This piece was written over the course of a month since I was preoccupied with other events for a long time, hence why I refer to Mass Effect 3 as yet to be released to then referring to it as a released title. Apologies!
Mass Effect 3 comes out in a couple of weeks, so naturally I thought I would reacquaint myself with the universe and start a new Shepard from the original game on PC. Also with me in a foreign country away from my original Xbox Shepard I thought I might as well just re roll a new character in preparation for Shepard’s grand finale.
Playing Mass Effect on its release in 2007 I definitely remember being completely enamored with it, but I was a jaded seventeen year old gamer with no real sense or insight into design (because I’m so totally indie now, totes ma goats). This is much akin to how maybe somewhere, somehow, for whatever dreadful reason all the planets of the universe aligned and a virgin gamer in a Rio favela inserts a Kane & Lynch disc into their Xbox. “THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER” he exclaims as he struggles with a stiffly moving camera and a multitude of abhorrently implemented game systems.
Mass Effect is a badly designed game. There I said it. Perhaps I’m being too harsh but its design on a player feedback level and most of its mechanics are an assorted flavor of mediocre and broken. This revelation shocks even me as I type this sentence; despite how much I immensely enjoy Mass Effect as a whole and as an experience; as I reflect on my latest 23 hour play through there’s no dodging it.
An action-RPG is a genre Mass Effect would be shelved under if you were so inclined to categorise it. There are two systems of play in that designation that define this game: The manner in which you can dispose of your enemies and the manner in which you can role play your character; both fundamental pillars that crumble beneath a fantastically crafted universe.
I suppose I’ll start with the action. You can tell Bioware attempted to make the cover system “intuitive” by simply having Shepard run up to a wall or barrier and lock himself into place. Unfortunately it simply doesn’t work. You have to approach the cover at a very picky angle (usually approaching it perfectly perpendicular works). Once you are in cover Shepard glides across cover as if he were a ballerina practicing his pointes against a glass wall, at a turtles pace with no urgency. Yeah never mind the flying bullets, you perfect that crouched crab walk behind cover Shepard. Of course there’s barely any use for the cover system, because enemies will rarely do anything other than charge at you guns blazing and hands flailing. “Have you ever fought an asari commando unit before?” A snide question one of the games boss characters proudly asks as she sends her commandos after me. Do they utilize the clever tactic of running up to ones face and shooting them at point blank? Yes? Well in that case, affirmative, I have fought the likes of your commandos many times before. Only these tools are sexily dressed blue aliens and have more shields than most other enemy characters. Close combat becomes an eventuality but Shepard sucks at hand to hand and despite all that ballet practice he moves with the dexterity of a cow. Fighting krogan in an enclosed space is a nightmare. They like to charge you for massive damage but Shepard can’t dodge or delay an opponent. All he can do is run away or strafe sideways and prick an enemy with his elbow. It is not an effective strategy or fighting method.
Having a less than average combat system tends to sour a lot (if not all) of the quests. Though mediocre combat doesn’t excuse the quite frankly badly thought out and poorly designed missions. One particular mission stands out the most. Shepard is tasked with destroying a virtual intelligence that has gone rogue in a human lunar base. This basically involves entering three identical looking buildings spaced fifty meters away from each other, killing some mechs and then walking into a specific room in each building and repeatedly shooting maybe 5 ‘VI conduits’ that each take about six shotgun blasts to kill. Standing in the centre of a room shooting several inanimate objects over and over is NOT fun. There were a few times where I was rendered inanimate several times myself via a mech’s rocket to my face as I entered the buildings. This promptly spawned me outside the entrance to the base (thank god I played this on PC, virtually no load times!). The only problem being when you’re outside standing in the middle of three IDENTICAL buildings it’s hard to figure out which ones I had already entered and which one I was supposed to enter. So at one stage I spent literally 8 minutes walking into the wrong buildings before finding the one I was supposed to be in, only to die from a rocket again and repeat the same process.
Speaking of identical level design, this trend permeates practically all the off-world side quests. For example: the same underground bunker consisting of a starting room, a connecting corridor which then leads to a larger enemy/crate filled room, followed by two other connecting corridors that both lead to smaller storage rooms that the objective usually inhabits; you’re bound to come across this space at least five times when doing side quests. At one stage I walked into one of these storage rooms I just mentioned only to find… NOTHING IN IT! (Cue Flanders ‘nothing at all! Nothing at all!’). I stood in this room in mild disbelief. Why on earth is this room here? It serves absolutely no purpose. The reality is the designers literally just copied and pasted this level template onto this world and couldn’t even bother populating the room with some miscellaneous objects to make it feel like a believable space, or even delete the BSP or block off the door that leads to the room. I suppose in real life we can accept a room being empty for the sake of being empty. An empty room in a game just seems to scream laziness. Either the developer doesn’t want us to be in there, or they’re just too lazy to make anything of it. As players engrossed in a world we expect our need for discovery to be satiated, not to walk into be a room and be told inadvertently to ‘piss off, there’s nothing for you here’.
Thankfully this repetitive use of space isn’t emulated in prominent locations and main quest missions. But these main locales have a specific and somewhat similar problem of their own, a term I suppose I’ll coin as the inefficient use of space. It’s easy enough to tell that many of these levels were meant to appropriate a feeling of grandeur and wonder, but Bioware goes about this in the wrong way in Mass Effect 1. It feels like in order to make places feel big… they’ve literally made them needlessly large by placing super long corridors and walkways everywhere. So walking from place to place takes much longer than it really should and all these areas look bare from the lack of decorative and filler assets. I’m sure the fast travel system on the Citadel was implemented after they had realized how inconvenient navigating the city was.
My last major complaint isn’t as big of an issue as the previous ones and perhaps I was unfair earlier in stating that the role playing portion of the game was a mess. In truth the series as a whole is a masterpiece of role playing and in my opinion a quintessential example of it. I strongly disagree however with the railroading of Shepard towards either Renegade or Paragon in the first two games. I’m either an easy going, understanding commander or a harsh and impatient prude. It is rare that I get the opportunity to play the middle ground. Especially when I am encouraged to play towards being a polar opposite by being rewarded paragon and renegade points for my actions. By the end game it’s practically impossible to make some renegade decisions because I simply don’t have enough arsehole points. I’m the type of player who likes to act harsh sometimes. Perhaps if as a player, I feel frustrated or if I think my character in a certain situation should feel frustrated. In Mass Effect 1 it’s once a nice guy, always a nice guy.
I suppose I could go even further into ripping this game apart. How the combat is outrageously unbalanced and cumbersome, or how the UI sucks. But truth be told I don’t want to. Bioware has addressed all these issues in subsequent games in what must have been a very valuable series of lessons learnt. Hell I certainly learnt a lot/had things compounded about design by just replaying the game five years later with fresh eyes. By Mass Effect 3 though, they truly conquered what they set out to make after all the faults of the previous games and it shows. What I want to say finally is that ultimately the universe Mass Effect 1 begins to untwine is so engrossing and grandeur it is impossible to not be overwhelmed by what has been created. The aliens you meet, friendships you forge, the impactful decisions you often make and the revelations you eventually ascertain, it all leads to such wondrous possibilities for whatever is to come next in Shepard’s (and indeed the fabric of our galaxy’s) story. Consider that the entire series of events takes place in only one galaxy out of the billions that exist. The Mass Effect universe is overwhelming. Despite how incredibly frustrating and daunting fighting through the game is, you can’t quit without learning the unknowns of the galaxy. Heavily narrative driven games like Mass Effect are more than the sum of their parts and it is in instances like this where a mediocre gameplay experience can be overshadowed by a marvelous storytelling and pure creative genius. Kudos.
