option of not killing them. Shepard was given nonlethal gas grenades on Feros. I think it would be interesting if Ryder had the task of distributing Lexi's antipsychotic on Kadara. What would s/he do if a pirate band refuses to take the medication -- kill them, incapacitate them and administer the drug without their consent, or find some way to persuade them? What if the treated groups get wiped out by the untreated groups if Ryder doesn't get everyone treated fast enough? Would s/he cut corners to save lives? What if taking the medication reduces Ryder's ability to kill efficiently -- does s/he take it? Why can't Ryder reprogram or stun the Remnant instead of destroying all that valuable tech? Then Ryder has to protect this limited resource from treasure hunters that just want to loot the vaults. What if the Angara scientists (not the Initiative, please) find a way to reverse the transformation of the Kett? This could be an opportunity to introduce stealth to the game, where Ryder has to neutralize a Kett commander either through assassination or kidnapping and deprogramming. Or maybe another faction that really deserves being murder hobo'd shows up. What if the Jardaan return and turn out to be Jardaan-supremacists that want to wipe Heleus clean and start over, forcing the Kett, Angara and Initiative to cooperate in order to stop them?
Andromeda had some of the best combat gameplay in the franchise. It really needs a better justification for engaging in it.
First off interesting find. But...well I think some points are worth mentioning. 1. As far as the Kett or the Remnant are concerned you should have little problem killing either one of them. The Kett are in the same position as the Reapers. Sure theoretically there *might* be a cure but that seems to be a far off possibility, so much like the Reapers, they are converted murder zombies. The Remnant are just doing a job but are A. unintelligent (so no moral qualms there, they are roombas) and B. they are opposing you. B. The Roekar and the Outlaws fall under a similar position. Like it or not, and for whatever reasons, they are still actively engaging you in combat. Sure, you might feel moral qualms about pulling the trigger but in the end they are killing you so you have to kill them first. C. You are right, the biggest problem with this game in this regard is the 'Vietnam effect'. How these bases and outposts keep on repopulating or keep on getting troops dropped to them as you drive past makes it so you are killing a lot of people. Its just something for game design that it seems Devs feel like they *have to* constantly repopulate areas in order to make the world seem *livlie*. Now most 'OW' games do this but some are way more successful. FO 4, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Andromeda has done horrible...by and large Inquisition, GR Wildlands, and Odyssey does a much better job. In any case though there are ways around it, I like you have driven past them on the way to my objectives and I just role play that the Outlaws I kill don't actually die. Given how you can revive your squad with medigel and the state of medical tech in Mass Effect I just role play that they retrieve their wounded and patch them up. SUPER hinky explanation but there is some small bit of lore which justifies it. |
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Post by capn233 on Jul 15, 2020 1:38:56 GMT
The Ryders progressed similar to other RPG protagonists -- at least they didn't start out killing giant rats/spiders in a basement like every fantasy protagonist since the beginning of time. Now that you say this, I think it would have actually been pretty funny if Ryder had to go to cargo hold Larder A and deal with some pyjaks first. Maybe your pet Mabari would have been there. I really enjoyed the game more when I lost my completionist tendencies and skipped everything I didn't find fun (crafting, mining, tasks, random encounters). I pretty much played Andromeda the second time as a 30 hour story focused game instead of a 120 hour open world resource collection simulator and found it so much more enjoyable. Yes. That was my experience in DAI exactly, I think I haven't quite done this in MEA though. Last time I think I was trying to get the 100% Heleus completion just to get it. So ... set your magic element assisted railguns that propel projectiles to a perceptible fraction of c to stun I guess? Yeah this probably was a missed opportunity for alternative weapon crafting, or powers. Especially since Ai is allegedly a civilian operation where they don't even arm the ships, you would think they might have some less than lethal weapons.
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Post by Shinobu on Jul 15, 2020 15:45:43 GMT
<abbr class="o-timestamp time" data-timestamp="1594685621000" title="Jul 13, 2020 20:13:41 GMT -4">Jul 13, 2020 20:13:41 GMT -4</abbr> colfoley said:
First off interesting find. But...well I think some points are worth mentioning. 1. As far as the Kett or the Remnant are concerned you should have little problem killing either one of them. The Kett are in the same position as the Reapers. Sure theoretically there *might* be a cure but that seems to be a far off possibility, so much like the Reapers, they are converted murder zombies. The Remnant are just doing a job but are A. unintelligent (so no moral qualms there, they are roombas) and B. they are opposing you. B. The Roekar and the Outlaws fall under a similar position. Like it or not, and for whatever reasons, they are still actively engaging you in combat. Sure, you might feel moral qualms about pulling the trigger but in the end they are killing you so you have to kill them first. C. You are right, the biggest problem with this game in this regard is the 'Vietnam effect'. How these bases and outposts keep on repopulating or keep on getting troops dropped to them as you drive past makes it so you are killing a lot of people. Its just something for game design that it seems Devs feel like they *have to* constantly repopulate areas in order to make the world seem *livlie*. Now most 'OW' games do this but some are way more successful. FO 4, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Andromeda has done horrible...by and large Inquisition, GR Wildlands, and Odyssey does a much better job. In any case though there are ways around it, I like you have driven past them on the way to my objectives and I just role play that the Outlaws I kill don't actually die. Given how you can revive your squad with medigel and the state of medical tech in Mass Effect I just role play that they retrieve their wounded and patch them up. SUPER hinky explanation but there is some small bit of lore which justifies it. A. I disagree that the Kett are the same as the reapers, because the Kett are still sentient beings with the ability to communicate. They are brainwashed and physically altered, but they are not mindless husks. One could have a moral debate with them (if the game allowed it) while reapers just want to eat your brains. The Kett are people, while the reapers are unknowable monsters. It hasn't been established yet whether the Kett can be reverted, but even if they can't they can still be reasoned with. Fun moral quandries: kill them, revert them, or leave them as kett and try to ally with them? What if an Angaran family wants you to kill their kett daughter if you can't revert her, but she actually likes her new life better?
The Remnant may be roombas, but they are also resources. Part of the story is that SAM allows Ryder to control Remnant tech. So why should Ryder's only recourse be to shoot the bots cleaning the remnant sites? Furthermore, if the bots are staving off the scourge and keeping the places functioning, it's not in Ryder's interest to stop them. It's not just that I feel bad shooting them, it also disregards the lore set up in the game. It would be more interesting if Ryder cleared a remnant site and later found it completely overwhelmed by the scourge and unusable, so the next time s/he had to consider whether leaving the robots intact (sneaking past), temporarily stunning them, reprogramming them (but they might not be as good at their jobs), leaving the site alone, or killing them and letting the scourge take over was the best option at the time. Maybe Ryder could eventually reclaim lost or broken sites by introducing reprogrammed or captured wild-type remnant bots.
B. They shot first can be an acceptable reason for killing outlaws, and that is fine. But why should the game limit me to killing them if there is a lore established treatment for cryo-psychosis available and we know the initiative needs more people to produce stuff? That set up opens up a bunch of tasty moral quandries like whether we should allow Lexi to experiment on people by having Ryder dart unsuspecting outlaws. What if her cure outright kills 5% of the people who get it? Does Ryder still want to convince people to take it voluntarily? Does s/he tell people the downside so they can consent fully? Or does s/he dodge the moral quandry by just killing people who shoot first and not offering the cure? The roleplaying opportunities are right there, and instead we just keep playing murder hobo. It feels as though the story is becoming more nuanced, but the gameplay isn't changing to match. "The goal is for Ryder to create a porcelain teapot -- here's your hammer."
C. I really dislike clearing a base and then having to go back there to retrieve a doohickey and finding it full again. Why couldn't I have found the doohickey earlier when I didn't know I needed it? It could be a fun quest if I unwittingly sold the needed doohickey and then had to track it down later. ("Uhh, Vetra, I need your help...") Or at least have the base be different the second time (that cover you destroyed before isn't there, they increased their defenses after the last time, the base is an abandoned ruin, there is a secret sublevel you missed before, the base is now Angaran and they found the doohickey in the basement, which they will happily give to you if you do them another favor...) I found Voeld weird in general because kett and Angara bases felt quite close to each other. Why didn't the kett find techix and assault it? Why couldn't I turn a kett base over to the Angara or fill it with initiative members?
Open worlds seem to create the perceived need for filler and filler combat adds to my enjoyment as little as filler of other types. Maybe I just need to accept that doing it all even on a first playthrough is just not worth it. But it's kind of a downer to feel like the less of a game I play the better it is. Strangely enough I loved the Hissing Wastes in DAI, which was open world but not crammed with tedious tasks. The emptiness was refreshing. I remember seeing a dim glow in the distance and setting off to find out what made it -- it felt like actual exploring. There was some other area (the Emerald Groves?) where I felt I had to pick a flower every 2 steps and I hated it so much, even though the area itself was gorgeous. (I know I'm in the minority on the Hissing Wastes, but I found it really atmospheric and a good change of pace.)
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I mean there are multiple ways it could be done.
