Apropos of *stuff* when I posted on the purple site I got to chat for a while, right at the end of Mass Effect 2's DLC era, with the lead (and only, IIRC, beyond the extensive plot notes he was given) writer for the Arrival DLC, before it came out. >
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He was talking about how excited he was for us to play it, and then we did, and everyone got super down on it so I don't recall him ever mentioning he wrote it again. Which made me sad, because he did a really good job, he just had a central point that was no win. >
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The thing about Mass Effect 2 was, a significant number of players had absolutely no problem with blowing up a batarian star system, bc Renegade players existed, and by the story's logic, it made sense to do. But the series is premised on "but Shepard also gets a blue thing!">
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So when the higher up writers threw this person Arrival, they had to have told him that within very narrow constraints he had to make Shepard kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and display a big casualty count so we all felt bad. >
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Now, again, at the time, people were less incensed by "are we, in real life, the type of people who would stem a robot apocalypse by killing a bunch of scaly four eyed people" and more incensed by "MY Shepard wouldn't do that"
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Or "MY Shepard would totally do that, why are you making me hang out with the Paragons" The only reason Arrival was a PROBLEM and not a dark plot twist was that we were promised we Controlled Shepard's Morality, which was never really true, and the DLC highlighted that
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Anyway, the point being that even Bioware ran into the issue of "what happens if our protagonist NEEDS to do something the audience doesn't want" and it was MORE of a problem because we normally got the illusion of control
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Replying to @BootlegGirl
I feel like some games strongly communicate that you are controlling a character rather than a player avatar, some games do the opposite, but when the lines get blurred this can lead to bad feelings.
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Being able to spend hours creating the character's face makes a difference yes
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