Right. I’ve now finished this as both a goody bloke and an absolute arsehole. The reason I bought this game (and stuck with the shitty opening stretch) is that Mass Effect 2 is getting really good reviews, and it does something a bit different. It detects your saved games from the first game, and things you’ve done in the first one will affect the story and plot and characters in the second one.

The first game is almost a Choose Your Own Adventure in the usual Bioware style – options in conversation can be nice (“I can help you with that”) or nasty “Fuck off, scum”), and your character accrues Paragon or Renegade points depending on which ones you choose. Like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic before it, and probably every other Bioware game ever, there’s some things which you think will be nasty that actually turn out nice, and vice versa. Some of them, you’ll work out which way they can go by exhausting the conversation options. Very few of them are an actual gamble, as in you can’t tell which way it’s gonna go. So the way I tend to play games like this is be really good first time through, and if I like it that much I’ll play it again and be bad and see what happens.

Where it gets fucking mental is that there are billions, OK, lots of things which can change between playing through as good and playing through as bad. This post will be spoiler-central for the original Mass Effect, so be warned.

There’s the stuff you do out and about on distant planets, the side missions. They’re optional, but they can add Paragon or Renegade points depending on which conversation options you pick, or in a couple of them, your direct gameplay actions. These usually end with Lance Henriksen phoning you and saying either “well done on talking your way out of it, glad there was no deaths”, or “it was a damn shame you had to kill five thousand colonists just because you wanted to loot their armoury, but hey, we’ll keep it out of the media, laters”. These side missions don’t have an effect on the overall plot.

When you get to the proper plot missions though, all bets are off. On one of them, you can either kill most of one colony or kill most of the other. For good reasons, too. The choice is implicit though, so you don’t actually know you’ll have to do this until it’s too late and guns are drawn.

On another plot mission, you are presented with a dilemma which affects one of your crew members, and an entire alien race, and every other race in the galaxy. And your options basically boil down to two – go after a cure for a disease, which may also end up to be used as a weapon against this guy’s entire race; or utterly destroy the place before the cure can be weaponised. If you go after the first option, then everyone questions whether you are fit to proceed with your mission. If you go after the second option, then you will have to kill your crew member first.

By the time you get to the end of the game, your choices and actions have determined who lives and who dies in your crew (and therefore, who will get the chance to continue their story in the sequel), which alien races have a chance at survival (and which alien races will be after your head in the sequel), and whether there will be a unified government with representatives of all alien races, including humans, or whether the humans take over governing the entire galaxy; not including all the other tiny decisions which have larger ramifications outside the plot.

What I’m now desperate to see is how the FUCK Bioware are going to continue every single plot permutation in the sequel. I’m guessing the little asides in the first won’t get picked up on in the second (although if that annoying stim addict diplomat appears again I’m hoping there’s also an option to kick the fuck out of him, whiny little bastard), but even leaving them aside, there’s a load of plot points which will need to be addressed in some way in the sequel, and they can all be changed depending on what you did in the first one. Bioware are a company that is perfect to attempt this, and they’re always trying to push the cinematic, character-based gaming angle, but if they succeed with carrying all this forward well in the second game, then they’ll have made something which should be cherished.

EDIT: Also, a game where you can actually choose which annoying character to get rid of, and which awesome character to keep; more games should have this! Get halfway through Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Mario gets the option to join up with the baddie to slap some fucking sense into Princess “Even worse than Kim Bauer for being repeatedly kidnapped” Peach. Maybe.

Tags: Mass Effect, PC

Modern popular are (generally) not the creation of one person. Modern popular games are mostly made by teams which can number in the hundreds. When you look at a game, everything you can see was made by someone. The music was written and recorded and compressed and inserted into the game by people. People programmed your character to move when you move the thumbstick (or press W, or whatever). In order for people who make games to ensure that something is working, they have to play the game. Sometimes, games companies get other people from outside the company to play the game to see if they can play the game too. People. Playing.

So how come no-one realised that the combat in Mass Effect is so, well, weak? It feels like someone at Bioware read a review of Gears of War (or Operation Winback or wherever they nicked the cover system from) and thought “ooh, I could use that”, without ever actually playing the game that got it right first time. If you’re using a cover system, make sure there’s enough bits of cover. Make sure there’s enough open space around that cover, so that you can move round it and the enemy can also move round it. Don’t, for example, make a level out of a load of short corridors, none of which provide any cover, so all you can do is go backwards or forwards. If you’re going to do that, then don’t, for example, make sure all the enemies rush you all the time. Especially when the enemies can only damage you up close, and you’ll be dead as soon as just one enemy throws up on you (seriously!).

That’s a mistake. An error in judgement. A frustrating one, but it is understandable. The bugs though, ooooh. They make my blood fucking boil. Examples:

A boss battle whereby the boss has one offensive move – “push the player out the boundary of the level, thereby killing the player in one shot”. This offensive move works despite your character being in cover, too. I beat this boss battle by hiding behind bits of scenery (I found some which they couldn’t get me through) and making the others in my team shoot everything for me (cos the bugged move didn’t push them through the boundary, oddly enough).

The “scientists” plot line. Starts well enough – some crazy angry fuckers are killing scientists, you gotta go to a planet with the scientists on it. OK. You fly your spaceship to the star system with the planet on it. Go to land on the planet. Loading screen. Game crashes. That’s a massive chunk of plot I will never get to see. And Garrus (the alien cop in my crew) is involved in it, and he’s not had chance to do anything worthwhile up to now. I’m gagging to play it, but it just won’t fucking work. Fuming.

You have a crew. You must choose two people from your crew to join you for missions and stuff outside the ship. Most of the time, the two characters you choose will follow along behind you. Get into combat, and they’ll get into cover themselves, use their powers and stuff without me having to get involved. This is good, cos the orders interface is shite. Want your crew to go upstairs? Aim upstairs and press the “Go there” key. Of course, if you aren’t pointing directly at the top of the stairs (which you can’t do, cos you can’t see the top of the stairs, cos you’re at the bottom of them), then it won’t work. You can make them go halfway up, or you can tell them to go through the wall (which they’ll say no to, silly!). It’s like they are scared of heights. They need you to comfort them. They are meant to be ass-kicking alien bastard fucks! Stairs should be afraid of them! Not the other way around!

Grrrrrrr. It’s almost like everyone who ever played this in testing just played the dialogue and cut scenes. Cos they are generally of a very high standard. The actual play part though, it’s flawed to fuck. It can be good, when the level design compliments the challenge before you, and you’ve got the right people for the job, and you’re not having to order any of your characters about. It can be really good when it works. But sometimes it doesn’t, and it makes me want to hurt my PC. With a spoon.

Tags: Mass Effect, PC

I know this metaphor has been done before (and by vastly better writers than me), but it’s so very apt for Mass Effect. It’s like an abusive relationship – you stick with it for the occasional flash of happiness, but you have to go through so much shit to get to it.

Starts off slow. Gets even slower (that fucking Citadel! LOL it’s huuuge). By the time you’re allowed to actually properly play the thing (flying round galaxies, looking at planets and shooting things), you’re ready to be put into a chemical coma. It’s at this point that you realise the game has been very clever – it’s been reducing your expectations so that when you put the hours in and find something worthwhile, you remember that instead of the hours of repetition you’ve put in.

So, in order to fit with this experience, I won’t bore you with detailing the endless clicking on planets to find collectables, or the fact that there’s only two player classes worth playing as, or the occasional awkward mission introductions, or the fact that all the planet expeditions are boring as fuck, or that Deanna Troi is fucking useless in a voiceover booth (goodbye, suspension of disbelief!), or that the game is generally bugged to fuck, frustrating as fuck in places, and fucking fuck annoying too.

What I will discuss is where it goes right. I’ve only put twelve hours into it (only! I’m on the second plot mission! Although I did choose to scoot around the galaxy all day, so it’s my fault), but up to now I’ve found the additional characters on your team to be pretty damn good (Aliens! A slightly schizo telepath thing fella! A racist woman! More aliens!). Their AI in a battle is hopeless, but the voice acting and animation is absolutely spot on. The characters you agree with are slightly annoying, and the ones you don’t agree with are quite likeable. It’s all done really well. Makes you think, kind of.

Like I said, instead of doing all the plot stuff, I’ve been exploring instead. There’s a couple of interesting side missions you can find that involve traps and nastiness and they are generally of a high standard. I found one, though, which is just genius. I’m gonna spoil it, so fair warning.

There’s a ship you find in space, which is dead. A couple of life signs, but the crew of twenty is mostly gone. No response from the communications thingy. So you go aboard. No-one home, the place is pretty much empty. You find some ships logs, and learn that one of the crewmen was in an accident, and was in a coma. His girlfriend, an L2 telepath (which you learn much earlier in the game can sometimes be erratic and unstable), didn’t take the news well. The doctor decided after some time that the crewman wasn’t going to wake up, and went to switch off the life support. So you hear all this and think “awesome, some crazy bitch killed the ship!”. You go round a corner, and there on a bed is a guy hooked up to a life support machine. Soon as you get near, the girlfriend appears behind you screaming loud as fuck and shooting and telepathing (whatever the word is) at you. No choice – kill her. She dies. And then you’re left with her boyfriend on life support. You can switch it off, or you can leave him on it for as long as it lasts. I switched it off.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t mark you as being “good” or “bad” for switching it off, or leaving him. it’s completely up to you, and there’s no consequences either way. The girlfriend showing up scared the shit out of me. That was awesome. But then making a decision, and realising the game makers had the intelligence to not have any repercussions for either choice made; that was a bit of sensitivity you don’t see often in games. No right or wrong answer. That was the standout for me.

Based on that, and the fact that I want to see what happens to the characters, I’m gonna persevere with the rest of the game. Maybe even buy the sequel. Bioware =classy.

Tags: Mass Effect, PC