Mass Effect 3 Editorials
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Mass Effect 3 is all about war. The massive marketing campaigns and pre-release hype surrounding the game have made loud and clear that the galaxy is no longer safe, and that the conflict with the Reapers will get bloodier before it gets better. In some ways, Mass Effect 3 succeeds in demonstrating the horror and brutality of war in manifold ways, both on the front lines and away from them. In others, though, it's a let-down, primarily because it isn't able to manifest this theme in any way beyond presentation.
Where the first two games in the series took place on a small scale and thus could focus on a small cast of characters performing a select number of events, Mass Effect 3 sticks to the same formula and leaves gameplay feeling completely disconnected from the events of warfare that drive the story. The warfare that drives the narrative is often pushed into the background, and the corridor-shooting action can seem insignificant in the larger picture. The game's token effort to portraying a galaxy-wide fight for survival, the "Theater of War" map, is little more than an indicator of which ending the player will receive, which itself boils down to completing all the game's side-quests rather than smart use of war assets.
It becomes obvious very early in that Mass Effect 3 could have benefited immensely from some sort of strategy element. As a game about galactic conflict, tying the core missions into a meta-game of resource management, supply lines, and other wartime concerns could have made the conflict seem real and immediate. Instead of hopping from one mission to the next, the player could have had to make hard decisions about whether to save or sacrifice certain worlds as the wave of Reaper forces made its way across the galaxy. These sorts of choices could have filtered into the standard missions, too - do I allocate valuable espionage agents to this sector, gaining extra intel for an upcoming mission, or do I requisition troops for additional fire support?
And then I'll point you over to VG247 for a piece on the series' successful handling of "save game legacy":
The reason I care about Garrus, Liara and Tali more than, say, Uncharted's Sully, Chloe and Elena is because they've not only followed me through thick and thin but because I feel as though I've shaped them over the course of several games.
I pushed Garrus to quit the Citadel Police in the first game, and in the second he nods to that as he guns down criminals as a mercenary. Liara's gone from a naive scientist to a hardened commando-type, all a result of our adventures together.
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A lot of it is illusion, of course Garrus would be gunning down mercenaries with a different line of dialogue even if you'd encouraged him to keep doing things by the book or even if you'd never recruited him at all but illusion is what makes games games.
It comes to a point where you begin to see context in lines of dialogue and pieces of animation that aren't actually there. Liara reacts warmly to every Shepard when they meet in the third game, but I convinced myself she was warmer and more intimate with my Shepard because they'd been lovers and Shepard had been loyal.
