Point and Click
Mass Effect is beginning to bore me.
I realized that yesterday afternoon as I tore through yet another series of missions, blowing away Geth troopers that were unable to so much as pierce my party’s shields. Shepard and her squad have not been in peril since the earliest segments of the Noveria mission. Now we’re in the sky-towers of Feros, single-handedly exterminating a Geth invasion force. If it weren’t for my interest in Mass Effect 2, I think I might have pulled the plug on this by now.
What’s getting to me is the bogus inventory management I have to do and the fact that I have absolutely no meaningful choices in combat. It’s too fiddly and generic to satisfy on the same level as, say, a hack-and-slash loot-fest like Diablo or Torchlight, but it’s too idiot-proofed to match something like Deus Ex’s or System Shock 2′s balance of RPG / shooter mechanics.
Every character has the full complement of weapons: pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and sniper rifle. Now most character are good with one, maybe two of these weapons. They will never use anything else, because it wouldn’t make sense for them to try. On the other hand, none of these weapons have any real disadvantages. Not when you have a squad of three people helping each other out. So the sniper rifle might be slow-firing, but a trained sniper only needs one or two shots to kill a healthy target. The shotgun is slow-firing and short ranged, but it is also a one-hit kill weapon at times. The assault rifle is kind of inaccurate, but it shoots so fast and puts out such high damage that it doesn’t need to hit reliably. It wears its targets down. The pistol… well, it’s not too good but the characters who rely on the pistol tend to have other powers to make up for it.
And since engagement ranges always tend toward short or intermediate, every single weapon I named above manages to be useful in every situation. Under attack from snipers? Run twenty feet and murder them with your shotgun. Is a big space lizard charging you? Step aside and tag him with the sniper rifle as he comes. Just make sure to max out your chosen weapon, and you’ll never need another.
That doesn’t mean I wont have to go into my inventory and tediously upgrade from one gun to the next. It won’t change anything, since all the weapons look the same and shoot essentially the same, but I have to do it to make sure I’m doing all the damage I can. It provides a nice little illusion of progress. But I have never really noticed much change.
Boxes. Identical weapons. People standing in the open and shooting. Back in the day, this could have given Doom a real run for its money.
What Bioware missed, I think, is that good shooters are really about improvisation and opportunity. Having the right tools can make a job boring. It’s more fun to take down a squad of enemies when the right weapon is down to its last dozen rounds, and the only other thing you’ve got on hand is a pistol and a couple hand grenades, than it is to simply machine-gun them. Those are the moments that let us invent strategies on the fly and play efficiently with inefficient tools.
Opportunity comes during what Lange calls “Fuck Yeah Levels”, when the game gives you a period of super-empowered grace and the incentives to enjoy it. The amazing weapons for which ammo has been scarce in previous levels are suddenly stocked. The most interesting enemies in the game are present in droves. The level design keeps the action fast and dynamic. It’s the lobby scene in The Matrix. Think of the climactic sequences in every act of a Max Payne title, or the street battle in Japan in Kane and Lynch, the church in Uncharted, or the scene where Sander Cohen tries to kill you in Bioshock.
In the same way a story uses the dramatic structure to vary the tension as it builds toward the climax, a shooter must vary encounter structure. If it doesn’t, the tension ultimately flatlines no matter the intensity of action. Whether I’m fighting three guys or 300 won’t really matter if my actions never change. That’s where I’m at with Mass Effect. Approximately 1/3 of the game fluctuates between dull and pointless.
Based on my (admittedly limited) experience with it, I’d say that Mass Effect is pretty overhyped.
I agree that the story and environments are a cut above the usual sci fi game, but the combat – the actual gameplay that makes it different from a movie – is generic and uninteresting.
I started my first game as an Infiltrator, figuring that I was in for some Deus-Ex style sneaking/sniping/hacking, only to be disappointed that the game (or at least the early parts I made it through) offered little opportunity for the former and little incentive to do the latter.
The problem with Mass Effect is that you’re always too balanced – if you don’t have the particular skill needed, you almost always have someone in your party who does and you have perfect, instant control over them. No worries. You don’t make interesting choices because it’s not imperative to do so. You’re right when you say that there are few “Oh crap” moments like you’d find in Deus Ex where you find yourself with the wrong skillset and are forced to improvise.
Hell, even the environments are pretty sad. Apparently architecture of the future is 85% hallway. It’s unconvincing in the exact same way FEAR is unconvincing: nobody would ever live like this. But at least FEAR’s bizarre layouts made for great encounters. Mass Effect’s don’t. The backdrops all very exciting, certainly. Feros is made of towers above the clouds. Noveria has a cool Ice Station Zebra or The Thing ambience going on. But where you, the player, are fighting? Narrow hallways, rooms with boxes.
But yeah, Deus Ex is a game that does this right. You can mix and match your skillset, but in every situation you will find yourself with some advantages and disadvantages brought about by your choices. At least until the late-game, when you are a demi-God. But that’s as it should be. At the end you are basically the Terminator, and nobody can touch you. Which is why you get to decide man’s fate.
I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to one of the things that are with games nowadays. Most games simply hold your hand too much. This is the reason why I consider Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis the second best FPS ever (behind Half Life 2 of course).
In CWC if you fuck up, you pay for it! I remember when I was playing a single mission called “Bomberman”. It had two objectives: 1) To blow up a moving convoy comprising of a T72, a Shilka, a repair truck and a BMP. 2) To aid a US Army squad codenamed “Bravo Squad” when they assault a nearby city held by a couple of Ruskis.
The first objective is the most difficult one out of the two because you have to destroy all of the convoy or at least most of it. If you are only able to complete the latter then you better hope like hell that the nearby US Army squad (that are hiding in a forest that is along the road that the convoy is traveling by) codenamed “Alpha Squad” can destroy the remainder of the convoy or you’ll have to deal with a T72 or BMP.
Mind you this will only happen if you don’t properly space out your explosives (you only have 3 satchel charges and you have to take out a convoy that consists of about 4 things that can possibly kill you) and if you don’t properly time the detonation then you’re pretty much fucked. Things like that are the reasons why I love CWC. Things can get incredibly tense when you realize that the game isn’t holding your hand and its completely up to you and your skills. Nothing else.
Now lets compare this experience to MW2. In that game there is no tension involved in terms of gameplay. Your character is a bullet-absorbing sponge who has perfect aim and can chuck 14 lb grenades like they are pebbles. In Operation Flashpoint when you are an infantry soldier you are nothing but a squishy human being. You can die very easily and very quickly if you aren’t careful and that increases the tension.
Games are simply too easy and too simpliflied. BTW does Deus Ex work on Windows Vista? That game sounds awesome! Also what do you think about the new one that is coming out (which is also coming out for consoles awwwwww yeahhhhh
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Honestly BioWare pulled off all of Mass Effect’s individual gameplay components with just average proficiency. As you no doubt know by now the Mako controls terribly, each planet you explore is just a few square miles of bland and desolate mountains, the inventory system is atrocious, and the weapon combat is just “eh”. These are the problems that continually plague Action RPGs – RPG developers just don’t know how to develop an action game. Furthermore, from what I understand BioWare spent most of the development time on this game just trying to get the Unreal 3 Engine to agree with them.
Despite all that crap, I see Mass Effect as something that becomes more than the sum of its parts despite how mediocre those parts may be. I just like the feeling of exploring the vast galaxy and solving interstellar problems. The world, being in it, and creating my own character all still manage to absorb me. That still makes the game worth it to me.
Mass Effect 2 doesn’t really fix all the first game’s problems so much as get’s rid of them. It’s like the game just decided to put on a different set of clothes than fix what it was wearing.
BioWare completely removed the inventory system and basically made it so that each character get’s a total of two-to-four weapons ever. They also replaced planet exploration (outside of the free DLC) with scanning that most people did find truly tedious – though I somehow managed to get completely addicted to it. Overall, BioWare actually made Mass Effect 2 much less of an RPG than the first game. It became something like Gears of War or an interstellar Rainbow Six Vegas with some resource management, space exploration, and a dynamic storyline.
That said, just like the first game, the “experience” is still there in Mass Effect 2. It has characters that I want to know more about – places I like visiting and using. The UE3 engine is also at its best in this game.
Lastly, you gonna snap on that Wal-Mart online deal for Assassin’s Creed II (PS3 version) for $25? It’s probably the cheapest you’ll be able to get a DRM-less version of the game for a while, and trust me – Assassin’s Creed II is one of the biggest improvements I’ve ever seen a sequel make over its predecessor.
Yeah, Mass Effect is certainly more than the sum of its parts. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how much more, because in truth the sum isn’t much to begin with. Personally I don’t feel like I’m exploring a vast galaxy or solving its problems. I’m moving from node to node on a map, and 90% of what’s at each node is filler. I’m thinking of just canning the rest of the sidequests and just hauling Saren in.
I’m not getting AC2. A sale isn’t a sale if I don’t have time to play it, and I really don’t have time for that game. Hell, I even passed on Metro 2033 today because I’m so backlogged. Between TMA, reviews for GameShark, and feature work, I have time for maybe one leisure game a month. It’s annoying to have so little time to play good games, but there it is.