My Blog

Playing "Mass Effect" makes me feel old. I remember the very first RPG I played when I was a young 'un. It was a little known game called "Final Fantasy III" for a piddly shit little system called the Super Nintendo. It was like nothing I had ever played before in my life. Combat was a blend of strategy and action as I commanded my party of intrepid adventurers through each and every battle. The story was told with crap animations, tiled bitmaps and pop up text boxes. However, it was brilliantly composed and magnificently translated even by today's standards. The graphics were a mix of stale tiles and battle backgrounds. Enemies in the game were never animated. When an attack was made, your character would make some motion and you would see a scratch, or a slice, or a claw mark across the image of the enemy and a number would pop out indicating how much damage you did. It was all sublimely simple to learn and difficult to master - the mark of any good game. Saving the world was never this in depth or fun before this epic piece of game.

Even back then, RPGs had a pattern that had already been tested, dissected, refined and reprinted a thousand times. Most modern day RPGs are based on the old Dungeons & Dragons rules and traditional campaign structure. In short, everything you do requires some kind of a skill check. Killing enemies gets you experience points which contributes to your next character level. Gaining that level makes your character more powerful and therefore better able to handle the next tier of challenges in the game. If you're having problems advancing, the problem is usually solved by "grinding" for experience by killing more enemies or completing tasks.

A typical game session involves, much like a book (predictably) the exposition. The characters discover a problem and set out to restore the status quo. Along the way, they encounter friends, enemies, giant rats, bears and, of course, merchants and innkeepers who are ever so happy to peddle their wares. The adventure concludes when the characters accomplish their task and restore the aformentioned status quo. If you've actually read this far, then you've probably never played an RPG before or, for that matter, any sort of adventure game at all.

For better or for worse, "Mass Effect" follows the above formula, as stated, to a tee. I almost feel that, as it was being made, someone was going down a checklist of things that had to be in their game. I wouldn't be surprised if such a list is posted next to the water cooler at BioWare's offices just to remind the average clueless sod what exactly it is they're making. Let's take a look at what that list might look like:

• Epic story. Check.
• Party of needlessly varied adventurers. Check.
• Action based implementation of RPG rules. Check.
• Functionality to pause in order to issue orders to party squad members. Check.
• Engaging soundtrack. Check.
• Rock-scissors-paper balanced system of skills. Check.
• Crap-tons of side quests and distractions. Check.
• Give out experience easy and often to keep the player advancing. Check.
• Everything = Money. Check.
• Game must feature some new skill or battle mechanic or a mix of existing systems. Check.

The list rattles on down the wall behind the cobweb encrusted depths known as of the water cooler. Somehow you get the feeling while you're playing it that you've done all this before. Though I admit that this is the format of all RPGs, lately, BioWare's just not doing as good of a job at hiding it as most (*cough*Elder*cough*Scrolls*cough*).

The game casts you in the role of John/Joanna Sheperd, an elite soldier of the Earth Alliance whom is the first human being considered for the uber-elite interplanetary commando unit, SPECTRE. We're told this is significant because humans are pretty much the nagging children of galactic society - always wanting candy and constantly being told to shut the heck up, lest we attract attention to ourselves. In short order, the SPECTRE evaluating you for membership is offed by another even-more-hardcore SPECTRE who has designs for galactic domination. Or, at least, so we are led to believe. Soon, you are given your own ship and free reign to go wherever in the galaxy you see fit in order to hunt down the rogue agent.

"Mass Effect" continues BioWare's tradition of offering amazing stories with more twists and turns than the French highway system. It is a sprawling epic, filled with action, mystery, intrigue and all the story elements you would expect from a space opera. However, this is one of the first games they've produced where every single piece of dialogue is professionally scripted and acted. All the animation for the games cut scenes and conversations has been painstakingly mo-capped and lip-synched in order to produce some of the most engaging scripted exchanges I've ever seen in a video game. Recent titles by BioWare had failed to live up to the insanely high standards set by games like “Planescape: Torment” and “Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn,” both of the text era. This is in large part due to the believability of computer animated characters. Reading dialogue off the screen and seeing it acted out by a wooden, low poly model doesn't really do the character interactions justice, however good the writing may be. This is especially true when you wind up spending half of the game in conversations. When making these sequences into being a large part of their games, they rightly decided the bar needed to be raised in this area and have largely succeeded.

The conversation sequences in the game use many of the same blocking techniques used by TV and movie professionals. Cinematic tricks like focus blurs and the positioning of the camera behind the person not speaking convey an immersive feel that nearly fools you into thinking you might not be playing a video game. In addition, you don't have to wait for the previous character to finish speaking before you choose your response. A few seconds before the character finishes speaking, the handy-dandy dialogue wheel pops up with your next set of scripted responses, allowing the conversation to continue smoothly and uninterrupted.

As well as it came out, it isn't perfect (but it's damn close). One of the problems is that the animation tends to repeat itself. Usually a character has some kind of an idle animation that plays or emotive head tilts and nods that are used in every-day conversation. All characters utilize these same skeletal animations so that conversation sequences can be quickly and easily produced with a minimum of fuss. When you're making a game as big as "Mass Effect," you need a way to cut down the work. Most of the time, everything looks great. And then you notice the same nod or head 'flip' or turn-and-walk-away being used in every conversation. It makes this repetition stand out like a sore thumb. Other hitches occur with the facial animations and transitions. Sometimes, a character will furrow their brow or widen their eyes. Then, when they blink, the edges of their eyelids will glitch through their cheeks. Also occasionally, an animation will glitch up or jerk and at other times a character's idle animation seems a bit too smooth to be human. Although these flaws are a necessary evil due to the scope of the game, when the player notices little things like these, it totally breaks suspension of disbelief.

Speaking of suspension of disbelief, "Mass Effect" looks amazing. The game makes good use of Unreal Engine 3 to produce the myriad of worlds you will find yourself exploring. Unfortunately, the game ships with a "Film Noise" filter that manages to make the game look like complete crap and give you an earsplitting headache all at the same time. For the first few hours or so, I thought I'd humor them and leave it on. "Maybe I'll get used to it," I thought to myself. It never happened and was then promptly shut off.

As I mentioned before, "Mass Effect" makes liberal use of effects commonly used in film and TV to lend it it's unique look. The focus effect, bloom effect and a kind of haze around the edges of the picture are also used. These effects work well enough on their own, but, same as in the conversations, it makes minor flaws stand out like a roach in a five star restaurant. Also, all these effects layered on top of each other tend to conflict with one another, leading to strange graphical glitches. Chief among these is the Unreal Engine 3's tendency to stream textures off the disc on the fly. You'll recognize this as the "texture pop" you saw in games like "Gears of War" and "BioShock," also Unreal progeny. When a new area or scene loads, you'll often be presented with a blurry and flat looking mess until the engine sorts itself out. This sometimes takes upwards of twenty seconds and in cinematic sequences with rapid cuts to different environments, it happens repeatedly. It doesn't affect the game, but it is very distracting that nobody's gotten around to ironing this out after two years.

As fantastic as the environments look once they're loaded, you'll notice another thing: The future will be clean. Very clean. "Mass Effect"s art direction makes the classic sci-fi mistake of making everything super clean, shiny and uncluttered. This makes the game appear a bit too "future-ey" and the game itself seem bland. You'll know what I mean when you look at the screen shots. BioWare would also do well to take lessons from Bethesda, who make not one but two clutter passes to their worlds before they ship, just to make sure the environments look lived-in. Even the supposedly barren uncharted worlds you frequently explore offer nothing but flat, textured terrain. Some rocks or trees would have gone a long way towards making the environments more believable. But perhaps this is a performance optimization of the engine, which, at best, tends to hitch up at crucial moments (i.e. combat) and, at worst, straight up run like old people fuck.

The combat in "Mass Effect" takes after recent squad based shooters like "Rainbow Six: Vegas" and "Gears of War." Same as in those games, you have limited control over your pack of retards in that you can command them to stack up on a corner or post up on a door, follow you or hold their current positions. You can also take cover against most flat surfaces and use them to fire around corners, something that is becoming common in tactical shooters nowadays. You can pause the game at any time to change ammunition types in the menu screen or use the quick wheels on the left and right bumpers to change weapons and order use of powers and special abilities. As you're probably gathering, same as most elements in Mass Effect, when the shooting works, it works fantastically. It embeds you in combat and presents you with new ways to deal with tactical combat situations. When it doesn't work, however, it quickly turns into a German schiezer cluster fuck.

Often times, you will notice enemies can shoot right through seemingly solid objects to hit you. Other times, when you're clearly hitting an enemy, it doesn't register a hit. When commanding your squad mates to use a power on a target, they're not smart enough to maneuver into position necessary to use it. They'll just shoot it straight from their position. If it hits, that’s great. What usually happens, however, is they'll just shoot it straight into whatever cover the enemy is hiding behind or moves behind during the time it takes to activate said ability. This brings me to my next point - cover. Cover in most of the game is entirely too sparse or poorly positioned to be effective the majority of the time.

Consider the following situation: when you enter a room full of bogies, there are at least a couple spots in the immediate area that traditional video game wisdom would teach was a good spot to post up for a fight. These points are crucial because they would provide good cover and build choke points to make a safe pocket for your team to maneuver in. You order your team to one spot and post up on another. The problem comes when you need your team to use their powers. In the illustration, the first case would work fine. Both you and your squad mate have line of sight to the target. However, in the second case, when you target the power on the second enemy's HUD indicator, the game ridiculously targets the power on the wall even though the squad member in question has a clear line of sight to the target.

Lack of good cover combined with your squad's inability to use their powers intelligently forces you to revert to the age old RPG strategy of pulling. Hey, didn't we learn this in "EverQuest"? Instead of popping into a room, posting up and using teamwork to thin the herd, you're forced to lure enemies back to your choke point by running into a room, cracking off a few shots to get someone's attention and then running back into the previous room where your team is posted up, funneling all the enemies into your neatly stacked mound of corpses. In this way, everyone maintains line of sight on the targets, allowing you to use your squad's abilities to their maximum potential. However, this bugs the shit out of me. What's the point of being able to order your squad to a certain position if that position renders their powers useless because the game refuses to target your squad's powers correctly? The only reason I can think of is for you to order your dumb, obedient lackeys to distract the enemy long enough for your human-intelligent self to kill the enemy.

Speaking of intelligence, the enemies in this game are about as smart as your NPC party members. They have exactly two strategies: a) Run around randomly and get picked off or b) Run directly at you and find out what happens. What this means is that, combined with the RPG random-ness and the completely indiscriminate AI is that the difficulty of the battles constantly gyrates between pathetically easy and unreasonably difficult.

Like most RPGs, "Mass Effect" incorporates an enemy leveling system that attempts to match the difficulty of the encounter to the level of the player. Instead of taking the limited purebred system Oblivion used, whereby all encounters were modified to be appropriate to your level, Mass Effect uses the age old river-crossing system of enemy encounters, likewise whereby the difficulty of a given encounter when you get to a new area is impossible to predict the first time through. For example, in "Dragon Warrior" for the NES, when you changed scenery in any way shape or form, the difficulty of the battles ramped up. When you first start out, you’re forced to grind Green Slimes in the plains outside the starting city for at least three or four levels until you can handle the higher level Blue Slimes in the nearby forest. Eventually, you work your way up so that you can handle anything on this side of the river and can start grinding in the plains on the other side of the river.

What I’m getting at is this: In "Mass Effect," there is no way to know when you have crossed the river. Consequently, there is no way to predict or gauge how difficult an encounter will be until you’ve unwittingly impaled your supple body on to your enemies’ waiting bayonets. This is something that I’m getting flat out tired with in traditional RPGs. Developers, take heed: add in some way to ‘consider’ enemies or areas if you don’t include an encounter leveling system. I don’t care how much it breaks suspension of disbelief or how it detracts from the atmosphere. If I can’t gauge how tough a given enemy, quest or area is, how can I plan my strategy without dying first? Admittedly, dying simply forces you to reload a saved game or go back to the nearest checkpoint, but it shouldn’t come to that. There are, in fact, a few areas in Mass Effect that, once entered, cannot be backed out of unless you happened to have saved the game right before you entered it. Hence, you could conceivably wind up stuck in an area that is hilariously high level for your party. This is just bad game design and the only people who seem to realize it are the folks making the MMOs. Mass Effect isn’t the only game guilty of this offense and so it doesn’t piss me off nearly as much as it otherwise would. However, you’d think with game development budgets in the millions and team sizes creeping into the hundreds that somebody would have fucking figured this out by now.

One area that doesn’t disappoint is in the sound department. Like most big budget games nowadays, lots of attention has been paid to the music and sound effects. Or perhaps the same amount of attention that was paid to everything. That, coupled with that fact that sound in video games is, in reality, pretty hard to screw up, probably led to "Mass Effect"s sound to being the one element in the game that isn’t screwed up in some way. At some times, the game plays a rousing ambient techno score. At other times, it reverts to a thoroughly impressive full orchestral score – a rarity in video games. The rest of the game’s sound consists of either dialogue or various sci-fi/action sound effects. While the sound effects are not fabulously amazing, but they get the job done just fine. The voice acting, on the other hand, is some of the finest I have ever heard in a game. It employs a number of recognizable actors (including Seth Green as the pilot of your ship, the Normandy) and is generally well written - even if it is a bit long winded at times.

One thing everyone seems to complain about in this game is the inventory. It’s a fact of life people: in any RPG, you will spend a significant amount of time fussing around with your inventory. Sure, "Mass Effect" could have used some variety of auto-equip system (it’s worth noting here that it wouldn’t have been hard – even "Final Fantasy III" had one over 10 years ago) but as it is, I don’t think it hurts the game that much. Get over it.

The bottom line is this: if you like RPGs even in the faintest, "Mass Effect" is a thoroughly competent and mostly fun romp through the galaxy. It is one of the few games I’ve played that is truly more than the sum of its parts. Its epic story, decent gameplay and excellent graphics might even keep you playing for a second run through. Just don’t expect anything miraculous. Before I sign off, I wish to present some tips for getting maximum enjoyment out of Mass Effect.

Tip 1: Get off the Citadel ASAP. This one is easy. Starting areas in free roaming RPGs are invariably boring. Mass Effect’s starting area, the Citadel super-space-station, is no exception. Remember in Kingdom Hearts where you were forced to run around that infernal island for two hours collecting parts to a ship that was doomed to be destroyed before you could actually get into the cool-assed alternate worlds brain-numbingly amazing story? Whoops, it happened again. Beat feet off the station and come back to do its side quests later. Feel free to send me your thanks.

Tip 2: Explore strange new worlds. No, seriously, I’m not joking. In just about every system, there will be one or two planets you can land on and explore with your Mako APC. These planets always contain various artifacts and other collectables that award copious amounts of money and experience for finding. Not only that, you will occasionally run across something really interesting, like a space pirate hideout or a derelict space craft (found by scanning empty areas of the system with your cursor). This feature adds a huge sense of adventure and “Trekkie-ness” to the game that is sorely needed and duly appreciated. Not only that, they level up your characters and give you enough money to do buy just about anything you want to. This leads into tip 3…

Tip 3: Do the Assignments, skip the Missions for now. You will probably notice that your quest log will list side-quests as Assignments and the main quest as Missions. Wait on the missions for now and do as many Assignments as you can find. The reason behind this tip is twofold. First, holding off on the storyline allows you to experience the free-roaming thrill of exploring the galaxy in your own ship. Second, the story encounters are set at semi-static levels. The game will adjust all encounters to suit your level, but not above or below a certain difficulty level. If you muscle through the story then you will find yourself being seriously outgunned around the middling parts of the game, leading to mass frustration effects. Doing the Assignments and exploring uncharted worlds first will allow you to level up your party so that you don’t get stuck in an inescapable area feebly trying to win encounters that are, basically, far beyond your ability to handle. As an added bonus, doing all the Assignments you can find will eventually unlock the “Completist” and “Rich” achievements. The former is awarded when 80% of all quests in the game have been completed and the latter is awarded when you accumulate 1,000,000 credits.

There you have it. Hopefully you can do as I have and look past "Mass Effect"s many flaws and see the gem within. If you cannot stomach the inventory management, extended dialogue or ham-handed shooter mechanics, you might not enjoy it. If you’re looking for another "Gears of War" or "Rainbow Six: Vegas," you will likewise be disappointed. This is an RPG, through and through - a good one at that. I just don’t foresee it setting any records or high acclaim in the long run.

Mass Effect is rated M for Mature by the ESRB for blood, language, partial nudity, sexual themes and violence. It was developed by BioWare Corp. and is available exclusively for Xbox 360 at retailers nationwide in plain and vanilla flavors.