Mass Effect: A Spaced Epic

Mass Effect 2 hit the shelves last week. It is a continuation of the space epic Mass Effect (in case you were wondering). The story picks up not long after the end of the first game.  

The opening sequence shows random hot female, aka Miranda Lawson, talking to mysterious, covered in shadows man, aka ‘The Illusive Man’, about the fate of the galaxy and how Shepard has shown the alien races that humans are strong-willed and pioneers and also how Shepard is the last hope the galaxy has to live to make sure that the threat of the Reapers can be quelled. Wild guess as to what happens next…

Shepard , who after a glorious victory against the reapers,  is on ‘his’ way home from somewhere, when they encounter a ship of sorts. The Reapers!? No, as Joker exclaims, it is not the Reapers! So… there is something scarier than the reapers out there in the galaxy that the crew of the Normandy (or Joker) know about… if there was something like this in the first game I didn’t quite catch it… but as luck would have it this ship is here to destroy the Normandy; and the ship is destroyed and Shepard is killed (no ifs, ands, or buts about it).

So, these two people in the opening sequence also belong to this super secret shadow organization (Cerberus) that already knew about the reapers from before the events of Mass Effect (1 that is) and just decided that it wasn’t worth letting the galaxy know, because hey, all they want is to push the pro-human agenda forward. At this point I lost interest in the story… I have really had enough of there being a shadow organization that knows everything, or controls everything, or is ever present without anyone’s knowledge. It is a plot device that has been used too often, and I think is the easy way out for any story writer to explain or sort out plot points…

But I didn’t play the first game for its immersive story, I played it mostly because the gameplay and the RP mechanics were interesting and there was an immense amount of character customization. Well the RP mechanic of the dialogue wheel of ‘what you see may be what you get’ is still there, but say goodbye to the character customization. This game boasts a simpler mechanism for this. You only really get to pick the abilities that you have (which are fairly limited at the beginning of the game, six I think, and the new ones can only be gotten after you do the loyalty mission for your crew)… Weapons and armour drops are gone as well. Now you to buy (or find on missions and then research) upgrades to your equipment, which happen to be very expensive… in Mass Effect, money really wasn’t an issue… now, in Mass Effect 2, I seem to be running out of it regularly. You tend to find new weapons that on missions that replace the one that you are already carrying (this can be changed at the weapon loadout menu in the ship armoury or before boss fights on missions).

There is now an ammo mechanism. Why? For giggles it seems. The first game had a perfectly good system as far as weapons went. You shot too much, the gun overheated; you waited for it to cool down. Now, not only do you have to reload, but you also have to look for ammo clips (these tend to be abundant on most missions, but on a few I found myself running low).

Upgrades to the ship, and weapons and armours are done by using resources that you find by scanning and spending an unnecessary amount of time probing planets. Your ship now comes equipped with 30 probes (initially, but going up to 60) which are used to extract the resources from a planet using the most inane and annoying feature of the game. What was wrong with the system in the previous game where when a planet was scanned, you immediately harvested whatever goodies were on the planet… did the galaxy take few steps back as far as technology goes while Shepard was dead? And to top it all there is also fuel that you have to deal with… whenever a mass relay jump is made, if there is a desire to go beyond the system that you are in you have use fuel (which you can run out of mid journey) and fuel costs money to buy, which there already is a shortage of. Why? Why is there a sudden need to track these banal things when the player should be allowed to concentrate on saving the galaxy!?

Mission gameplay mostly consists of little bit of talking and a LOT of running, hiding, shooting, and exploding. In the first game fighting as incidental to the story that was going on; there was a lot more emphasis on character development and story progression than there was on the ‘run and gun’ aspect; which is why the combat system was a little kludgy. Now since they have honed the combat system a lot, it seems everything else has taken the sideline.

The action part of the game (which there is a lot of) consists of:

1)      Go into area where there are many conveniently placed boxes, walls, and other such structures.

2)      Hide behind afore mentioned structure/s and wait for enemies to arrive.

3)      Poke out from cover and shoot.

4)      When health is low, hide behind structure to regenerate health.

5)      When all enemies are dead move on

6)      Go to 1

*Oh and the B button is used to melee the enemy.

Sound familiar? This game is better described as ‘Gears of Mass Effect’ or maybe ‘Halo 3: M.E.S.S’ (That’s Mass Effect Shepard Saga). The story itself is about as epic as in those games.

But on the bright side there are no MAKO sections any more.

Seems to me, Bioware has a history of screwing up the sequels…

Example:

Neverwinter Nights. Probably one of the best PC based RPG in the last decade. The combat was easy and the RP fun. And it came with the Aurora toolset, which led to the design of some great player created modules.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Much hyped sequel to the first game that fell flat on its face. Combat was overly complicated (with the AI being dumb as bricks and you having to control 2-4 characters at the same time), and there were incomplete dialogues and plot-lines. This doubled with the fact that they took out the ‘easy to create module with’ toolset and replaced it with an overly complicated toolset, so there was not quite the prolific development of modules by players as there was for the first one.

Knights of the Old Republic: Same as before, the game play was simple yet challenging. The story was fun and interesting.

KotOR 2: Well ok, so for this they actually did a good job as far as keeping with the gameplay of the original game, but with the amount of levels that were being thrown around… gameplay was really simple… the game stops being hard after the first quarter. And there seemed to be unfinished plot threads.

But, in both those cases… Obsidian was the one who made the sequels so I guess the blame lies on them.

Well, EA bought out Bioware, so maybe this whole thing is EA’s fault.