Mass Effect — Suspended in a Sunbeam

There’s something inherently awesome about the promise of a trilogy of epic games from a developer that has produced quality products already.  Granted, there’s also a dubious quality to such lofty goals as well, but if done right, a trilogy should be released in a timely manner, with all three games being self-contained yet tying in to each other well enough that it seems like each separate adventure is a building block to a longer narrative, and then it should not fall apart at the conclusion after running out of loose ends.  An epic trilogy like this should be something that gamers talk about in awe for years to come.  If done wrong, or better yet: if the trilogy fails to take off and is cancelled before it can be completed or the second and third games languish in development hell while the development studio loses lawsuits, changes names, and then has its high-ranking officials arrested for possession of child pornography, then it becomes a footnote that will be used for years afterwards as an example of what not to do.

The reason I waited to play Mass Effect was not because of Too Human’s broken promises and failed expectations.  Bioware is not Silicon Knights.  No, the reason is much simpler than that: owning large piles of games does tend to delay enjoyment of said games.  I can’t always play the hot new shooter/RPG hybrid right away when it comes out.  In fact, back in 2007, I didn’t even have an Xbox 360.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I have had moderate success avoiding Mass Effect spoilers, but it was fear of such that inspired me to finally marathon the series.  Well, not really a marathon since I played the hell out of each game with no regard to speed.  I’ve seen reviews that state that the first game can be completed in less than twenty hours; I played for more than triple that before I finished it.

That should tell you everything you need to know right there.  If I hate a game, I certainly won’t be spending any more time than is absolutely necessary playing it.  I didn’t bother with any of the extra content when playing Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, for example.  However, every time I play Final Fantasy IX, I am tempted to waste hours on end playing Chocobo Hot & Cold.  And while playing Mass Effect, the temptation was just to go and explore the galaxy in search of more side-quests.

Oh look, conversation trees!  This must be a Bioware game!

I’m generally not used to games which have me shooting at enemies while they shoot back.  I don’t play Call of Duty or Battlefield or Medal of Honor.  I’m more used to games with battle systems where, if I’m getting slaughtered, I go to an easier area and grind for experience.  My lack of skill is made up for by a sudden spike in statistics.  After my 60 Strength is upgraded to 90 Strength, an enemy with 65 Defence is soon left in the dust with deep sword wounds.

Mass Effect has none of that.  Instead, levelling up grants points that can be spent on upgrading a character’s skills and inherent characteristics.  In a way, it resembles a fantasy tabletop RPG: certain skills won’t always work until enough points are spent.  It did seem inconvenient that I would have to leave certain things behind and try to remember them for later if my ability to hack a terminal wasn’t sufficiently high enough.  Then again, I didn’t like hacking anyway.  It consisted of a quick-time event where I had to press buttons in quick succession and sometimes I would mess up.  With things like metal extraction, I could try again for as long as I needed to, but for other things, like opening certain doors, I was locked out permanently and could only use omni-gel to get in.  There’s a limited supply of omni-gel, though, and during my first mission, before I knew what I was doing, I ran out and ended up having to leave some doors permanently locked behind me.  By the way, unnecessary equipment can be turned into a pittance of omni-gel, but early on in the game, it doesn’t really help much.

The QTEs felt slightly misleading as well.  Occasionally, I would run into some “hard” decryption, but then I’d only have to press three buttons that flashed at the same speed as they do during “easy” decryption, and I concluded that the only reason it was called “hard” was because if I hadn’t invested enough skill points in decryption, I would not be allowed to do it, not even with omni-gel.

Things got easier for me as time went on, and although Mass Effect suffers from a limited resource problem early on in the game, it turns into an embarrassment of riches problem by the end.  Considering how much equipment and money can be picked up, it’s not hard to accumulate the maximum amount of credits the game will allow.  By then, of course, there’s not much left that can be purchased anyway, and I was good enough with the QTE that I didn’t need omni-gel any more, so I accumulated a decent amount of it as well, from equipment that I would’ve gotten nothing from if I’d sold it.  I had to sell it or gel it anyway, since I also had a limit to the amount of equipment I could carry around.  Also, I’d hit the level cap of 50 (New Game + raises it to 60), so fighting enemies wasn’t even giving me experience points any more.  It’s very easy, doing side-quests that are readily available, to get to a point in the game where I received no benefit from continuing on.

If this were a Goth Rocket Drone, it would be all black and spout random nihilistic poetry.

So why continue a game that no longer rewards a player for doing anything?  Well, once the game is finished, save data from Mass Effect can be used to influence its two sequels.  This isn’t like with Xenosaga where playing through one game grants the privilege to see Shion in a skimpy bikini in the next.  A lot of planning went into the plot, to the point where choices in this game continued to make an impact right up to the end of the trilogy.

These choices extend into the dialogue itself.  At various points in the game, Commander Shepard can respond in a number of varying ways and occasionally is given even more dialogue options based on whether she’s helped others, put her own self first, or both.  It works a hell of a lot better than in the last Bioware-developed game I played, where it felt like the dialogue choices I was given made no difference to anything.  There wasn’t really any point to it anyway since I’m pretty sure they never figured out a way to port data over between the first game and whatever second game they had intended but failed to make.

Anyway, Mas
s Effect is very fun.  The somewhat deep equipment customization system is hampered a little by an unintuitive display, to the point where sometimes I didn’t know if I had attached something to my guns or not, and it’s difficult to see if there’s any real benefit to doing so, but the results were more than enough to satisfy me.  By the end of the game, I could take my fully customized level X shotgun and Leeroy Jenkins my way across a long bridge full of enemies without dying.  I suppose the game’s rather basic AI has something to do with that, too.  I mean, if you’re tasked with preventing someone from crossing a bridge and they’re weaving back and forth while running at you and shooting your comrades one by one, shouldn’t you try to move around and present a more difficult target rather than standing still and expecting that you might get a lucky shot in?

As fun as that was, the most fun I had in the game was also the most time-consuming aspect of it.  I must be Canada’s Worst Driver, at least in a virtual world, because when driving the Mako around to explore various planets, I would often tumble over things, go sailing in the air, sometimes uncontrollably roll end over end, and emerge without a scratch.  Whenever I did damage my Mako during these crazy stunts, it was always this one front tire on the right-hand side that got destroyed and nothing else.  It turned out that the physics of the Mako driving sections were so wild that it was sort of like driving around inside a crash-test dummy, and yet it was some of the most hilarious hours I’ve ever experienced in a game to date.  I can honestly say that my favourite part of the game was driving around in the Mako and looking for things.

This conversation tree looks like it could be a conversation all its own.

The game is also aurally superior to most games on the market these days.  I know that it’s sometimes annoying to hear about game developers who try to make their games as cinematic an experience as possible, but in the case of Mass Effect, the soundtrack seems more like a science fiction film soundtrack than a video game soundtrack.  When done well, it can enhance a game quite well, and this time it did.  That’s really all that needs to be said about it.

Sometimes, though, glitches and oversights can creep into games like this.  Occasionally, while on foot on an alien planet, I would get stuck in sharp depressions in the ground, as if someone had dug out dirt purposely in the shape of a cone, and the game wouldn’t even let me climb up out of it.  Usually, the best solution would be to return to the Normandy and then come back to the planet (although I’d have to drive back to where I was if I wasn’t finished there).  Sometimes I’d try saving and loading again to see if I’d be freed from my deceptively-open prison, and that would work.

One more thing of note: as I played through the game, I seemed to have an easier time dispatching my enemies.  The longer I played the game, the less I would die and fail.  My enemies would go down in one hit when they used to go down in two or three, and each shot would take more and more health off of the stronger ones until they, too, went down in one hit.  At the time, I thought my own skill was increasing, since enemies are generally supposed to get stronger towards the end of a game, right?  It wasn’t until I was halfway through the second game that I figured out what was happening…