Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

In this Deep Look I examine Mass Effect 1 and its brilliant, but flawed relationship system. I look at the nuisance of endless loops through the Normandy. I explain the issues with the series' moral binary and clear moral guidelines. I also comment on the odd depictions of romance that the Mass Effect series routinely produces.

P.S. Check out my new channel art while you're at it! I changed my profile picture for a reason!

Does anyone have any opinions on whether videos like this should use a webcam or not? I have been rolling without one for a while because I figured that people wouldn't want to see my dumb face in the corner of my videos. But talking to the camera seems like it could be useful and it seems like putting a face to the voice could be valuable as well. It seems to work for Patrick in Spookin with Scoops, though that might just be a horror game thing.

@thatpinguino: No camera. Facecam is the worst thing.

I feel like Dragon Age did romances better due to each person having a different personality and there wasn't just a single "good" conversation option for everybody, which causes you to actually think about what you're selecting instead of just always Upper Left everytime.

@corevi: I agree for the most part about Dragon Age, though the present system made it way too easy to just gift your way into someone's good graces. The actual dialog systems in Dragon Age were a whole lot more subtle and realistic than the systems in Mass Effect though. I really wonder why DA2 had such a regression when it came to its romance systems. I also wonder why Mass Effect didn't adopt some of the stuff that DA pioneered.

Because the entire design doc for DA2 was make it more like Mass Effect.

More likely the entire design doc was shredded when EA told the devs you only get a year to make DA2.

There's all the Press A Make Awesome Happen stuff though. That was certainly not a product of time constraints.

@thatpinguino: I agree for the most part about the points you bring up here. Especially in Mass Effect 1, I hated taking the elevator down to the shuttle bay to the point where I would occasionally just skip those guys down there or be so ready to move on, that I would just kind of button through their stuff. That's disappointing to me, because after playing all 3 recently, I find it incredibly interesting to go back and hear all those early conversations again. I just think 1 was not as great as some characters (Liara) would rarely ever have anything new to say after a point. But you know, since it's the first one, I gave it a pass.

As I played 2 and 3 though, I rather enjoyed checking in on everyone after each mission. Yeah, the load times sucked, but I was so eager to talk to each character that I really didn't mind. Walking though the Normandy definitely gives you greater attachment to the ship as well, unless you're really impatient, I guess. I'd rather that than just picking a name off a list and talking to them sort of visual novel style.

I'm with you on the relationships. Nothing frustrated me more (especially in 3) than talking to my love interest, in this case Liara, and having no dialogue difference despite being in an intimate relationship with her. Even more frustratingly so, having to reaffirm that in every game. I understand that, yeah, they want to give you the chance to explore other options, but the fact that had to tell her twice in 3 that I wanted a relationship is crazy. To be more specific, halfway through the story in 3, she mentions how nice it is to be friends and I was given the option to tell her I wanted to be more than that. I literally threw my hands up in the air because not only have I romanced her since the beginning of Mass Effect 1, I had to reaffirm the relationship in 2 and then again in 3 at the beginning of the game. You'd think halfway through 3 she'd finally get it. It definitely took me out of that moment and is a good example of the gameplay ruining those moments.

So yeah, it would have been nice to have altered dialogue with each love interest to really take those relationships to the next level. That being said, I think the idea of changing the dialogue for each love interest for both Shepards would be insane. At a point, they need to release the game. That's a hell of a lot of VO and time spent for each one to have new dialogue. And I think the moments in the game where the dialogue does change are really strong. Does it make up for the infrequency of them? Maybe not, but the fact that those moments were fantastic was enough for me.

@theblue: My issue is less with walking the Normandy as much as the lack of new dialog. If everyone had something to say after every mission then there would be no issue. It is when you make a full loop and find that 1 out of 9 people had something new to say that there is a problem. The answer to that problem is either to tell you who wants to talk or to make sure everyone always wants to talk.

I'm with you on the relationships. Nothing frustrated me more (especially in 3) than talking to my love interest, in this case Liara, and having no dialogue difference despite being in an intimate relationship with her. Even more frustratingly so, having to reaffirm that in every game. I understand that, yeah, they want to give you the chance to explore other options, but the fact that had to tell her twice in 3 that I wanted a relationship is crazy. To be more specific, halfway through the story in 3, she mentions how nice it is to be friends and I was given the option to tell her I wanted to be more than that. I literally threw my hands up in the air because not only have I romanced her since the beginning of Mass Effect 1, I had to reaffirm the relationship in 2 and then again in 3 at the beginning of the game. You'd think halfway through 3 she'd finally get it. It definitely took me out of that moment and is a good example of the gameplay ruining those moments.

That is a perfect example of how Mass Effect mishandles relationships. The games are really good at showing how relationships start and how they end. However, things like sustaining a relationship and mixing in physical intimacy are just mechanical and superficial. The games tend to vacillate between courtship and sex without really showing a steady relationship.

So yeah, it would have been nice to have altered dialogue with each love interest to really take those relationships to the next level. That being said, I think the idea of changing the dialogue for each love interest for both Shepards would be insane. At a point, they need to release the game. That's a hell of a lot of VO and time spent for each one to have new dialogue. And I think the moments in the game where the dialogue does change are really strong. Does it make up for the infrequency of them? Maybe not, but the fact that those moments were fantastic was enough for me.

I don't know how rough it would be to alter the dialog in the early games, but in future games I would hope that these issues are addressed. Either dial down the number of romace-able people to accommodate the greater depth or find a way to make it work. I think the character moments were some of the strongest scenes from the ME series and I think that a few changes could make them even better.

Interesting that you prefer Dragon Age, because that game had its own relationships problems. In Origins, your companions got stat bonuses (+2 magic for Morrigan, let's say) based on how high their approval rating was. So basically, the most efficient way to play the game is to be the yes-man to whomever you decided was on your party for that playthrough. To do anything less is to introduce real, measurable handicaps to your team's combat ability. And if you're not a neurotic min-maxer, low approval also locked you out of further conversation trees, likely the reason you're playing a Bioware game in the first place. So, if you're tired of Morrigan's nihilistic powermonger schtick, just shut up and nod your head - good things will come your way.

The introduced a slightly improved system for DAII - your companions got bonuses for consistently adversarial responses as well as consistently friendly ones, but the game still only rewarded consistency. If, say, you enjoyed Merrill as a person but abhorred her blood magic hijinks, you ended up breaking even on the friend-rival scale, and you got no bonuses at all. She might even try to murder you if you make a certain choice at the end, even though she theoretically is fonder of you than if you two were full "rivals"!

So I guess I'm saying Bioware's got relationship problems in general, especially where relationships interact with the systemic parts of their games. Ideally, I'd prefer the conversation system to be completely siloed off from the more gamey stuff, but that's probably asking for too much. A neat alternative is something like Alpha Protocol's approach - you get a sweet perk for nearly every choice you make in the game, whatever that choice happens to be, so you get to feel like you're personalizing a character without feeling screwed for your choices. Another preferable alternative is Telltale's The Walking Dead, which probably had some math running under the hood to determine who left, who stayed, etc., but never made it explicit by telling you to fill up a bar, and if you wanted, you could go into the options and keep yourself completely ignorant of which choices were "important".

When I heard via developer Q&A that Inquisition ditched the approval system, I became hopeful that they were aware of these issues and were trying new things, but I guess we'll see come November. As for Mass Effect, I'd like them to ditch the Paragon/Renegade system entirely - it's beginning to feel old-fashioned - but I recognize that that's unlikely to happen.

@encephalon: I would say that the gameplay ramifications of the relationships in ME and DA are both not great. However, how you talk to characters in DA1 is a bit better than in ME just because the dialog options are not morally organized by their placement on a wheel. You never have to care about what the dialog choices actually say in ME as long as you hold up and to the right or left. The characters in DA1 also have different likes and dislikes so you actually have to think when you butter them up, rather than just holding up/right or up/left. There is a little bit of gameplay involved in making friends in DA that just isn't there in ME for the most part.

@thatpinguino: No disagreement here. Mass Effect has some of the same problems in that there's a surface presentation of choice, but the game systems tend to reward moral consistency. It was most explicit in ME2, where your charisma is directly influenced by your Paragon/Renegade score - the red or blue conversation options are unlocked by reaching a certain threshold, so if you want to keep everyone loyal for the Suicide Mission, you better be all the way Paragon or Renegade. They pulled back on that in ME3, but even the visual language of having a bar to fill up, I feel, sends a pretty clear message. Again, I wish they'd just get rid of the Paragon/Renegade paradigm, but I suspect it's considered so integral to Mass Effect that it's not even up for discussion.

Bioware games are kind of dead to me at this point. I thought that Mass Effect had a lot of potential in that first game. By creating a detail-rich sci-fi universe that was fleshed out and clearly had some thought put into it, they laid a solid foundation for future releases. I actually thought of the relationship stuff as a side affair, just one more piece to move around in their space opera deluxe that I neither liked nor disliked particularly much. The explorable environments (even if they were just mostly barren dusty planets), the squad combat with an emphasis on the powers and the gameplay hooks tied into story mechanics (for example, guns don't need to reload, but do overheat with usage) were solid positives on my part and things that I wanted more of.

What did I get in the second game? No exploration and dumb Gears of War imitation shooting, which killed the "gameplay" part of the series for me. The emphasis they put on fixing your team's emotional woes killed the "story" part of the game. Not only are there too many goddamn people for me to actually care about, you were penalized if you didn't at least partake in some of their bullshit drama. Pretty much every single design decision they made in the transition from the first to the second game was one that I disliked. I wasn't even going to play the third one, but it came out when I was living in the dorms at college, and I borrowed it from a guy who went home for Thanksgiving. Never mind that I almost didn't finish it over a four day weekend because it was so looooooong, but it was the same game as 2. Another Mass Effect game elicits zero positivity on my radar.

I'm not even going to talk about Dragon Age; the shift from Origins to DA2 was SO terrible that I will not be touching another one of those games purely on principle. Fuckin' EA.

Also, I think that everyone can agree that unless they devote an unearthly amount of time to cross the Uncanny Valley and put all their resources into making the sex scenes less robotic and inhuman, Bioware should just drop them altogether. I'm able to suspend my disbelief and buy in to a lot of their dialogue and character interactions, but both Mass Effect and Dragon Age had scenes that were physically painful to watch. If they really are invested in advancing and developing their romantic character interactions then they need to get their shit together on that front. It's why other games with relationship mechanics (that aren't just porn) skip the "hey let's bone" part, because nothing quite reminds you that you're playing a video game than watching badly textured, jerky mannequins try and impart concepts like "intimacy" and "affection." Ugh.

Your video brings up plenty of fair points (the "loop" around the Normandy is a hassle. Combine it with the lengthy loading times of the first game and it becomes an active annoyance at times), some of which would unfortunately require a lot more effort on the part of the writers and voice actors. As someone who has always thought that romance junk in these games has been corny and poorly-written, I find the increased emphasis on that stuff in every successive Bioware game to be a tad alienating even if it's all entirely optional. I'm not passionately opposed to romance in RPGs, Bioware or otherwise (important to point out that Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer have said there will be no romances in Pillars of Eternity) I just think it's something that is beyond the scope of most game writing and most game writers.

If you're looking for people who are very passionate about the brand of romance that Mass Effect allows for, try reading the Bioware Social Network forums every now and again. If you're wondering what audience is being catered to with some of the more awkward or fan fiction-y aspects that always tend to show up in Bioware games, that's the audience. I could use more adjectives to describe those sorts of forumgoers, but I think they speak for themselves just fine.

@arbitrarywater: I was a 15 year old boy once too and I understand that the intimacy shown in Mass Effect fits that idea of romance. But as I've grown those scenes have just gotten poorer and poorer. Not to mention the constantly expanding sexual stable that Shepard has access to as the games progress. It jumps from 2 characters to like 10 and it is quite creepy by the end.

@seveword: I found the characters in ME2 to be much more compelling than the original cast from ME1, especially the returning characters. I can see how you could get overwhelmed by the sheer number of critical characters though. I mean characters like Kelly Chambers and the other Cerburus dudes were a bit of overkill. Also all of the characters in ME2 were a bit too Oceans 11 at first. I liked it overall, but it would have been a bit more believable if every single character were not painted as "the best in the galaxy." It doesn't speak well of the galaxy's assassins when Thane gets taken out by random geth during a mission.

I agree that the actual look of the romance scenes are pretty darn off putting.

@encephalon: Not to mention how every game started you at almost square 1 for paragon or renegade, despite your previous history. I would guess that a straight paragon Shepard in ME3 that has carried on from ME1 would be as paragon as paragon can be at the beginning of the game, but you have to regain your paragon status anyway.

Are you telling me that just talking to a lady over and over won't land me a girlfriend!? Because that would explain a lot!

@paliv: I'm saying it will likely take more than that, yes. You also need to select the dialog choice to the top right.

I have done fully paragon and fully renegade playthroughs, but I found them to be uninteresting in comparison to *pushes glasses up* actually role-playing. Sometimes the renegade options just seem dickish for no discernible purpose and some of the paragon choices make Shepard seem way too passive. The choices that you can access with high paragon/renegade are neat sometimes, but if I remember correctly none of them are really game-changers.

And yeah, I think it's weird how they split up the Normandy so much in ME2. I think it's cool that the people hang out in places that fit their personalities, but the loading screens are bothersome.

I liked your video, but I feel like you went off-topic (and I realize that I commented on the off-topic stuff) a bit. You talked in general about the morality/dialogue systems instead of honing in on the relationship stuff specifically.

@jimipeppr: The high renegade and paragon options are musts for some of the loyalty situations in ME2 and for saving Wrex in ME1. They aren't much more interesting than the ordinary paragon and renegade options from a writing perspective. Usually Shepard is just more convincing than he/she would be with the regular renegade or paragon option. And yeah paragon vs. renegade is usually just space jerk vs. space messiah.

I extra don't get why you are notified when a loyalty mission is available, but not for regular conversations. Kelly will tell you to go talk to crew members when they REALLY want to talk, but not normal conversations.

I guess the title might be a little off then. I really wanted to cover a wide number of topics that are wrapped up in the morality/dialog systems and those topics effect the relationships in the game. So I conflated a few different systems. Thanks for the feedback though! I'll try to match my title and focus to my content a little more tightly in the future.

@thatpinguino: The red and blue conversation options are actually less interesting from a plot perspective because they're basically get-out-of-jail-free cards. The games have a habit of setting up a "hard" Sophie's Choice scenario, then tossing you a consequence-free solution provided your points are high enough. Again, the worst offender in this regard is ME2 - for example, the argument scene between Jack and Miranda, or Tali and Legion, where both their loyalty is on the line unless you sweet-talk them.

After I cleared the Loyalty Mission with no casualties, I thought it might've been neat if there was really no way to come out unscathed, but I doubt that would've been a very popular decision overall.

@encephalon: Yeah the only hard choice that you have to make is whether to save Ashley or Kaidan. Almost everything else is pretty easy to process based on whether you are all red or all blue. I actually lost some crew members on the final mission and it was pretty impactful for me. Much more so than if everyone was A ok.

Even the minor things like punching that reporter. Any other line of work and that's a PR and legal nightmare which costs you your job. You didn't go deep enough, Bioware. I do find the 11th hour romancing to be particularly dumb. At this point you've got bigger things to worry about than a potentially consequence-free apocalypse fumble.

@shindig: It is especially funny that you can do it 3 times and she never gets the hint. You would think a superior would tell Shepard to not do that crap on camera.

This was super well done, I will definitely check out your channel.

@anupsis: Thank you very much! I try to put something up at least once a week on either Sunday or Monday, but I have regular life obligations that mess up my schedule occasionally.

Not having played the Mass Effect series, my only exposure to true Bioware relationships comes from the Dragon Age games. (Well, Dragon Age 1 and as much of Dragon Age II as I was willing to stomach). So much of the way that the relationships in those games are structured feels bizarrely arbitrary. In Origins, the problem I had was that the relationships were based entirely on meters that you had to affect by picking the right dialogue choices during conversations, while throwing gifts at the party members in camp. It was a system that I was horrible at using, as I never did max out any of my relationships to the love scene level. Which honestly I feel was for the best, all things considered. Of course, when I got to the end of the game and Morrigan takes you aside for her offer, since I was playing a female Warden, it again didn't matter. Though I did get a kick out of convincing Alistair to sleep with the woman he abhors.

Dragon Age II takes things in a worse direction, however, with the dialogue wheel and its icons. It got particularly obnoxious in my conversations with Anders. There were times where it seemed like every other line had a big heart icon right next to it, as though it were a super-obvious wink-wink-nudge-nudge "CHOOSE THIS OPTION TO SEX" line. It frankly made me feel unpleasant. And it's something I likely would have seen a lot more of had I decided to stick with the game for longer than the opening chapter.

@hailinel: I didn't find DA1's relationship system to be that hard to min-max. You are constantly tripping over gifts and many of the gifts you find are valued by all of your party members. So you just give the shinny stuff to whomever you are pursuing. Honestly the gift system allows you to basically say whatever you want to your party members and still romance them if you give them enough bling. Ii had a male warden and I still made Alistair do it because it was just funnier that way.

The DA2 system sounds a lot more like Mass Effect, except instead of a heart symbol you just pick the top right option. It is equally weird that Shepard can flit with almost every single crew member of the opposite sex plus all of the Asari, yet beyond ME1 there really are no repercussions for lasciviousness. You don't even get confronted about it after ME1. Maybe if you actually enter into two separate relationships in 1 and 2 something comes of it but I'm not sure. The heart thing sounds pretty darn gross in DA though.

I remember in ME3 that my Shepard had specific things to say to Tali since they were in a romance. On the ship there were unique dialogue and actions that only would have happened because we were in a relationship, not just leading to the final mission. (specifically the picture you receive) So maybe it depends on the character that you romance?

But yes, the criticism of the relationship system is mostly valid, they really gamify social interaction, whereas other friendships are developed mostly because of how strong the dialogue and voice acting both are.

In retrospect, it really isn't hard to min-max, though I guess I just didn't have the patience to really try. It was just a really odd system and I'm not really fond of the "throw random objects at characters to make them love you" approach. At least, not in the way that Dragon Age handles it. And yeah, the DA2 method is pretty gross. Though I honestly didn't like anything about DA2's conversation system. I'm not sure why Bioware insists that the dialogue wheel is a better option than a simple list of clear dialogue choices.

The ME2 side quests were some of the best sci-fi short stories I've read or seen recently.

I wonder if it could be better if you could active spurn someone. Shepherd's always the one initiating it but, the attention coming from the other direction, being rejected and then seeing the aftermath of that could have been an interesting thing to add.

@shindig: Jack will reject you if you take her passionless sex offer midway through her storyline. But, none of the crew members will come after Shepard or actively break up with Shepard otherwise. I guess there is that Shepard super fan who you can spurn in a way. It is asexual, but it covers a bit of Shepard rejecting someone.

@hailinel: The wheel is definitely nicer from a ui perspective. It also has the benefit/cost of making the dialog choices simpler to understand if you aren't in the game for the dialog and the role-playing. It seems like a little concession for shooter fans along the lines of ME's shooter mode: it shortcuts the role-playing part if you aren't playing close attention.

@hyuzen: There was definitely a little extra dialog when Shepard talks to his/her significant other (so long as that significant other was still on the Normandy). I just don't remember it being a huge deal. I don't remember if Shepard ever goes on a date for example.

I tend to believe that this is the reason ME2 is generally the most highly regarded of the three, even beyond the gameplay changes, which generated some pushback from RPG purists - ME2 invests heavily in what Bioware does well (small, character-focused vignettes), while also minimizing the main plot, which I will submit is their perennial weakness.

It's worth noting that the game with mostly static characters and a heavy focus on the Reaper arc, ME3, made the internet explode, even though the Collector arc was about as dumb as the resolution to the trilogy. It just didn't matter in ME2 because it was a footnote to the real reason you were there: to meet cool aliens and solve their family issues.

@thatpinguino: Hmm, it's been a while since I played ME3. I know there's the occasional opportunity to meet up with characters around the citadel (they email you saying they're free) but I don't remember what happened with Tali in that situation, if it was a date or not.

@hyuzen: I remember hanging out with the crew on the Citadel, but I don't remember the talks varying depending on what relationship you have to each given character.

@encephalon: I agree with your summation wholeheartedly. The characters in 2 ARE the game as far as I'm concerned and getting so many interesting characters to meet or learn more about was the draw. ME3 just does away with a whole lot of what made 1 and 2 fun because it has to pay off all of the cliffhangers that the earlier games introduced. Though the resolution to 3 really blew up the world because there was no expectation of a sequel that will make everything better. The terminator baby in ME2 was real dumb, but you could at least tell yourself that they might do better in 3. 3 had no such logical safeguard.