As announced in a post “Mass Effect: Command and Shepard, Part 1/4“, Story Structure will take a closer look at how the game series handles its theme of leadership. We will look at what tools are used to discuss the theme, how well the different tools work and to what effect they are deployed. In the last entry of this series we looked at how different styles of leadership distinguished enemies from allies in Mass Effect 1. In Mass Effect 2 we encounter some changes, although much stays the same.
We get a wholly new, same old Shepard, a new spaceship with some new crew members and some old acquintances. The main villains remain the reapers, although instead of Sovereign, Saren and the Geth now new henchmen are trying to lead the way of the Reaper fleet into the known space sector: the mysterious Collectors.
One important new thing, is that Shepard doesn’t work for the military anymore, or even as a Spectre for the council. No, now he works for the Illusive Man and his organisation Cerberus.
A New Party
Cerberus can more or less be located within objectivism, on an ideological spectre. With no morals holding them back they seek to advance humankind in every way possible. Although there is one man holding the strings, the different research facilities operate independently. Which is used to explain why in Mass Effect Cerberus has been the villain in a few of the side missions. Shepard works for them, because once more the democratic and bureaucratic institutions, like the council and the army, chose to ignore the threats of the Reaper. Only Cerberus gets us the funding we need to find out who the Collectors are and how we can defeat them.
The Villains
The Collectors got their name from attacking specifically human settlements, and abducting all of their populace. Throughout the game we find out, that the Collectors are a millennial-old alien race, called Protheans. They had been the peak of the last evolution cycle, and defended themselves against the Reapers. However, their attempts were futile and they got eradicated. The few that survived got modified by the reapers, so that they lost their identity and became nothing more than mindless slaves for their masters. They collect humans and only humans, in order to construct a new humanoid reaper and for that they need the organic materials from their models.
The Crew
Once again, the crew does not add particularly a lot to the theme. Although the side-missions or lore of some of them fit along the theme.
In summary, once again we can see the theme of leadership and ruling running through the different parties in the world of Mass Effect. With Cerberus being an interesting new perspective included into the discussion, while the Collectors are nothing more than another way to showcase the villains’ ability to control. Now, how does ME2 represent leadership in its mechanics?
Commanding Shepard
With Cerberus backing us up, we start in a much greyer zone, than we did in ME1. Commander Shepard, again can be either an altruistic or an egoistic leader. This time however it does have some consequences. The idea of the game is rather simple. Gather a crew and go with them onto a suicide mission into the Collectors’ base and destroy the new born Reaper. Thanks to this simplicity, most decisions’ outcome will be experienced during the suicide mission.
Emotional Leadership
Each crew member comes with their own side story, told in a few missions. Only when we finished those missions, the crew member becomes loyal to us. And only if we have enough loyal crew members, the suicide mission can be a success. This is a great way to showcase, that leadership means caring for others and helping them with their problems. This gives them a believable reason to follow you onto a literal suicide mission. However, once little criticism I’d like to add. The choice the player gets here is between more or less content. What player would actively choose to not pursue the side missions? I for my part always want to experience as much content as possible. So it’s not really a choice.
There are also some moments where two crew members get into a fight over character specific issues, on which they don’t agree. Here Shepard has to manoeuvre a chat with both of them to resolve the issue. Although, I think these talks are more important on who you get to romance, than on how your crew performs on the suicide mission.
Strategical Leadership
There is a feature that forces the player to make some tactical decisions. Loyalty is not enough to grant that the suicide mission is a success. During it you encounter a couple of situations, where you have to decide which of your crew members you have to send to solve it. If it’s the wrong one, it could end lethal. However, in my opinion, the set-up is lacking and it’s sort of too little too late. It’s a neat idea though.
Moral Leadership
There are not many moral decisions Shepard has to make in this game. There is one big one, however, and that is how closely we want to work with Cerberus. Do we simply take their fundings and do our own thing, or do we feel some responsibility towards them, and do exactly as the Illusive Man orders us to do?
The consequences are not huge. But it is an interesting thought to provoke in the player nonetheless. Ultimately it comes down to the players evaluation of Cerberus’ morals and ideology.