T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s unusual that I have to break up my nitpicks post into two parts, but Mass Effect has forced my hand and brought this punishment on itself. The game is not nearly as awful as these posts might make it seem, but it does have egregious flaws that need to be recorded and cataloged.

The game is saddled with heartless, incessant, and tediously flow-breaking loading screens. Some are disguised as elevators. The game is just a jerk when it comes to squandering slices of time. For example, if you have a mission that calls for you to visit the Citadel:

1. Bring up the galaxy map, set the destination.
2. See a short but un-skippable animation of the ship going through the Mass Relay.
3. Back to the map screen. Use the map again to direct the ship to dock at the Citadel.
4. Loading screen.
5. See a short but un-skippable animation of the ship pulling into dock.
6. While not a loading “screen” per se, the game pauses for a few seconds while the word “Loading” appears.
7. Exit the ship and choose your away party.
8. Loading screen.
9. Get in a mandatory long-ass elevator ride. (A loading screen, really. A long one.)
10. Once out of the elevator, use the “fast” transit system to go to the right part of the station.
11. Loading screen.
12. Unless you’re very lucky, you’re going to have to hike for a distance to reach the person you’re looking for.

This adds up to a couple of minutes of semi-interactive waiting so you can have a fifteen second conversation.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect:Nitpicks Part 2”

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.

As promised, I have compiled my gripes with this game into a single, easy-to-access (and also easy to ignore) list of problems, complaints, issues, and little grievances.

I do this ostensibly as a sort of armchair game design and analysis, but in the case of Mass Effect I’m doing it also as a form of catharsis. Some of these flaws truly grate, and served to yank me out of my entertainment for a helping of petty annoyances at regular intervals. I will not feel like justice has been served until I have unpacked the full list. This will take two posts.

I have tried to arrange my complaints in order from the trivial to the traumatic, but this is an imprecise process at best.

This is spoiler-free, aside from the sections blocked in red.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect:Nitpicks Part 1”

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.

Sometimes knowing (or thinking you know) how a game operates can work against you.

Early in my first Mass Effect play-through, I noticed the codex. There were only a couple of entries in it at that point, and they were things I’d already heard about. Now, a lot of games have this sort of journal feature that stores facts given to you by NPCs. This is a nice courtesy feature for absent-minded players, for players who might have overlooked or misunderstood something said to them, or for players who return to a game after a long absence. It’s a great feature, but you usually don’t need it. And that’s what I thought the Mass Effect codex was.

It wasn’t until someone in the comments of my first impressions post mentioned how rewarding the codex entries were that I went back for another look. While a couple of them are just a re-hash of things said to you in the game, most of them are a gold mine of details that bring the setting to life and address some (would-be) holes in the setting. Bonus: Most of them are read to you, and have nice pictures to go with them. (Yes, it may be childish to like “pictures” with your prose, but audio and visual does make the ingestion of information more fun.) Double bonus: The voice of the codex is the voice of the narrator from the Leisure Suit Larry games. As I play the entries I keep listening for the double entendre that never comes. Particularly during the Asari entry.

Anyway, an example of a seeming plot-hole which is covered in the codex: I thought it was stupid that the Krogen “didn’t have any scientists” to work on the genophage. If you guys don’t have any scientists, then how did you make it into space? But the codex reveals that the Salarians discovered the tribal and warlike Krogens, and brought them into space. Krogens don’t really have the disposition to try and invent things, but they’re smart and cunning in their own way, and can learn to use technology as well as anyone else.

Suddenly the Krogens went from being Klingon rip-offs to a fascinating race with a proud history but a tragic yet inevitable downfall.

Now that I know how useful it is, the codex is having the intended effect: I’m foraging for data by exhausting the dialog tree of every NPC that will consent to conversation.

I wouldn’t have ignored the codex if I hadn’t thought I already knew what it was. Funny how that works.

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.

Mass Effect is the worst game BioWare has put out in over a decade.

…but it’s still a great game.

I guess that says a lot about BioWare, that they can slide this far and still have a quality product. The elements that I love in BioWare games are still there, just watered down a bit.

Aderson: What about Shepherd? He’s a mildly retarded boy who spends all day staring out the window. Udina: Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy? Anderson: That’s the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy.

BioWare games are first and foremost character-driven games, story games second, and roleplaying games third. KOTOR set the bar unbelievably high in this regard, giving us a collection of characters so memorable that they’re still beloved today, even after their quotes and gags have been run into the ground by their well-meaning fans.

The premise is that humanity is the new race on the block. We’ve just recently dragged our sapient butts into space and found it was already populated by a half-dozen other races. So much for the final frontier.

One of the crucial locations in the game is the Citadel – a huge space station built by a long-dead alien race. Nobody really knows how the Citadel works, but it’s huge and powerful and the perfect place for the galactic oligarchy council to make their home. The council employs the Specters – a small group of covert specialists who are beholden to nobody but the council. Think of them like CIA spies with diplomatic immunity, working for a small group of aliens who live in an unassailable fortress and who aren’t accountable to anyone. Given this power structure, it’s actually really impressive that the galaxy is only usually torn apart by warfare.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect:
First Impressions”

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.