The next chapter in the Mass Effect series – known for now as Mass Effect 4 – is in development at BioWare. The upcoming title received a new trailer at The Game Awards 2020 which hinted a return to the Milky Way and old fan-favorite characters like Liara T’Soni and maybe even Commander Shepard.
Mass Effect: Andromeda may not have been the best received entry in the series, but there’s one key change Andromeda made that Mass Effect 4 should take from the last game. Andromeda, however, did not fully take advantage of the opportunity that change presented. The next Mass Effect needs to take Andromeda‘s lack of a paragon or renegade system, and focus on improving one other aspect of the game to realize that change to its full potential.
Mass Effect: Andromeda did away with the Paragon-Renegade morality system used in the first three games. There are a few reasons that binary morality systems aren’t conducive to immersive roleplay. For a start, moral binaries often penalize players for not sticking to a single path. The original Mass Effect trilogy’s system made this mistake by only allowing certain dialog options to be accessed at key moments in the story if the player had almost exclusively chosen Paragon or Renegade until that point. As a result, the Paragon-Renegade morality system denied the player character the opportunity for change and development.
The majority of Mass Effect players chose the Paragon route, which means that for most players Commander Shepard, while a charismatic player character, had little development over the course of the series, always choosing the “right” thing even when it wasn’t expedient or even rational to do so. The same can be said for players who always chose Renegade – it’s a different version of Shepard, but one with equally little room for development.
The old Mass Effect morality system often made the right choice clear in-game even when it wasn’t clear in Mass Effect‘s story. If the player was doing a paragon playthrough, they should have always picked the blue paragon option. If they were a renegade, red was the way to go.
This has the effect of making players watch the admittedly still very enjoyable story of the original Mass Effect trilogy unfold in front of them instead of rewarding them for truly immersing themselves in the player character. By doing away with this system, Andromeda made players use their own intuition to judge whether a decision was right or wrong. However, the last game didn’t realize its lack of a morality system to its full potential.
Getting rid of a game’s morality system doesn’t mean getting rid of moral choices, it just means that those choices have to be judged within the story itself as opposed to the mechanics of the game. A lack of clarity as to whether a decision was ultimately right or wrong is a level of ambiguity not only found in real life but in most compelling stories, and by removing the system, it has the chance to let players explore more moral grays. To take full advantage the storytelling opportunities this presents, BioWare needs to make sure Mass Effect 4 gives players a greater variety of ways to deal with conflicts.
This is something that has been a consistent thing, though. For example, towards the start of Knights of the Old Republic when the player is still on Taris, they might come across a man being harassed by debt collectors. The Dark Side option is to let them continue, to help them, or to rob the man. The Light Side option is to kill the collectors – there’s no actual “good” way to resolve the problem without killing multiple people the player has only just encountered.
Some of Mass Effect‘s toughest decisions had vastly different outcomes, but often there were still only two choices at key moments, a problem not created by but often exacerbated by the Paragon-Renegade system. Moving beyond that to create a more complicated system of actions and consequences could be exactly what Mass Effect 4 needs to recapture the originality and boundary-pushing excitement of the first three games nearly a decade after the release of Mass Effect 3.
BioWare shouldn’t just do away with its morality system in Mass Effect 4 like it did in Andromeda, but it should try to incorporate a wider variety of options to allow for a greater diversity of roleplay experiences. One player, for example, might want to play a version of the game’s hero who believes that conflict itself is inherently immoral and should be avoided at all costs. Another Mass Effect player might want to dive into the world as a character whose idea of being “good” is their commitment to battling evil head-on.
These different approaches shouldn’t always have favorable outcomes in the next Mass Effect game. However, they should be presented as options for the player to attempt whenever possible, and it should be clear from the consequences of different decisions that sometimes practicality and morality come head-to-head.
This also doesn’t mean that each dialog tree in Mass Effect 4 should have 10 options, each correlating with a different theory of morality. By removing the Paragon-Renegade system and giving players just a couple more approaches to each problem, Mass Effect 4 would also encourage players to mix and match different moral approaches at different times. This would allow them to have a far more realistic and unique approach to each problem and playthrough than the Paragon-Renegade binary encouraged.
Mass Effect 4 should follow in Andromeda’s footsteps, removing its morality system. The next step should then be to ensure that the players, now more immersed in figuring out these decisions for themselves, aren’t presented with dialog options which make the same point in different ways. That diversity of choices in Mass Effect 4 could help return the series to the heights of the original trilogy.
Mass Effect 4 is currently in development.
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