BEST STORY EVER? Posted by Padr on Feb 9, 2010 09:04 (211 days ago) |
One evening my Commander Shepard was in the middle of an in-depth conversation with Liara T’Soni about her past (I’m playing the original Mass Effect for the first time). There was some definite flirtation going on and it began to make me feel a little uncomfortable. I realised that if my girlfriend came home and sat on the couch beside me it would be difficult to keep playing. Not because there’s anything wrong with talking to a group of on-screen polygons but simply because, if somebody who knew me well was watching, I would feel obliged to do and say the same things in-game that I usually do and say in real life. And that, I suddenly realised, is not what RPGs are about. In Mass Effect’s universe I can do whatever I want to do.
Obviously the clue is in the name; ‘role playing’ game, but I’ve been playing Japanese RPGs for 12 years now and while I love the genre I’ve always thought the name was a little off. Used to the story heavy fantasies of Japan I had thought that the only thing tying videogame RPGs to their table-top origins were stats and collecting or upgrading loot. Mass Effect isn’t the first western RPG I’ve played. With Oblivion and Fallout 3 I discovered the ability to influence story, to tackle quests in your own way and to determine whether your character was ‘good’ or ‘evil’. While I found them interesting, I still played those games by taking the path of least resistance. Choices in games are usually black and white and I almost always make the ‘good’ choice; making friends or avoiding combat in the hopes there will be some reward waiting for me. Before Mass Effect it never occurred to me that role playing meant you could take on any persona you wanted just to see what would happen next.
 What sets Mass Effect apart are the shades of grey that shroud your decisions. Many of the interactions between the characters in this game seem to exist solely to allow you to create your own ideal Shepard. How you react to racism, to people’s views on religion and nationalism, or to the romantic advances of friends and crew members, allows for something rarely found in videogames: character development. And how those around you react to your decisions provides another gaming rarity: context for your actions. In so many games the decision whether or not to shoot someone in the face or whether or not to steal from a starving family is often presented as interactive storytelling. But of course stories require believable characters and interaction between those characters. By providing freedom of choice but tempering that freedom with consequence, Bioware achieve something that before this, I hadn’t found in-game. All eyes are on you in Mass Effect; crew, superiors and the press.
The game does so many things right that I’m willing to overlook its being one of the worst pieces of game code I’ve ever had to endure. Frame rate and sound quality issues; physics bugs; repetitious vehicle combat; poor enemy and squad AI; difficulty spikes; all that time spent going up and down lifts and, worst of all, the complete absence of a quick-save system, make Mass Effect one of the most frustrating games I’ve played. Comparing the fluidity of Final Fantasy XII’s team based combat or Fallout 3’s VATS system with the confused chaos of a Mass Effect battle highlight the game’s failure to create an engaging action RPG interface. The Benezia battle is one that sticks out in my mind as particularly terrible game design. But the things it does right are the things I’ve been waiting for games to do all my adult life. And the promise of a sequel (you can read Soans review right here on GamezBox.ie) with all these issues ironed out, set in a universe where the decisions I’m making now persist, has really got me excited. Here’s hoping Heavy Rain can take this type of immersive storytelling and bring it out of sci-fi and into the real world.
Padr
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Feb 9, 2010 18:41:24 (211 days ago)
