GamePlanet Interview with Mike Gamble Dec 22'16

Yes, Grunt's tank and Okeer's project utilized Collector/Reaper technology.

You mean the same Rana who worked with Saren on his project, also using Reaper technology, and is indoctrinated by the Reapers? 

Rana is indoctrinated?
It doesn't mean the sleep training program was influenced by Reaper technology. It might be? Sure, but there's no proof it was, or how exactly the Reaper technology were used on the project.

Got it. I forgot about it.
The fact that they're indoctrinated doesn't mean that every step or process related to the project have to with the Reaper technology though. I don't  think a sleep training program has to be related with the Reapers. 

So we are led to believe. 

Fair point.  But I really really really like the theory that the Council's insanity and pure incompetence is indoctrination related.  Granted they are politicians and I hate politicians, as a prettygeneral rule (some exceptions may apply) but even the Council seemed really dumb. 

So, it's been a busy few days and I just now managed to finish my response to being asked why I'm not excited about Scott and Sara having different personalities... in about 2500 words

I know people are more seem more interested in the "class-swapping" thing, but I needed to say this. I’ll try to explain why I’m the opposite of excited about this in a comprehensive manner, but this is going to be a wall of text, so sorry in advance. I'll use spoiler tags to help.

There are multiple overlapping issues here:

1. The fact that choosing gender now determines aspects of your protagonist’s personality, contrary to past Bioware games.


2. The implication that autodialogue will be more frequent than it was in DA:I (where it was almost eliminated after the response from ME3). That’s definitely a step backwards in my opinion. Why have autodialogue when you can... not?

3. The autodialogue that is present, even if it’s somehow infrequent, will be opinionated. That is, the protagonist will always say something regardless of it you think it fits the specific character you’re trying to play. This shouldn’t be good news for anyone who doesn’t have fond memories of the autodialogue plaguing ME3.

4. Moving on from autodialogue, we have the question: Will this affect which dialogue options are available to each sibling on the wheel?

If the answer is yes, there are more follow-up questions. How frequently will this occur? Will it make all of the options in some conversations different, or only some? If it’s all of them, it’s quite obviously railroading your character into a certain personality... which is what Bioware said was the point – I just don’t like it for hopefully obvious reasons. Even if it only affects some of the possible options you get, that’s still limiting because, well, you can’t say something they other sibling could that might suit you/your character more. You’ll just have to go with the next-best option, which isn’t ideal. Here’s a random example to illustrate the point:

5. Many have cited replayability as a plus to this system. The idea is that you’ll be encouraged to play through again as the other sibling to experience other content. This is a fallacy, because we would actually have not only the same replayability with all options available to both siblings, but more. This is simple logic. Why would only being able to play each within certain confines give you more replayability than being able to play each without those confines? No confines allows for all of the variability you would have with set traits and then some.

6. Finally, we get to the “But they’re different characters, of course they should have different personalities!” point.

Here’s the thing, though: They aren’t set characters. They’re not NPCs (when we’re playing as them, obviously); we have dialogue options and interrupts. So if we have control over what they do and say most of the time, why not give both siblings the same set of options? Where is the advantage of one protagonist having options the other one doesn't have access to? That is objectively inferior to both protagonists having all options available to them.

That's my main point. If there is no set canon anyway, why not? You can talk about how we "just need to roleplay that protagonist" all you like, but being able to influence the character sort of negates the whole “But their personality!” idea, because I’m giving them their personality.

Obviously, we’ll never have full control over our RPG protagonists, but as long as devs keep making improvements in that regard, or at least don’t regress, I’ll be happy. This is not that. This is regression.

And you don’t have to worry about the siblings having different personalities on account of being different people anyway - the NPC sibling will have their own. So there: They’re different characters, they’ll have different personalities. It’s no reason to limit our RP of the one we’re driving.


So... We’ll have to wait for the game to know exactly how this will play out, but those are my concerns. “Reacting differently to situations or people” could mean just about anything, from preset Scott and Sara differing about whether a planet vista is beautiful to full-on personality traits and unchangeable opinions about other characters. Obviously, I hope it’s not extreme, but even the smallest changes will be annoying to me in practice and on principle. I mean, that planet vista probably is beautiful. I want to be able to say so, okay?

And in a narrative-heavy game which (supposedly) exists in a single universe with rules, continuity, etc, lore consistency is very important.  If we're going to retcon the lore because the setting you created is suddenly inconvenient for the story then why are we even calling this a "Mass Effect" game?.

heh you are pretty much right. Giving a protag a personality requires giving them a personality. Who knew?