Mass Effect 3

[The Dude]

Because I think a lot of people feel like they would love Mass Effect if just it was written better. There's a million iterations of some stories, no reason it couldn't be the same for ME.

[Captain Jin]

As horrible as most fanfiction is I actually like to use it to practice my writing or just get the writing bug out of my system. It's funny though when you peruse stuff it's just silly fluff so the genre as a whole gets a pretty bad rap, but I've seen some legitimate writers out there just tackling stuff that's great in an assortment of different titles.

Edit- And Gaidin if I'm practicing my style or my writing and I want solid feedback it's not easy to get that with original work. But if you do it on something already established you can get a pretty solid following if you portray well-loved characters or story arcs well. I think it's a good way of improving as a writer without undertaking the monumental task of creating a 100% original universe in the case of getting better at writing.

[Gaidin]

Edit- And Gaidin if I'm practicing my style or my writing and I want solid feedback it's not easy to get that with original work. But if you do it on something already established you can get a pretty solid following if you portray well-loved characters or story arcs well. I think it's a good way of improving as a writer without undertaking the monumental task of creating a 100% original universe in the case of getting better at writing.

Well you guys were talking about getting together and doing something. Not merely practicing your style or writing. Fixing the errors of ME basically has you starting from the ground up in the first game of the trilogy because everything is designed for a game, not something written. I'm not even sure how many of the characters you'd keep. You might even add more. Side characters of ME1 are suddenly main characters because now you can come back to the Citadel while Shephard is on a mission in a different chapter. The ME1 characters are still main characters in ME2 because you can visit their worlds while Shephard is recruiting. Also the recruiting game changes because, again, that story is designed to be a playable game. It's a totally different ball game, something redesigned from the ground up.

I mean, the world is good, don't get me wrong. But, you're re-engineering the story if you're writing it.

[Mangalore]

as a passionate hater of reboots and retelling I'd always prefer something original to something adapted. That said the important thing is that as a creator one has something to tell one cares about. The problem with fanfiction is that the original will always overshadow it as canon. While going off on a tangent or telling your own story in the same universe might work retelling the story sadly won't win against the original. I'd say the only reboots and reimaginings that work disassociate themselves completely from their originals to tell their own story.

[The Dude]

Well canon is only what it is by virtue of concensus. Of course I'm not under the illusion that we'd be able to create anything that could overwrite the trilogy of games. I mean, the story might be better (in fact I'm 100% confident it would be), but that doesn't change the fact that Mass Effect is primarily perceived as a trilogy of games.

This is exactly what has kept me from putting down the first few words. Or, well, I did write a few pages, but it didn't take very long before I began to grow agitated with the fact that I was essentially using someone else's fiction.

[Slaytaninc]

As horrible as most fanfiction is I actually like to use it to practice my writing or just get the writing bug out of my system. It's funny though when you peruse stuff it's just silly fluff so the genre as a whole gets a pretty bad rap, but I've seen some legitimate writers out there just tackling stuff that's great in an assortment of different titles.

Edit- And Gaidin if I'm practicing my style or my writing and I want solid feedback it's not easy to get that with original work. But if you do it on something already established you can get a pretty solid following if you portray well-loved characters or story arcs well. I think it's a good way of improving as a writer without undertaking the monumental task of creating a 100% original universe in the case of getting better at writing.

Nothing really wrong with that. I'm working on a fantasy novel, and let me tell you, world-building and creating a plot entirely from scratch isn't easy.

[Gaidin]

World building's the best part honestly. Forget the plot for a moment. I love just making all the rules that make everything work, and then working out the history. But then, I'm an engineer anyway, so meh.

[Mangalore]

World building's the best part honestly. Forget the plot for a moment. I love just making all the rules that make everything work, and then working out the history. But then, I'm an engineer anyway, so meh.

While I have the same first instinct I feel that working out the plot is actually more difficult because there this stuff and the characters have to come together in a coherent manner.

[The Dude]

Constructing a plot is like putting together a puzzle where the content of each individual piece keeps changing depending on what other pieces you put in. It requires a serious amount of revisioning that will before the end drive you nuts and make you think that you couldn't possibly be writing anything good anymore. Red herrings sneak in. Chekhov's guns go unfired. And you don't see them until you get back to the first chapters and remember how that paragraph was once meant to contain substantial info that you would later get back to but now no longer has any relevance.

It's rewarding, though, when everything adds up and comes together and you're in a position where you actually know your plot well enough to chafe off the burrs and just stick to what matters. The editing phase, which is where I'm at now, appears to not so much be one of rearranging sentence structure and description, but of removing words and sentences and sometimes paragraphs because they turn out to add nothing except distraction.

Of course I'm talking about writing a book, not so much a game, but the same rules hold true. Mass Effect as a trilogy is filled with narrative redundancies and red herrings that have obviously never gone through the editing process. Mass Effect 2 being the worst violator in that department.

[Habelo]

I too wish to write a book. The only thing that i seem to lack is pr0 skillz in english grammar. Anyone know a place where i might find help?

[Squid]

School, take some English courses.

[Habelo]

Meant more like on the internets.

[Squid]

There are plenty of online courses available from various schools.

[frozenprince]

I'm still waiting for my permanent dialogue button that's just Shep saying "Giant. ****ing. Robots. Are coming to Kill. Us. All. Quit your petty bull crap for 10 god damn minutes and focus on not becoming EXTINCT! *Shep smacks a hoe*"

I played through ME3 again this week and all I could note was just how badly I wanted to say this through 90% of the game, and how utterly insane I found it that Shep didn't just spend her whole adventure spouting off variants of it.

[Gaidin]

Constructing a plot is like putting together a puzzle where the content of each individual piece keeps changing depending on what other pieces you put in. It requires a serious amount of revisioning that will before the end drive you nuts and make you think that you couldn't possibly be writing anything good anymore. Red herrings sneak in. Chekhov's guns go unfired. And you don't see them until you get back to the first chapters and remember how that paragraph was once meant to contain substantial info that you would later get back to but now no longer has any relevance.

It's rewarding, though, when everything adds up and comes together and you're in a position where you actually know your plot well enough to chafe off the burrs and just stick to what matters. The editing phase, which is where I'm at now, appears to not so much be one of rearranging sentence structure and description, but of removing words and sentences and sometimes paragraphs because they turn out to add nothing except distraction.

Of course I'm talking about writing a book, not so much a game, but the same rules hold true. Mass Effect as a trilogy is filled with narrative redundancies and red herrings that have obviously never gone through the editing process. Mass Effect 2 being the worst violator in that department.

Also the thing to remember here is that world design is going to go a completely different direction. Everything's designed for a playable 3 person party shooting game. You do this for a written story some things are going to be taken out, some things are going to be revamped, some things get more interesting. I mean, Kasumi's loyalty mission all of a sudden gets redesigned from the ground up to be Ocean's 11 and is a legitimate theft with the entire party in on it and no pathetic shootout at the end. Something that, if they did a special forces soldier correctly Shephard would have the skillset for anyway. But players for some reason want him to get his gun on.

[_Elysium_]

How the last mission of ME3 was not a boarding party shooting its way through Harbinger's insides is still beyond me. I mean if they'd really gone all the way through with the Crucible plan, if there'd really been sort of an overarching concept behind it rather than a last minute asspull, the best possible implementation that I can think of would've been this: the Crucible is a device capable of interfacing with a Reaper's mind. You have to go all the way into one like you did in ME2 and hook it up to, I dunno, some sort of hub or something. Doesn't really matter. Then you can choose to destroy the Reaper's mind or turn it to your cause. A Reaper at a time. In the final battle for the Citadel (not for Earth, the whole Earth focus was retarded) you fight your way onboard Harbinger and eventually make your choice. The rest of the Reaper fleet scatters when they see what you've done. Whoo. First battle won. Make more Crucibles. End of the trilogy. Imply that victory through hard work is entirely possible. Cut to heroic scene of combined fleets pouring through mass relays across the universe with elite teams lead by Spectres boarding Reapers.

This way you've got all sorts of important ME2 things coming back. Destroying or saving the collector base will alter the amount of choices the Crucible offers you. The Reaper IFF masks ships approaching for boarding (after all it remains the main explanation why not one Reaper in all of ME3 ever shoots at the Normandy despite having been offered plenty opportunities to do so). Etc etc. It also justifies the multiplayer component in that sense, because then you're playing the N7 teams getting stuff done, making it post Shepard campaign content as it were.

Ah well.

That is absolutely brilliant. Makes perfect sense.

Now I dislike ME3 even more.

[Katsumoto]

Just curious, with all this Extended Cut business and subsequent interviews and whatnot, did they ever explain what happened in the scene just before the Star Child, where you beam up to the Citadel? Like how did Anderson get there, how did the Illusive Man get there and how he was able to control you, why all those things were moving in the Citadel etc.

[Tankfriend]

No, nothing of this is ever explained at all. Unless you come up with explanations of your own, this means:
- Anderson followed Shepard into the teleport beam, but ended up ahead of him/her because the internal structure of the area supposedly changes
- TIM uses his Reaper implants to control Shepard/Anderson; he might've been on the Citadel already, but how he got into that control room is left open
- the "moving things" (I guess you mean those in that room with the chasm and bridge in the middle?) are probably some kind of power system; at least that's what Liara calls the exact same things on the Shadowbroker ship back in ME2's Lair of the Shadowbroker DLC

[Gaidin]

Like how did Anderson get there, how did the Illusive Man get there and how he was able to control you, why all those things were moving in the Citadel etc.

Anderson is a good question, but regarding TIM, here's the thing you're going to realize one day, especially if you actually write something. Not every character in a story knows everything. And as the gamer from Shephard's point of view, all you know is that TIM is there. How he got there is pretty damn irrelevant as you don't know how nor should you. You've got other, more important things on your mind. All that matters to you at the moment is he's there and that's what you have to deal with. If you have time later, you can figure out how he got there. It turns out, with the endings, any of them, you don't really have time for it then either, but that's neither here nor there.

[Mangalore]

With TIM the bigger issue is what the heck is game plan was. Last thing you see of him from the Cerberus HQ claiming smugly that he is winning despite losing everything, then he screws everyone over probably killing 13+ million people and then he dies not doing anything that justifies his actions from his madman genocide to his horrific disfigurement.

He serves sadly no purpose for occupying the better part of two games. You could cut him out and it literary wouldn't change anything. Anderson and Shepard could be bleeding out from their wounds anyhow and the real end comes from nothing anyway.