T w e n t y S i d e d

These first few entries might be a little dry. We’ll get to the good stuff eventually, but we have groundwork to lay before we can cover that.

Therum

Even though I do this planet first, it feels like a bad place to start exploring this particular universe. It’s short on expensive content like characters, dialog, cutscenes, and detailed environments. The combat can be kind of newbie-unfriendly at low levels, and the mission ends with a fight against a Krogan that can be ridiculously hard for some classesOh, you’re an infiltrator that specializes in sniping at a distance? Well enjoy being locked in a confined space with a charging Krogan that can kill you in five seconds. Also enjoy the fifteen seconds of un-skippable cutscene leading up to the fight.. The brown rocky landscape is monotonous the moment you lay eyes on it, and it only gets worse as the mission drags on. This is the kind of stuff developers usually save for that late-game slog.

On the other hand, the interface shows the the player’s squad is still one member short, and it’s natural to expect they will be eager to come here and complete the team. On the gripping hand, I’m not sure the player has enough information to know or guess that Liara will be the final squadmate. Basically, I’m really curious what the designer’s intention was, and how people responded. I can’t remember my first play-through. Did people understand Liara was going to join the team, and did they make a beeline for Therum to get her?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 4: Why is Therum Gone?”

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.

Last time I said that Mass Effect 1 missions feel like television episodes. I’m not saying these adventures would work as television scripts as we find them in the game. Some would be far too shortThe plot of Therum barely qualifies as a skit. and others would be far too longEven if you trimmed all the combat down to the essentials, Noveria is probably still movie-sized. but they still fit the overall pattern of American television where a cast of regular characters visit a new location, meet some locals, and have an adventure with one or more complete arcs. This is distinct from (say) something like Witcher 3, where the various arcs are all tangled together, nested, branching, meandering, and criss-crossing, and where the audience is dazzled with an ever-shifting cast of charactersEven the protagonist POV character shifts from time to time!. This is also different from something like Arkham City, where a half dozen (mostly unrelated, or barely related) plot threads are opened in the first hour or so, and then the player gradually closes them one at a time.

I really enjoy the Classic BioWare episodic style, and I’m not sure why it isn’t more popular. It seems like a good way to compartmentalize game development. It must be insane trying to coordinate something interconnected like Witcher 3, but in a game with lots of discrete locations you can probably hand each episode off to its own small team and let them work without worrying the teams will get in each other’s way. And as others have pointed out, it makes for a better safety net if you start to run out of time or budget. It’s easier to cut a location from the game and patch over the hole if the locations aren’t deeply interconnected.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 3: Eden Prime”

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.

I really love the first Mass Effect game. I wouldn’t have written this 120,000 word series if the game didn’t resonate with me on some fundamental level. I replayed it while writing this series, and was struck by just how well it holds up. It’s the lowest scoring of the three games on Metacritic, I’m sure it sold the least, and it seems to have left the smallest impression with fans in terms of memes and quotable moments. But for me it’s an experience I can’t get anywhere else: Large-scale, big-idea sci-fi space opera that’s grounded by technical detail and bolstered by careful, intricate worldbuilding.

Also, it has one of best best videogame soundtracks, ever.

A World by Worldbuilders

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect Retrospective 2: Details versus Drama”

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.