Mass Effect 4 Needs to Redefine What it Means to be a Renegade
Mass Effect 4 is on the way, taking players back to the Milky Way and seeing the return of fan-favorite followers like Liara T'Soni. Although many fans of the franchise will be eager to return to the characters and storylines from the series' heyday after the disappointing reception of Mass Effect: Andromeda, not every part of the original trilogy is worth emulating.
Mass Effect 4's Renegade choices need to improve on those in the original trilogy. In the first three games playing a purely Renegade Shepard can lead to wildly inconsistent characterizations, with Shepard swinging between well-intentioned but expedient pragmatism and utter sadism. Even if the next game does away with morality points, the return of Renegade-style choices seems likely. Mass Effect 4 will need to redefine what it means to be Renegade.
The original Mass Effect trilogy's morality system isn't the first three games' strongest suit. Players are heavily incentivized to go almost exclusively Renegade or Paragon, which led the vast majority of polled players to pick Paragon options throughout the games. Instead of judging decisions by their possible outcomes, the "right" choice in any given situation is usually clear depending on which moral alignment the player is going for. Because increasing Shepard's Paragon or Renegade points is also necessary to unlock more dialogue options, the system can sometimes feel more like point-farming than genuine decision making.
Mass Effect: Andromeda got rid of the Paragon-Renegade system, and although the game didn't have as many major decisions as the original trilogy, this was a step in the right direction. Mass Effect 4's trailer hinted at the return of Commander Shepard as the player character. This doesn't necessarily mean the original trilogy's restrictive morality system will be making a return. However, it does seem likely that if Shepard returns their dialogue options will break down along roughly the same Paragon-Renegade binary in order for players to create continuity with the Shepard they knew from the first three games.
In fact, despite the majority of Mass Effect players picking Paragon options in the original trilogy, Mass Effect 4 appears to canonize one major Renegade choice. In the trailer, Liara walks over a dead Reaper and finds a piece of Shepard's N7 armor. This, along with an image released by BioWare showing a rebuilt Mass Relay, hints at Mass Effect 3's Destroy Ending being canonized. The Destroy Ending kills the Reapers along with all other synthetic life in the Milky Way, while also destroying the Mass Relays. It's also the only ending that can hint at Shepard's survival.
If Shepard survives, most players will be expecting to be able to roleplay as a Renegade or Paragon Shepard, even if this doesn't contribute to Renegade or Paragon points like it did in the original trilogy. However, while the sometimes-sappy selfless heroism of a Paragon Shepard stays relatively consistent throughout the original trilogy, the same cannot be said for the games' Renegade options.
At the start of the Mass Effect trilogy the difference between Renegade and Paragon options seems clear. Paragon options appear to focus on principles over pragmatism - sometimes to a fault. Players would expect Renegade options to therefore focus on pragmatism over principles, but that is not always the case.
In the original Mass Effect trilogy, the interpretation of "Renegade" ranges drastically throughout the games' dialogue options. In some cases, the Renegade route leads to Shepard simply being rude. In other cases, xenophobic. In some cases, Shepard's Renegade choices are expedient, like killing the Rachni Queen to prevent the possibility of another Rachni War. They might be ruthless decisions, but they make sense as Shepard's interpretation of the right thing to do. In other cases, Shepard's Renegade choices border on the psychopathic, such as letting factory workers burn to death in Zaeed's loyalty mission or siding with Morinth over Samara in Mass Effect 2.
This range of options wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the morality system didn't lump them all together. It's hard to unlock the top Renegade options in the first game, for example, without being both a committed pragmatist and a xenophobe, despite those two things not necessarily being related. The player can get Renegade points by being anti-alien in Mass Effect 1 that then unlock dialogue options unrelated to that prejudice.
After Andromeda, it seems likely that Mass Effect 4 won't use the same morality system as the original trilogy. This makes it less likely that players will end up picking dialogue options and making choices they otherwise wouldn't have in order to unlock future choices. However, BioWare also needs to make sure that the choices the player character has available to them in the next game don't lump different interpretations of Renegade together in the same way as the original trilogy.
Instead, BioWare should give players a greater variety of dialogue options in any given situation. Without points at play, players could have the option to pick a dialogue choice that represents a principled, Paragon Shepard. But at the same time, they could have multiple dialogue options that break up the original trilogy's variety of Renegade interpretations. In a single dialogue tree, for example, they might have the option to work with aliens for cynical and practical reasons that reflect some of the original trilogy's Renegade options or to reject them based on prejudice which reflects some of the other Renegade options in the original trilogy.
This would give Mass Effect 4's version of Shepard more roleplaying flexibility than the character seen in the original trilogy, especially if Mass Effect fans aren't penalized for mixing and matching their choices as in the first three games. This could just as easily apply to a new protagonist if Shepard's return turns out to be unfounded, retaining the range of dialogue options found in the original trilogy without lumping together a variety of character traits under a single "Renegade" umbrella.
Mass Effect 4 is in development.
Post a Comment