First of all, I’ve been a fan of Bioware games since playing Baldur’s Gate I as a kid. I’m a huge rpg fan, and I’m glad when a new Bioware game comes out, both for the experience of playing the game and for the rewarding experience of being a fan of one of the best electronic game developing companies in the world. However, it’s exactly because I’m a fan of Bioware that I am writing this post – I think Bioware is a great company who creates great games, but there’s nothing stopping them from being even better. Basically, I think that some of the aspects of Mass Effect 2 were lackluster, and they were lackluster in a very particular way.
I greatly enjoyed the original Mass Effect, but I acknowledge that it had some flaws – most notably, past a certain point, combat ceased being anything interesting, and the cover system in the game was of questionable value, and most people I spoke to about the game didn’t really use it. The ‘elevator’ loading times were
also a little frustrating at times. However, I still consider Mass Effect to be a *great* game, due to things like the quality of voice acting, well-designed characters and interesting character development, a wonderfully immersive world, and an exciting story that had me more or less on the edge of my seat a good portion of the time. Sovereign’s introduction on Virmire is, in my opinion, one of the best ‘Oh ****!’ moments in any video game I’ve ever played. So I was of course *eagerly* looking forward to Mass Effect 2.
First of all, the gameplay was vastly improved between the two games. I died a few times in the beginning as I adapted to the reality of cover being a necessity, and I found the teammate AI behaving much more intelligently. There were actually situations in which I wanted to switch weapons, which was nice. The graphics were of course greatly improved, but what mattered more to me was the fixing of the problem where, especially in cutscenes, textures would not load immediately. I was a little frustrated in the first game staring at certain NPCs when their faces hadn’t been fully rendered yet. So there was definitely an ‘onwards and upwards’ feel to some aspects of the game. But…
The Mass Effect series is a series of rpg’s. The gameplay is great, and bad gameplay will wreck an otherwise good rpg, but there are a few things that set rpg’s apart from, say, a shooter or action game. It isn’t quite story, as pretty much all games have a story, although it’s true that a story tends to have a greater impact on the quality of an rpg. What makes a computer role-playing game is the role that is played. I feel that in ME1, I was playing a role, in all of my various playthroughs. In ME2, this feeling is muted. The few times in which you would expect to be able to express what your character is thinking, such as the reunions with your ME1 LI’s and some conversations with TIM and Anderson, the opportunity is quashed via some completely milquetoast dialog options that don’t allow the character, and the player, to contest the information that is fed to them by NPC’s. I think I echo the frustrations of a legion of gamers who wish that their character was able to be more forceful with the Council in their refusal to see you or entertain the notion of the Reapers, and that it both stretches the bounds of credulity and closes off what would be the logical avenue for a pro-Council, anti-Cerberus sort of character, in a manner that smacks of railroading. The other situations I mentioned play out similarly.
Why is this bad? Why should players be frustrated when they’re not allowed to express what is not a fringe avenue of character development, but the logical one, building on what has happened in the first game Again, this is meant to be a role-playing game, and the Mass Effect series without the ability to play your role is just a bad third-person squad-based shooter. As much as I enjoy the gameplay of ME2, if I just want to go shoot some aliens, I’ll play Halo.
Now, a big focus of Mass Effect 2 is the team that you assemble. While I question the utility of assembling a team primarily made up of new characters when a good deal of the first game was spent characterizing your existing team, complaining about that when it’s already happened without offering some constructive comments is pointless. There is a decent amount of characterization here, and some of the missions are just fun, like storming Nassana Dantius’s tower (playing that at PAX last year left me giddy). The good parts of these stages of the game play out like a well-written action movie, which is cool. In particular, Tali’s loyalty mission seemed to me to be *very* well written, and I’m not a huge Tali fanboy. I didn’t really appreciate some of the characters (I found Jack to be obnoxious and I wouldn’t trust her on a ship, and Samara was cool and all but I found it hard to care about all this Asari culture that just got dumped in my lap, and in any case a Renegade Shepard would probably think of her as a liability) but I didn’t dislike any of them enough to start nerd raging about it, similar to how I found Kaiden obnoxious in ME1: those characters were there to appeal to people in a different demographic than I belong to.
This focus on the teammates and the process of recruiting them and securing their loyalty and emotional stability is interesting, though the main reason I find it to be ultimately disappointing is the lack of the ability to experience that kind of characterization for Shepard. The Mass Effect games have some awesome characters, but Shepard is the protagonist, and in the end the story needs to revolve around the plot and Shepard. In Mass Effect 1, the enemy (at least initially) is one who is both threatening the galaxy and who you have reason to have a personal grudge against (as Saren basically calls you a worthless incompetent in front of the Council, and gets away with it, in addition to all the other bad **** he’s done. Then he kills one of your friends), and there’s an impetus to track that son of a **** down and make his life absolutely miserable. In ME2, the enemies (Harbinger and the Collectors) are definitely a threat to the galaxy, but the personal reasons for going after them just aren’t there – instead the personal conflicts you have are directed at TIM and your old LI, and possibly the Council, all of whom cause conflicts for the character of Shepard – but none of the tension created by these conflicts is resolved by the end of the game, leaving me with the gamer equivalent of blue balls. One could argue that this is being set up to be resolved in ME3, but I don’t think that’s the case – I feel that the ME1 cameos of your LIs (Wrex doesn’t count, as his is actually handled well) were thrown in as an afterthought, and in the end they serve to frustrate more than they serve to resolve anything, as there’s no opportunity to defuse the (unjustifiable, in my mind, but relationships don’t always work on logic) feelings of betrayal that Ash and Kaiden express, and the incident itself seems like an attempt to end the relationship despite what the player might want for their character. I think it would have been handled better had there been more player choice involved in these scenes, but this lack of choice is part of an underlying problem with ME2 – Shepard him/herself is not shown to be much of a character over the course of the game. The strong points of ME2 are in the characters and how they are shown to the player, but there is little chance to show Shepard, the main character, to the player. While some might say this is an attempt to make Shepard more easily identified with by the player, I think that in the end it just draws focus away from Shepard and towards the other characters in the game. I’m not saying they are bad people, but I believe that the writing team fell into the trap of putting more effort into the NPCs as they were ‘their’ characters, as opposed to Shepard, each particular instance of which is more a property of each player.
I’m not saying that ME2 is a bad game, per se. What I think the fundamental failure of the game is that it fails to provide what I understand as an *rpg* experience. The game has many high points. For example, Bioware’s ability to find and utilize voice talent makes everyone else in the industry look like amateurs, and the combat is fun and manages to stay fast-paced while remaining about strategic choices in squad composition and power use. But for Mass Effect to live up to its promises, it needs to be a good rpg.
So I think a few things should be thought about going into
Mass Effect 3:
1) Shepard needs to be given more attention, and his or her choices need to matter
more. I’d like to see some more chances to express through action or words what’s going on inside Shepard’s head, and I’d like to see how the NPCs and the world around him react to that. I feel in ME2 exactly the opposite was occurring.
2) No new teammates beyond what we have. Going through the trouble of introducing new teammates to the fanbase at this point is going to detract from the plot, and anyone who can’t find a decent amount of the existing ones (collected from both the games) appealing and who demands more is being disingenuous.
3) A plot which doesn’t serve to box the player in. In the first game, we had no motivation whatsoever to go work for Cerberus, whereas in the second game a very sizable portion of players would rather be working for someone else, or at least not serving Cerberus faithfully. So why force it?
I threw this together because I wanted to start a thread with a more constructive tone, as opposed to just counter-trolling the people who were trolling people complaining about certain aspects of the game, so please keep things civil, if you care to respond.
Edit: formatting.
Modifié par Terraneaux, 18 février 2010 - 11:56 .
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