Treasure Efe

The problem with the Mass Effect series in general, as well as with Half-Life, is that the writers painted themselves into a corner with genre selection. They're both written as cosmic horror. Cosmic horror is a genre where the universe itself in inherently hostile, either literally or in effect because the antagonist is overpowered beyond hope of evening the scales. The reason that cosmic horror stories are unwinnable isn't story logic, it's genre convention. Think of Cthulhu. Cthulhu, as written in the stories, if you think about him logically, is kind of a wimp. He's just a big dude sleeping on the bottom of the ocean. The maximum extent of his toughness is that you can drive a steamship through him and he won't die. That's pretty formidable in 1927, but in 2027, or 2450, not so much. At least not from a logical standpoint. But to conclude this would be to miss the point. Cthulhu isn't an unbeatable menace because of what he can do. He's an unbeatable menace because the genre convention calls for the author to make him unbeatable. Cthulhu, in other words, is a Mary Sue. The very tropes of cosmic horror fiction demand that no matter what force is brought to oppose him, the author will always asspull some nonsense about how it doesn't work because of Thing I Just Made Up. The whole purpose of having a cosmic horror genre is to evoke that creepy feeling of overwhelming dread, wherein the monster can never be destroyed, only escaped, and often only temporarily. Which is why it's a great set up for a certain type of short story, but not so good for novels. Now, genres are for readers, not for writers. If I'm writing a Cthulhu story, I can always allow the humans of 2450 to utterly annihilate Cthulhu with 60 grams of antimatter. But the problem with this approach is exactly the same as the realization that allows it: genres are for readers. If you thwart the very same setup convention, the defining characteristic of the chaos monster that makes it unstoppable, you unwind the very thing that gave the story its dramatic tension in the first place. And this feels like a letdown. If Cthulhu wasn't so tough after all, then the stakes weren't so high after all. Everything unravels in a vague sense of letdown, which is exactly what we experienced at the end of Mass Effect 3. The genre of "heroic high-stakes video game plot" demands that the protagonist/player win in the end, and win big. The player's efforts must be rewarded with triumph, or the ending sucks. BioShock: Infinite, and Spec Ops: The Line both failed in precisely this way, and came off as pretentious crap with their "take that, player" endings. But the genre of cosmic horror demands that the foe be unbeatable. As we have already discussed. So if you make Mass Effect or Half-Life, you have to deliver a triumphant ending without actually destroying the threat. Now, this is not impossible with clever writing. I could think of several ways to do it in a series of novels. But novels are the efforts of one dude typing, and they come out when they're good and ready. In a video game, you have hit a deadline on a budget, and anything the writers write, the coders must code, and the artists must draw. So, unfortunately, Mass Effect and Half-Life were both doomed from first episode. Which is the real, underlying reason why one was completely badly, and the other not at all. We think fondly of the first episodes of these because they were very well executed, but also because that's where cosmic horror is strongest... in the setup. The payoff is a lot more difficult. And both creative teams couldn't deliver under the pressure of competing demands. If you're going to write cosmic horror, it's wise to know at the beginning exactly where you plan to end.