I had high expectations, and this could have been a great game. Although it received almost universally high ratings, I found it flawed in many regards. Is this “a new high mark for storytelling in games”, and are the RPG elements “outstanding”? Maybe to a typical XBox360 owner, but I would disagree. Of course, that’s not to say that I am not looking forward to playing the sequel. Based on what I had been told and the fact that they came from the same company, I was expecting Mass Effect to be Knights Of The Old Republic in a new universe. Rather, it is an FPS with RPG elements, and thus my natural comparison is against Deus Ex. Unfortunately for Mass Effect, neither it nor anything else has quite measured up.
First, let us discuss the story. It is difficult to write original space opera content when the ur-examples loom so large. A hive race of sentient machines that seem to exist for no purpose but to destroy organic lifeforms? It’s the Borg Geth of course. Small, elite order of warriors, respected by some but distrusted by others, who protect the galaxy? You must be talking about the Jedi Spectres. In spite of that, much of the setting and plot of the game is indeed new and interesting. The writers make some bold choices, and there are definitely emotionally moving moments. They try to stretch the setting such that it makes sense for the hero to be out on his own, answering to no one, and it sort of works; better than most games that just hand-wave this away.
The actual plot quests (“Missions”) are varied and interesting, but the main plot is only a small part of the game. The side quests (“Assignments”) are mostly formulaic: land on a planet, enter a small installation, kill everything, press a button at the far end, repeat. There are only a few different building designs, which make it seem even more repetitive. It makes sense that a single well-tested design would be fabricated and repeated throughout the galaxy, but this is a case where realism is boring.
I like the design of the combat system, from the use of overheating as a temporary limiting factor in the use of weapons rather than ammunition shortages, to making every weapon upgradeable. The first feature, combined with shields and health regeneration, mean that you never need to worry about optimally completing a battle and makes the entire experience very fluid. My first playthrough was as the default Soldier and I mostly found my companions’ uses of tech and biotic skills to be an annoyance. I plan to go through again in hardcore difficulty with a tech- or biotic-based character, and my expectation is that the battles will become more tactical and those skills will be useful. The economy is a definite weakness; the items that you find are almost always as good or better than those you can buy. The only purchases I made in the entire game were the prototype weapons available after the Rich achievement, the manufacturers’ licenses, and the upgrades that allow you to carry more grenades and MediGel. There are no unique items in the game, which means that you never get the excitement of finding a new, amazing item as there was in KoToR. I suspect the last two issues are related. The decryption minigame is annoying after you’ve done it a few dozen times, and driving the Mako around also becomes tedious when you yet again must find the spot in the mountain range separating you from your destination that is not so steep as to prevent your passage. Also, this is the second consecutive Bioware game I’ve played in which I had to solve a Tower of Hanoi problem. Surely they can come up with *some* other kind of puzzle.
This is, I believe, the first game I have played that includes Achievements. If their desired effect is to help wring replayability out of things that would otherwise lack it, it is working. I am going to play through a second time partially to see how a different class selection and wildly different personality and approach to solving problems will affect the game, but also partially to unlock more of them. For a completist like myself, such a shiny trinket dangling in my face is hard to pass by.
I saw the alien sideboob, and am glad to report it did not scar me for life. If you wanted to script a situation to show how absurd “think of the children” thinking and uninformed mass hysteria can be, you could not have come up with something better than the story surrounding this. It truly is incredible. (By the way, I noticed that the mother of the owner of the alien sideboob was voiced by Marina Sirtis. For nerdy young men of my generation that’s the original alien topboob, and it was on network television every week.)
This is a little off topic but video game related. Why have rpg-esque games failed to adopt the brilliant item model laid out by diablo? Having a large variety of possible magical bonuses, with each bonus having a range of possible values with ‘set’ and ‘unique’ type fixed items in addition is very engaging for the player and makes a typically boring and routine part of most games (collect dropped gear, inevitably sell) into something interesting and possibly useful. It seems that this system could easily be incorporated into games like Mass Effect and Kotor, and even more so in Morrowwind, Oblivion. Fallout 3 etc. These games have a half-assed system in place for doing this, and its better in some than others, but it only exists in all its glory in Diablo, with WoW coming in a distant second.
This system makes a little less sense in non-magic worlds like Fallout and Mass Effect, but having it and justifying it with better technology or whatever would so improve game experience and replayability that it would easily outbalance any negatives. It seems so obvious to me, and I would assume many gamers, the way to go in these games that its almost comical they that so consistently fail to deliver. Allow me to elucidate:
1) Have a large catalog of item types for each body slot. Items have a range of base values for damage / defense / whatever you want to call these. When you find an item of this type, the value is randomized in the range. Higher quality item types have higher ranges and drop from higher level monsters.
2) Have a large catalog of modifiers that improve damage, defense, light shit on fire etc. These mods have ranges, with higher quality mods of the same type having higher ranges and dropping from higher level monsters. On occasion an item that drops will be magical and have some number of randomized mods on it.
3) (I have yet to see this in a game but REALLY want to) Have a large catalog of modifiers that make items LESS useful.
3) Have some items with some fixed modifiers. These items are rare and have unique names.
4) Add challenge areas to the game that can only be passed with exceptional equipment / high level characters (so not at the point when you reach them naturally in the story). This will give the players things to kill with all that tricked out gear. Give small but meaningful rewards for passing these challenges (the Achievements are clutch here).
5) Allow the player to keep playing after the story is over / import powerful characters into a new game. Actually, both of these things, its so easy why not? I would really love to see a game where something catastrophic happens near the beginning that can actually be stopped by a sufficiently high level character, but if it is stopped, rather than just beating the game at that point (Chrono Trigger style) there’s actually a whole new story (shorter for practical reasons) that plays out. So when you kill the big baddy in act 1 and save your hometown, instead of the credits rolling you get some nice alternate story to play through for a little bit as a reward. Another option which might frustrate less than serious gamers, although I would find amazing, is if in the regular story, you get to a point (maybe 5 hours in or something) where the game gets REALLY hard, so it basically forces you to import your characters into a new game and start over to advance. You could even make some changes to the first 5 hours that lead the character down a different path. For example, you’re a nobleman’s son, and he needs you or your brother to lead a group of men in battle for the king. He has you duel to see who is the better swordsman, you lose, and after he and your brother go away you spend some time defending the castle (and get more powerful) but are eventually overwhelmed and everyone inside is killed. Yuo import your character into a new game, this time you beat your brother in the sparring match and go off to war with dad, while of course your brother stays home and gets killed.
Comment by Michaluk — July 1, 2010 @ 11:18 pm
I love Diablo, but I do *not* want to see the “fight your way through the same area 250 times in hopes that something good drops” mentality exported to every other game. Especially in something that purports to be a serious RPG it should feel realistic in a way that the endless grind of Diablo does not.
Comment by chadhogg — July 3, 2010 @ 10:17 am
I think you could have a more developed item system without the need to grind areas. This is kind of a necessity in MMOs that have an emphasis on items (Diablo, WoW etc.), but in a single player game you could simply have a much larger item variety, but not make the game so difficult that you’d need the best weapons to win. It would add considerably to replay value since you’d be finding different stuff each time, and it would give people that play many times or play one characters to a very high level cool stuff to look for. The Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance type games did a decent job with this, but the items could be expanded even more from that. One of the few bad negative things I can say about the Elder Scrolls games was the item types and magic mods were very limited. One fan made mod for Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4) expanded the item types by about 400% and it made finding items much more interesting.
Comment by michaluk — July 3, 2010 @ 2:20 pm