Welcome to Vertical Slice Chewing. I aim to make this a fairly regular thing where I take an in-depth look at easily digestible nugget style chunklets of games that I feel do something particularly noteworthy. The impetus behind this is about 15% an examination of some of the more subtle design choices that contribute to the wider framework of an individual work’s impact, 5% because it’s easier than reviewing full games, and 600% so I could use that picture of the dog eating pizza. Savour the cheesy goodness, sweet prince, you are a shining diamond in a crumbling world of dirt.

Today’s slice is from Mass Effect: Andromeda. First off: I did not hate this game. It did have flaws, great squawking flocks of them, in fact, but I still found a lot to like. Admittedly, I didn’t experience Andromeda upon its purportedly bug ridden launch, because I no longer buy games until at least a month after release. If you have to ask why, then I have to commend you on managing to rig the gigantic rock you live under with the electricity needed to game in the first place. Publishers have been dropping games in these suicidal Ripley clone-esque abortive states for years now, and the public has responded to every invitation to the shit sandwich buffet by begging for seconds. Andromeda launched in the state it did because EA knew they could get away with it, lovable scoundrels that they are, and all considered, who can really blame them?

See, look at that adorable face. Don’t you just want to take him home and shove his face into an oven until the molten flesh bubbles like a thick layer of delicious cheese over the hearty crust that was once his skull? Right, I was meant to be talking about Andromeda‘s slice, wasn’t I? It’s Liam’s Loyalty Mission. Let’s have a look.

I kept getting the feeling while playing this section that it belonged in an entirely different game. The goofy, saccharine dialogue was suddenly replaced by dynamic and genuinely funny writing. The routine level design gave way to an M.C Escher painting of tangled machinery, and the underdeveloped primary antagonist was momentarily replaced by a believable and constantly present villain.

I realise there’s 3 pretty large complaints about Andromeda there, and before I look into what Liam’s loyalty quest did right, it would make sense to unpack them a bit, otherwise I’m just using fancy words to throw shade at the game without the backup of some solid gold facts*, so let’s do it:

*Not actual facts, because attempting to make objective statements about my personal experience with a piece of art would be fallacious and misguided , stupid.

Complaint the first: Goofy, saccharine dialogue. (Saccharine is pretentious speak for cloyingly sentimental, you illiterate prole)

Most of the dialogue in Mass Effect: Andromeda comes in two distinct but equally shitty flavours:

Tonally dissonant goofiness

i.e about eighty percent of all dialogue options. Seriously. I won’t even go into examples because there are so many damp squibs that they actually serve to make bits of intentionally weighty discourse that don’t include them ineffective by preventing us from taking Ryder at all seriously. At one point, I decided to give Andromeda the benefit of my rapidly decreasing doubt, and reasoned that maybe the writers had intended a layer of underlying subtlety. Perhaps, I thought, this constant barrage of weak irreverence exists to give the impression of some sort of dissociative disorder on the part of a protagonist recently traumatised by the death of their father and the galaxy wide threat of unknowable evil, causing them to resort to sarcastic quips in inappropriate situations as a means of dealing with the harsh realities of a cruel, uncaring universe. Maybe, I thought, what initially seemed like bad writing was actually Bioware embarking on a subtle exploration into the tragedy of the human condition, cleverly mirrored by the physical exploration of new frontiers that makes up the bulk of the actual gameplay, resulting in a game resonating with the emotive force of deft experiential metaphor. Then I remembered that this game includes the line ‘let’s take out the trash’ without irony. I had just gotten the razorblades prepped and my wrist bared, and then another character said the same line about a minute later. It was at this point I knew I had to live, because I had some internet complaining to do.

Unearned, forced sentimentally.

Vetra: Hey Ryder, did I ever tell you about my sister, with whom I have an as yet unresolved rocky relationship with?

Vetra: Wow Ryder, that last shoot out with the Kett sure was rocky, much like the unresolved relationship I have with my sister.

Vetra: What a strange new planet this is. I hope that we will soon resolve our currently unresolved mission here. Also, I have noticed the terrain here is very unstable and, on closer inspection, appears to mainly consist of large rocks….

And so on…

Now, if I drew a graph here, it might have a few crossover points where both of these elements successfully blend into a tasty cocktail of bittersweet, darkly comedic emotion, complete with a dainty pink umbrella of self awareness, because this does happen on occasion. But I do not like graphs because I don’t trust their haughty airs of self presumed objectivity or the way they occasionally disguise themselves as pies to lure in unsuspecting hungry folk before barraging them with facts, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Complaint the Second: The Complaintaning – Predictable level design

Ok, so I know that the creation of an engaging mix of sprawling, open world environments and hand crafted combat arenas presents a tough balancing act. Some of the planets were very pretty to look at , and integrating noteworthy set pieces convincingly while still having the wider landscapes make some sort of geographical sense would have been a pretty monumental achievement. Even The Witcher 3 suffered from this a bit, and it’s likely a side effect of designing a world first and populating it with one of five or so identical tasks afterwards. But the loyalty missions do show us that dynamic and interesting design isn’t beyond the developers abilities, and after approximately 100 billion identical shootouts, a greater sense of a designers personal touch in certain areas wouldn’t have gone amiss. Identical encounters are fine if your game contains enough inter-playing systems to bounce off each other and smart enough AI to create emergent moments, and, for the most part, Andromeda had neither.

Complaint the Second 2: The Third Complaint – Vague, Underdeveloped Cliché of a Primary Antagonist.

That Archon is bad news, man. We know he’s bad news because the first time he appears on screen, he brings his tiny orchestra to play ominous music, and also his lightning machine. Also he has goons. Many identical goons. But he is not identical to the goons. He is a special person with a special cape. Also, he’s too important to carry his own floating tech doodad, so he has one of his goons do it. Are you impressed by his evil majesty yet? What will his floating doodad do? Wait a second… it’s creating a holographic projection of Ryder! He wants Ryder dead or something or other! I like Ryder because Ryder is me and I like me, so that’s all the motivation I personally need to engage in relentless, galaxy wide genocide. But wait! The ill defined thing he wants to happen did not happen! Well, that seals it. He’s definitely a villain, because if he was a hero, the thing he wanted to happen would happen, ill defined as it was. Now he is doing a sulky walk away from the place. What an arsehole. I cannot wait to spend the next 80 hours murdering anything that looks like him.

Later, after being intercepted by a Kett fleet, we get to have a conversation with the Archon. There’s a bit more going on here than it might first appear. Don’t be fooled though: Hidden depths are not always an indicator of quality. See: Your mum’s vagina.

Archon: ‘Where is the one who activated the Remnant?’

In attempt to give us a sense of a mano-a-ketto rivalry with the Archon, the writers have him call Ryder out personally here. You’ll notice that instead of referring to Ryder by name or by some sort of status related nomenclature like ‘The Captain’ he instead refers to Ryder’s actions, or specifically, the actions that are in direct conflict with his personal goals. If he’d called us ‘The Captain’ or ‘The one in charge’ or whatever, he’d be aligning his own personal standing with ours. This would reinforce the one-on-one conflict element, but would also be an admission on the Archon’s part that he views us an equal. The writers are a bit smarter than this though, and are attempting to show us that the Archon doesn’t actually care about Ryder on personal level, just as a stepping stone to further his goals relating to his obsession with Remnant technology. Now, if used in a different context, this same technique could be implemented as part of a successful character building moment. It does actually do the work of what could have been some clumsier expository dialogue, and reveals something about the Archon’s motivations (Don’t worry, the clumsy exposition comes later) The issue is that his motivation isn’t especially interesting, and it feeds into the trope of the villain that views all other life as an insignificant inconvenience along their path of totally evil destruction. BUT WAIT THE REAPERS DID THAT AS WELL AND THEY WERE ALL COOL AND IMPOSING AND DRENCHED IN LOVECRAFTIAN INTANGIBILITY. Indeed. But any sense of the Archon’s character embodying these traits is weakened by failed attempts to humanise him. Giving him the all-too-human all-too-played-out flaw of obsession with power while also attempting to give the impression that the Archon is such an unknowable evil that he treats Ryder’s existence as a mere tool to help him further his own ends are contradictory goals, and each weakens the impact intended by the other. Shit line then.

Archon: ‘Their DNA signature is there. Answer me’

Yep. I got it. He’s cold and calculating and does not respect human biological makeup, although for some reason still uses human biological terms.

Ryder: Just tell me what you want?

Archon: I won’t explain what you can’t understand.

Ah, the old covering up for a lack of interesting motivation with a pretence of depth, whilst also making the actual pretence so obvious that the audience is expected to attribute it to the villain, rather than the writers.

Archon: Your defiance is naive and reckless. This day marks the beginning of your greatness.

Whoa there doggo. No more pizza and terrible dialogue for you today.

Ok, so that’s it for the complaining. Looking back, that was all quite negative of me. When I started writing this, my original intention was to counter the overwhelmingly negative public reaction to Andromeda by having a look at some of the positives, because in all honesty, quite a lot of my time spent playing the game involved me being surprised that it was nowhere near as shitty as I expected it to be. By the time I got to the end section though, I found myself bumping the difficulty down to casual and blitzing through the finale just so I could be done with the thing, and also skipping the majority of the epilogue conversations. This made me realise that I didn’t care enough not to consciously ruin my own experience, although I’ll admit that the run up to the end was visually spectacular. The game did have some genuinely great moments, and even the bits that were crappy never felt cynical. Mass Effect 3 felt cynical as hell to me, like every design decision had been filtered through a boardroom. This one felt like the same team, after already having endured so much corporate torture that they no longer possessed any semblance of innovate thought, attempting to create something they dearly loved to at least experience a simulation of human emotion. A passionless passion project, if you will. If Mass Effect 3 was a cybernetic claw tightening itself around the contents of your wallet, Andromeda was the tentative first poem of a robot designed for evil but reprogrammed for good, blinking through cybernetic eyes at a new sunrise and asking ‘is this what you call…love?”. Liam’s loyalty mission was one of these moments. So let’s put on our old classics and then turn them off again because social interactions make us nervous and then take a look, shall we?

Immediately, we’re introduced to the two concentric narrative threads of the mission: The overarching conflict of Us vs. Some bad pirates, and Liam’s internal struggle over blaming himself for the situation. Even though the whole pirate thing is basically an excuse to shoot more dudes, the fact that Liam has a personal stake in the mission adds significance to the encounters to follow. The success of the mission is immediately linked with Liam’s redemption, and providing we have even the smallest amount of affection for him as a character by this point, the entire routine affair is now reinforced with a human element as its central conflict.

“We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s hit the go button, shoot some pirates, and save people.”

Fuck yes Andromeda. See, there’s beauty in simplicity, too.

We get a great moment where our crew is plunged into darkness, discussing how stupid their plan is, and then Liam kicks the door open to the cargo bay. It’s atmospheric without being melodramatic, diffused by humour that works within the context of a mission that the crew already know is stupid, and also a rare moment of dynamic visual variety. It gives the impression of being focused and directed, and the player is already starting to get a greater sense of Liam’s character through his physicality than his dialogue trees have provided us up till now.

But wait! Something’s wrong™! This is a Kett ship!

I was genuinely scared here for a moment, although not for the reasons the game intended. I was really, really sick of fighting Kett at this point, and was looking forward to shooting some generic dudes in power armour. See Andromeda, Kett are so fundamentally uninteresting that they actually make generic dudes in power armour seem appealing. Then it turned out to be a delightful ruse, and some generic dudes in power armour turned up anyway. This made me very happy.

Upon first contact, the main bad dude of this mission appears over the intercom to shout some bad dude things at you. It’s not a new trick, but it does introduce him from the get go, and serves to keep him present throughout.

Soon, the mission reveals itself for what it truly is, as far as tone is concerned, and that is a farce. When I say farce, I mean in the dramatic sense, rather than the pejorative: Absurdist comedy, in the best way possible. Providing you pick the option where Ryder attempts to impersonate one of the pirates, we get to see Liam laughing in the background (or ‘snickering’ as the subs would have it), immediately representing a jump off point for the upcoming transformation of narrative priority. And BOOM. The lens through which we view the context of this entire conflict has suddenly shifted. Now, this same sarcasm pervades Andromeda in its entirety, but the reason it works in this context and not others is because it’s presented as a foil to tension, rather than as a tonal element that we’re expected, as an audience, to accept as complimentary to it. Because the game has already established that the true stakes of this mission relate to character, the threat of failure to stop the dastardly schemes of cardboard cut out villain is replaced by the threat of a failure of Liam’s redemptive arc. Keep in mind that outcomes are secondary here. We could totally fail to take down the fun sized big bad and get all the captives killed and maybe lose like, a couple of toes or something, and the mission would still be a success, both inside and outside the fiction, as long as Liam successfully underwent character growth.

What follows is a few more examples of potential danger played out as physical comedy (The turret behind the door, cutting off the pirate dude mid sentence via the intercom) Again, this works because of a shift in tone. The villain is, all considered, no less generic than the Kett, but the way he is framed within the established mood of the mission colours the whole thing differently. This, combined with the genuine character conflict that arises from Liam’s emotional outbursts over his supposed failures, serves to allow the genuinely emotive moments to shine. It is two conflicting levels of tone working in tandem to strengthen each other – the lack of which to be found elsewhere is, to me, the central failing of much of Andromeda’s narrative. The reason why these disparate elements work so well here and fail in the rest of the game is due to a polarity reversal in their presentation – suddenly, the conflict itself is secondary to the way the characters deal with said conflict, and that is the heart of what a Mass Effect game should be.

There are a few more things I really liked about this section, the level design being one of them, but that’s more or less the gist of it. Also, this is already about 3x longer than I intended it to be, so that’s me out. COME BACK FOR MORE VITRIOL SOON.