J Arcane
12-24-2008, 01:37 AM
It's that time again, and with Christmas looming, and last minute gifts to be had, I thought perhaps it was time to bring up a certain recent RPG that is currently on an impressive discount on Steam:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/PCMASSEffect1.jpg
Mass Effect
Xbox 360/PC, 2007/2008
Bioware is a company with a long and respected history in the genre of CRPGS, at least as far as much of the gamer crowd and the critics feel. Once upon a time, they churned out a couple of RPGs in the old school sandbox tradtion that, while never to my taste by right of their chosen version of D&D, earned them a hell of a lot of respect. Neverwinter Nights damn near revolutionized the CRPG genre with it's focus on modding and multiplayer, as well as earning both it, and it's expansion Hordes of the Underdark, a place on the list. KOTOR on the other hand, was a slap in the face, taking the Western CRPG a step in a more console direction, with railroaded corridors and plot details ripped off from Final Fantasy games, and Jade Empire basically just gave up being an RPG almost entirely in favor of being a Fighting Force clone with some tacked on dialogue.
By the time Mass Effect arrived on the PC, my respect for Bioware had pretty much evaporated. I was convinced they'd "gone console", and didn't really have a good RPG in them anymore. To be flatly honest, the only reason I got it at all was because I'd just built a brand new hot-shit gaming PC for my roommate, and wanted something really damn pretty to put it through it's paces. I wasn't expecting much, at all.
To say I was pleasantly surprised by this game, would be an understatement of epic proportions. Instead of being agitated or bored, I was entheralled. Mass Effect, in very short order, managed to consume my gaming time to a level it usually takes an MMO to accomplish. I stayed up damn near until dawn the night I finally beat it, sitting in the dark with the headphones on, while my roommate had long since given up on trying to wrestle the machine away and gone to bed.
Why, you might ask, did this game have such a hold over me? Why did it entrance so thoroughly? It almost gags me a little to say this, but well, it's the story.
I am generally not a big proponent of story in games. Years of being lead along the railroad through one shitty, badly written excuse for a story after another, legions of faied novelists and TV directors spoonfeeding hackneyed dialogue and plot points you can see from 300 miles away with a blindfold on, combined with a great admiration and personal enjoyment of the concept of emergent story, of story that comes from stuff I did and how it played out, instead of what the developers scripted to happen, have all conspired to leave me incredibly jaded and dismissive of the importance of story in video games.
But every now and then, I run into a surprise like Mass Effect, a game whose story alone I want to see through to the end. And of those games, Mass Effect really blew me the hell away at just how damn good it really was.
For starters, the characters are brilliant. There's is not one fucking main chracter in this whole game that I can describe as "forgettable" or "dull" or "cardboard". Everyone of them is wonderfully realized, and not just through reams and reams of text and over expository dialogue, though there's plenty of that if it suits your taste, but also just from their attitude, their actions, through the course of the story. You will meet characters you do not like, but you won't like them because they're lame or bad, but because you just don't like them as people.
The writing and story lines are superb, for a very simple reason: Bioware's writers finally learned the color grey. Bioware have somehow managed to put away the fixation they've inherited from their Star Wars games on lame black and white story lines, and introduced some real fucking choices in the game. You will be forced to make some very hard choices in this game, choices with no obvious right or wrong, good or bad decision. I swear Bioware must've had Doctor Who, especially the new series, on constantly playback loop in their writer's meetings. Life as a Spectre has a similar feel to life as the Doctor, you have to make a lot of choices no one should ever have to make, and will eat you up in side even after you've made them.
For the first time I started to feel again like I was truly roleplaying in a CRPG, something I haven't felt since I first played Fallout so many years ago. The dialogue feels less and less like I'm being forced down one path or another, and more like I'm actually making the decisions myself, and I can actually have a coherent character or philosophy behind them and still be able to portray that through my choices in the game.
And it gets me thinking that maybe the problem I have with story isn't so much with the focus on story itself, but rather, story without meaningful choice. I gravitate towards story-less games, or games where I'm called upon to make my own story in a way, because it's so very rare for an actual scripted story to present the kind of choice I need to truly feel involved in the game world.
But enough about the story, let's hear about some gameplay. Well, this was no slouch either, I'm happy to say. The third person action combat was fantastic fun, though it sort of blurred the lines at times to me as to how much was skill and how much my stats were actually affectiing combat. The cover mechanic was good, despite me generally finding cover mechanics gimmicky crap, although combat did tend to fall apart in a frenetic mess when cover wasn't available or you were fighting foes that tended to charge up close.
The leveling system was interesting, and gave you some room to customize your character in some interesting ways, including some bonus skills you could take based on how far down the "lawful vs chaotic" spectrum that here provides a more suitable replacement for their previous games' "pure snowy white good vs puppy eating evil" approach.
They also made some attempt at creating a more sandboxy sort of feel, however sadly it falls flat on this mainly because the sidequests are mostly junk. Most of them wind up playing out almost identically to one another, so after doing a handful of them, as well as a couple of the special quests for my party members, I mostly ignored them for the main storyline. Still, it was nice to see them put in the effort, and I'm hoping they have time to actually put some more depth into them for the next one.
Overall however, the game was a hell of a lot of fun, with some of the most incredible moments in my years of gaming, and sets an absolute landmark for truly great writing and story in video games. If Bioware can continue to imporve upon what they presented here, they may actually manage to become a respectable CRPG developer once again.
I know I'm there for Mass Effect 2. Let's all hope they don't disappoint.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v644/J_Arcane/PCMASSEffect1.jpg
Mass Effect
Xbox 360/PC, 2007/2008
Bioware is a company with a long and respected history in the genre of CRPGS, at least as far as much of the gamer crowd and the critics feel. Once upon a time, they churned out a couple of RPGs in the old school sandbox tradtion that, while never to my taste by right of their chosen version of D&D, earned them a hell of a lot of respect. Neverwinter Nights damn near revolutionized the CRPG genre with it's focus on modding and multiplayer, as well as earning both it, and it's expansion Hordes of the Underdark, a place on the list. KOTOR on the other hand, was a slap in the face, taking the Western CRPG a step in a more console direction, with railroaded corridors and plot details ripped off from Final Fantasy games, and Jade Empire basically just gave up being an RPG almost entirely in favor of being a Fighting Force clone with some tacked on dialogue.
By the time Mass Effect arrived on the PC, my respect for Bioware had pretty much evaporated. I was convinced they'd "gone console", and didn't really have a good RPG in them anymore. To be flatly honest, the only reason I got it at all was because I'd just built a brand new hot-shit gaming PC for my roommate, and wanted something really damn pretty to put it through it's paces. I wasn't expecting much, at all.
To say I was pleasantly surprised by this game, would be an understatement of epic proportions. Instead of being agitated or bored, I was entheralled. Mass Effect, in very short order, managed to consume my gaming time to a level it usually takes an MMO to accomplish. I stayed up damn near until dawn the night I finally beat it, sitting in the dark with the headphones on, while my roommate had long since given up on trying to wrestle the machine away and gone to bed.
Why, you might ask, did this game have such a hold over me? Why did it entrance so thoroughly? It almost gags me a little to say this, but well, it's the story.
I am generally not a big proponent of story in games. Years of being lead along the railroad through one shitty, badly written excuse for a story after another, legions of faied novelists and TV directors spoonfeeding hackneyed dialogue and plot points you can see from 300 miles away with a blindfold on, combined with a great admiration and personal enjoyment of the concept of emergent story, of story that comes from stuff I did and how it played out, instead of what the developers scripted to happen, have all conspired to leave me incredibly jaded and dismissive of the importance of story in video games.
But every now and then, I run into a surprise like Mass Effect, a game whose story alone I want to see through to the end. And of those games, Mass Effect really blew me the hell away at just how damn good it really was.
For starters, the characters are brilliant. There's is not one fucking main chracter in this whole game that I can describe as "forgettable" or "dull" or "cardboard". Everyone of them is wonderfully realized, and not just through reams and reams of text and over expository dialogue, though there's plenty of that if it suits your taste, but also just from their attitude, their actions, through the course of the story. You will meet characters you do not like, but you won't like them because they're lame or bad, but because you just don't like them as people.
The writing and story lines are superb, for a very simple reason: Bioware's writers finally learned the color grey. Bioware have somehow managed to put away the fixation they've inherited from their Star Wars games on lame black and white story lines, and introduced some real fucking choices in the game. You will be forced to make some very hard choices in this game, choices with no obvious right or wrong, good or bad decision. I swear Bioware must've had Doctor Who, especially the new series, on constantly playback loop in their writer's meetings. Life as a Spectre has a similar feel to life as the Doctor, you have to make a lot of choices no one should ever have to make, and will eat you up in side even after you've made them.
For the first time I started to feel again like I was truly roleplaying in a CRPG, something I haven't felt since I first played Fallout so many years ago. The dialogue feels less and less like I'm being forced down one path or another, and more like I'm actually making the decisions myself, and I can actually have a coherent character or philosophy behind them and still be able to portray that through my choices in the game.
And it gets me thinking that maybe the problem I have with story isn't so much with the focus on story itself, but rather, story without meaningful choice. I gravitate towards story-less games, or games where I'm called upon to make my own story in a way, because it's so very rare for an actual scripted story to present the kind of choice I need to truly feel involved in the game world.
But enough about the story, let's hear about some gameplay. Well, this was no slouch either, I'm happy to say. The third person action combat was fantastic fun, though it sort of blurred the lines at times to me as to how much was skill and how much my stats were actually affectiing combat. The cover mechanic was good, despite me generally finding cover mechanics gimmicky crap, although combat did tend to fall apart in a frenetic mess when cover wasn't available or you were fighting foes that tended to charge up close.
The leveling system was interesting, and gave you some room to customize your character in some interesting ways, including some bonus skills you could take based on how far down the "lawful vs chaotic" spectrum that here provides a more suitable replacement for their previous games' "pure snowy white good vs puppy eating evil" approach.
They also made some attempt at creating a more sandboxy sort of feel, however sadly it falls flat on this mainly because the sidequests are mostly junk. Most of them wind up playing out almost identically to one another, so after doing a handful of them, as well as a couple of the special quests for my party members, I mostly ignored them for the main storyline. Still, it was nice to see them put in the effort, and I'm hoping they have time to actually put some more depth into them for the next one.
Overall however, the game was a hell of a lot of fun, with some of the most incredible moments in my years of gaming, and sets an absolute landmark for truly great writing and story in video games. If Bioware can continue to imporve upon what they presented here, they may actually manage to become a respectable CRPG developer once again.
I know I'm there for Mass Effect 2. Let's all hope they don't disappoint.