Mass Effect 3 and the Stories We Think We Tell (Spoiler Free)

Finished Mass Effect 3. If you're an active resident of the internets, you've probably heard that a whole lot of people aren't just displeased with the ending, they actively hate it -- to the point that Bioware is caving and preparing an alternate ending (try searching around if you want to know more). I'll admit that the ending feels a little contrived at points (and the post credits scene is laughably bad), but it could be waaaay worse.

Here's the thing to know: in the minds of the game's creators, the message of this series was never simply about survival. For them, the whole of the series was about organic vs synthetic life (and the presumed deficiencies of organics). In that light, the ending makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, this overarching "organic vs synthetic" plot line was never made nearly as explicit as the "fight for survival" that dominates the rhetoric of the characters. Yes, the synthetic nature of the Reapers makes them a unique sort of enemy, but it's their unknowable-ness (a combination of their origin, their age, and their limited appearance), not just their unnaturalness that makes them daunting.

You could just as easily have had an advanced organic race that shows up every several thousand years to check in on the modern races and assimilate or destroy them as they see fit. The Reapers didn't need to be synthetic to be effective, they just needed to be insurmountably powerful. Being synthetic is one path to that. Simple sci-fi technobabble is another.

It would be hard to do more with just the Reapers themselves to enhance the clarity of the message that the writers were trying to deliver, though. They need to be somewhat remote so they can remain effective boogeymen. Besides, Sovereign and Harbinger both bring out the whole "gaaah, you are puny organics, we are your future, cower! COWER, I SAY!" rhetoric on those rare occasions where you do get to communicate.

In order to make this story work, you need to have a world that's built around paranoia about the limitations of organics from the start. You need to have the advanced races terrified about the technological and cultural plateaus that they've been sitting at, sometimes for millennia. Humanity has only been part of the interstellar scene for about 30 years by the end of Mass Effect 3, and yet we're as advanced as any other species in the galaxy.

You need to have more incidents of failures to contain or control artificial intelligence, possibly all having gone and merged with one another to form some heterogeneous variation on the Geth. You need to have these scarier Geth floating around the edges of "civilized" space before things ever start, using their unique intelligence to devise technologies and solutions and threats that we've never conceived of. The Reapers need to not be the only threat, but the biggest and most sudden. The Reapers need to be a realization for the existing fears that are already plaguing the population.

Instead, we have a peacetime galactic government that is focused on politics as usual and just the one incidence of failed A.I.. Worse, the Geth don't seem to be improving much upon the same technologies everybody else in the galaxy is using, and once Legion shows up to provides a mouthpiece for them, they suddenly become more accessible -- making it seem like collaboration could be a legitimate option if organics are willing to set aside their (limited) fears.

Fixing these problems of setting would be an important step, but the rest of the problem is harder to address. Part of the reason the basic survival narrative seems so dominant is because it's next to impossible to provide a gameplay goal built around anything else. This stripped down story was always going to engage the player's attention because surviving is what they spend roughly half of the game doing. The only solution I can see is to make fights with synthetics lifeforms more imposing. Make sure that they are so much harder to kill than simple security robots. Make these fights feel distinct and more tense. Don't just send Shepard and friends off to kill them in droves, but let a handful of Geth be a significant challenge.

With these (not insignificant) changes, I'm sure people would have still complained about the ending because it's an ending and it's never going to satisfy everybody (and there are some contrived elements to it). But the complaints would have been for different reasons and could at least have been in line with what the writers were envisioning. As it stands, I'm glad to know what I know and I'll be glad to let that knowledge shape how I play through the game in the future. It was a fun trip, even if I'm not certain it was as strong as either of the first two games.