Would Mass Effect have worked as a linear Narrative? (SPOILERS ALLOWED)

[xchurchx]

As every one knows Mass effect is partly player/story driven narrative where you can choose how to react to situations IE Saving or destroying the collector base. But the game ended in a way where a majority of the choices i made became irrelevant, which kind of killed the fun of mass effect for me. So i wandered if Mass Effect could've made me feel the way i did for the characters and story if i couldn't make those choices and the game made them for me.

So in short would Mass Effect have worked as a linear narrative? (such as Uncharted or final fantasy)

 

[Zhukov]

It basically already is a linear narrative.

The elements of choice serve more as seasoning on a predetermined story rather than "player driven narrative."

And before the fans jump down my throat, I don't mean that as a criticism. It's just the way they're designed.

 

[RJ 17]

It basically already is a linear narrative.

The elements of choice serve more as seasoning on a predetermined story rather than "player driven narrative."

And before the fans jump down my throat, I don't mean that as a criticism. It's just the way they're designed.

Pretty much nailed it right there. Yes you can choose red or blue quite often through the series, but in the end you still have to chase down and defeat Saren. You still have to confront the Collectors. You still have to....ummmm....do whatever it is that happened at the end of ME 3.

Think of it the way Legion described technology in ME 2: advancement is not a linear path, there are multiple ways to get to the exact same end. That's pretty much how ME plays out in general: you can be a prick or a saint, but your ultimate goal is still the same.

Edit: To clarify since it does look like I contradict myself with Legion's quote, the events in the ME series can be taken in any order you like, but they're still all the same. The truth of the matter is that no game is truly non-linear. All the choices always lead to the same end. For a game to be truly non-linear it would have to have absolute freedom of choice and a consequence - good or bad - for every choice the player could possibly make.

 

[Fappy]

I don't think people would have felt nearly as attached to the characters if they didn't have some control over their relationships. That's a big thing imo.

As far as interest in the setting I don't think freedom of choice would have made a difference. One thing that baffles me is that they made this awesome IP in a vibrant and detailed universe with a huge following and decided to nuke it. Bioware's a bunch of masochists.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I think that to an extent Mass Effect hits an unhappy medium between linearity and nonlinearity. When I play something like, say, Psychonauts or Shade, the linearity works because the protagonist's actions are something the character is doing (that teach me things about him/her.) When I play something like New Vegas or Devil Survivor, I feel like, with a few exceptions, the options given me more or less encompass the range of ways it makes sense to act in a given situation.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, is just nonlinear enough to make you want choice and consequence to be a major part of the storytelling, and just linear enough to make you feel like the choices you want to make are not adequately reflected in the choices the game offers you and that there are not sufficient consequences to those choices.

Moreover, in addition to not working particularly well as an RPG C&C-laden narrative, I don't think it works well if we conceive of it as a linear TPS narrative with a few token choices thrown in. This video addresses this pretty well:

 

[TheCaptain]

The elements of choice serve more as seasoning on a predetermined story rather than "player driven narrative."

If I may expand on this: If you take a step back and push aside all the characterization of Shepard and all the NPC's, ultimately there's no choice in what happens. You get to make these big decisions, like, for example, destroying the Collector base in ME2 or handing it to Cerberus, but that doesn't make a huge difference as to where the story's going. Mass Effect was exceeding at one thing, tho: Making it look like you would really change the course of the story.

This illusion of control came crashing down with the ending of ME3 - this especially since in all endings, the mass relay network is destroyed, the Normandy and surviving crew end up on the same jungle world.

I think it was in one of the early interviews where Hudson went on about how they didn't need to make the endings as similar as the ones of ME1 & 2 since every other game would take place during or before the Shepard trilogy. If they had leapt on that opportunity and created the "wildly different conclusions" they were going on about, the impact of the... unexpected matter of the Catalyst starchild would have been lessened.

On the other hand, if Mass Effect had just been presented without the possibility of making your little choices along the way, I think the series as a whole would've lost a lot of its appeal.

You could try an experiment: Set up a new game in ME3 and play in "action" mode for a while - from what I recall, this mode makes all the conversational choices for you, and you're only required to kill stuff. I don't think it will be as much fun.