Mass Effect 2's Thermal Clips

Mass Effect 1 was an inventive, awesome experience that opened a new science fiction world to its audience, one with the best kind of unlimited potential for the imagination to take hold of and explore.  It was more than just a space opera (though it was an excellent specimen of such), it was also a game that captured the exciting beauty inherent in interstellar exploration, the real-world majesty and promise of the cosmos that we as a species are still girding ourselves to engage in.  It was inevitable that ME1 would have a sequel...and while Mass Effect 2 was a far cry lesser than its predecessor, it was certainly an excellent and worthy continuation, and great in its own right.  What separates ME2 from the first game isn’t any particular failure, simply more a case of being unable to quite recapture the same magic that Mass Effect 1 seemed to effortlessly immerse itself within.  Less a shortcoming than just a different direction and perspective.

But Mass Effect 2 does have actual, demonstrable flaws.  And 1 of its more famous ones is the addition of the thermal clip to the game.  Basically, it’s like this: in Mass Effect 1, the firearm technology is so incredibly advanced that guns don’t actually use bullets any more.  Instead, you just stick a rod of metal in the firearm, and the gun’s inner workings shave tiny pieces off the matter, and use that as ammo, because with the technology of mass effects, every weapon can be a goddamn railgun, and that means anything solid shot from its barrel is more powerful than any conventional armament, even tiny metal shavings.  What this basically means is that all guns in Mass Effect 1 have limitless ammo, since you can stick a single rod in there and have enough ammo to perforate half a city.  The guns’ll overheat if you just keep firing them nonstop, forcing you to let them cool for a bit before continuing to fire, so it’s not like you can just run around reenacting Contra, but still, the benefits of guns that have essentially limitless ammo are fairly obvious.

And then, in Mass Effect 2, firearms "advance" again, as the technology of the Geth is reverse engineered, and now guns require thermal clips to fire.  Basically, while the ammo is still technically infinite, guns now refuse to fire if you don’t have a functional thermal clip in them to deal with the heat they generate, and you have to keep replacing these clips if you want to keep firing.  So, technically different from having limited ammo, but in practice, exactly the fucking same.  I think the explanation was that the Geth attack convinced the civilized galaxy that they wanted guns that could keep shooting faster for longer before needing a break due to overheating, or something, because the Geth’s own armaments had a very fast rate of fire thanks to this thermal clip system.

Riiiight.

This is not a new subject to criticize.  As explanations for gameplay limitations go, this one rates somewhere between the absurdity of why Fox couldn’t use his blaster in Star Fox Adventures, and that time EA tried to convince us that linear games don’t sell well any more.  Fans have been complaining and pointing out the utterly irrational stupidity behind this change from the moment ME2 hit the shelves.  Bioware’s decision to prioritize a gameplay mechanic they wanted more highly than what was right or natural for their story is well-documented.  And I’m not here to repeat it--the decision to switch from guns with infinite ammo to guns that stop working until you shove a new ammo-analogue into them is so transparently, obviously idiotic that there’s no damn need to; the only way you could possibly not figure it out yourself is if you happen to be a Bioware writer yourself.

So what am I here to do today, then?  Well, I’m here to point out the absurdity of the logistics of this change.

See, when the galaxy’s decision to switch to guns with limited ammunition is lambasted, the criticism is almost always based on how stupid and nonsensical it is to believe that a community of rational, thinking beings would consciously completely abandon weapons with limitless ammunition in all their military endeavors.  But what no one seems to realize is that this isn’t just a failure in storytelling from that angle--it’s also an outright plot hole.  Beyond how dumb it is, the galaxy’s universal adoption of the thermal-clip-based firearm is a logistical impossibility.

Consider the following facts for a moment.  A: In every firefight Shepard gets into in ME2 (and ME3), he can retrieve the thermal clips from the corpses of his fallen opponents.  B: The only guns Shepard has any option to obtain in ME2, period, are the ones that depend on thermal clips.  And most importantly, C: The events of Mass Effect 2 take place 2 years after those of Mass Effect 1.  A and B mean that, by all observable evidence, essentially all armed individuals in the galaxy are using the new thermal-clip-reliant guns (since the models of ME1 did not have thermal cooling capabilities adequate for the new weaponry, or else there wouldn’t have been new weaponry, so Shepard can’t be collecting thermal clips from enemies using the guns from ME1).  This is a conclusion generally backed up by the games themselves, too; I’m using A and B to prove a point that’s already implied anyway.  And when combined with C, this means that within the span of 2 years and no more than that, the entirety of a galaxy’s civilizations completely rearmed themselves with an entirely new stock of guns.

There are more than half a dozen different space-faring civilizations in Mass Effect, and every 1 of them had their entire military completely swap out their old firearms for new ones, uniformly and universally.  And not just their military, but their police, their security guards, their bodyguards, and anyone else whose job entails the possession and potential use of a firearm.  On every official level, military to law enforcement to civilian, a complete overhaul of weapons inventory has occurred   Think about that--think about the logistics of manufacturing literal millions if not billions of handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and so on to completely rearm every Council Race’s military entirely.  Of transporting those millions of guns.  Of retraining all users of these firearms, who are used to working with weapons without a thermal clip mechanic.  Of, for that matter, manufacturing billions of spare thermal clips for those weapons, then transporting them, stocking them, and storing them, for thousands of separate gun-using groups within each species.

It’s legitimately not possible.  If the Council Races had started rearming on the day that Sovereign got wrecked in Mass Effect 1, there’s still no conceivable way that by the time Sleeping Beauty pulls his ass off the lab table, resumes saving the universe, and starts working on hitting that Quarian booty, the entire civilized galaxy has thoroughly replaced every firearm in circulation and reserve.

And that’s generously giving the entirety of the 2 years to this process, which is infeasible in and of itself.  There’s no way that reverse-engineering the Geth weaponry was done immediately, even if the Council scientists were able to get a head-start thanks to Shepard’s general exploits in ME1.  There’s no way that the process wouldn’t be delayed by debate and discussion on every level of the Council and the races within it.  There’s no way every single institution using firearms would be immediately willing or even able to foot the bill to completely change out its inventory.*  A private security firm or a police department isn’t gonna need the latest tech for every single agent and every single operation they undertake--and that’s not even accounting for the usual capitalistic reticence to ever pay for new equipment if it’s in any way possible to avoid it, even when that new equipment is needed.  There’s no way the firearms’ designs would be immediately hashed out and able to be manufactured from the very start, even if the Geth tech had been reverse-engineered on Day 1.  There’s no way the manufacturing facilities wouldn’t need some time to be set up, and the lines from production to transportation established.  Even if it were somehow rationally possible for the entirety of the civilized galaxy to rearm itself entirely in the span of 2 years, it wouldn’t actually have those full 2 years to do so!

And it only gets worse when you consider that most of Mass Effect 2 takes place in the uncivilized frontiers of the galaxy, outside of Council space.  Are you trying to tell me that in addition to all the legitimate, official institutions of the galaxy fully restocking themselves with the latest weaponry, every single mercenary outfit, crime organization, and terrorist cell also went out of its way to acquire enough brand new guns for their every single member?  The thugs operating in the back alleys of Omega, they’re outfitted with weapon technology that’s on the exact same level as the highest military special forces operatives?  The Batarian Hegemony exists as a hostile faction proudly separated from the rest of the galaxy’s races, which has no reason to care about the threat of the Geth to the races of Council space,** but they’re 100% on board with following the Council’s decision to completely change the way all personal firearms work?  And then they somehow acquire and voluntarily adopt this outside technology, and even stick to the same schedule for this overhaul?

The fact is that when the chips are down, when all is said and done, the writers of an RPG or other work have a bunker they can crawl into when it comes to a character making illogical or uncharacteristic decisions.  George Lucas, the fucktards in charge of Star Trek: Picard, whoever was writing Shion in Xenosaga 3, every creative mind on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise past the first movie, and definitely Bioware, they’re all very fond of this little impenetrable defense: they’re the writers, and what they say goes.  No matter how out of character, no matter how outright stupid, there is nothing technically impossible about most badly-written character decisions.  So the irrationality of the galaxy as a collective whole abandoning infinite-ammo weaponry entirely in favor of the heat sink system we see in Mass Effect 2 may be truly staggering, and every critique made against it may be completely legitimate, but Bioware’s writers can still dive into their little panic room, the same one they keep on hand for when someone so much as glances inquisitively at Dragon Age 2’s Anders, and insist that thermal clips are just what all the military experts across the galaxy unanimously agreed on, and in the end, that can’t be disproven.  Bioware even used this fact to mock its detractors on this point through the banter of Conrad and Shepard later in ME3, with Conrad pointing out how illogical the decision was and Shepard just coming back with “well that’s what the smart people wanted so I guess you must be wrong, buddy.”

But the logistics of basic possibility?  That’s a different matter.  It doesn’t matter how many battle experts Bioware tells us agreed on changing the system when the scope of that change simply could not be accomplished.  And that’s why I’ve always been surprised that on the many, many occasions when the thermal clip thing is criticized, the arguments almost always seem to be purely based on the irrationality of it, and never mention the fact that, beyond its stupidity, it’s also outright and obviously impossible.  Because it’s the latter point of debate that Bioware can’t just wave away: there is not even the faintest possibility that every corner of the civilized and uncivilized galaxy could have changed their armaments as thoroughly as they’re shown and said to have in the 2 years between Mass Effect 1 and 2.  The thermal clip system isn’t just stupid, it’s impossible, and it represents a failure on Bioware’s part.















* There’re thermal clips to be found during a mission in Mass Effect 2 in which Shepard has to put down some Geth that have reactivated and taken control of a Quarian vessel.  So apparently, we’re supposed to believe either that Tali didn’t happen to notice that every Geth arm she shipped home to be analyzed was holding a gun, or that the Quarians, famous scavengers who as a species can barely afford the duct tape that’s holding half their ships together, splurged on outfitting themselves with brand new guns.  Or maybe the Quarians just purchased a bunch of thermal clips, for guns they can’t afford.  It’s all equally ludicrous.

And that’s not even getting into the outright plothole that is Jacob’s Loyalty mission.


** For that matter, why would the merc groups and criminals care about their weapons being designed to better fight Geth, either?  Everything they intend to use their guns for is going to involve non-Geth targets.