Mass Effect 2 was
in many ways a consummate disappointment for me. Its gameplay was shaky, at times
superfluously sloppy. The design was
weak, characters were inconsistently developed, and EA used ME2 to test a number of strategies for
distributing content that were excessively mercenary. I was so disillusioned by ME2 that I decided to skip Mass Effect 3 altogether.
That highly principled stand against rampant capitalism
collapsed a few days ago when, following a heated (and in retrospect, somewhat
prescient) conversation with a friend about Mass
Effect 2’s shortcomings, I promised to buy Mass Effect 3 if I could get it for around five dollars. The next morning I turned on Origin, EA’s
terribly thought out answer to Steam, and learned that Mass Effect 3 was on sale for six dollars. I looked at my houseplant and life-mate,
Edgar, shrugged and said “WHADDYAGUNNADO?”
Edgar did not respond.
This sale, on the heels of a great collaboration between EA
and the Humble Bundle people, got me into the downloading-things-on-Origin
spirit and, within a day, Mass Effect 3
was ready to go on my PC. I sat down,
finished the Mass Effect 2 campaign I’d
been crawling through (in order to re-create the most enjoyable of my four
console-based Mass Effect 2
playthroughs) and, the same day, booted up Mass
Effect 3.
Playing through the final bars of Mass Effect 2 reminded me of all the reasons I’d left the game
behind. The final battle, with a colossal
amount of under-the-hood, totally illogical bullshit determining certain
outcomes (along with some totally reasonable, really well integrated branching
decisions as well), the sloppy, slippery, jerky combat, the lackluster weapons
which, by game’s end, grew boring as fuckall, and the meh character
customization, which felt like something that would fit well into a MOBA but
was, at best, an anemic framework for an RPG.
The rush of these elements in the game’s climactic finale reminded me of
why I’d given up on the series, and left a sour taste in my mouth going into Mass Effect 3. I wholly expected Mass Effect 3 to be a slovenly mess of an object that offered
little more than fan service to Bioware’s most devoted (and least critical)
customers.
After an opening scene which wholly fulfilled all my worst
expectations, I was dumbstruck by how much had been improved. Smoother movement and combat controls, more
polished and better thought out character progression (including the expansion
of skills that previously had little or no practical application), sharper,
prettier graphics. This was the game
that Mass Effect 2 wished it could
be, an elegant refinement of the previous two iterations in the series blended
into a marvelous mix of shooter and RPG.
Mass Effect 3 captivated me
with only a few minutes of its gameplay.
The shaky, sloppy shooting of Mass Effect 2 is gone, replaced with a well tuned, balanced system
that made firing weapons, movement and cover interlocking, viable combat
options that fit into a larger system of powers and melee attacks, and weapons
that were just downright fun to shoot.
The easy weapon choices of Mass
Effect 2, wherein a clear front runner for each weapon type was gone,
replaced by an ever expanding selection of five key weapon types, all of them
with their own unique advantages and disadvantages, tradeoffs for different
scenarios, real reasons to select or avoid them. Gone was the shallow progression of Mass Effect 2. In its place, a smoothly iterating series of
upgrades, selected for relative small amounts of cash, that steadily improved
weapons you felt like continuing to use.
The individual upgrades from the first Mass Effect game returned as well, giving each weapon type
additional depth and customizability, but simplified, stripped down so that
each upgrade need only be purchased once before it can be used by the entire
team. Nearly every problem I had with
how the core game of Mass Effect 2
played has been corrected, iterated on and shifted into a positive. I’ve never enjoyed playing a sequel to a game
I hated as much as I’ve enjoyed playing Mass
Effect 3.
Even the painful exploration mechanic of Mass Effect 2 has been improved upon,
though it’s far from perfect.
Exploration is no longer both a resource and time sink, instead simply
requiring time, and much less of it than Mass
Effect 2’s “scan every square inch of every planet” nightmare system. You’re still pushing your ship around a tiny
map like some sort of dipshit, but there’s no real in-game currency cost
involved (unless you make some serious mistakes) and the flavor text for each
individual world, while still there, is no longer oppressively crammed down the
throats of min-max players who simply want “the best ending” and “the most
resources.” That said, there are
problems with the new system to be sure.
See, the new system still involves probes. These new probes ping the map, revealing
points of interest beyond bits of flavor text (which are a totally viable
reason to want to explore planets for plenty of people). But there’s a catch: these probes alert the
invading Reapers to your presence. Ping
too many times, too close to where the Reapers are listening, too greedily or
too deeply, and the invading armada will come down on you, hard. Introduce reapers to a system and you’ve got
no choice but to run or die, and running means you can’t harvest resources in
that system until you complete another mission.
It’s a smart little trade between risk and reward. It’s not simply a matter of investing time in
the game, it’s a matter of considering when and how to scan a system, and
whether or not a scan that will draw full-on Reaper attention is
worthwhile. On its surface, it’s a great
idea, but in practice the system promotes mad, suicidal pinging to determine
the location of potential points of interest followed by a quick and easy
reload. Savvy players can easily game
the system to find points of interest and remove the guesswork from the
equation, which removes a lot of the risk that Bioware left in the mix. That said, metagaming aside it’s a huge
improvement on the old system.
And Mass Effect 3’s
story is tremendously dumb. Bioware is exceptional
at building worlds, but as great as many of the concepts that they bring to
bear are on a grand level, they remain terrible at actually establishing
characters, motivations and a textured storytelling experience. The cultures and peoples of Mass Effect are tremendously interesting,
particularly when you investigate them in the meta-text of the first game, but
the intrigue, romance and politic populating the games themselves showcases the
nuanced understanding you’d expect from a high school student. Relationships are less adult things about dialogue
and maturity and more polarities of desire and passive-aggressive sniping. Good luck being friends with an ex. And some fundamental plot points simply don’t
make sense. The existence of Cerberus,
for example.
This isn’t something limited to Mass Effect, or Bioware in general.
In fact, I call it the David Mitchell Effect, in honor of David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas, where it’s particularly
prominently displayed. Mitchell spends
roughly half his book building futuristic worlds, one of which is explored from
the perspective of a cloned fast food worker who is made sentient by the
government of her world in order to discourage the potential movement to grant
human rights to potentially sentient fast-food-working clones. The system required to enact the story Mitchell
tells relies upon a degree of control that totally negates the necessity of the
enacting such a plot, and heavily implies an existing framework possessed of
sufficient wherewithal to recognize the unnecessary nature of such plots. Simply put, it’s a dumb story arc that relies
on the bulk of a world’s population, including people who have ostensibly built
some pretty complicated systems, being thoroughly dumb in almost every way.
Likewise, Cerberus is so powerful in Mass Effect 3 that it can operate openly in conflict with multiple
governments at once for decades at a time and possesses such an aptitude for
infiltrating these governments and their support systems that it moves about
and attacks them with absolute impunity and apparently limitless
resources. An organization that powerful
could exercise considerable covert control over the government without entering
open conflict and, in fact, would have motive to avoid open conflict in favor
of covertly coordinating with the resources of the governments it undermines. I’m making a bit of a straw man here, and I’m
rushing through my point, but again, simply put, Cerberus is dumb, and it’s
symptomatic of a bunch of stupid shit that happens in the story of Mass Effect as people try to expand its
world to add in things they think of as “cool.”
But I don’t want to simply rag on the story of ME and its world. Some people enjoy it, and while it’s dumb, it’s
very invested in its own dumbness in a way that can be quite satisfying, like
the most self-possessed and self-congratulatory pulp, arguably the best kind. And in fairness, I’m only about eight hours
into the game right now; while I fully expect the story to resolve in a
laughably dumb way, the game itself is good enough that I really don’t care,
and if it doesn’t, I get to be pleasantly surprised. Plus, Bioware gets tremendous points for, for
the first time in Mass Effect’s
history (really, in the history of any of their major AAA release titles),
recognizing the existence of real, grown up gay people who don’t act like a
version of fucking Puss-In-Boots from Shrek. That’s tremendously refreshing – even if the
relationships are still often adolescent, they’re celebrating equality and
representing a maturity that makes me excited for Bioware’s future
releases. Perhaps the day when Bioware
presents players with a non-shoe-horned in-game romance with a character who
isn’t an underdeveloped object of desire isn’t far off. If the way they zeroed in on Mass Effect 3’s sweet sweet gameplay is
any indication, if they keep working on it, they’ll get it sooner than later.
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