Quote Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists View Post
I know that Star Trek does sometimes do technobabble space magic nonsense, but it usually strives to stay within a lane of plausible, human scenarios. It's managed to remain relatable and semi-grounded for over fifty years and still tells interesting stories to this day. It baffles me that sci-fi games can't take inspiration from it and keep their narratives from spinning off into fantastic tripe. I mean, Mass Effect 1 was a Star Trek RPG with the serial numbers filed off and it eroded away. Andromeda didn't even try! It started in on the magic in the prologue.
Star Trek has the substantial advantage of being strongly episodic, and rooting most of its conflicts in ethics, politics, or the environment. The Enterprise shows up and has to stop bad thing from happening without violating the Prime Directive, or gain enough understanding to negotiate a settlement, or stop a space problem from doing a bad thing. These are all generally very character rooted things.

Videogames don't have that luxury. For one thing the main character in most games is somewhere north of 99% character free. Yoi can't have an interesting conflict about how to solve a problem without violating a character's ethics when that character is basically a cardboard cutout - the player can have an interesting debate about how to solve the problem, but that's not narrative. They also have to make the plot solvable what the player can actually do in game, which is walk places and kill things. Mass Effect does add talk to things, but because it's an RPG, it (probably correctly) assumes that players want to shoot some fools, and therefore needs to provide a steady stream of fools to shoot. Preferably culminating in a boss fight and/or sick loot.

So you need a plot that can be resolved by the player walking to the right place, and shooting the correct thing in its glowing weak point. From that, I think the descent in blue particle effect proper noun space magic nearly writes itself. You need a game, so there's got to be some obstacles to just going to the bad guy and shooting him, so here's some other places to go, full of dudes to shoot. They need a reason to be there, so they're guarding something, maybe some sort of weapon or information you need to defeat the bad guy - objective, proper noun and space magic all in one! The bad guy needs to be doing something bad that can only be stopped by shooting him, so why not a doomsday weapon? More proper nouns and space magic!

I find it notable that ME 1 and Halo 1 both mostly sidestep the worst excesses of "commander, get the Cypher to the Conduit before Lord Vile activates the Converter, or else the Archon will destroy the Nexus!" sort of story. I suspect that this is because they're the first games, which allows them to use information as an objective much more readily than later titles - figuring the Reapers out is satisfying, but you can only play that card once. Also they're just free to introduce stuff in a way that later titles aren't by dint of being first titles. The Flood are a great end of the second act twist, but you can't really introduce secret space zombies multiple times.