On my most
recent run through Mass Effect 2,
much like my last run through the first game, I played together with my wife,
and this trip was basically hers. I did
the moving and shooting, because I’m at least nominally good at that, but she
called the shots. One of the many
differences between her play-through and mine is that she plays a female
Shepard (I play a male Shepard, because I am boring and dumb). There’s always a delay of a second or two
while I readjust to seeing her character as Shepard, in my eyes. I’m so used to seeing my own custom Shepard,
even the default face design looks weird and wrong to me.
Perhaps
because I’m not the one making the decisions, I get to observe more. It’s like driving while having someone else
navigate. I don’t have to concentrate on
where we’re going or how we’re getting there; I just get to keep the car safely
on the road, and watch the scenery ahead.
* * *
There’s an
idea that if you’re doing some kind of work in multiple installments, you want
to leave room for improvement as you go.
The general rule for sequels is that escalation is key. Bigger, louder, faster, more exciting, more
complex, more entertaining. The easy way
to do this is to hold something back for later efforts. If you do your best work first, it’s hard to
top.
I doubt this
was BioWare’s intent with Mass Effect
– the original game’s a little too much of a mess, in ways that don’t really
seem like they were calculated so much as they were resigned to – but it was
the outcome, nonetheless.
Now, let me
be clear on one point: I love Mass
Effect. The first time I stepped out
onto the surface of some desolate moon without breathable air, looked up and
saw two planets hovering in the sky, I was mesmerized. There’s something about the sensation of
being light years removed from anything familiar that the game manages to
convey so well I can love it easily, despite the mechanics being frankly
embarrassing in how rough and imprecise they are. There’s also the story to consider, alongside
the characters. Mass Effect was, overall, a tremendously positive experience for
me. But starting Mass Effect 2 on the heels of the first game, I mean right after having played the first
game, literally stopping only long enough to swap out the discs, really throws
into perspective just what a mess the first game is.
* * *
There’s a
tonal shift between the two games that becomes apparent, if you’re paying
attention, as soon as you load up Mass
Effect 2. It comes in the form of
the title screen.
The original
Mass Effect starts out with a
serene, hopeful piece
of music playing over a slowly panning view of Earth. When you go to the main menu, it appears in
shades of cool blue. The in-game menus
are also in various shades of blue. The
color isn’t something that really draws notice to itself, except retroactively,
but blue is the color associated with Paragon-oriented moral choices in the
series. When you have a choice which
requires a certain level of reputation, either Paragon or Renegade, the Paragon
option’s text always appears in blue, and the meter which shows your Paragon
and Renegade levels uses a pale blue color for the Paragon side of the
meter.
Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, opens
with a title screen showing a brown dwarf star burning angrily in the
background, and an open view onto a fiery inferno that (we eventually learn) is
near the center of the galaxy. The music is a sort of
lower, darker theme, though still suitably epic, with a touch of desperation to
it. The overall color palette for this
screen is an orange color, and the in-game menus are likewise orange, which is
the color of the Renegade side of the morality meter in the game.
This isn’t
to say that either game necessarily pushes you in one direction or another, but
I do feel that the overall direction
of each game is indicative of a general outlook, and it’s that outlook that’s
different between games. Mass Effect has a positive, hopeful
outlook. Your character, Commander
Shepard, is appointed by the galaxy’s ruling body, the Council, to bring in a
rogue Spectre (essentially, one of many highly trained and extremely dangerous
special operatives of the galactic government who operate with
limited-to-nonexistent oversight), and in fact you are yourself made a Spectre
in order to do this. This is a first for
humankind, relative newcomers to the larger galactic civilization who are not
always seen in the most favorable light.
Even when you fall short, even when your enemy escapes, even when you
find irrefutable proof that your initial enemy, the rogue Spectre named Saren,
is only a pawn in a much larger and more terrifying conspiracy that has its
roots in events that must have begun to occur literally millions of years ago,
there is still a sense of hope. There is
a sense that you can do this, that with determination and courage and a bit of
luck, you’ll make it in the end.
Mass Effect 2, right away, changes all
of this. Your character is now, instead,
something of an embarrassment. Much of
the truth behind the danger you managed to divert (and only temporarily, at
that) is swept under the rug. In
fairness, said truth would likely do little more than cause a galaxy-wide
panic. The coming disaster is massive on
a scale for which no real preparations can be made. How can you get ready for a galaxy-wide
extinction event of all spaceflight-capable species? For the majority of the game, even as a
Spectre, you’re operating largely on your own, tracking down an enemy few have
encountered and lived to tell the tale, and which fewer still even believe
exists. Previously, the eyes of the
galaxy were turned to you; you were seen with such hope. Now, you’re something of a pariah, and you’re
moving in seedier circles. It’s far
easier, and more tempting, to take the easy way out, accept the quicker, less
scrupulous answers to complex problems, justifying these darker means with
desperate ends. Should there be any
doubt, do keep in mind that the final mission of the main story is referred to,
in the most matter-of-fact way, as the Suicide Mission. Your survival is not expected – not even,
really, to be hoped for. Success, sure, everybody wants you to
succeed… at least, everybody who doesn’t believe you’re just chasing boogeymen out
in the dark corners of the galaxy. But
survival? It would be great, sure, but
let’s not kid ourselves.
* * *
The changes
seen in Mass Effect 2 go beyond just
the story, of course. Combat has been
tightened and expanded upon. Maneuvering
is more precise and controlled, while at the same time offering more options
for how to navigate the battlefield and deal with enemies. Getting into and out of cover is far easier,
and movement is snappier and more precise, so you’re less likely to get
yourself killed while mashing yourself up against a vertical surface and
waiting those crucial few milliseconds for the game to realize that you’re
leaning on the stick for a reason,
you’d like to take some cover here, maybe, if that’s okay, you know, and not
get shot at quite so much.
Likewise,
your character’s skill advancement has been simplified. There are fewer skill trees to advance (and
fewer ranks in these), and all of them are pretty much just focused on special
abilities like various ammo powers (a retooling of the various ammo mods you
could – and would – spend God alone
knows how much time swapping around in menus previously, but more on that in a
bit) and combat abilities which let you do things like temporarily increase
your accuracy, rate of fire, or shield strength, as well as boosting your
class-specific special abilities.
Weapons and
armor have also been changed. There are
far fewer weapons (you’ll typically only have three or four of any given type),
but on the other hand, instead of having only two or three basic models for
each weapon and several different palette swaps for coloring, each variation on
a weapon is visually distinct. The new
weapons you find also aren’t strictly linear upgrades in damage, accuracy, and
rate of fire, but rather offer different approaches. One sniper rifle may be immediately lethal to
all but the toughest enemies, but have a longer reload time which takes you
away from the scope, while another may be less powerful but offer semiautomatic
fire, letting you more easily stay focused on the enemy.
Armor is
handled much the same way. Instead of
whole new suits of armor (which were basically just three designs and a dozen
or so different color schemes) which are largely just upgrades in various forms
of defense, the armor in Mass Effect 2
is modular. You can swap out different
bits and pieces to focus on how you’d like to orient your defense, or what
armor bonuses you’d prefer, while still keeping to the character’s visual
theme. Though, hey, if you still want to
look like a well-armored circus clown like the first game, you can modify the
color scheme.
The main
point I’m trying to make here, I suppose, is that in the original Mass Effect, character advancement was
largely vertical. In Mass Effect, the question of “Do I use
this rifle or that rifle?” is largely a matter of balancing the advantages and
drawbacks. One might deal more damage,
but the other handles heat absorption better (weapons in this setting don’t use
conventional ammunition, but instead risk overheating and jamming with extended,
continuous use). But every weapon
ultimately operates the same way. If
you’ve fired one assault rifle, you’ve fired every assault rifle the game has
to offer. The only difference between
any of them lies in how much damage they deal, how closely you have to watch
your heat gauge, and how much you have to compensate for growing shot spread.
With Mass Effect 2, the physical functions
of your gear will change, so that (for instance) one rifle may feature
continuous, automatic fire, while another offers slower but much more accurate
three-round bursts, while yet another one fires a powerful, single shot with
every pull of the trigger. This changes
how you fight in a much larger way, and therefore how you approach the
game. Mass Effect encouraged you to get better stats and better gear – to
grind, in the grand tradition of role-playing games since time immemorial. The improvements were largely mathematical,
quantitative. Mass Effect 2 instead asks a question: “How would you like to play
the game?” and lets you build your character accordingly. The design is less vertical and more
horizontal, the different options more qualitative. Even within the somewhat more rigid
definitions of your chosen character class, you have more options to tailor the
experience to your own preferences than Mass
Effect offered.
And so this,
from a purely mechanical perspective, already puts the sequel head and
shoulders above its immediate predecessor.
* * *
With Mass Effect 2 keeping most of the
fiddly RPG mechanics out of reach, you’re left with more time actually playing
the game. Mass Effect had you spending what probably amounted to actual,
literal hours (in frequent stretches of a few minutes at a time) diving into
menus, switching armor, weapons, and modifications for these (keeping in mind
that, toward the end of the game, each of the four weapons every character
carries will likely have two weapon mod slots and one ammo mod slot, and most
armor will have two mod slots) between each of your half-dozen or so
squadmates, and of course Shepard also.
You’d also spend significant time melting redundant and unwanted
upgrades and equipment into omni-gel, which was a sort of all-purpose material
that you could use to hack various pieces of equipment to overcome certain
challenges and repair the Mako. The Mako,
if you’re curious, is basically a six-wheeled tank that maneuvers with the lightness
and grace of a drunken water buffalo.
You know,
now that I think about it, I take back what I said about the Warthog in Halo: Combat Evolved. The Warthog handles like a dream in
comparison to the Mako. But I’m going on
a tangent here. I was trying to make a
point, actually, before I got sidetracked by flashbacks to what must be hours
of my life spent fucking around with equipment menus. I’ve played Mass Effect and Mass Effect
2 probably five times now, possibly more.
At any rate, enough that it’s getting hard to clearly recall now how
many times it’s been, exactly.
The point is
that, having obviated the need for the vast majority of the menu-diving
bullshit, Mass Effect 2 is free to
focus on what has been the greatest strengths of the series, which are the
story and the characters.
Let’s get
the bad out of the way first.
If there’s
one really valid criticism I have against the game, it’s that the story
structure basically makes a strong central narrative impossible.
Basically,
after you do a couple of initial missions to get the plot kicked off, you’re
presented by your nominal boss, the Illusive Man, with a set of dossiers of
people to recruit for your mission. Some
of these (mainly just the DLC characters, the mercenary Zaeed Massani and the
thief Kasumi Goto, I think) are characters whose services he has purchased
outright. Others, he’s simply looked
into, and believes they’d be assets for your team. You’re invited to go on these recruitment
missions in the order of your choosing, in keeping with one of the central
structural themes of Mass Effect as
a series, which is player choice. The
Illusive Man will forward you additional dossiers as you go, giving you a team
of an even dozen characters, eventually.
Each of your team members will, in addition, have an optional loyalty mission,
which they will confront you with at some point after you recruit them.
The idea
behind these loyalty missions is that each character has some prominent and
unresolved problem in their past, and during the course of your main mission,
they come across information that could lead to them resolving it. Despite being optional, these side mission
are strongly encouraged. Characters who
are loyal will unlock a new skill to advance, and have a greater chance of
surviving the final mission (some of them will flat-out die without it, no
matter what you do). There is no real
tradeoff for not doing the loyalty mission.
You can conceivably go for the final mission sooner, if you’re in some
kind of hurry (and if you are, why are you playing a Mass Effect game?), but all that will happen is that you’ll get a
large number of your teammates permanently killed. These deaths will actually carry over to Mass Effect 3.
As you build
up your team, you’ll occasionally get missions that advance the main story, but
there are surprisingly relatively few of these.
The recruitment and loyalty missions (as well as smaller side-missions
you may run across) take up a majority of the game. Because these can be tackled in almost any
order, they can’t really touch on the main plot points, as most of them may be
done before or after major events. So
the overall story, while still highly entertaining, feels a little more
disjointed, and it’s a bit easier to put the game down for stretches of
time. There’s not as much of a driving
sense of need.
The first
time I played through Mass Effect 2,
I hardly noticed this. The second time
also, since I was having so much fun revisiting something I’d loved, and
overturning new little things here and there.
But it becomes apparent on further play-throughs.
Most stories
have a overall sense of rising tension throughout. The story is always moving in a general
upward direction as it progresses. By
contrast, Mass Effect 2 comes to
long plateaus as you play, where the
tension fails to increase, because the overarching story which is the entire
reason we’re there is put on the back burner for a little while.
This is,
perhaps, about the only way in which Mass
Effect 2 can be said to come up short in comparison to its
predecessor. The original Mass Effect, in retrospect, has a lot
of problems (samey cut-and-paste side-misisons, loose and sludgey controls and
movement, the awful fucking menu business about which I have at this point
probably said entirely too much), but there was almost always a sense of strong
forward motion. A good number of the
side-missions were short enough to feel like minor distractions, and were
always clearly optional. The major three
missions toward the middle of the game, even though you could tackle them as
you chose, all were tied to the main story in some way or another. Whatever order you chose to do them, they
still all felt like a definite step forward simply by providing you with more
information on the central conflict. By
contrast, the character missions in Mass
Effect 2 are more detached from the main focus of the story. They need to be done, yet at the same time,
they don’t push the story forward or upward.
The result is that although the overall game is larger, it feels like it’s
grown wider rather than longer, if that makes any sense at all.
In a game
with less interesting and well-written characters, this would be a serious
problem. Here, though, while these missions
do kind of blur the focus of the main story, they’re still entertaining, and
serve as a way for you to get to know your team. Even the least interesting characters – your
first two human squadmates – still manage not to be boring, and are mainly just
less immediately and aggressively interesting than the other members of your
mainly alien crew.
But then,
that’s one of the things that I’ve always liked about Mass Effect as a series.
There are so few other games I’ve played where the characters in your
party are characters you can interact with in a meaningful way. In most games, party members are basically exist
to move and act in combat, and to talk during story sequences. As both the player and the main character,
you mainly interact with them by watching them do whatever the game tells them
to do in the story, or by tweaking their abilities and gear for combat effectiveness. Mass
Effect and its sequel give each character a spot on your ship where they
hang out, and you can go talk to them.
Sometimes it’s informative, sometimes they’ll actually give you a
mission to complete (even in the original Mass
Effect, while there weren’t loyalty missions, there were what seemed to be
prototypes for them), and sometimes they’re just fun to listen to. You interact with the characters on a more
personal level, and affect real change in their lives. Mass
Effect 3, when I get to writing about it, will go one better with this, and
have the characters move to different sections of the ship over the course of
the mission and interacting with each other entirely as a background event, for
verisimilitude.
And while
the story of Mass Effect 2 may focus
on the characters rather than the plot, and may feel wider than it is long, the
story is still worth every bit of time spent experiencing it.
* * *
So, the story
so far…
Mass Effect saw the Citadel Council
(representatives from the three most powerful races in civilized space: the
asari, the salarians, and the turians) choose Commander Shepard to become the
first human Spectre, and charged him with hunting down the rogue Spectre Saren
Arterius (a turian with no love for humans) and bring him to justice. The crime for which he was meant to be
punished was an attack on a human colony called Eden Prime, where he commanded a
force of geth (a synthetic race of beings who had previously been content to
stick to their own corner of the galaxy for the last two centuries) to capture
a Prothean Beacon (which was subsequently destroyed), then bugged out in
Sovereign, his massive warship.
The
Protheans, for reference, were a race of space-faring beings who went extinct
some fifty thousand years for unknown reasons.
They left behind the Mass Relays, which every other race capable of
space flight uses to navigate the galaxy.
They also left behind the Citadel, a massive space station which, in
their time, served as the seat of their government and the center of their
culture, and serves the current generation of the galaxy’s sentient species in
the same fashion.
Though
vanished, the Protheans did manage to leave behind a small number of
artifacts. The Beacon on Eden Prime is
one such. Like many Prothean devices, it
interfaces directly with the mind of whoever is using it, imparting knowledge
through a series of visions. During
Shepard’s brief encounter, one fact became clear: the Protheans did not
vanish. They were wiped out by a race of
mechanical beings known as Reapers.
Shepard’s visions of the Reapers were, perhaps understandably, dismissed
as fancy by the Council, who saw them as a fairytale of sorts. They believed Saren was using the idea of the
Reapers to control the geth (being likewise synthetic, they looked on the
Reapers as gods), and to distract Shepard’s attention from whatever the real
threat might be. Shepard, however,
remained convinced that the Reapers were a very real and imminent threat.
As Shepard
hunted down Saren through his associates and known business dealings, it
becomes clearer that the Reapers were no mere rumor or myth. Yet
still the question remained: If the Reapers were real, where were they? What did they look like? What did they actually do?
Answers to
some of this were found on the planet Virmire.
There, Saren had a project in the works to cure the genophage. This was a disease that was deliberately
inflicted on the krogan race in order to curb their campaign of violent
expansion across the galaxy. Krogan can
potentially live for over a thousand years (though the lion’s share of them die
by violence well before then), and had been the heroes of the galaxy once, being
technologically uplifted to stave off another violent expansion attempt by the
(now supposedly extinct) insectoid race of rachni. The krogan had seen their expansion as
necessary (due to their high rate of birth) and deserved (for having saved the
galaxy). The genophage was meant to
lower krogan birth rates, thus keeping their population at a lower, yet still sustainable
level, obviating the need for expansion and thus removing the problem. However, the aggression and violence inherent
to krogan nature instead saw their birth rates decline.
Curing the
genophage would have given Saren the immediate support of the krogan, who would
be a powerful weapon in his hands. Thus,
although Shepard might have been in favor of curing the genophage under normal
circumstances (depending on how the player played), the cure in Saren’s hands was
a disaster waiting to happen.
It was while
sabotaging the facility where the cure was being developed that Shepard and
company stumbled across the truth of the Reapers. Saren’s ship Sovereign wasn’t a Reaper-designed
ship, as was first thought. It was a Reaper. What’s more, though it had weapons sufficient
to wipe out fleets of starships, it had a far more sinister and subtle way of
undermining its foes: Indoctrination.
Though the
mechanism was (and remains) poorly understood, the Reapers emit a kind of
signal that seems to be undetectable by any currently known means. But exposure to any Reaper, or to most Reaper
technology, for that matter, has a subtle effect on the mind of the
observer. They will find their wills and
their thoughts slowly but surely bent to the Reaper’s purposes. Where they might once have seen the Reapers
as a menace to be fought tooth and nail, they might instead begin to believe
that outright hostility is the wrong response.
Surely it would be better to study the Reapers first – know thy enemy,
after all. Who knows? Perhaps Reaper technology might be used
against the Reapers...
Perhaps, as
Saren argued, it would be better to help the Reapers, to prove to them that
organic life has a purpose and a place in the galaxy. Perhaps servitude – even slavery – was
preferable to extinction?
The Reapers
are ancient on a scale difficult to fathom for any mortal mind. The Protheans were not the first race to be
destroyed by them. They were only the
most recent in a very, very long line.
Every fifty thousand years, the Reapers would return to wreak
destruction on whatever races currently have achieved spaceflight technology. No reason was, initially, given for
this. They simply do. More horrifying still, the Citadel and the
Mass Relays were not the invention of the Protheans, but rather the work of the
Reapers themselves. By using the Mass
Relays, the organic races’ technology would evolve along lines of the Reapers’
choosing.
Perhaps as a
result of their machine intellect, the Reapers are a cold, logical race. Though they should easily be able to
overpower any fleet the current generation of space-faring races can bring
against them, they do not take chances.
Working through proxies such as Saren, Sovereign had determined that the
time was right to go to the Citadel, and use it for its true purpose, which was
to allow the rest of the Reapers into the galaxy at large (normally, they rest
outside the galaxy, waiting for the time to return and wreak havoc). In addition to beheading the galactic
government in a single blow, this would give them access to data regarding
homeworld and colony locations, population information, military strength and
resources, and other information of incalculable strategic importance.
But this
time, the usual pattern did not hold.
While Sovereign was simultaneously trying to access the necessary
protocols within the Citadel and also to fight off Shepard’s efforts to stop
this (by possessing the corpse of the recently slain Saren), Shepard managed to
destroy Saren. The shock of it
momentarily distracted and disoriented Sovereign. In this moment of confusion, several fleets came
together to destroy it. The galaxy was
saved.
For a time.
Mass Effect 2 opens with Shepard’s
ship, the Normandy, being attacked by a mysterious race of beings known as the
Collectors. Many of the crew manage to
escape.
Shepard does
not. Left to float in the void of space,
Shepard’s corpse ultimately falls into the hands of an organization called
Cerberus.
Cerberus are
not nice people. Chances are, if you
played Mass Effect, you encountered
them. You might not have (I didn’t, my first time through, because I was
apparently some kind of idiot), but if you did, you got a pretty good idea that
they were basically Mad Science, Inc. In
Mass Effect 2, it becomes apparent
they they’re even worse. The problem is,
in part, one of semantics. Cerberus, as
an organization, tends to view itself as just aggressively pro-human, and very
intensely focused on their efforts. The
rest of the galaxy sees them mainly as anti-alien terrorists. While it’s not known what sort of resources
and revenues they have, they operate in cells, each one largely unaware of the
others, and each one focused around a single project. Perhaps Cerberus aren’t quite terrorists, but as the saying goes: if it walks like a duck,
looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, well…
Currently,
Cerberus are investigating the wholesale disappearance of human colonies on the
fringes of civilized space. None of the
usual anti-human agitators, such as the batarians, seem to be responsible. The Illusive Man, the head of Cerberus,
suspects the Collectors. Worse, the
Illusive Man believes the Collectors are working with the Reapers in some
way. The problem is, much like said
Reapers, few people have even heard of the Collectors, much less believe in
them. And Cerberus is as radical as it
gets; if they said the sky was blue, no one would take them at face value.
For the
Illusive Man, to whom money is no object, the answer is simple: recreate the
fastest and most powerful ship in the human Alliance fleet (the Normandy),
rebuild the greatest fighter in living memory (Commander Shepard), and then,
like a gun, point them at the Collectors and pull the trigger.
The cells
devoted to these two tasks seem to have basically the same guiding philosophy:
bigger, better, stronger, faster. The
Normandy SR-2 is about twice the size of its predecessor, and while Shepard is
no bigger, neither is the character entirely organic any longer. A wealth of cybernetic and other enhancements
are implanted into Shepard’s body, so that after revival, they will be a far
more powerful fighter than ever before.
After sending Shepard to witness the aftermath of a Collector attack
firsthand, the Illusive Man then issues a new task: Assemble a team of the
best, toughest, craziest motherfuckers the galaxy has to offer, regardless of
species, and take the fight to the Collectors.
The team
this time is different. Mass Effect gave us fairly noble, clean
characters. Upstanding soldiers, a naïve
young scientist, a young traveler seeking a way to prove herself to her people,
a cowboy cop, and a mercenary. Urdnot Wrex,
the mercenary (and a krogan), was perhaps the most morally grey, and even he
was mainly just pragmatic in his dealings with his enemies. Mass
Effect 2 gives us two Cerberus operatives (one more gung-ho about her employer
than the other, but both still fairly faithful), a mercenary, a thief, an
assassin looking to redeem himself, a convicted felon dangerous enough to be
held in cryonic storage, a vigilante operating in a hive of scum and villainy
that would put Mos Eisley to shame, and several more.
The trouble
is, being an ally-by-circumstance with Cerberus, Shepard doesn’t have the luxury
of old contacts and resources, though there are still a handful of friends from
before who are willing to lend a helping hand.
* * *
It’s not
unusual for a role-playing game to let you create a unique face for your
character, and even let you choose the broad strokes of their background. It is
a little unusual, though, for a game to make that background come up in the
story (albeit in minor ways). It’s more
unusual still for the game to let you make choices about how you’ll handle
situations.
Like with the
original Mass Effect, the choices
are to some extent illusory. The
synopsis I provided above for the first game is a good example of this. It takes into account none of the choices
(some even quite major) that the game offers – though perhaps “requires” would
be a better word. Most situations of
note offer a choice between doing things the Paragon way (diplomatic,
cooperative, idealistic, forgiving) or the Renegade way (forceful, unilateral, cynical,
vindictive). The outcomes of every
encounter, every choice, are mainly the same.
The difference is in the perspective, the feeling of each
encounter. The events are the same, but
you have enough affect on them to take ownership of them. What this means is that you take a great deal
of ownership of your character, as well.
More so than
the previous game, there are many ways the ending can play out. While there’s only ever the one end, your
choices leading up to it affect who will live and who will die. Some of these choices are obvious (or will
be, in retrospect), though many are not.
You can have an ending where everybody survives, if you play your cards
right. Or you can get some of your
people killed. You can get all of them
killed. You can even get yourself killed (though this ending will
not, naturally, carry over to the sequel), though to make mistakes for that is
basically a willful act of stupidity.
What I love
about Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect as a series, is the way
these choices play out. I like a fixed
narrative. I feel that it’s stronger
than the more open-ended plot of a game like, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
It’s fun to play around in a game that gives you complete freedom, but
by the same token, there is, sometimes, a loss of meaning. There is a balance to be struck. Most games offer no real choice despite their
interactivity; most games offer you about as many choices as a book. You can continue playing, or you can stop,
and those are your options. A few go to
the other extreme, but in them your actions seem to lack a certain weight and
purpose in comparison.
Mass Effect is a balancing act. You can debate whether or not it’s a good balancing act (personally, I feel
that it is), but that’s somewhat aside from my point. Earlier, I mentioned that Mass Effect 2’s improvements over its
predecessor were more horizontal than vertical, more qualitative than
quantitative. That analogy, or some
version of it, holds here as well, I think.
A game like Skyrim offers
quantitative choices, for the most part.
Mass Effect 2’s are more
qualitative. You can argue that the
morality system is clunky and obvious, and, sure, that argument has merit. I’d even probably agree with it. But the fact that it does deal with the morality of choices, rather than the
consequences of them; the fact that it deals with the means so much more than the ends
when it comes to those choices, is exactly what fascinates me about them.
What it
comes down to is that I like to be the hero.
And being the hero is not about skill or strength or cleverness. Those things, all of them, are simply tools. What separates a hero from a villain from a
bystander is the act of making a choice, whatever the circumstances, whatever
the outcome, and to be willing to be measured by that choice.
To be a hero
is to choose.
