Never Too Old To Play™

Anyone who has played Baldur’s Gate (or its sequel), Neverwinter Nights or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic knows that BioWare is one of the top video game development studios in the industry. As far as the role-playing game genre is concerned, the strength of the BioWare brand is second only to that of Square Enix (although that could change soon if the reception of the two companies’ recent releases are any indication).

Almost every BioWare game is both a financial success and a critical darling:

• Baldur’s Gate sold over 2 million copies worldwide during a time when the computer role-playing game genre was struggling and won numerous Game of the Year awards from various industry publications. 
• Baldur’s Gate II and Neverwinter Nights also sold over 2 million copies worldwide and won various year-end awards.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide, won numerous Game of the Year awards and is considered by many not only to be one of the best and most influential Star Wars works but one of the best games of all time.

BioWare continued this trend with their first next-generation release, Mass Effect, and surpassed their past achievements by creating a game that is without a doubt superior to all those that came before it. Mass Effect is quite frankly an evolution of the role-playing game genre, building on concepts first introduced in Knights of the Old Republic to reach a point where the player is deeply and directly involved in playing a role instead of just assigning stat points.

Don’t get me wrong – the game involves character customization (a ton of it, to be honest) for all the stat geeks out there. The ability to decide whether your character will be mighty brute of a warrior or a powerful wizard, a front line trooper or a stealthy sniper is important to role-playing games.

However, most RPGs (especially Japanese RPGs) are content to limit the effects of the player’s choices to just the combat. The rest of the time, the player is just watching as their character goes through predetermined, unchanging cutscenes where the exact progression of the script was set in stone long before the game even hit the shelves. No matter what kind of player you are, no matter how you’ve chosen to build your character, the details of the story and the dialogue – and how your character fits into it all – is exactly the same as it is for any other player.

This is not the case with Mass Effect where almost every conversation in the game includes dialogue choices that can elicit notably different responses from the other characters. Depending on how you interact with a given character, you may be able to learn useful information, avoid (or initiate) a combat situation or even set up an eventual romantic encounter. Better yet, many of the choices you make in this game have some effect on aspects of future games in the series.

While the game of course follows a general story structure – no matter what choices you make, you’re going to end up facing the final enemy in the game – the details of how you get there are going to be different for each player because each player is going to decide when their character will stand up for what’s right, when their character will take the low road and when their character simply doesn’t give a damn, and those decisions will determine how much of the story the player gets to experience.

And trust me – you’ll want to experience as much of the story as possible. The writing is far better than what you’ll find in most video games and even most movies, and the story has a truly epic feel to it. Playing through the game is almost like watching a cinematic masterpiece unfold before you, like discovering the love child of Star Wars and The Godfather. But you get to participate in exactly how it all plays out: you get to decide whether Luke Skywalker is a momma’s boy or a gangsta from the mean streets of Mos Eisley. There’s so much story that you can’t even experience it all the first time through – to truly see and hear everything the game has to offer, you have to play through multiple times and make different choices to see how it all plays out.

If you decide to do this, your eyes certainly won’t be worse for wear as the game is absolutely beautiful. The level of detail in the graphics is simply stunning although perhaps a bit ambitious for a team working with both the Xbox 360 hardware and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 for the first time. Especially impressive is the modeling and animation of the faces during all the conversation scenes – although some of the characters fall deep into the uncanny valley, these are nevertheless the best faces of any video game by far.

The game does suffer from a very inconsistent frame rate, some noticeable texture pop-in when you enter new areas and a strange symptom where sometimes during cutscenes parts of a character’s face look like they’re missing, almost like they’re in front of a green screen and someone speckled green paint on their heads. Fortunately, most of the visual bugs go away when you install the game to the hard drive – I highly recommend you do this if your 360 has a hard drive.

Perhaps the most incredible feat BioWare pulled off during the development of this game was their creation of one of the most believable universes in video game history. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter about a dozen different intelligent alien species that you’ll be able to interact with. In some cases, you’ll be able to recruit a representative to your squad.

The various races look quite distinct from one another despite most being of humanoid form. For example, the volus are short, squat beings who are shaped somewhat like bipedal rodents – BioWare probably named them after the vole – although one can’t say for sure what exactly they look like since they have to wear pressurized environment suits due to their ammonia-based biochemistry while the hanar resemble giant walking jellyfish and the asari, an entirely female species that is somehow attractive to all races, look very much like blue-skinned human women.

BioWare didn’t stop with just visual differences, though. As you interact with members of the different species, you’ll notice distinctive vocal qualities as well as varied adaptations to the English language. The aforementioned hanar, who speak in a melodic tone, always refer to themselves as “this one” or “it” when conversing with individuals they do not consider close friends or family as the usage of the first person with strangers or mere acquaintances is considered egotistical in their culture. The giant elcor, who hail from a high gravity planet, speak in monotone with a deep, hollow vocal quality; thus, they have to explicitly communicate the tone of their statement (i.e. anger, sarcasm, happiness) in order to avoid misunderstandings with other races.

Further, BioWare developed for each race a relatively detailed culture and history which often times comes into play when you converse with members of that species. For example, you won’t find a shortage of complaints from volus individuals about how unfair it is that their species does not have a seat on the Citadel Council, the ruling body that presides over the galaxy, despite their contributions.

Mass Effect is one of the only games where you are cognizant of a world outside of the area in which you’re playing. You and your comrades are just one piece of the whole puzzle – a big freakin’ piece but still just one piece. Regardless of whether you are successful in your mission to defeat the enemy, the universe will keep moving on: the Council races will still look down on humans; Krogans will still hate Salarians for the sterilization they instilled upon them; Quarians will continue their nomadic existence.

BioWare included all these little details that fill out the world they created to make it vibrant and real such that it almost becomes an organic entity unto itself instead of just a backdrop for the action like in most games. Theirs is one of the most fully realized game universes ever put to disc (or cartridge for that matter).

As great as the game is, it’s not all that surprising that it wasn’t a runaway success. BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic was well received but its spiritual successor Jade Empire, its first foray into inventing their own intellectual property instead of licensing an already successful on such as Star Wars or Dungeons & Dragons, didn’t fare quite as well at retail. However, good word of mouth (and some price drops) helped it accrue more than two million in sales since November 2007.

Now that you can purchase Mass Effect as a Platinum Hit for the more than reasonable price of $19.99, there really is no reason for you to not give it a try. It’s easily one of the best games of the generation and a masterful experience that you’d find hard not to enjoy.

Final score: 5 out of 5

Parent to parent

I probably would not recommend Mass Effect for younger gamers. It’s hard for me to say that because I think the title has some of the best storytelling in gaming history with a lot of thought provoking material, but that material is often based on rather mature themes that are likely too heavy for most children. The game also involves a lot of violence as well as an optional romantic side story which can culminate in a love scene – a fairly ambiguous and tasteful one but a love scene nonetheless.

Experience this for yourself!

• Mass Effect (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Mass Effect (PC) (Amazon)