Part Three: Of Histories and Mysteries
Mass Effect Andromeda is structured, from a story standpoint, as a mystery. You arrive in the new galaxy with a colonization plan, but your target planets are not what you expected them to be, and it’s unclear what happened. Something changed during the hundreds of years you were in stasis between galaxies, and you set about trying to piece together the enigmatic clues left behind.
This is not, in and of itself, a problem. Video game stories lend themselves well to the mystery structure, for several reasons, and lots of games play out this way. In the first Mass Effect, you need to figure out what Saren is doing with the geth, and what the deal is with his giant spaceship; in its sequel, you’re trying to uncover the origin and objective of the Collectors; and in the third game, as the Reapers bear down on you, you want to know what the Crucible does, and what the heck Cerberus and the Illusive Man are up to. In Tomb Raider, you want to find the connection between Yamatai’s Sun Queen and this weird island on which you’ve been marooned (and in the sequel, you’re solving the riddle of the Prophet and the Divine Source). In Borderlands, you want to know what’s in the Vault. In Shadow of the Colossus, you’re figuring out why Dormin wants Wander to destroy the Colossi. In HALO, you’re searching for the purpose of the ancient rings. In Alan Wake, you must solve the riddle of Bright Falls while searching for your wife. And so on, and so on, through countless titles — at the beginning, there is an unknown, and after investigation, there is a revelation.
The popularity of this structure with game designers is partly because it’s easy to lay out an interactive narrative using the mystery model. You start with an introductory cut scene; the player takes over to defeat a challenge (combat, usually, or possibly an explicit puzzle or platforming/navigational test) and reach some sort of objective; then another cut scene to reveal the next bit of information, and your next objective; then another gameplay challenge follows; then another cut scene with another reveal; and so on.
In addition, this structure is also experientially congruent with the basic mechanics of playing a game. At the outset, not only do you not know anything, you don’t know how to do anything. The early challenges are typically tutorials for the basics of gameplay just as much as for the basics of the story. Then, the longer you play, and the deeper you get into the story, the more practice you acquire, and the more polished your skills become, so when you finally reach the final stages and are facing the fully understood antagonist or problem, you have maximized your ability to deal with it. Primarily, though, you are pulled through these games by the pleasure of digging deeper and deeper into the central mystery.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Andromeda mucks all of this up.
It fails, in my opinion, in three specific ways.
The first big problem is that the mysterious event that disrupted your colonization plan is basically over and done with when you arrive. You wake from stasis, and you find yourself looking at half a dozen planets that have been wrecked and left inhospitable, instead of the garden worlds you expected. Sprinkled across them are abandoned alien structures, which the characters in the game call Remnant; if you thoroughly explore and investigate them, it’s suggested, you will eventually puzzle out what happened in this part of the galaxy however many centuries ago.
The mystery, in other words, is not an active one. It’s finished. Whatever took place, it’s over, and you are standing in the middle of the aftereffects. Your investigation, in short, is a static one; you wander around, peeling back the layers of the past as the game sees fit to reveal them to you, without anything ever continuing to evolve or change. Your objective, really, is to understand what happened before, so you can undo it and restore the environments you thought you’d be colonizing. Narrative momentum is not forward; it’s a reversal, an undoing.
It’s clear that the game designers have created an elaborate scenario for you to explore and expose, but because it’s just that, a scenario, there’s no inherent drama, no story, in digging up the past. It’s almost anti-dramatic, like you’re wandering around scratching the silver off an endless series of lottery cards. Fundamentally, it’s the amateur’s mistake of confusing world-building with narrative. It’s not enough to come up with a huge and complicated world, and then to dole it out to the player in bits and pieces; there has to be something happening for us to be engaged.
The first Mass Effect shows how this is handled correctly. Midway through the game, we start to realize that Saren is not the main villain after all, and there’s a power behind him, something much greater and much, much older. But it’s still active in the present, and we have to solve the mystery of the past in order to understand the immediate danger and thereby save the future.
It’s even possible to make a “dead world” mystery work. Look at Bioshock, which sends the player into a dripping, creaking tomb of a city, and tells us to figure out what it used to be and how it got this way. Early on, though, we start getting clues that the world is not as dead as it looks, that history is still unfolding, that the crazy creatures running around may directly connect past to present; and, ultimately, we feel that we are in fact now playing an active role in writing the final chapter of this mysterious undersea metropolis.
None of that is true in Andromeda. The story of the past, whatever it was, is done, and we’re wandering around looking at its remains like we’re touring a museum, examining artifacts under glass and poking buttons to listen to explanatory recordings. The mystery is initially tantalizing, but without an active connection to engage us, this tour of the past rather quickly becomes a dull, repetitive slog.
There are strong hints that the game designers didn’t realize that this after-the-fact narrative style would be an irritating dead end. At several points as you’re exploring the various vast environments, you get the opportunity to pick up little side quests off datapads and at scavenger sites: an opportunistic trader is attempting to play two purchasers against each other, or a team of resistance fighters is pursuing a desperate objective, and so on. You can follow these clues, seeing how this side mini-story develops from site to site. Sometimes the clues lead you to a location where the story is still playing out, and you can take an active role in its conclusion. But often the final destination is a site with only information about how the mini-story concluded before you arrived: dead bodies and a farewell letter, say. By the third or fourth time this happens, you’re grumbling at the game, I chased down all these waypoints for this? and wondering how the game’s writers did not understand how exasperating and aggravating this would be.
And clearly, they didn’t, because Andromeda’s big overarching mystery story is exactly the same.
But there’s more.
