Pages

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Meta

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -



The world (er, galaxy) needs saving again, and like always, it’s up to you to save it. Being the space marine that you are, this should be expected. Bioware brought about this great action/adventure/”RPG” to us last holiday season (2007); Mass Effect. This game is the first in a series of three that they originally claimed would all be within this console generation’s life cycle, though this is highly unlikely. I got this game as part of the holiday rush of release games. Though I was excited about it, I hate to admit it sat on my shelf of shame (after only putting 6 hours in initially) for over half of 2008 before I got back into it (I blame Burnout Paradise coming out in Feb 08). Once I was back in the swing I became more excited at the prospect of following the story and the side quests and actually completing the game.

Now personally, I have a hard time getting into full RPGs. Oblivion was a fun concept for me initially, but grinding for hours at a time to get quest elements done started to wear on me, and I never ended up finishing more than a handful of tasks in the main storyline before I was to the point of endlessly wandering the map for other things to do. After a bit of this, I put it away, not to be touched again.

Then came Mass Effect., and I was cautious, as this was an RPG again. However, right off the bat the storyline caught me. Sci-fi is easier for me to slip into, and the story held its own fairly well. Also, the level of detail in the environments and overall graphics presentation was impressive, and cutscenes were a joy to watch. Once I started the game, I did spend a bit longer than I needed to with character generation, going for a red-headed woman with green eyes, and a survivor background. I also picked her as a straight soldier since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to worry about the bio skills (magic).

For the first couple chapters, I played it like a standard third person shooter, though after a bit the game became harder and harder to the point where I realized I would have to start playing with inventory and skills leveling. Mass Effect lets you control as much as you want to with the two members chosen out of your extended squad whenever you go on missions. If you feel the need you can micro-manage the hell out of them, and control every aspect of what gets bumped up when they level. Given that I wanted to enjoy the experience a bit more and not be bothered with every aspect of my squad, I set the game to auto-level them and allow them to use whatever skills they needed to get the job done. Then there were weapons, armor and upgrades to manage. For the longest time I only focused on myself, letting my squad suffer. Only when I realized that they were dying (passing out) too often did I start to focus on upgrading them. Once they were upgraded, the game became rather easy, allowing me to cut through most enemies like butter. This was on normal difficulty. By the last few chapters you certainly need to know how to use the array of weapons and skills as your disposal in order to survive some of the boss battles.

Overall the storyline kept me wanting more. I wanted to know what happened next. However, reading endless Codex entries or the survey info of every single world I looked at didn’t interest me at all. The main quest line was good, and the side quests did help support the main story, but I mostly used them as experience point farms and not to help flesh out the main story. The voice acting and choices for dialog I feel was one of the highlights of the game. This made some parts of the game feel more like an interactive movie. Also the aspect of changing your good or bad karma based on the dialog choices you make adds much more thought to something that could have easily be no-brainer choices.

Weapon, armor and accessory upgrades were not that big of a deal to find. Initially I was spending tons of time buying them and making sure I was all set before leaving the Citadel. I soon realized however that getting better gear was as easy as just playing the game as there was always a multitude of upgrades along any given path. It didn’t even matter if you had too low of a hacker skill to open certain cases, as the items that were found along the way were more than sufficient to keep you upgraded at a higher level than your enemies.

Annoyances. There seemed to be a rather long time loading new maps when you traveled between them, often taking place in elevators. When new levels did appear for you there was often texture pop-in, as though they presented the level to you before it was fully rendered. Also, trying to figure out what planet you were trying to get to was often difficult, causing you to have to exit the galaxy map and re-read the journal to figure out where you were going again, then go back to the galaxy map to try and get there. It would have been nice to see a feature in the galaxy map which allowed you to quickly check your journal. Furthermore, the Makko which is really the only way to travel around on worlds you visit is slow and cumbersome. The vehicle just doesn’t have the speed necessary to make planet roving fun. The Makko is one of the reasons I decided to not do all the side quests and metal surveys on all the planets. Lastly, I find no fun in fighting “zombies”. The levels which had mindless, dumb enemies rush at you felt unsatisfying and had me longing to be in the next level. Some areas felt similar to fighting the Flood from Halo.

In closing, I found the game to be the most captivating of any RPG style game I have played. The story held me there and the game play overall was fairly easy to pick up and run with. The settings in the game allowed you to have as much or as little control as you wanted over your squad, their upgrades and their actions. The graphics on a whole beat the pants off anything I had witnessed in other larger world RPGs such as Oblivion. Sound, though I hadn’t touched on it before, really helped set the mood and held true to the theme. I put about 20 or so hours into the first play through of Mass Effect, though it could have easily been done in much less. For $3/hr I feel the $60 price tag of the game was well worth it. The level 42 character I ended up with at the end felt comfortable and familiar, and I knew her limits very well. I am looking forward to doing another quick play through with the character in order to get the achievement for level 50 at least (*cough*achievement whore).

I’d recommend most people who enjoy sudo-RPGs or even shooters with more in-depth story lines to pick it up or trade for it.

-Ben Mazhary-Clark

Tags:

3 Comments »

  1. How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.

    Comment by KonstantinMiller — July 6, 2009 @ 12:50 pm

  2. In a fast move to try and revitalize this 2 year old game, it appears Bioware may be announcing a second DLC for ME1 just before ME2 comes out next year. This has been a constant source of frustration for fans of the game, as Bioware originally promised “frequent” DLC for the game. In practice, the only ever released the one “Bring down the sky” pack. The pack was good, and fun, but really didn’t bring anything new as far as gameplay or concepts to the game like you might expect from DLC. Rumor has it that this new DLC will help bridge the storyline between ME1 and ME2. I personally consider this a cheap shot. Here’s to hoping that they do a better job with DLC in ME2, but I won’t hold my breath.

    - Ben

    Comment by virtualdev — July 7, 2009 @ 10:29 am

  3. [...] have switched it up a bit, making RPGs less of a painful grind and bringing back the fun.  Mass Effect was the game that got me interested in RPGs again.  The inventory management was pretty easy, the [...]

    Pingback by The Videogamer @ Borked.us » Make a run for the Borderlands — May 8, 2010 @ 1:52 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Rss Feed Tweeter button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Delicious button Digg button