Forum:MoS Legendary Edition

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Project: Manual of Style: Legendary Edition

Proposal for MoS addition regarding coverage of re-release content in articles.

Currently developed by: User:Elseweyr - originally developed by: Community effort

Developer(s) notes: First draft created. Project includes "note" template to be used for highlighting LE changes.

Status last updated: 18 July, 2021

Page location: User:Elseweyr/Sandbox/MoS:_Remakes
Page should contain: The new MoS section should contain instructions for how to deal with various degrees and categories of change introduced by the Legendary Edition as well as potential future remakes of existing games.
Supporting links or images: Mass_Effect_Wiki_talk:Manual_of_Style#dealing_with_remakes_and_remasters and related Discussions thread
Discussion on: this page

Other Notes

Moving the discussion from scattered sources to a dedicated project post.

Comments

I still haven't seen the changes for myself (got some vacation coming up so that will hopefully change soon), but here's my 2 cents based on other people's input. I essentially agree with most everything proposed in the supporting Talk page, with a preference for this heading structure:

 == Mass Effect ==
 === Legendary Edition ==
 == Mass Effect 2 ==
 === Legendary Edition ===
 == Mass Effect: Retribution ==
 == Mass Effect 3 ==
 === Legendary Edition ===
 == Mass Effect: Andromeda ==

A separate top-level MELE header doesn't make much sense to me. It would break up the flow of the article and some context may be lost. For walkthrough articles, if you flesh the MELE section out and make it more or less independent of the OT part of the page, you'd likely end up duplicating a lot of the content, which is also not desirable.

Pages like the Mako Guide seem to warrant a separate version. Right now it has both a MELE section and a mechanics section that only applies to MELE but is embedded among the original sections. No bueno.

As for lore:

• Cut content – While some content is intentionally cut, restoration implies that it was "meant" to be there (to our best guess). I also think we can safely assume that the LE would be the basis for any future installments that build on the events of the trilogy. For these reasons, I'm in favor of treating content restored in LE as canon.
• Altered content – Hopefully these cases are rare enough that we can treat them individually. The issue of Tali's face, for example, is really unique. I'm sure many original Talimancers are unaware of the controversy, and the image of Tali available at the time may have been a meaningful part of their playthrough, so in this case I would let the two versions respectfully live side by side. At least for now.

Final note before I fall asleep on my desk. I've seen some talk of using "tagging" as a solution to some MELE issues. Would someone mind elaborating on what exactly is meant by that? Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 22:57, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

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A first draft of the MoS segment now exists, as well a MELE-tailored {{note}} template included in this project proposal:

• User:Elseweyr/Sandbox/MoS: Remakes
• User:Elseweyr/Sandbox/LE

Let me know if you have any comments or ideas. Elseweyr (talk • stalk)

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Looks nice. I like the LE note template; as a coding newb, is there any reason it's triple bracketed as opposed to just 2 pairs of brackets? Also regarding headers, what of the situation where we are attempting to compare two versions of something that exist in totally (or near totally) exclusive modes in the OT game versus Legendary? For example, the Overkill talent for assault rifles has very different mechanics and numbers in MELE from the original ME1. Or see Immunity--this is how it is on the Fitness page currently. The description paragraph for LE is slightly reworded. Also on that page there luckilly isn't a "notes" section but what if there were? Would those have to be duplicated for any LE subsection, or just kept singular but with the LE note template you devised used where appropriate to note anything specific to LE?

On a related note, from a style perspective how should comparisons between the original game and LE be handled wording-wise? I think we discussed this and it's come up a few times, so words like "original" game is favored but words like "vanilla" or "classic" aren't. What about "base game" as it appears on the Fitness page right now? I personally don't like that either since it's referring to LE as if it's an "add-on" or DLC of some kind.

Regarding files and images, this has already happened where someone has replaced the images for certain enemy types in original ME1 with their LE look and there are significant differences. Since your sandbox section states the "emphasis" should not be on "replacement" exactly how do you see that jiving with this? Because we already have many instances where an "original" enemy's appearance has been replaced even where it is unique and perhaps should be preserved somewhere (seems to be the case with several geth enemy types in ME1). Neo89515 (talk) 17:30, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

You seem to have uncovered two things at once: a) the triple-curly-brace mistake is present in the documentation of both {{note}} and {{warning}}, b) you caught me copying the content of {{note}} along with the mistake when creating the LE template :3

Because some abilities, equipment, etc. may be affected a lot and some not at all, it may not be possible to make a one-size-fits-all rule for how to cover remaster changes in each article type. There also technically isn't anything in the MoS about how to cover multi- versus single-player differences - it kind of just evolves depending on how much overlap there is. Community projects can be used once a standard is needed for a particular, larger set of articles.

The idea that might still be useful to convey is that we want to reuse as far as possible and split from smaller sections to larger ones depending on how to best serve the reader. It can be tough to quantify, but changes to numbers can be covered inline (similar to MP notes on ME3 Power pages) whereas differing descriptions and actual mechanics just make things confusing to read in parallel. Fitness looks fine to me, for example; I just think (Original Game) is redundant in the header. There could still be a shared Notes section, where entries can be grouped and labeled depending on how much there is for each version. Tabbed solutions if there is only minor overlap but lots to say. I'm pretty sure these can be organically organized, since some pages have many notes and others have none.

Bottomline: These things are useful and necessary to discuss in the context of a particular remake and its elements, but may not be feasible to cover in detail in the MoS for remakes in general.

As for this image question, I haven't been able to track replacements very well, and I'm concerned about creating a task to stop an unstoppable force. That said, I would emphasize two points:

1. What I think should not be done in any case is OT/LE replacement by uploading a new version of a file. The filename itself should convey which game the image is from, which also means that the file reference should be updated manually in each affected article. That way we can also track changes and replacements more easily.
2. If there is a significant visual difference between the OT and LE subject, the original image should still remain embedded in the page somewhere. Hopefully someone designs and implements an elegant and unified display solution some day.

Lastly, I suppose a note about "vanilla" and "base game" can be added to the general MoS. "Classic" is specific enough that I wouldn't use it unless it's part of the official nomenclature. I'm certain we have used "base game" in contrast with DLC, but indeed it should not be used in the context of remasters.

Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 19:17, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarifications. Regarding use of "Original" in the header on Fitness--I did that, as I reasoned it would serve two purposes: (1) "flag" people's attention to there being version differences and (2) indicate the section's info applied to the original game ONLY and not LE. I think that in the rare situations of mutual exclusivity it makes sense to do that, though not in situations where there is considerable overlap (see Geth Prime page for this--I recently removed a reference to "original" in the Tactics header on that page as it's not a case of mutual exclusivity). Neo89515 (talk) 05:19, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

Just stopping by to say that I've looked through the proposed MoS text and it looks pretty good to me. Might want to clarify e.g. why we don't want to use "base game" to mean OT (in other words add the example of the different connotation you gave above to your note)? Finally, I will say that I personally would prefer to use the same "yellow" of the Note: template for the Legendary Edition: template, entirely for the subjective reason that I think it looks a lot better against the rest of the text, and I sort of cringe at the amount of "another clashing color" that will be abruptly introduced. Since the text highlighted would end up saying "LE" or "Legendary Edition" anyway in most cases, that seems clear enough to me without needing a new color introduced? Cattlesquat (talk) 18:11, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, both, for your comments. I can add some elaboration on the terminology if you think it's helpful.

I didn't realize the orange would be so jarring, but I do think it would be a good thing to label the game-specificity with a visual cue. Yellow notes are supposed to be universal, whereas LE-notes should definitely grab LE-players' attention while signaling that they can be ignored otherwise. I don't personally think the yellow looks particularly good (though I am rather used to it) but the difference in function warrants some distinction in appearance. As long as a separate template is used, however, specifics can of course be adjusted at any later time as well.

Neo: I maintain that it would be cleaner to keep the original's heading as just "Mass Effect" because the section structure itself implies two different versions of the same thing, so I don't think there's a need to underline the distinction further. Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 13:55, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

RE: "original" headings--I have come to agree actually, as the "Original" usage has created some unforeseen linking issues. RE: note template, I personally don't feel the orange text is that distracting and I like the idea of having a way of visually calling attention to MELE changes. Neo89515 (talk) 16:33, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

I dropped a minor wording suggestion into the page as that seemed the easiest way to make clear what I meant. Keep or reject, etc, etc. Cattlesquat (talk) 19:36, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Alrighty, thanks! I made a couple of minor adjustments, otherwise I think the page is pretty much good to go.

I'll give another day or two for additional feedback before opening the vote. Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 20:48, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

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Everything looks good. I had just two questions -- so we're treating unique LE bugs just like any other bug now, requiring 3 confirmations, right? Also, how should "LE only" description text be treated in the case of some gameplay mechanic/aspect where it works mainly like it did in the original game(s) but now has some additional or different functionalities? See example: Immunity. When the new LE subsection was made, the description paragraph for Immunity was copied verbatim there with some additional lines/changes to reflect how it worked uniquely in LE. I actually stripped that down to ONLY the things that were different about the power in LE, reasoning that if people wanted to get the general overview for how Immunity works (in either version) they could read the original game's description, but if looking at the LE section they would only get the "new information". Correct/incorrect? Thanks. Neo89515 (talk) 13:54, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, although we are reducing the amount of bug confirmations to 2 total. It's part of my MoS overhaul, which I will try to finish this week.

Regarding the description, I think the basic guideline of "reuse as far as possible and separate where necessary" plus common sense will do. The way you did it for Immunity is just fine. Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 18:25, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Nine days totally passes as "a day or two", right?...

I will do my best to find the time to look this over in a day or two. Ahem. Neo89515 (talk) 00:09, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Voting

Support

1. Elseweyr (talk • stalk) 18:43, 27 July 2021 (UTC)