Richard's Online Journal
[07/06/08] Replay: Mass Effect
Mass Effect is still a silly name. It's like calling Baldur's Gate "Laws of Thermodynamics"
A quick look back into the archives for Bioware’s Mass Effect, now available on PC. Finally, everyone can enjoy the epic adventure, thrill to the plotting, and be hideously emotionally scarred by visions of bare blue bouncing butt-cheeks.
Updates for the PC version: It’s one hell of a lot more fun with the new interface, with the mouse making it feel much more like an action game than the Xbox 360 controller’s hybrid version. Still some weirdness though, not least that you apparently can’t turn subtitles on and off during the game itself.
Anyway. Replaying it with a Jedi… sorry, a Biotic… after finishing it as a regular Soldier on Xbox, but already feeling a bit tired. It’s still a great game, it’s just one I know all too well is fibbing about caring what I say and do. You can save the universe as a nice guy (although I recommend choosing the female character just for Jennifer Hale’s voice acting) or a nasty bastard/bitch, but the only difference tends to be one line of dialogue here and there. It’s still fun, I still recommend it, but I doubt I’m going to be there until the ending movie again. What I can say is that I wish I’d been able to play this version, with the new control system, first time round, so if you held off, treat yourself to a couple of minutes of smugness during the installation.
For the rest, time travel back to January...
(UPDATE: All that said, if anyone can tell me how to get rid of the irritating spotlight effect currently strangling the whole screen, I’ll be very grateful. I don’t remember it being very intrusive on my HD TV, but it’s starting to make me feel deeply claustrophobic on my PC monitor. The Citadel especially is meant to be huge, epic and beautiful, not an interstellar broom closet...)
The main one that jumps out? Fallout. It’s a dark world, and while your decisions don’t necessarily impact the gameworld while you’re playing, the endings really hammer home the results of your actions. Help Vault City expand? By proxy, you just killed off the mutants living nearby. Promote one criminal group in New Reno? You’ve just played kingmaker to thugs.
What made it particularly effective was that it wasn’t a case of good and evil. With the best will in the world, you could make a complete hash of everything. I’m hoping that Bethesda will really push this element.
(My least favourite moral choice in recent years remains Bioshock. The more I think back, the more it annoys me that it made such a huge deal out of the Little Sisters, while completely dismissing the Big Daddies due to them not being small and cute...)
Posted by Richard on Saturday 7th June
I would join in the smugness, but I’ve had to sacrifice Mass Effect for the moment so I had enough money for a train ticket. However, I shall try and hold on to the feeling for use at a later time…
As for morality in games - I agree that I would really like to see a game that didn’t have such a black/white way of dealing with your descions. As you mention, Fallout was quite good, I only hope number 3 manages something similar. Although I do worry slightly…
Posted by The_B on Saturday 7th June
The trouble with dealing with decisions is that at some point, you have to be judged by the developers. One of the best was Planescape Torment, simply because you could take what you wanted from it.
Most notably, when asked “What can change the nature of a man?”, the only correct answer was the one you believed to be true, whether it was ‘love’ or simply ‘nothing’. It said a lot about the game that everyone I know who’s played it actually stopped to think about it before picking an option.
Posted by Richard on Saturday 7th June
Oh yes. Planescape Torment - I really need to reinstall that soon and give it another playthrough. Probably with those resolution upping mods that were mentioned on RPS recently.
Posted by The_B on Saturday 7th June
The developers don’t have to judge you necessarily; they do have to say what happens as the result of your decision if the decision is to have any teeth, but there’s no reason it can’t be left to the player to judge that result themselves.
Of course, you can create your world and your dilemmas in such a way that the consequences do judge your actions - i.e. the consequences are such that certain choices are obviously “good” or “bad” - but that’s certainly not the only way to do it.
Posted by Thomas Lawrence on Sunday 8th June
I FEAR CHANGE
Actually quite liking the new layout.
Anyway, just got Mass Effect (hooray for wife’s 10% ASDA discout card) and so far I’m enjoying it a hell of a lot more than Jade Empires (god that game was so decidedly average… had such potential but the combat was far too boring and there wasn’t much to do). Seth Green is a bonus and I love the way the coversation system works, feels very fluid.
Planescapes ending video was always the same but you could read into it a number of ways, even though I didn’t *like* the way it ended, the look of determination on his face as he picks up the mace went very will with how I’d handled the last section (the super-uber-awesome-happy-ending way). Cunning.
Posted by Nick on Sunday 8th June
You fear change? Try pulling the switch ;-P
Mass Effect is ludicrously more fun than Jaded Empire. In every single respect, right down to not having an insultingly predictable betrayal.
As for Planescape… yes, true. But in many ways, it’s the only way it could have ended. The only problem I had is that it’s not final. Going to hell to fight in an endless war isn’t really that big a deal if half the people you met have wandered on back.
Posted by Richard on Sunday 8th June
In fact didn’t the Nameless one himself already fight through there at some point in a past life already?
Posted by Nick on Sunday 8th June
Yes, but not as a resident. I only know bits and pieces of the lore as it relates to this stuff, but I’m pretty sure that while anyone with enough power can get there and even survive if they’re strong enough (for instance, a mercenary hero, or an explorer, like TNO himself is in Baator earlier on), if you’re sent there after death, you’re there for good, can’t improve yourself, are stripped of your memory (no big deal there, I guess) and transformed into some karmically suitable monster.
Of course, Morte did okay for himself after the Pillar of Skulls, so…
Posted by Richard on Sunday 8th June
Yeah, as far as I remember, actually surviving in the Blood Wars is - relatively speaking - easy if you just happen to wander in. It’s if your eternal soul or whatever gets roped in that you’re screwed. I could be more precice if the ‘complete’ Planescape collection I have wasn’t four files short…
Posted by Cradok on Monday 9th June
Oh, and with regard to Mass Effect itself, would love to actually play it, but since my 360 version won’t go five minutes without crashing, I don’t really feel inclined to buy a whole new copy for a different machine.
Posted by Cradok on Monday 9th June
I love this topic and I wrote a nice little piece (if I do say so myself) on how I feel about the whole freedom/being judged system that games seem to employ. I’d love to see a game that had cause and effect, instead of “good/bad points awarded”. One day, maybe.
http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2007/03/peter-molyneuxs-emotional-stuff.html
Posted by Johnny W on Tuesday 10th June
The great irony of B&W;was always that if you tried to be really, really good, you wound up doing about as much damage to your people as if you’d dumped fireballs on them and sacrificed their children to yourself.
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 10th June
Re-reading your January post made me wonder: what video games have done moral dilemmas properly?
The way I see it, you’d need a few things:
1) Actions that have lasting consequences on the game world.
2) Decisions where there are no obviously right answers.
3) The game not to classify your decision for you along some cosmic moral axis.
Posted by Thomas Lawrence on Saturday 7th June