How would you all feel about time dilation being introduced into the story of a Mass Effect game?
For those unfamiliar with it, in a nutshell Einstein's theories of special and general relativity allows for time travel into the future. Time is relative both to the speed in which you are travelling and your proximity to massive objects.
If you were on a space ship travelling at 90% the speed of light the passage of time for you would be cut in half. Let's say you synchronize your watch with a friend on Earth before your journey. When the journey begins both of your watches read 1:00 PM. After 10 minutes at 90% the speed of light your watch would read 1:10 PM, but the watch on the wrist of your friend back on Earth would read 1:20 PM. He or she would have experienced twenty minutes to your ten. This effect would greatly increase the faster your space ship travels. Mass Effect side steps this, as do most science fiction stories set in space, because telling a coherent story is difficult if your space jetting heroes are also in effect time travelers.
Travelling at near or beyond the speed of light however isn't the only way to experience the effects of time dilation, and gravity also has a role to play. Time passes more slowly for us hear on the surface of the Earth than it does for astronauts in space. The effect is miniscule, but wouldn't be if instead of orbiting Earth the astronauts were orbiting close enough to something with many times the mass of Earth, like a black hole. The movie Interstellar featured this, with the astronauts searching for a habitable planet among several that were orbiting a black hole. For every hour spent on the surface of the planet closet to the black hole, years were passing on Earth.
While time dilation isn't a thing for space travelers in Mass Effect, they could experience it if like in the film Interstellar, they spent some time close enough to a black hole. On that note I think it could be fun way to explore choice & consequences in a Mass Effect game by having the protagonist go to a place where he or she would experience gravitational time dilation. The protagonist for example could pursue the big bad to a planet where this is an issue, only to later return to the main hub, to find that decades have passed in the hours or days spent on that planet's surface. Earlier decisions regarding that hub could result in major branching changes to that hub and some of the characters populating it, that rather than being shown or explained in an ending slide or narration, are experienced by the protagonist when he or she returns.
It would be ambitious of course, probably require a lot of work, and might be difficult to pull off. But if the devs were able to pull it off I think it would be an awesome way to implement choice & consequence into their RPG.
Of course you'd probably also need to get the big bad caught up in the same effect, and not getting much of a head start on you. It would also probably be a better fit for a future game than Andromeda, which seems to be focused on finding a home for colonists. I doubt those colonists are going to wait while the protagonist is missing for thirty years. As long as the plot of a ME game could accommodate it however, I think it might be something worth considering.
Thoughts?
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