my name is mwd

Not that I’m behind the times, but here’s some thoughts on a video game from 2007.

Mass Effect is one of those games that I kept getting recommended to me by not just video game enthusiasts, but also game designers and writers, so given the third instalment of the franchise is due out this christmas, I thought I better go and pick up the original game and get playing to see what all the fuss was about.

Mass Effect is a science-fiction, third person perspective, RPG, shooter, exporation, open, adventure game (I think that about covers it). You play as Commander Sheppard, and lead a crew of humans and aliens around the galaxy trying to stop a rogue agent, but as ever there are much bigger things at stake.

Whilst Mass Effect’s story is highly derivative in some ways, borrowing liberally from the cannon of Star Trek, Stargate, and in particular Babylon 5, it does so in order to deliver such a rich world that you can easily forgive it. The game feels less like a game, but almost like you’re playing a season of Babylon 5. The texture to the story, the characters, and the different races is so well done. It reminds me of the promise of “interactive movies” from the early 90s as CD-ROMs took off, but it does so naturally and nails it really well.

Lots help this too – you can customise the look (and gender) of your Commander Sheppard, so the game becomes your story, rather than feeling like your playing someone else’s story. The voice acting is also above average, populated with actors who’ll be familar to any TV offering in the genre: Seth Green, Marina Sirtis, Dwight Schultz, and so on.

Although there’s a story arc to follow, the pace at which you play, and the order in which you tackle the challenges along the way is up to you, and this fact changes how the game feels as you pick up different characters in your team along the way, and indeed you can change your team as you go along – again, giving you the feel that your playing through your story rather than a writer’s story. There’s also more planets out there than just the ones you need to visit to complete the missions – you can land and explore many procedurally generated planets and find tangents to the main quest.

The other thing it does well, and something I’ve only seen done well before in Fable II (which I guess came out after Mass Effect) is force you to make decisions that one way or the other will have a bad consequence. Typically in games you win or lose situations, but its rare you’re asked to make a sacrifice that’ll have repercussions for the rest of the game in a way that you actually feel torn. The only other time I’ve seen this done well is Fable II.

The graphics are great, the combat system mostly works fine, and all that is good, but what really sets Mass Effect appart and makes me want to make you get an XBox 360 and play it is the way it presents a rich story to play through that I’ve not seen any other game manage, even Fable II as good as it was. Even the Halo lore, which itself is quite rich, doesn’t come close.

The only part where it felt it missed a beat was in the mandatory love scenes – I’ve nothing against the idea, they just didn’t work well here and felt shoe horned it, rather than a natural fit. But that’s a minor point in an otherwise excellent game. It must have been a monumental effort to work out all the story and character combinations to put the game together, but the results are definitely worth it.

I’m now just getting started on Mass Effect 2, and it looks like it’ll be just as good.