Mass Effect (or as I’d like to call it: Sim Elevator) suffers from being not great at almost everything it tries to do. You’re exploring the galaxy but it feels really small, and this is roughly 25 years since Elite came out. There are about half a dozen little missions in the main story, the side missions are all similar and take place in the same cut-and-paste environments, but worst of all is the inventory system which made me want to stop playing rather than upgrade my team’s weapons.
Having said all that, I spent a lot of time playing.
Everything else is dressing for the conversations. The choices you make affect how the plot unfolds. Mass Effect is one of the better games that tries to do this but there are several problems that always seem to plague this genre.
- Choosing the “nasty” reply often stops the conversation dead.
- “Nasty” replies are often comically absurd, moustache-twirling, foul-mouthed threats. In real life, the worst people act like your best friend then take advantage of you.
- Choosing a path through the conversation tree results in an immediate reward of karma or credits or items. So it’s easy to play through all possible scenarios then just choose the one that gives you the most reward.
In short, conversations in these types of games are played not from some idea of character but strategically, like a resource management game. I think the first step in avoiding this is to dispense with the good – evil axis and think more carefully about how some kinds of actions produce certain kinds of results.
