My experience with Western
role-playing games is, well… “Sparse”
would be a tremendous understatement.
“Just this side of non-existent” is probably more accurate. I played Stonekeep
for a few months back in 1999 or early 2000, well after it was new (I was going
to say “after it was relevant”, but then remembered there was really never any
such time). And I’ve sunk some hours
into Diablo and Diablo II. But that’s pretty
well it.
Final Fantasy VII was my first real RPG of any kind that wasn’t
part RPG, part something else (like Crystalis
on the NES). And of course, then there
were the subsequent Final Fantasy installments (and some earlier ones), Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete, a few Breath of Fire games, some time spent
tinkering with a few Tales
games...
The pattern to all of these is
usually pretty straightforward, well worn territory. You have a town where someone tells you where
to go next and who or what you need to kill there, some other people might give
you helpful hints, drop information about a short side-quest, or let you buy
and sell various items and bits of equipment.
Experience is earned from battles, which tend to occur randomly – this particular
ageing, hoary mechanic comes down to us from of old, when this was the best way
to simulate the occasional encounter with dangerous monsters you might expect
while traversing the trackless wilds of the fantasy world du jour. Killing monsters earns you experience points,
and eventually, when you accumulate enough, your experience level increases. This makes all the monster-pummeling
marginally easier.
In between these bouts of
village-finding and random encounter-having, the story occurs. This typically happens in chunks of cut-scenes,
completely non-interactive. These tend
to be riddled with bits of whatever the director or scenario writer can
remember of their time in Philosophy 101.
Perhaps I’m being unfair, but if
so, well, familiarity breeds contempt.
Certainly there are exceptions. And
there is a certain amount of comfort in having one’s expectations catered
to. But these exceptions are just that:
exceptions. And by their nature as such,
they merely serve to underscore the general pattern.
So as you can likely imagine, much
of Mass Effect was strange to
me. Getting experience points just from
talking to people and examining things? Having
party members I can actually talk to when I want, to explore their
personalities and their pasts (or not) as I choose? Being able to choose what I wanted to
say? Being asked a question, and being
able to say “No” without the game saying, effectively, “Haha, okay, seriously
though: say ‘yes’ or you’re not going anywhere”? What madness was this?
* * *
I first encountered Mass Effect at a friend’s house, back
when the game was still new. I was
vaguely intrigued by what little I saw of the opening mission, though I was
horrible at what little I played because the Xbox 360 controller was unfamiliar
to me. Its placement of the A, B, X, and
Y buttons was completely the opposite of what I expected. Back then, the game looked amazing. This was the first HD game I had seen played
on an HDTV, and so that perhaps has something to do with it. Today, the graphics are far less
impressive. But aside from running
around awkwardly and shooting very poorly, I had no real sense of what the
larger game was like. That I was,
effectively, in the game’s tutorial portion didn’t really register with
me. That the game was actually some
species of RPG went right over my head.
It was an odd night.
Still, the title Mass Effect, and the general sense of
interest, stuck with me.
I wasn’t able to own the game for
myself, initially. This was still in the
early days of the last console generation.
I’d taken a long, hard look at my finances, and chosen, rather than an
Xbox 360 or the then-astronomically priced PS3, to buy the system I could
afford. Sadly, Mass Effect didn’t look likely to see a release for the Wii at any
point in the near future. But I kept it
in mind. And then, some two or three
years later, my wife (then my pseudo-fiancee) and I got together the money for
a respectable desktop PC. Browsing Steam
one day not long after this, I found Mass
Effect for twenty dollars.
Realizing, suddenly, that I could play beefy HD games like this, I
thought, “Why not?”
Not since Ico, back in 2001, or Breath
of Fire: Dragon Quarter a year or so later, have I been more amply rewarded
by an impulse buy. Maybe not even
then. Roughly an hour or two after I
started playing Mass Effect, I quit,
went into the Steam store, and bought Mass Effect 2.
In an odd way, playing Mass Effect is like going to Disney
World. There are a lot of interesting
things to see and do, and you can’t really see and do all of them in a single
trip. And subsequent trips are like
returning to Disney, in that you’re faced with a dilemma: Do you revisit all
the highly enjoyable things you did before, which made the experience enjoyable
and memorable for you in the first place, or do you forsake those and do
something completely new?
* * *
Choice is a big part of Mass Effect. And ironically, most of the choices are, on
some level, irrelevant. Well, maybe
“irrelevant” is putting it a bit strongly.
What they mainly boil down to is a matter of flavor, or perspective, for
lack of better terms.
The story always hits the main
beats. You play as Commander
Shepard. The gender, face, first name
(never used in-game), personal background, military history, and skill set of the
character are all up for grabs.
Humankind is the new kid on the galactic block. There is the Citadel, a construct built by an
ancient precursor race, now vanished, known as the Protheans. The Citadel isn’t quite a capital, and the
representatives of the various other sentient races of the galaxy who live and
work and negotiate there aren’t actually the rulers of their respective people,
but at the same time, the Citadel is a symbol of galactic civilization and
unity. Of all the races who have
embassies and representatives there, only three are actually on the
Council. The asari are a mono-gendered
race (who tend to appear female to most other races), great policy-makers and
diplomats, and are almost universally adept with biotics, which serve as magic
in this game’s setting. The salarians,
by contrast, are a relatively short-lived species, for whom 40 is pushing
decrepitude. Warm-blooded amphibians
with a habit of speaking quickly, they take a very scientific approach to life. Lacking the brute force of the other Citadel
races, they rely upon spying, espionage, sabotage, and other trickery to gain
the advantage in warfare. Lastly we have
the turians, militaristic and hawkish, but disciplined; essentially Romans in
space. They have a somewhat antagonistic
attitude to humanity, due in large part to a brief conflict fought between the
two races not long after humanity discovered the Mass Relays. These are the giant structures which allow
for convenient space travel; like the Citadel, these are believed to have been
built by the Protheans, and the technology behind them is poorly understood.
Shepard is earmarked to be the
first human Spectre. Spectres are
operatives working for the Council, given an almost absurd amount of leeway and
virtually no oversight (the better to plausibly deny, if necessary). The Spectres are the Council’s right hand,
and having a human Spectre is generally seen to be a step toward having a human
on the Council. But the first mission,
meant to be one of many, to see whether Shepard would qualify as a Spectre goes
sideways before it’s fairly begun.
Instead of retrieving the Prothean artifact recently discovered in the
human colony on Eden Prime, Shepard encounters an attacking force of geth,
synthetic beings who have not, until now, ventured beyond their own little
corner of the galaxy for some centuries.
These are led by a turian named Saren, himself a Spectre, now apparently
gone rogue. The mission ends with the
artifact being destroyed, but not before it grants Shepard a strange,
disturbing, distorted vision of the doom visited upon the Protheans fifty
thousand years ago by a race of spacefaring machines known as the Reapers.
It is these Reapers Saren appears
to be serving. He seeks the Conduit,
which will allow him to bring them into the galaxy to wreak havoc once
more. Shepard, once he or she is able to
prove to the Council beyond doubt that Saren has gone rogue, is then made a
Spectre and charged with bringing him in.
From here the game opens up,
offering three different story missions, each of which offers certain
information about Saren’s plans and movements.
There is also an ocean of side-missions in which to lose yourself, about
which more later.
Ultimately, the plot unfolds, as
mentioned before, along the same lines no matter what you do. Your choices mainly tend to affect how events happen, rather than
determining the outcome directly. You’ll
always, for instance, rescue your teammate Liara from her entrapment in an
ancient Prothean ruin, but you can choose whether to be nice about it, or
whether you’d rather be an asshole instead.
This type of choice is really the
heart of the game’s morality system.
* * *
Most games that feature any kind
of morality system are honestly kind of laughable, mainly because of the way
the choices are presented. Your options
usually boil down to either being able to do something very obviously good
which is also very obviously reasonable and sensible, or something outlandishly
evil, such that it is completely ridiculous and could only be considered even
remotely reasonable from a completely insane point of view.
I’ve heard this particular
tendency in game design referred to as the “Save the Baby/Eat the Baby
Dichotomy”.
Mass Effect tends to avoid this problem by not presenting its
choices in a good and evil light.
Instead, where the choices break down into obvious types at all, they
break down into two.
Paragon choices tend to emphasize cooperation, diplomacy, and
appealing to people’s better natures. A
Paragon Shepard would generally rather negotiate than go in guns blazing, and
is often forgiving and understanding, and keen on behaving in a way that seems
fair. But a Paragon Shepard isn’t all
sweetness and niceness. As much as he or
she may want to avoid starting a fight, they rarely have problems with ending one.
Renegade choices, by contrast, tend to go pretty much the
opposite. A Renegade Shepard has no
compunctions about using force to do what seems right, and often feels quite
certain that the ends justify the means.
Renegades don’t hesitate to threaten, and tend not to be overly
concerned with the needs of others. The
mission takes priority, and God help you if you find yourself in the way and
slow to move. However, a Renegade
Shepard isn’t completely evil or tyrannical, and it may be that some Renegade
options seem more just, or at least more expedient when it matters.
Both choices, when offered, will
get the job done equally well. What
changes is the way other characters respond to you. The “flavor” of the story, the sense of
perspective it takes as you play, changes according to your choices. What you do or don’t do, and how you do what you do, causes the
characters to respond in different ways.
And Mass Effect keeps track
of it all, as you discover in the sequels.
As much as personalizing your
character’s face and background, these choices personalize both the story and
the character for each player. More than
changing the story, the choices offered let you feel more involved in it.
In this, Mass Effect actually walks a very fine line. On the one hand, you have the wide-open
narratives of Western RPGs where your characters are usually blank slates (of
necessity, being player-created), and the story is therefore never very personal. In these, you usually have a lot of choice
about what you’ll do and how you’ll do it, because the view taken in most
Western RPGs is that they are a simulation of an adventure. Japanese RPGs, on the other hand, tend to
focus more on the story. Where
exploration is possible, it’s rarely of much consequence, as the game typically
wants you to go to specific places in a specific order so as to advance the
story a certain way. These games
typically have a more in-depth story, as the characters are pre-made, with
personalities and appearances designed by the developers. Most Japanese RPGs tend to focus on the
plot, rather than the simulation of an adventure.
Between the two, we have Mass Effect. I don’t think it was BioWare’s intention for
the game to necessarily take a middle way between these two schools of RPG
design, mind you. But I feel like it
does that, just the same. And the way
BioWare handles it, we still get an engrossing sci-fi adventure without losing
the feeling that we can choose how we go through it. We feel like we’re doing it all our own way –
and we are, in a sense – even as the game always, always dictates what we
do. It’s because we choose how to do it that we feel like we’re in
charge.
* * *
Actually playing Mass Effect, from a mechanical
perspective, and from a broader game-design perspective, can be frustrating.
While it’s structured as an RPG,
it has the basic mechanics of a cover-based third-person shooter. But the mechanics are just that: basic. Moving can be imprecise, and the character
slow to respond. Taking cover isn’t
handled by way of a button press. You
just shove the character up against a wall, and if you’re moving more or less
perpendicular to the surface in question, Shepard will take cover. From there, you can lean out and shoot at
your enemies. But if you come at your
cover from the wrong angle, it can be difficult to “stick” to it. This usually results in the enemies taking
potshots at you while you try to actually take cover, and likewise results in
you having a frustrating time aiming and firing. This is especially irritating if your squad
(two chosen ally characters who may accompany you) gets in the way, which they
invariably do.
Worse than this, and less
forgivable, is that the game itself is a bit…
Well, “janky” is the word that comes immediately to mind. The framerate suffers visibly during more
intense conflicts (when you most need
it to be smooth), to the point that aiming and firing can occasionally be
difficult for more than just the usual reasons. Even outside of battle, camera movement is
kind of rough and jagged. Vehicular
combat can also be an issue, as you may occasionally find yourself too close to
a target to be able to actually hit it, even when you have it in your sights. And the less said about the driving segments,
the better.
Playing the game on PC, rather
than on console, can mitigate this somewhat.
While still not exactly worth writing home about, Mass Effect’s visuals look considerably better, and lack the
framerate problems and rough camera issues when running on even modest
hardware. It’s also nice when the
textures load more or less immediately, rather than taking several seconds to
pop in as they do on the Xbox 360 version.
But then the PC port introduces bugs not present in the original version
of the game (to the best of my knowledge, anyway). I found myself ejected from the level
geometry during a boss fight in one run through the game. A friend of mine says that he’s run into a
situation where, once a weapon overheats, it never, ever cools down again. This isn’t just the Overload ability (which
you can also learn and use against enemies); Overload is temporary. This is permanent.
In a broader sense, the gameplay
of Mass Effect is a bit uneven,
also.
Story missions are a blast to
play. Wonky mechanics aside, they
provide interesting environments, objectives, and enemies. The story that advances through these
missions is also pretty interesting, and of course playing through multiple
times lets you play through it multiple ways, with different party
combinations.
But then you have the
side-missions.
These are given to you by other
characters. Sometimes you’ll enter a
system and be alerted to an occurrence that requires your attention. Sometimes you’ll find clues while on a main
mission that lead to a side-mission.
There’s always a bonus to be had in experience, gear, and money for
completing these, but they don’t offer much beyond this, and are kind of
lacking in themselves. The vast majority
of them are barebones affairs with little interaction or plot advancement, and
usually go something like this:
You touch down on a planet, and
are given a small part of its surface area to explore. There will be a few different points of
interest, often in the form of rare minerals you can survey, or abandoned gear
you can pick up, and one or two places (depending on the mission) where the
actual meat of the side-mission happens.
Traversing the planet surface is an exercise in aggravation. Typically, the shortest distance between any
two points on the map is a straight line which has that planet’s equivalent to
Mount Fucking Everest right in the middle of it. It’s fun, at first, to realize that the Mako
(your exploratory vehicle) can drive up virtually any surface that isn’t an
actual 90-degree cliff, given time enough, and sufficient finagling. It goes from fun to irritating in a hurry,
however, when you realize that not only can
you, you’ll have to. Frequently, and at length. Then, as you begin to thank your lucky stars for
finding a nice, flat stretch of ground to drive over… Invariably, this is when you will encounter a
Thresher Maw. This is essentially a
giant worm, found on many worlds, that spits acid and does its level best to
ruin your day. You can fight and kill
Thresher Maws, but this quickly (which is to say, more or less immediately)
becomes tedious.
So you drive to where the mission
actually happens. And here, you’re
confronted with the fact that there are only three maps in which side missions
take place. You have the mine shaft, the
pre-fab dwelling, and the underground bunker.
The only variation to speak of in these is where the crates and any (entirely
static, non-interactive) machinery in them will be placed.
Finishing the side mission usually
nets you some money, maybe some halfway interesting gear, and often fleshes out
some of the “lore” or other sub-plots going on in the main story.
The side missions aren’t actually awful, but they do get tedious, and the
work-to-fun ratio is not favorable.
They’re best done a few at a time, between story missions.
* * *
My most recent play-through of Mass Effect is actually my wife’s
play-through. She has been in the room
for a good portion of all four of my previous runs through the entire trilogy,
and has gotten more than a little curious about the game. So she took a stab at playing herself. For this, I had to leave the room.
It turns out that a lifetime spent
not playing more violent video games,
developing the skills necessary to run, jump, punch, shoot, throw grenades and
otherwise ruin your opponents’ whole week does not predispose one to much skill
with this sort of gameplay. So it’s more
than a little intimidating, and even its basic mechanics offer a comparatively
steep learning curve to a raw newcomer.
I should explain that this is nothing against my wife. She plays games like The Sims, and all its countless and myriad variations and
expansions, and as much as I tease her, secretly, at the bottom of my heart,
those games are intimidating to me because they are completely
inscrutable. So I do the running around
and the shooting things, and she chooses where we go and what we do and say,
who we do it and say it to, who we like, who we dislike, who we’ll fall in love
with, who we’ll ultimately have to sacrifice.
She’s playing a female Shepard,
out of curiosity as much as anything else.
I always play a male Shepard, because I am boring and dull. I have run through the entire trilogy about
four times, and have played Mass Effect and
Mass Effect 2 five times. Always, I play a male Shepard. After all of that, she’s been curious about
what it’s like with a female Shepard. It’s
actually helped to make the game new for me, because I’m so used to hearing
certain lines of dialogue at certain times, and when those lines are delivered
by a different person in a different way, it sometimes jars the whole
experience into a strange feeling of newness.
Especially since characters react differently depending on whether you
play a male Shepard or a female one.
* * *
Ultimately, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough. I love it, really – despite all it does
wrong, there’s a lot it does right to be worthy of that love – and I still, in
the end, enjoy playing through it. I
love setting down on alien worlds, seeing strange skies with strange moons,
suns, and planets in them. I like
standing on a high place, hearing the ambient music, and the booming of the
wind, and staring out across the vista.
Even with all the lack of refinement, there’s a certain rough elegance
to it at times.
But playing at someone else’s
direction lets me think about things in a way I sometimes don’t get to when I’m
focused on the decisions I want to
make. When I know a choice is coming and
I’m debating it silently in my head, running through a particular firefight or
stretch of Mako driving purely on auto-pilot, I don’t have time to notice the
minor flaws, and the not-so-minor flaws, that have been there since the
beginning. Then, too, it doesn’t help
any that I’ve since played much better third-person shooters. Gears
of War, of course, and then Mass
Effect’s own sequels both stand as better examples of how this sort of
gameplay should really work. Sure, you
can always say that Mass Effect is
supposed to be a sort of RPG-shooter hybrid, but problem isn’t that the shooter
mechanics aren’t very deep or fleshed out.
They’re just shaky, and kind of bad. You have only to play Mass Effect 2, with its much tighter and more responsive moving,
maneuvering, and shooting, to understand what could have been – what should have been.
But, at the same time, Mass Effect’s story elevates it above
these problems, and the sense of exploration is unrivaled in anything else I’ve
played, including its own sequels. If it
falls a bit short of the mark in this, it at least aimed high, and you can tell. When it’s on,
it’s really, really on. At its worst, Mass Effect is a diamond in the rough.
And when that’s the worst you can
say about a game, well… Some studios
live and die wishing they’d made a game you can say that about.
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