Impressions: Mass Effect 2

So, how good is Mass Effect 2?

Short answer: It’s very, very good.

I’ve probably got a solid 15 hours or so in on the game and there’s really nothing about it that isn’t improved from Mass Effect 1. If you like that, this is a no-brainer. If you didn’t like Mass Effect 1, that's not not necessarily a deal-breaker either. If it was just one or two things that bothered you, the inventory management, the ATV, the noxiously repetitive and inconsequential side quest, then you may find this is more your cup of tea:

- It works much better as a shooter. Use of cover and running between cover points feels great once you get the controls down. Your AI guys aren’t entirely inept, which is a big improvement (though sometimes they still make you wonder).

- The side quests, now called N7 missions, appear to not be hopelessly generic although I've only found a couple so far. (This is a huge improvement, but side quests seem difficult to find unless you're willing to travel off the beaten path for no plot reason whatsoever.)

- Characters look considerably more emotive when speaking. This wasn’t bad in ME1, but the improvement is remarkable here.

- The hacking mini-games (there are two) are more interesting and reflective of what you’re actually doing. They're not particularly difficult, though, and there's rarely much chance of failure once you get used to them.

- There is no inventory management. Just research upgrades that are applied to the whole team or specific characters (pending the equipment type you have them using). For example, you pick up weapon and armor upgrades that must then be researched.

- Researching is a mixed back. To research you need to gather minerals from planets, but you no longer have to roll your ATV over every inch of mountainous terrain to find them. Instead you scan from orbit using a sort of mini-game where you hover a sensor over every inch of the planet, looking for a blip on the sensor’s readouts to which you can fire off a probe to harvest it. It would be a much-improved and more immersive way of both finding resources and making them important if it didn’t take just as bloody long to thoroughly scan from orbit as it did to roll around in the ATV. It hasn’t been unheard of for me to dump all 30 of my ship’s probes into a planet and spend a good 10-20 straight minutes doing so. Like the ATV, it gets old quickly, but now it's even less optional because you need the minerals to get your upgrades.

If you just flat didn’t like the Mass Effect gameplay, this probably won’t change your mind. It’s still a lot of watching conversations (occasionally choosing a dialog option) squished in between shooting a ton of stuff. Really, I’d say there’s probably less overall action in this game, relative to the dialog and canned sequences.Some won’t like this balance at all, since you're not doing anything during these sequences but watching a movie play out.

Personally, I love that stuff and my biggest complaint is that I wish there were more of it when you're on your ship. More debate between crew members over actions you've taken. More opportunities to draw loyalty from your crew (or lose it). Instead NPC loyalty seems tied specifically to whether or not you complete their individual side quest and it doesn't appear that you have to pick and choose. Looks to me like you can do them all if that is your want, which means it's not so much a matter of choice and priorities as it is how much time you want to spent building up your squad.

So, I’m not convinced it’s Dragon Age good, as I think Dragon Age is, overall, a better *game* (so far), but I’ll end up playing through this more than once, no doubt. It’s got great characters and it tells its story in a compelling way. It's not as tactical as Dragon Age, but then, neither was Mass Effect 1.

***minor spoilers follow***

I have not gotten my wish for a bit more open, less guided, gameplay experience. It’s definitely a different story structure from Bioware’s other recent games. You do get the freedom to go where you will more quickly, but my experience has been that the game gives you a few places to go right off the bat, you go and do them all in whatever order you prefer, and then it launches the plot forward, giving you a new set of four or five places to go. How far out this process is stretched I don’t know as I’ve only unlocked the second “chunk” of quests so far. It’s different (and different *is* better), but at the end of the day, not really any more open than Bioware's previous games.

I did import my Big Damn Hero character from ME1 and the result has been pretty flawless. You lose your stats, but you get bonuses to things like your paragon/renegade rating, the amount of credits you start with, etc. And if these initial sessions are any indication, most of the choices you made in ME1 do carry through in some capacity. It’s not just the big stuff. The little stuff is there. Some of it I’ve seen referenced in news reports on the Citadel or even on my ship, in some cases I have direct encounters with lesser characters from the first game who do remember how I treated them (or vice-versa).

The only thing about the story itself that bugs me a bit is that there are times it feels like its forcing me in a direction I don’t want to go. In this game, you work for the morally gray (bankrupt) Cerberus Corporation. Period. There’s no telling them to go to hell. Well, you can, but you still work for them. There doesn’t seem to be any taking your ship back to the Council or the Alliance and saying, “Screw those guys. I’m back and reporting for duty.” (Unless I’ve missed something.) Granted, that would be hard to do, but the way it’s done here results in some scenes that are hard to swallow. I mean really, the Council and Alliance still aren’t willing to take my word about the Reapers? These guys are treating my character even more disrespectfully than in the first game, which is saying something. That, to me, is forced. It’s the kind of thing you get over when playing and there is a ton of great stuff to make up for it. When I encountered my character's "love interest" from the first game, for example, it was a tremendous and emotional little scene. Also, I think it's harder with a sequel like this not to have pre-conceived notions of where the story should go. It's frustrating at times when it goes in a completely opposite direction, but not remotely fatal.

I’ll write more later. It’s late and I need to sleep. If you’re on the fence, I think this is a game worth playing. It’s definitely going to be in the running for my game of the year. Also, it has Boo, the miniature giant space hamster, and how can you not love that?

More Thinking About Mass Effect 2 (What I Want to See)

It’s very possible I’ll get my review copy of Mass Effect 2 today –-I’m guessing I’ll be under NDA for details until Tuesday, however-- and after this post earlier in the week regarding how repetitive Bioware’s story structure has become, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d like to see in Mass Effect 2.

It’s time for Bioware to retire the particular three-act structure they’ve been using for their last three big RPGs (Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age). That structure being:

- Act 1: Start you out with a couple of introductory “levels,” where your character achieves some sort of personal status update (Jedi, Greywarden, Spectre)

- Act 2: Open the world up for the character to explore, but have four specific and self-contained points that must be completed to advance the story.

- Act 3: Once those four key points are completed, close the world back up again for the big climax and denouement (the Star Forge planet and station in KOTOR, the Conduit and return to the Citadel in ME1, and the Landsmeet and battle with the Old God in Dragon Age)

This is a very workable and successful model, don’t get me wrong, but at some point you have to do something new. Taking what we already know about ME2, here’s at least one possibility that I think would be intriguing.

At this point we know that your character, Shepard, is tasked with building a team and gathering enough intelligence to successfully deal with the game’s ultimate threat (the Reapers, presumably). There’s going to be a focused starting point that will take a good three to six hours to complete, as there has to be, but I’d like for that to be as short as possible. Open up the game world to the player as quickly as you can.

When it does open up, instead of there being three or four or five crucial plot points you have to check off to reach the third act --points A through D we’ll call them-- give us a galaxy with the full alphabet (so to speak). Give us a dozen or two different places to travel. Make each of them important in their own way, but also make each of the completely optional. Make some more impactful than others in terms of giving you what you need to succeed, but don’t tell us explicitly which locations offer the most bang for the buck. Give us clues and hints through the narrative, but make the player prioritize where to go with the time they have (my next point).

With this format in mind, the player should only have time to visit a certain number of points before venturing off to deal with the Big Bad. Not a countdown timer. I despise those. But say there’s 20 places to visit; only allow us to visit 10-15 of them before we have to go deal with the uber threat. From there, how successful you were at picking your spots over the course of the game, gathering allies and acquiring crucial intelligence, affects how easy it is to survive the finale (as Bioware has already discussed).

I would love this kind of format. Freedom and consequence, plenty of replayability, and everything you do matters without their being needless handholding. Some things may matter more than others, of course, but nothing is throw-away as was the case with most of the explorable star systems in ME1.

Will that be what we see in Mass Effect 2? Most assuredly not. Hopefully we’ll get something better than an idea I mulled over during my commute. Just so long as we get something a little different. It’s time for story structure in Bioware RPGs to take that next step.

Mass Effect 2 and Story Arcs

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to write something up about my expectations/fears regarding Mass Effect 2. Having played through three full Bioware games since October (Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and a second run-through of ME1) it’s hard not to see some of the patterns to Bioware’s game design, some good, some not so much.

The one that really stands out to me is that Bioware has really fallen in love with a specific narrative structure that drops you first into a small pool, then opens up the limits of the game world for you to explore as you choose, and then draws it back in to a very structured finale.

In ME1 it started with the combo of Eden Prime and The Citadel where you learn the basics of the gameplay and characters, become a Spectre, and are then sent out to explore the galaxy, completing four main plot lines in four different areas, before engaging in the finale. In Dragon Age it was the Origin story and Ostagar (and Lothering I suppose) where you learn about the world, become a Gray Warden, and are then released to explore Ferelden –which had four key areas to explore to advance the story- before getting to the Landsmeet and the finale. Knights of the Old Republic also has a similar progression.

So my question is, will Mass Effect 2 continue this trend? On one hand, it does work at providing the illusion of an open world where you can come and go as you please. It is, however, just an illusion, and the more you return to the well game after game, the less illusory this structure becomes.

On the other hand, what I love about Bioware is how focused they are on telling a story with their games and I think there’s an argument to be made that more freedom for the player makes focused storytelling more difficult. Still, it would be interesting to see Bioware attempt a game with a bit more freedom for the player to move and explore. At the very least I’d like to see them create a new illusion for player freedom instead of once again repeating the same formula from their past games.

Mass Effect 1 Redux

Over the holidays, and the past couple weeks since, as prep for the upcoming release of Mass Effect 2, I started up a fresh run through of Mass Effect 1 and managed to do something I’ve not done in a long, long time – finish a RPG a second time. I also went back and read my initial review of the PC version of the game. I was a bit too easy on it. (I gave it an A-.)

Now, don’t get me wrong as I stand by the text of the review. I still really like this game. The story arc and characterization are, for my money, about as good as it gets. In some ways I enjoyed this play-through even more because I went the Renegade route with my player character, which has some fun and chilling moments that I’m not used to seeing in these games, what with my penchant for playing a Big Damn Hero character. I did, however, let the game off too lightly in terms of what it didn’t do very well.

The side quests in the game (and there are many) are really a complete and utter joke, which really isn’t permissible when you consider just how short the main plotline for the game actually is. There’s the beginning of an effort that could have made these side quests fun, especially with regards to the ethically devoid Cerberus corporation. But nothing is really ever made of it, which makes these quests just a giant loose end waiting to be resolved. (Maybe in the sequel?)

I also love the idea of a Starflight-esque romp through the galaxy, roving around planets in an ATV and collecting resources and such. But the implementation isn’t just bad, it’s a complete and utter disaster. There are what? Three or four design templates at work for planet based structures and ship-boarding actions? It’s outright lazy. And, truly, don’t get me started on the mountainous terrain. I’ve read a lot of complaints about the ATV, but really, the ATV is fine (or at least adequate). It’s the constant zig-zag terrain that is, at times, completely un-navigable, that really kills the planet roving. There were times I was ready to heave my keyboard across the room.

It’s flaws as a shooter also stood out a bit more to me this time around. I still had fun with it, but your AI teammates constantly run in front of you when you’re shooting, shoot you in the back, and get stuck on edges of walls and objects. If it weren’t so easy to survive combats on standard difficulty it would be extremely frustrating.

Beyond those elements, however, I can’t say I had any complaints. Were I scoring it again I’d be looking at a B+, maybe a B if I’m feeling grumpy. It hasn’t, much to my relief, dimmed my expectations for Mass Effect 2 one little bit. If anything, the fact that there’s now so much for Bioware to build on with this IP has only raised my expectations. Frankly, I’m betting on an even better game than Dragon Age, and you people know how irrationally I loved that game. (Speaking of which, the Return to Ostagar DLC is finally coming out today. Something for my new rogue city elf to explore! Huzzah!)

Mass Effect Wrapup

I never got around to posting anything, but I did finish Mass Effect a couple of weeks ago. The main storyline continued to click, for me, right through to the end. The side quests got really old after awhile, though.

The quests themselves were just fine in terms of being distinctive in their goals. But their implementation was just so repetitive that it got old. Every last one of them involves dropping to the Rocky Mountain region of whatever planet you need to go to (climbing all those peaks gets to be like eating your vegetables after awhile), pick up the same sorts of side stuff in the ATV (minerals, artifacts, etc.) and then assualt one of about three or four different location types that always re-use the layouts and enemy locations. On that level, it's sort of like playing a less extreme version of Assassin's Creed in the amount of repetitiveness. I just expect a little more than that from Bioware.

The ending of the game was really satisfying and provides one of the few decisions of consequence in the game. I'd like to have played it both ways, but the final boss battle is a bit long (with a non-skippable cinematic in the middle of it) and you can't save, so I didn't care to go through that again right away. At some point, maybe as prep for Mass Effect 2, I'd like to go back through the game as a Renegade and see how different the experiene is.

The only thing in the wrap-up I didn't like is that there were no epilogues of any kind for your NPC party members. You get a nice finale for your character, but it's like the rest of your party just disappeared into the ether. Given the amount of time you spend getting to know those characters and getting invested in them, I think that was an oversight. Still, it's up there with The Witcher (still unfinished) for the best RPG I've played in quite some time.

Mass Effect's Shortcomings

I've spent every single evening this week playing Mass Effect in an attempt to get as far as I can in it before writing my Gameshark review; a review that's already a few days overdo thanks to the sinus infection I had last week and the long Wings playoff run. Not that I'm complaining about the latter, of course. I haven't finished the game yet (boo!), but at this point I think I've got enough of a handle on it to get a review done (yeah!).

Overall I remain very, very impressed with this game. That said, it is, predictably, flawed in many areas. This is the type of game that in many places is so unbelievably good that the areas where it fails to measure up really start to stand out after awhile. The sometimes inane behavior of your squad mates in combat is a pretty easy target. Let's just say it could be better and move on from that.

I've also really grown tired of the limited dialog options. I don't necessarily have a problem with the fact that most every response is of your generic good, neutral, evil variety. It's that how characters respond to your choices really doesn't change much and sometimes not at all. The dialog is very carefully crafted to feel seemless, but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to realize that many, if not most, of the NPCs have responses that will fit whatever option you choose. And even if something you say does merit a unique response, it's usually of the one to two sentence variety before the NPC jumps right back into the generic conversation tree. And, really, don't get me started on the love triangle with two members of your crew. I'm all for romances between characters in an RPG, but their dialog (and the dialog I have to choose from) is the stuff of high school romances. At this point in their development as developers, I really expect better from Bioware than that.

I also don't like that a lot of parts in the game, mainly in the side quests, get told to you rather than shown. Survey a planet and a text dialog narrates to you what you found. Complete a planet based side quest and -too often- you get a text dialog that narrates a quest summary to you. This aspect of the game reeks of underutilized potential. If I survey a planet, why don't I get a report (either audibly or textually) from Joker (the pilot) or someone else in the crew? It would accomplish the same thing, but at least it would be done within the context of the game universe and it would give a very underutilized ship's crew something more to do. (Another problem is that only the NPCs seem to have dialog that evolves with your progress in the game. The other members of the ship's crew have the exact same dialog options they had when I first took command of my ship. Ugh.)

Hopefully this doesn't leave the impression that I've soured on the game. It's still a great, great game. I'm leaning towards and A- at this point. But when sequel time comes (if it hasn't already), I hope Bioware takes a good look at some of the things they could've done better. For all the things Mass Effect does right (and there's a lot), there's still a ton of unrealized potential.

Mass Effect (PC) Impressions

Preface: I'm still not very far into this game. That's why this is an "impressions" post and not a review. My level of enthusiasm may change as I go deeper into it (though I doubt it).

If you haven't played it, Mass Effect is set in a distant future setting in which mankind, having discovered alien technology, has catapulted to the stars and found itself as one of many races looking to co-exist (or not) in the cosmos. You're a military man (or woman) with the last name of Shepard (the first name is up to you). It's a mix of classic RPG elements (multiple character types, character leveling and development, epic story) and 3rd person action. But as I've been playing it, the comparison that comes to mind more and more often is Starflight (1986).

Starflight didn’t have any 3rd-person action shooter elements, but you created your captain and crew, took command of a fully upgradable ship and explored a multitude of star systems and planets in an attempt to figure out why stars across the galaxy were going nova and how it could be stopped.

In Starflight you direct your ship where you want, when you want, collecting hints and following-up on rumors as you go. As you travel, you can land on any world (that doesn't have crushing gravity) and use your armed rover to search for alien artifacts as well as biotic specimens and useful minerals that can be mined and sold. As you gained money, you could train your crew to improve at their jobs. For example, your communications officer would get better and better at translating ship-to-ship communications between alien races. You could also improve your ship and take on more dangerous areas of space. It was epic in scale, when you consider it shipped on a pair of 5.25" floppy disks. True, you needed your own imagination to fill in a lot of details, but that was true of most games of the time. (And I suspect my imagination filling in the blanks for those old games is why I still revere them so much.)

Starflight was and remains one of my all time favorite games.

In Mass Effect you start off as a lone marine on an assignment that is very much on rails. But it's not long before you end up with a ship of your own, the autonomy to go where you will, and a team of party members that travel with you, allowing you to select any two of them as you adventure outside the ship. (Which crewmen you select can have a significant impact on how easy it is to accomplish your goals in a specific area.) The planetary exploration is incredibly reminiscent of Starflight (at least, so far). There are fewer star systems and fewer worlds, but if there's reason to do so, you can land on inhospitable alien worlds and find resources to be mined, alien artifacts and other unforeseen encounters. The main difference being that you can actually get out of your ATV and walk around a bit. (Plus, it uses more than 16 colors. Mass Effect is gorgeous.)

All that, however, isn't what makes Mass Effect the kind of game experience I've been looking for, for years. It's that the galaxy is allowed to breath. When you first arrive at the central world of Citadel, Mass Effect looks like it's going to be a pretty generic 3rd-person shooter with a little talkity-talk as you go. But as you explore the Citadel an entire galaxy opens up to you. The alien races all have incredibly rich histories. Every character of consequence has a deep personal history that offers clearly defined motivations for their actions. And the actions you take in the world have consequences in the world appropriate to their scale. (If you're just doing one person a small favor, they'll remember you. But if you do something big that gets everyone's attention, most everyone will comment on it.) With characters and cultures so well defined, it's easy to get lost in the world and get to the point where you actually give a shit what happens to the people in it.

Bioware has also done a marvelous job of investing you, as a player, in your own character. You can pretty much, if you so choose, make up a character in your own image, which is nice. There's a handful of character classes that allow you to specialize in three main areas or some combination thereof: combat, biotic skills (magic) and tech (decryption, electronics, etc.). But beyond that, the game also lets you select a two-part backstory involving how you grew up and a life changing event. There's only a few options to choose from, three for each of the two parts, I think. But the ones you choose are frequently reflected in the game. If you decided that your marine was the sole survivor of a disaster, for example, NPCs throughout the game will refer to that back story. Even if the options aren't as diverse as you might like, it was still very effective at investing me in my own character, something that I never got from Oblivion or Bioshock.

Granted, this game isn't going to hit everyone's happy place like it did for me. There's every bit as much talking up NPCs and running fetch quests as there is intense combat. If you're not one who likes to read or hear a lot of dialog, or spend lots of time solving other people's problems, Mass Effect is going to be boring as hell for you. And it's not like Mass Effect breaks a ton of new ground. This style of game has been around forever. For all Bioware's crowing (before the console release of the game), your dialog options, in particular, really don't go anywhere we've not been before and your dialog choices don't often have the moral ambiguity or unknown consequences of The Witcher.

For me, though, I don't care. Mass Effect is hitting an itch that I haven't been able to scratch since the days of Black Isle studios and the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale), but it's doing it in a sci-fi setting that I've been missing since Starflight, more than 20 years ago. (Note: I still haven't played Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe I've just missed out.) Bottom line, if you like a good, old school, PC RPG that unfolds like a great book or movie, Mass Effect is well worth checking out.

Oh, and for what it's worth, I have yet to hit the infamous alien sex scene (perhaps I missed it?) that caused all the controversy last fall. I did, however, just find this YouTub clip that pretty much sums up my feelings about it. It's only 30 seconds, so give it a quick view:

Restoring the Faith

Believe it or not, I've spent a fair amount of time in recent years, not playing games, but rather thinking about whether or not I should bother playing games anymore. Even with the ones I've really liked the last few years, like Civ4, Bioshock or The Witcher, I end up putting my time in and then asking myself, "was it worth it?" And it's not that the answer is always no, but I think the fact that I feel the need to ask myself the question is telling. Sure, I can get lost in playing Civ4 for days on end if my job and role as a parent didn't prevent that from happening, but when I finally turn away from the screen I don't necessarily feel like I've really gained anything.

Every so often, however, I'll play something that reminds me why I play games. You see, I'm all about the story. I think the one constant in my development from young'n to kinda sorta being an adult is my love of a good yarn told well. I think when you're exposed to a story and characters that, for whatever reason, are able to communicate to you and allow you to get lost in them, well, they become a part of you forever. And there's no rhyme or reason to it. One person's Citizen Kane might be another's Batman and Robin. (I'd say and vice-versa, but come on. Nobody liked Batman and Robin.) The love/hate relationship the masses have had with the latest Indiana Jones flick is proof enough of that.

Getting caught up in a story, I think, happens more easily with non-gaming media (books, movies, TV, even music) where you're just along for the ride. But a good game can accomplish just as much as any of these other mediums. When it can, it's even better than those mediums because, in its own way, it's happening to you. You're not just along for the ride anymore. After more than 20 years playing games, it's the ones with stories that ensnared my sense of wonder that I remember. X-Wing may have been a better space dogfighting sim than Wing Commander, but decades later, I remember the Wing Commander storyline (and the game) more fondly than I remember X-Wing (which was a great game too).

If a game can call me back to it because I simply have to know what happens next, just as I might stay up far too late to digest just one more chapter of a good book, then it's hitting my narrative g-spot. Baldur's Gate II remains my all time favorite game, in part, because it is the most epic title I've ever played. It's characters weren't just portraits off to the side of the UI, they were people with histories and their survival mattered to me. Likewise the quests let you feel like you made an impact on the game world and that you weren't just doing them to gather better arms and more experience. Ultima V, despite the archaic graphics of the time, still allowed a willing mind to run wild. Lord British is missing? The eight virtues of the Avatar perverted? Your heroic companions of Ultima IV in hiding? Just what has happened to my Britannia?

It's been awhile, though, since a game really was able to grab me on that kind of level. Bioshock came close, but in the words of Ken Levine, at the end of the day it was really, "just a shooter." Ultimately, I still think its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2, was a more memorable game. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion never really gave me a game world that I could feel a part of, even if the world itself was a breathtaking place to explore.

I was beginning to think that perhaps I'd changed, that my ability to sink into these places and become a part of them had been lost to a mind that had to worry more about making sure the kids were eating their dinners and that the mortgage got paid. Despite having a computer and three game consoles that do get used regularly, more than once I've wondered if I shouldn't just close it all down.

Then, along comes a game like Mass Effect and the feelings brought on from playing games like Wasteland and Planescape: Torment are suddenly rekindled. I hear the voice of James Earl Jones at the end of Field of Dreams, saying, "It reminds us all of what once as good and can could be again." Okay, yeah, he was talking about baseball, but the axiom still holds.

Yesterday, I finally got in a good, long marathon session of Mass Effect and the short version of my impressions can only be summed up as this: I love this game. I play it and I remember why, at 34 years old, I'm still playing games and why I'm not going to stop anytime soon. It's a fully realized world with three-dimensional characters that are almost instantly compelling. And it makes me feel like I'm a part of it, that I'm not just grinding out experience so I can improve my character skill set. Since this post is already pretty long, I'll just leave it at that for now. I'll do a real impressions writeup between now and Tuesday morning.

Oh, and I'm embedding the following video again because there should never be a reference to James Earl Jones without it coming up: