T w e n t y S i d e d

We’ve reached the Expositional payload of the game. I can’t think of another (active) AAA game company that’s still willing to focus on story to this degree. In other games, the story just there as a (lazy, often incoherent) justification for combat, but in BioWare games it feels like they design it the other way around. It’s used as an in-game reward, and they’re not afraid to let players sit through several minutes of it at once. I don’t want to snipe our eventual play-through of Mass Effect 2 here, but it’s instructive to compare this deep, thorough, lengthy, and thoughtful conversation with what we get at the end of Mass Effect 2: pew pew pew! boom!

Sorry about the massive framerate drop in the middle of the episode. Randy posted this an earlier thread:

In what might be the biggest “DO OVER” of my life, I realized today that I had been running ME at max resolution, even tho during the editing process it was being reduced to a much more appropriate resolution. I apologize to all you viewers out there that were forced to witness abysmal FPS, I just tested it, and Fraps+Livestream+Mass Effect+Vent+Steam ect.. was running at a smooth 30 FPS consistently when done with 1080 Resolution. I demand a do over!

Ouch. The last episode is already done, so we will have to apply this knowledge to our next series. I’ll be announcing the next game and some other changes to the series on Thursday.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Warning: For reasons we still don’t understand, this episode contains Mass Effect’s infamous XXX hard core porno sex simulation*.

We joke about wanting to romance Tali, but I have the sense that this is a pretty common preference among male gamers. Tali seems to be a lot more popular than either Liara or Ashley. And I think she’s more popular because she’s simply more interesting. Liara is smart, Ashley is capable, but Tali is both. Yes, she has a skin-tight body suit, but so does just about everyone else in the game. More importantly, she’s got chicken feet and you never see her face. So I think her popularity is due to her personality far more than sex appeal.

Having said that, there seems to be no end of speculation (and photoshopping) concerning what we would find under the mask:

(The real Tali model is actually pretty ugly under the mask. Her face is just there to hint at the shape with faux-lighting. I can’t find it now, but someone managed to move the camera close enough to look through her helmet using the clipping plane. They showed that her head is low-poly and sort of mannish. EDIT: Found it.)

We’re not ready to announce the next series, but I will say it’s not going to be Mass Effect 2. Not right away, anyway. We don’t want this to turn into “The Mass Effect Show”. We’re going to do one or two other games before we head into Mass Effect 2: Cerberus Goes Bananas.

* And by “XXX porno” we mean, “a side view of a bare female bottom”.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.