Part Four: The “Convention Problem”
In the conceptual stages of any game, the design team needs to decide how much it will lean on established conventions of the given genre, and how much it will attempt to blaze its own trail, doing things in new ways and trying to establish new conventions. Sometimes it’s a matter of aesthetics, as in the current AAA trend for pushing the envelope on photoreal imagery, with more cartoony designs as in Crackdown or Borderlands as noteworthy exceptions. Sometimes it’s in the design of the interface; every shooter gives us some sort of reticle, an ammo meter, a shield-and/or-health meter, and usually a radar view or other enemy detector, with only the arrangement and visual emphasis of these elements separating one game from another. And so on, and so forth, down a long list of design choices where the creators must decide between doing the same old thing, versus trying to do something new.
Andromeda includes a number of elements where it seems apparent the designers wrestled with this question and were unable to make a clear choice in either direction, resulting in compromises and halfway measures that distract the player and detract from the experience. In many cases, it feels as though they started with the bold option, and then retreated back to the safety of convention, leaving perceptible vestiges of their earlier flirtation with innovation.
For example, let’s consider your character’s role in the story. It’s fairly common in this kind of game, and in genre entertainment generally, for the central character to be, or become, Really Important and Famous. Because of the demand of escalating narrative stakes, it’s difficult to get the player/viewer to buy into the importance of the protagonist’s mission if they’re not directly affecting the biggest problems in the story’s world. In the first Mass Effect trilogy, Shepard is just another Space Marine who gets the opportunity to become The First Human SPECTRE, and then goes on to Save the Galaxy several times, until by the middle of the “Citadel” DLC story a supporting character says openly and directly to Shepard and Crew that they are “legends” (which means Shepard doesn’t need to wait in line to get a table at the best sushi restaurant on the station).
And it’s not just Mass Effect, either: In Wolfenstein: The New Order, Blazkowicz starts as one soldier among many, until he’s tasked with a key infiltration role by the Resistance, eventually leading to a climax in which he’s facing the central villain single-handedly. In Red Dead Redemption, Marston is a reformed outlaw living quietly on his farm, until the government demands that he help them hunt down the surviving members of his old gang; by the end of the story, he’s become a notorious killer known and feared by everyone, culminating in a finale where what feels like the entire United States Army descends upon him. In Watch Dogs, you’re an obscure hacker and electronic thief who gets caught up in a conspiracy that escalates until you’re using your skills to shut off the power to an entire city and expose the wrongdoing of high-level elected officials.
It’s just how these things work.
At the outset, though, Andromeda suggests that it’s going to do things differently. The mission of cross-galactic exploration is led by the Pathfinder, who, at the outset, is not you. You’re just a member of the team, looking up to the Pathfinder. The game goes out of its way to describe you as younger, untrained, and untested.
This creates an interesting dynamic where you have an active role in the missions, but not only are you not in charge, you are explicitly not qualified to be in charge. As a player, you wonder how this will work, exactly, because it’s so different from the norm, but you’re interested to find out.
And then, early in the story, the Pathfinder is removed, and you’re installed in the position, and boom, you’re now the most important person in the game, same as always.
It’s not as though Andromeda is the first example of failing to live up to its attempt to break the usual storytelling model. Just this past year, we got Star Trek Discovery, which made a lot of noise before the premiere about how it would be the first Trek to focus on a character other than the Captain. Fans wondered, would this be a longform version of the underrated Next Generation episode “The Lower Decks,” focusing on the logistics and operational challenges of being a low-ranking Starfleet officer, working head-down at ground level, instead of being the strategic leader? It was unusual, and challenging, but exciting to ponder the possibilities. And then the show basically found a new way to make this secondary character The Most Important Person in the Quadrant, with everyone looking to her for guidance if not explicit orders, and that dynamic faded.
What’s irritating about this element of Andromeda is that it’s not the only time BioWare has experimented with its gameplay framework and attempted to put the player-character outside the center of world events. In Dragon Age II, we play Hawke, a refugee turned mercenary/adventurer in the city of Kirkwall. Over the course of the story, we rise in wealth, power, and prominence, but we never achieve direct control over the events of the game; there are various factions and political rivals pursuing their own aims entirely independent of our choices and influence, and they take action on their own, without any possibility of our intervention. Some players found this frustrating, describing the story as being “on rails,” but others recognized BioWare’s enormous ambition in trying to marry complex longform fantasy narrative with a gaming mechanic, giving us an epic tale spanning many years, in which we play a critical but not central role. It’s unfortunate that DA2’s development budget and schedule were repeatedly compressed; the response of reviewers and players to the resulting compromised gameplay was muted, muddling the potential interest of the game’s structural experimentation. It’s probably not coincidental that with the next game in the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition, BioWare returned to the expected “Most Important Person in the World” convention.
The point is, this is something BioWare knows about and has tinkered with before, so it’s annoying (and telling) that Andromeda feints at it and then drops it.
