okay but saying “i wish i had known you sooner” — like the love in my heart is growing so big and fast for you that i wish i had the opportunity to have you way earlier by my side, because i want to love you longer than i can do now. my love for you reaches my past and makes a place for you.
This criticism of the way ME3 handles the Rachni Queen plot beat from ME1 neatly encapsulates a lot of my issues with Bioware’s story design–namely, that choices aren’t allowed to matter enough.
But fine. It’s a videogame and it can’t possibly take into account every possible course of action. A complex dilemma is boiled down to a simple binary decision. That’s a bit of a bummer, but you can’t have everything.
But this just makes it all the more frustrating when Mass Effect 3 muddles the whole choice. There are four total outcomes for the Rachni:
If you spare the Rachni queen here on Noveria, then you find her a prisoner of the Reapers on Utukku.
If you KILL the Queen here on Noveria, then the Reapers construct a Queen Thrall, because they want to control Rachni soldiers and no we don’t have time to explore that idea in detail. Let’s just go with it.
You can rescue the queen, which turns her into war assets.
You can leave her to her fate, which… whatever. Nothing happens.
You can rescue the thrall queen, which turns her into negative war assets[2] when she betrays you off-screen at some later time.
You can leave her to her fate, and she will attack you.
They went to all this trouble to give us this branching outcome, when I think that what people really wanted was for that initial decision to stand. If I kill the queen she should stay dead, not be replaced with a color-swapped doppleganger. It’s this strange mindset that players must value content more than choice, that we’d rather see our decisions negated than miss out on one mission. Heck, if you don’t want to cut a mission then just fill the cave on Utukku with… I dunno… other mooks. Whatever. Just don’t un-do the earlier decision, and then turn around and offer the player the same decision again.
This is something that harmed Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Negating a major player decision doesn’t just harm that particular moment of the game, it harms every subsequent decision. You’re asking the player to ponder this uncomfortable decision with complex ethical implications and unknowable outcomes, but now in the back of their mind they have this nagging doubt, “Bah. It probably doesn’t matter what I choose anyway because nothing I choose makes any difference. I’ll just do whatever gives me paragon points.” It’s destructive to one of the core promises of the game, which is that the player will get to “make choices that matter”. Players are hungry for even a little authorship over the world. I think we value that far more than one more stupid gunfight.
You see this a lot in the Dragon Age series, too–with occasional exceptions, choices you make in earlier DA installments, or sometimes even earlier in the same game, lead to what are narratively near-identical outcomes, simply because actually having a choice have consequences for the long-term plot is too risky from a game design perspective. It really hollows out the whole concept of player choice, and in many cases I would simply prefer no choice, or a purely cosmetic dialogue choice, to being given an apparent choice only to b told later, “oops! didn’t count :)”