Pumping Irony

Warning: High Likelihood of Spoilers!

As always, due to my job I am nowhere near finished with Mass Effect 2 yet. I’m possibly not even halfway finished, not really sure since I’ve been avoiding storyline spoilers, etc. for the most part, though I’ve heard rumors it’s a shorter game. I have recruited the first batch of NPC squad-mates — Archangel aka Garrus from Mass Effect 1, “Jack” the biotic psychotic convict, Professor Mordin, Grunt the Krogan super-soldier prototype, and the DLC mercenary Zaeed  — and have completed the first mission for the Illusive Man where Shepard fights some Collectors — the new galactic enemy for Mass Effect 2 which look like a cross between Turians and the aliens Will Smith fought in Independence Day (I’m secretly hoping Shepard spazzes out shouting “Who’s the man? Huh? Who’s the man? Wait til I get another ship and I’ma line your friends up beside you! *whap!* Welcome to the Citadel!”) — then has a brief reunion with Ashley Williams, who gives him an earful for, in her eyes, betraying the Alliance (and her?) and working for Cerberus. The two Cerberus personnel Shepard begins the game with, Jacob and Miranda, have given Shepard their personal stories leading to their Loyalty quests but I’ve not yet deviated the Normandy off-course to begin either of them.

For this first Mass Effect 2 article, I will give my impressions of the game so far as well as seeing how I fared on my Mass Effect 2 Wishlist a few weeks ago.

I imported my Mass Effect character, a male Soldier Paragon who I completed one playthrough of Mass Effect with. I still intend on doing a second playthrough to get him to level cap and complete a few extra achievements, as well as playing a biotic class to re-play as a Renegade someday. But for now I was most comfortable with the Soldier class in Mass Effect as well as being comfortable with the Shepard I’d already played, so I wanted to continue his story in Mass Effect 2 rather than starting a fresh character.

Let’s start with my Wishlist items:

1) Make it fun from the start.

I’ve had a real problem with Western RPG’s in that, while they may be stylistically more appealing to me than JRPG’s, they have been intrinsically boring as well. I’m still nowhere near finishing Fallout 3, and haven’t even played in months. Oblivion? I did the initial quest to escape the castle and get into the world and haven’t played since. Checking the timestamps on my Mass Effect achievements, I completed Eden Prime in July, 2008 then didn’t play again until November, where the game finally picked up pace and retained my interest and I completed the first playthrough at the end of January, 2009. (Who says achievements are useless?)

Compare that to Dragon Age: Origins which was immediately fun and intriguing and for the most part kept up the pace the entire game. The only break I took from playing Dragon Age was due to the deluge of heavy-hitting AAA titles that released back-to-back from September through December, and even then I’d still stop in DAO to run a quest or few in between the new shiny games.

Mass Effect 2 has done a great job so far of being cool, fun and interesting the whole time I’m playing and I actually look forward to my next session whereas the other RPG’s I mentioned, obviously that has not been the case. The opening CGI cinematic with the Normandy crew frantically ejecting before it was destroyed while Shepard staying behind to fight through the floating wreckage to save Joker as the Normandy is in her final, fiery death throes, then ultimately giving his life as he ejects Joker’s escape pod while the enemy ship fires its final blast (hey, I did warn about spoilers!) was very gripping and I think I even made a few “oooooh’s” out loud. Even though BioWare made no secrets about the whole “death of Shepard” thing, I never knew how true that was or how and when it would happen, so starting the game that way had me reeling in shock and kept me riveted to the screen.

2) Improved dialogue animations.

Oh, my! I stated in the Wishlist how the characters were mostly stiff mannequins during dialogue scenes with only a few animation frames. Mass Effect 2 dramatically improves that with character shifting between idle stances, pacing back and forth, NPC’s looking at whomever is speaking, NPC’s continuing their activities in the background and so forth. All the character textures and animations have been improved and are utilized well during dialogue scenes. However… Occasionally there are times during dialogue scenes when the new higher-polygon-count and more complex character models appear a little strange during their close-up scenes, especially when the facial animations for emotional portrayal are used. One recent close-up of Shepard had him open his eyes wide, probably to appear amazed or shocked, but they opened so wide with his bright white round eyeball models hanging in the sockets that he looked more like a Halloween mask. Jacob is even more noticeable because his facial expressions get a bit wonky fairly often. Sometimes he’s Jacob, former Alliance grunt turned Cerberus soldier. But other times he answers that age-old question “What would Marty Feldman look like if his corpse was put through the Universal Soldier program?” What, no one else ever wondered that? No one? Anyone? Hmph!

3) Improved usage of Unreal Engine 3.

Mass Effect was, I believe, BioWare’s first time using UE3. It showed. UE3 is well-known for texture loading and pop-in issues, and those reared their head in Mass Effect more than any other UE3 title I can think of. In addition, there were a lot of performance issues where the framerate would suddenly start chugging along, sometimes making it difficult to control for brief periods. Auto-saves would freeze the game. Memory usage was inefficient with frequent load spots that would freeze the game momentarily. During dialogues, characters would randomly jump from position to position rather than smooth animation cycles. All in all, Mass Effect was one of the worst offenders I have personally played when it comes to the laundry list of UE3 technical issues.

I am pleased to say that BioWare has certainly taken the past couple of years to adequately familiarize themselves with the engine. Every single UE3 issue present in the first Mass Effect has been addressed in the sequel. I’ve yet to have even a single noticeable framerate drop, even in busy locations. I loaded up Mass Effect for comparison and just jogging through the Citadel the engine was having difficulty and sprinting nearly made it a slideshow a few times, the framerate dropped so badly. Mass Effect 2 handles its asynchronous streaming fantastically. Manually save your game and you’re right back to controlling Shepard while the “save” icon does its thing. If it weren’t for that “saving” icon you’d never even know you’d reached an auto-save point, and even in the largest areas I’ve seen so far the game never stops to load new parts of the same map. All this is with even better graphics, more detailed environments and the full arsenal of lighting and particle effects that are UE3’s specialty. Kudos to the BioWare team!

Even more amazing, I think Mass Effect 2 is the first and only UE3 game I’ve seen where the initial texture loading isn’t plainly obvious. Epic’s own Gears of War 2 does it. Borderlands does it, and it’s only a few months old. I have no proof of this, but I suspect BioWare uses the pre-mission character loadout screen as a buffer of sorts, or perhaps as a distraction, while the textures load in the background so that when the screen shifts to the game, everything is already loaded and ready to go. If I was a betting man, I’d say BioWare got some assistance and consultation from Epic this time, as they are known for providing those services for their engine, but regardless the results seen in Mass Effect 2 are damn impressive.

4) No elevators, please.

To a small degree, I am actually torn on this. In Mass Effect those torturously lengthy elevator rides were an opportunity to pan the camera around and check out the gear of Shepard and his team without them moving around. Some of the elevator conversations were humorous, sort of a pre-cursor to the conversations heard in Dragon Age: Origins, as was some of the news announcements over the radio. On the other hand, the elevators were torturously lengthy and I don’t miss that at all. To be fair, the elevators were a roleplay-ish compromise to the technical issue of having UE3 live-stream the new level. Mass Effect 2 does technically have a few elevators, but entering an elevator simply presents a level selection screen, then a loading screen while the new level is loaded. The loading is pretty fast, and the loading screens themselves are animated so it’s not that bad, really. On the Normandy it’s nice because the loading screen is a sort of 3D wire-mesh of the ship showing the elevator progress to the selected level.

5) Moral ambiguity.

Ok, I struck out on this one, though it was more of a hope based on other RPG’s such as Dragon Age: Origins which had shades of grey and I actually had to read the responses to see which was appropriate to the character I was playing. Mass Effect was pretty simple in it’s Good (Paragon) or Bad (Renegade) and you always know that the top choice is Paragon, the middle is neutral and the bottom is Renegade. It’s the same in Mass Effect 2 and honestly, while there was a ton of changes streamlining to the actual gameplay and mechanics in Mass Effect 2, the dialogue circle is a big part of the Mass Effect “feel” and it’s probably for the best that it was kept intact to avoid breaking too far from feeling like a Mass Effect game.

So, 4 out of 5 on my wishlist, number 5 being a bit on the bogus side to begin with, so not bad! Now for some general impressions of the game so far.

The first Mass Effect was a bit of genre-blending on BioWare’s part as a relatively full-blown RPG disguised as a third-person shooter. On the downside, that disguise was rather flimsy since if you so much as fired a shot in the general vicinity of an enemy it was considered a hit and the RPG die rolls took over to determine the actual result. This was even more obvious in the Mako which would only hit within a specific range, regardless where the targeting reticule was capable of aiming. BioWare said that among the many improvements for the sequel that they wanted to step up their game on the shooting aspect. They’ve done just that. If there is any RPG die roll combat resolution occuring, it’s very well hidden. Weapons don’t have stats, and armor only has a mild bonus to a single aspect of combat. If I may be so bold, I will compare Mass Effect 2 to Borderlands. Gearbox may have pioneered the acronym “RPS” for Role-Playing Shooter and they did an excellent job of providing a solid first-person shooter based solely on player skill with a few (mostly passive) RPG abilities. With Mass Effect 2, BioWare has seemingly reversed the roles of the first game, delivering a solid third-person shooter with some RPG features; BioWare’s own take on an “RPS.”

On that note, I mentioned above that I suspected BioWare got some assistance from Epic on the Unreal Engine 3. I also suspect the BioWare guys have been playing a lot of Epic’s Gears of War games, because an awful lot of the new controls and abilities in Mass Effect 2 are derivative of the Gears of War series. In Mass Effect 1 holding the A button put Shepard into a mild sprint. In Mass Effect 2 the camera actually bumps along like a sort of “follow cam” you’d see in chase scenes in a movie. Exactly like Gears of War, which also uses the A button. The Gears of War series is a cover-based shooter where pressing the A button near a wall or short barrier would put Fenix into cover then pop his head out to aim a shot then safely fall back under cover. Mass Effect 2 has the exact same controls. In Mass Effect 1, either the LT or RT would draw weapons and the B button would stow them. Now, in Mass Effect 2 pressing the Back button stows weapons while the B button is now a melee attack. Exactly like Gears of War. In fact, the only perceivable difference control-wise between the two is that Gears of War uses the X button to interact with objects while Mass Effect 2 uses the A button. Otherwise, it’s not too far a stretch to say that Mass Effect 2 is essentially BioWare’s version of Gears of War with a strong story (they’re all about that Fourth Pillar, remember?) and RPG character progression.

This shift has rubbed some people the wrong way, but I approve. For the most part. Mass Effect 2 has been highly streamlined from the first game. Skills, for example, is one obvious area that this shows. Mass Effect had a whole screen of skills for each character to assign points. Mass Effect 2 has a much smaller choice of skills per character, and only 4 “levels” per skill but achieving that 4th level will “evolve” that skill into another selectable higher skill. For example, as I said earlier, I imported my Mass Effect character who was a Soldier class. In Mass Effect 2 one of the Soldier class skills is Combat Mastery. Achieving level 4 in combat mastery will evolve the Soldier class into either a Commando or Shock Trooper class, which has a few different abilities and bonuses, especially bonuses to Paragon/Renegade points. Also each individual point I assign to any skill is immediately noticeable whereas the effect was much more subtle in the first game, if it was even noticeable at all.

Some aspects have gone far beyond mere streamlining, though. The unholy mess that was the inventory system has been completely removed, for example, and replaced with weapon loadout lockers. One is located in the Normandy’s armory and most locations where missions or combat can occur will have one. Those are the only points you can choose which specific weapon within each weapon category that Shepard and his team will carry with them.

There is very little in the way of acquiring better gear either, though personally I don’t see that as a downside for the type of RPG that the Mass Effect series is. In an MMO or RPG-ish games like Diablo clones (including Borderlands) enemies are little more than loot piñatas and the constant urge to acquire better gear is what keeps players coming back for more. Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins are the only two BioWare RPG’s I’ve ever played (and completed) and in both of those the characters themselves and the storyline is what kept me playing, not gear. While gear dropped constantly in DA:O I very rarely found anything that was actually worthy of using and all my characters kept their gear they acquired mid-game throughout the rest of the game and its conclusion. Same with Mass Effect, I had tons of “stuff” in my inventory but most of it was vendor trash and there was very rarely any reason to upgrade. If I found any armor for my NPC team, I’d usually equip it based on looks because they almost always had equivalent stats. While having few actual sets of armor, Mass Effect 2 actually has more customization available, but only for Shepard. Your NPC companions get one “upgrade” upon completion of their respective Loyalty quest but from what I’ve heard it’s nothing more than a color change on the same armor.

Mass Effect 2 did add some cool MMO-ish features like casual appearance. Think of LOTRO’s (and EQ2) “appearance tab” and you’ve got the gist of it. In Shepard’s quarters on the Normandy you can choose which set of armor he wears while out and about and choose from a few choices of non-combat appearances while aboard the Normandy. You can also choose background music that plays while in your room, and buy fish for the aquarium, though you have to stop by to feed them rather frequently or they die.

Planetary exploration is another feature that so far seems to have been put on the chopping block. The first game had the Mako rover, which was cool in concept but between the horrible controls and gawd-awful physics, just didn’t work at all. The planets’ landscapes in Mass Effect were uninspired at best, and downright atrocious at worst. Rather than fixing things up for the sequel, BioWare outright removed them, giving us planetary scanning instead. Now, at first I was excited about this because someone in the beta tweeted how fun scanning was, and I thought there would also be some planetary exploration. I was looking forward to having a Lt. Data moment proudly exclaiming “I’d be happy to, sir! I just love scanning for life forms!” then singing “Life forms! You tiny little life forms! My precious little life forms! Where are you?” But alas, that is not to be. Rather than something that actually makes, you know, sense and simply having EDI (the onboard Cerberus AI) automatically scan the planet and display the locations of resources, etc. we have to manually scan a small circle of the planet’s surface waiting for a spike on the meter then launch a probe to gather the resources. This involves holding the LT to actually run the scanner, which moves rather slowly during scanning. I’ve taken to simply rapid-firing the LT while moving the scanner reticule up and down the planetary grid, only slowing when I feel a spike (which displays graphically but also uses the gamepad’s rumblers) then launching a probe. Needless to say, scanning is nothing more than a boring time-sink, but one that is required because the various resources are currencies spent on researching upgrades.

Speaking of pointless time-sinks, let’s talk about hacking. In Mass Effect 1 hacking was a simplified quick-time-event (QTE) version of the old Simon game only rather than repeating the sequence by memory, you had to quickly press the appropriate button when it illuminated on the Simon screen. In Mass Effect 2, bypassing and hacking each have their own mini-games. Bypassing (usually used to open a door) is accomplished on a circuitboard screen. Several nodes are shown, each with its own icon that displays upon mouseover. Find an icon then mouseover the other nodes until you find the matching node to close the circuit. Simple enough, and fairly quick. Hacking, on the other hand, shows a scrolling grid of segments of “code” and a target segment. You simply sit back and watch the grid scroll along until hopefully the target segment appears before the timer runs out and you click it. Three or four segments in total. Both bypassing and hacking feel very unfinished, tacked on, and obviously a shallow time-sink to expand the total playtime by a few minutes at a time. They’re both quite boring as well, though if I had to choose one, I’d much prefer the bypassing mini-game. I think I prefer scanning planets over hacking, and believe me when I say that I am not enjoying scanning planets. At all.

I’ve mentioned how the graphics have improved, performance improved, and all the UE3 eye candy is out in full force already. My initial impression is that the actual maps themselves are smaller than in Mass Effect 1 but so far they are more immersive. There’s usually more actually going on than before. Sure, in the first game the Citadel was a huge area, but considering it was supposed to be this huge multicultural melting pot, it was mostly empty. The parts of the Citadel I’ve seen so far in Mass Effect 2 seemed smaller in comparison but much more lively and more representative of what the Citadel is supposed to be. Remember the nightclub Chora’s Den in the first game? Now the Citadel has a new club called Flux and there’s an even bigger club called Afterlife on the Omega station that are far more believable even though they don’t offer any more actual interaction than before. BioWare did have some actual exotic dancers come in for motion capture (I’ll bet that was a fun session!) and comparing the animations of the dancers in Chora’s Den to those in Afterlife is practically night and day. The Flux club has a dance floor where patron NPC’s are dancing and there’s an interactive spot for Shepard to show off his oh-so-white-boy moves. In full armor and weapons, mind you. He’s such a bad dancer you just can’t help but laugh.

Finally, I’d like to mention the Mass Effect dialogue system in general. I just finished Dragon Age: Origins last week then immediately started Mass Effect 2 and the difference in systems is shocking. I much prefer the Mass Effect way of doing things. In DA:O the dialogue choices don’t appear until the character speaking finishes what he or she has to say. Then you choose your response, to which there is no voice acting whatsoever for your own character. The Mass Effect system is to present your upcoming dialogue choices well in advance of the NPC completing his statements so you can prepare your choice ahead of time, and choosing quickly enough will allow for a seamless dialogue delivery. Not to mention Shepard is fully voice-acted for both male and female. Sure, DA:O would have required male and female recordings for each playable race but it would have made a huge difference in bringing some on-screen personality to your own character. The dialogue in Mass Effect 2 has increased dramatically over the first title, with over 31,000 lines of written dialogue that if listened to non-stop start to finish would total over 25 hours. While I stated above for #5 on my wishlist that I feel Mass Effect 2 is better off without all the grey areas, etc. I do hope for the Dragon Age sequel BioWare displays the dialogue choices ahead of time like they do in Mass Effect. I also hope Dragon Age sold enough to become an important enough IP for BioWare to warrant the expense of providing voice acting for the player character next time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.