By John Walker on February 21st, 2009 at 5:56 pm.
Rather out of nowhere, along with two artwork desktops, Bioware have posted the first teaser trailer for Mass Effect 2. As you might expect for a barely announced game, there’s no gameplay footage here, but instead a rather worrying implication. Well, it’s an interesting surprise so I’ll not spoil it. It’s below.
Oddly the Bioware site says the embed code won’t be available until the 24th Feb. But then has links to download the .wmv and the .mov of the file, so of course it’s already on YouTube in lovely HD.
Oh noes! What can it mean? And when will we see more? We’ll try and find out details as soon as possible.
Enormous thanks to Jack for alerting us to this.
WANT!
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I think it means d0g from HL2 will be in this one. And that Bioware is going to make a killing on the “must have” game of 2010. 2010…feels sort of odd writing, like it’s science fiction itself, not just a year away. Anywho, till we see a taped sign on a cat, lets all speculate madly!
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WANT 2!
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I really should play the original Mass Effect. I’ve heard a number of people say it was awesome and other’s say it was just average. So now I come to you guys for some advice.
Should I buy this game? I’ve liked all of BioWare’s games, BG 1 and 2, KotoR and NWN, and am overall a big fan of their stories, so is this worth some time in it?
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Hey, I didn’t notice the artworks! Guess that’s what RPS is for. In other news, I just discovered Zero Punctuation. Oh dear me.
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Yup, you should, Jeremy. It has a truly epic story, and provided you can wade through some long (but interesting) dialogue, it’s worth it.
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You definitely should buy Mass Effect, but don’t expect massive replay value. The main quest is epic if you just sit back and enjoy it; the sidequests get extremely repetitive.
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Definite room for improvements in the original, I dearly hope to see these improvements make an appearence in the sequel, certainly, as one of the few unreal engine 3 games thats actually managed to entertain me somewhat, I’ll be interested to see what they do with it.
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I can’t wait for more elevator rides! But they should remove Fedex quests inbetween, they distract from the elevator rides.
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Also, wouldn’t be surprised if Shephard is listed dead officially so that no one could moan about waste of tax payers money when he/she goes flying off to hunt for signs of the machines returning.
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That second bit of artwork with the beach looks absolutely gorgeous.
As for the twist: If BioWare pulls an “insomnia = back to level 1″ stunt in ME2, I will write them a very angry letter! Perhaps I will go so far as to post an angry blog post on the Internet!
Consider yourselves warned, BioWare!
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@Jeremy
It follows in the footsteps of KoToR in terms of how it plays, so if you liked that, then you’ll enjoy it. I found it entertaining enough to play through the once, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to play through it a second time.
Interesting to see where they are going with it, if the teaser is to be taken at face value, but kind of lame as well given the earlier promises. Still a long way off yet, so one can’t really call it.
More than anything else I’m hoping to see a bit more variety in the look of people (long hair for the ladies perhaps?) as well some general activity in terms of the NPCs moving around rather than standing about like chess pieces waiting for you to wander up and talk to them.
Nice CA though.
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Jeremy – no question, if you’ve liked their other games. I’ve been replaying KotOR recently (see Eurogamer tomorrow), and ME doesn’t go as deep. But it’s still very great.
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Hray \o/
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Obviously you guys have missed the point of the trailer entirely. Sheperd has died, but they managed to put it’s(or his/her’s if you prefer) into the body of a Geth, with the task of infiltrating their ranks. Mass Effect 2 is going to be the undercover, Point Break equivalent of a Space Opera. It’ll be great
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What the hell.
How can they do this to us.
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I think the original was one of the many recent games that showed great potential but just missed the boat and became merely average. The side quests were exceptionally bland, and with the exception of the Citidal it was very linear. There was a simplistic black and white morality to it which was completely transparent. None of the quests offered the tough decisions that were present in KOTOR (the droid that ran away from its owner, playing judge, lying about a wookie’s death to his brother,) and using the charm dialogue options worked without fail, even against religious zealots. The inventory was horrific, taking ages to sort through once you had a big pile of useless equipment.
And yet I still enjoyed playing the game. The combat was far more intuitive than the majority of RPGs. The story was, although cliched, engaging and the world had some interesting (albeit, again, obvious) cultures and people.
If the problems persist I may not enjoy it a second time around, but hopefully they can learn from the mistakes and create the great game Mass Effect could have been.
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If watching the appallingness that is CSI Miami has taught us anything it’s that lead characters dying is a great way to get them into deep cover.
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Man, Sheperd deserved/didn’t deserve to die, he/she was such a saint/amoral character, I for one am glad/pissed off that Bioware would reward/screw us like this.
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I bet shepard dies, but his mind is uploaded into a robot, and that way they can make the robo man do text to speech stuff, which gives the affordance of believable robotic voicing (like Glados in Portal), and also allows you to be much more generative about the things you can say… give you a proper toy-language to play with, where you can talk about all the inworld nouns and verbs and the system can actually understand the sentances you construct (a bit like how orders are constructed in End War). Walk up to a guy and say stuff like “Grnejunask said he dislikes you, and gave Bjarskintizzle a plasma rifle to murdusk in return for an assassination on your head.”, except you’d actually be constructing a lie, and at that point the dude you were talking to, he’d be on the war path against Grnejunask, even though Grnejunask is a nice guy.
That’s what I wish they’d do, anyhow. Someone’s got to do it eventually, right?
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Yep, ME is definitely worth playing. I bought it a month or so ago (in the few hours when Steam screwed up and accidentally gave europeans access to the US prices, making it a reasonable purchase)
It’s got a lot in common with KOTOR (a good thing), and I really like the story/setting. Driving around on uncharted planets collecting rocks gets a bit repetitive, but luckily, that’s only a side quest.
Of course, you might want to keep in mind your options DRM-wise. The retail versions only allows 5 installations, and doesn’t have a deactivate tool to free up installations (yet. There’s no official word on whether such a tool will be released, but given that they have at least one more patch on the way, it’s not impossible).
The Steam version allows as many installations as you like.
On the other hand, at least in Europe, the Steam version is currently going for an absurd €45 (compared to $20 for US customers)
About the ME2 trailer, am I the only one who is *not* shocked by it in any way?
I mean, it shows a Geth, and something with ‘N7′ on it (which was plastered all over the Normandy).
We see a bit of text saying “killed in action”, but we *do not* see any signs of actual dead bodies.
And we know that your savegames from ME1 can be imported to the sequel. I also believe they’ve stated that they wanted the entire trilogy to revolve around Shepard.
So isn’t the obvious interpretation something like this:
Shepard (in the Normandy) gets pwned by Geth, the Normandy crash lands, or is otherwise captured/destroyed by Geth (hence the Geth in the trailer with the N7 insignia). Without the ship, Shepard is obviously unable to contact the Alliance, who logically assume that he/she is killed in action.
Of course, he/she is simply taken captive or fighting his/her way out of a heavily fortified Geth fortress or something, killing hundreds of Geth and generally being a hero.
Seems a pretty straightforward way to state that “yes, Shepard is alive, you’ll keep playing him/her, and the Geth are going to get pretty close to killing you”.
None of which should come as a big surprise, of course…
It might even serve as a way to “reboot” your character. You already had the most advanced ship in the galaxy, and most likely you’d maxed out your bank account and your inventory was crammed full of high-quality weapons.
Now you get taken prisoner by the Geth, they destroy your ship and take your guns. Back to square 1.
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Hopefully s/he has the option to fashion a rudimentary lathe to assist his/her escape and subsequent ressurection/return.
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I have to side with Aubrey on this one.
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Get ready for hot Geth on blue alien chick action.
And Jalf has probably just described the entire first hour of Mass Effect 2.
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I never worked out how to use the force power things during combat, so in an impressive demonstration of stubbornness, I played through the whole game without using any.
Also:
“‘N7′ is a vocational code in the Systems Alliance military. The ‘N’ designates special forces, the 7 refers to the highest level of proficiency. It applies to marines who have graduated from an elite training programme. Both David Anderson and Commander Shepard are classified as N7; Anderson was one of the first graduates.” – From ME Wiki.
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Pags is King of the Thread.
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Wonder when they are going to patch the ME’s GPF bug that prevents me from playing :(
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I didn’t enjoy Mass Effect. FOR ME it was a short game because I concentrated on the main quest and ignored the side quests.
Why did I ignore the side quests? Because they didn’t matter. At all.
SPOILERS AHOY!
If you just played the game as it was handed to you.
Battle.
City slog.
Battle.
Battle.
City Slog.
Battle.
Battle.
City Slog
City Slog
Battle.
Win.
Ish.
I’m marvellously out of step with industry gaming, apparently. Far Cry 2 was dire. Little more than an 80′s arcade game. Fallout was bland, compared to a BG, PS:T or Gothic. World of Goo was fine for half an hour then I realised I had to perform like a trained rat level after level.
Of the above I’d credit World Of Goo with at least trying something different, even if it didn’t work for me, personally. I’m still baffled how Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect (to pluck a game from the last 12 months at random, um despite the title of this entry) managed to become industry favourites. Surely we’ve seen these before and better.
The professionals will tell me that these games represent the best of what we have now, or something similar. But that just tells me that things haven’t moved on, and in fact have gotten worse.
Mass Effect annoyed me, which triggered this rant. To my mind it’s a shoddy game. Barely a game at all, in fact. Little more than a diversion, akin to staring out a window at falling snow. But colder.
I don’t like Mass Effect.
Now, get me started on Jade Empire. That was a real POS.
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Oh and if you enjoyed Mass Effect’s story you should check out the latest writing by up and coming author Fred Saberhagen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Saberhagen
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I agree about the main storyline of ME being ridiculously short. I still had fun in the game though, but yes, you had what, 4 missions to go through before you’d completed the game? (not counting the tutorial-esque Eden Prime)
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The city artwork is so deliciously, deliciously cyberpunk.
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Clearly Shepard isn’t dead. Who’d want to harm her gorgeous, pixie-like visage? With red hair, green eyes and pointy chin. (The One True Shepard)
I quite liked how they set up those optional exploratory missions almost as soon as you enter the citadel, though actual exploration in the brick on wheels was a bit crap.
and the abortion quest! Alright, it wasn’t actually abortion, but still… prenatal treatment is probably the same to those damn pro-lifers.
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So… this is to let you to make a new character, I suppose. Shepard will likely pop back up as a NPC; if you still have you ME1 saves he/she will probably look fairly familiar.
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You don’t have to like “the new hotness” and it doesn’t make you wrong. I haven’t gotten far in mass effect. Shelved mainly due to wanting to experience it in a week long rampage rather than breaking it up.
Been enjoying the rpg meets brothers in arms combat. But again i’m still at the begining so if that doesn’t fit with the game you played its me not you.
Playing as the sniper+engineer and… I’ve not even finished the first combat area.
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Nah, it’s just a bit of Baldur’s Gate 2, ‘innit guv’nor? Lawks, ‘ave we gone and got ourselves in a bit ov bovver? Lots your ship, mate? One or more of your companions pickled in a jar before the game begins? Shockin’ care on you space cadets get up to, I must say.
Certainly the new game stripping gear is a good thing. Having played through twice on the Xbox with the same character, my assault rifle was immune to overheat and could just be used with the trigger constantly depressed. And my sniper-rifle could one-shot almost anything. Medi-gel was rarely useful due to armour regen, etc.
I am interested in seeing how they handle powerhouse characters capable of launching someone into orbit, though. Presumably they are going to go down the BGII: Shadows of Amn route and simply add to the level cap, but it begs the question: I was able to talk someone to death in the game – how much more persuasive can I be?
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Talk them back to life again?
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“And we know that your savegames from ME1 can be imported to the sequel.” What? No amnesia? This is blasphemy!
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For me Mass Effect is one of the best games of all time not because of the story, or the actiony sequences, or the rpg elements. It’s because of the atmosphere the game manages to pull off. As far as I’m concerned it simply doesn’t have all the features an RPG should, therefore it’s merely an RPG in the sense Deus Ex was an RPG. But as an interactive cinematic experience I don’t think any other game ever made has come close.
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Heh, I remember the save-game importing for BG2, theres an exploit where if you time a pause just right at the beginning of the game you could drop equipment on the floor and pick it back up after the game has tried to ‘steal’ from your main characters inventory. Guess my characters were able to hide more up their butt than just a hamster.
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Mmyeah, you already did that with the post’s title, really.
Not that it really is a spoiler. Or that I care. ;)
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“Pags is King of the Thread.”
King of the Internets more like. Well for an evening at least.
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The bg2 exploit was useless the room next door had all your best stuff in it. Some of it hidden mind. Only things worth keeping were the drizzt sword and the pantaloons. Bg2 gear out classed everything else.
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Pags brought a smile to my face.
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@dadioflex
Couldn’t agree more with you. Except for World Of Goo. That one was actually really fun.
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I need to try the gothics off gog. The only thing i tried was the gothic 3 demo where i fell into the ground and died after landing on nothing.
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I wonder why they didn’t just use the more easily remembered name “Shepherd” than the name that they do use: “Shepard”. Odd, and I bet it messes up their googleability.
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@dadioflex
So basically all modern gaming sucks and things were much much better in the good old days?
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Who the hell is searching for Mass Effect by typing in Shepherd/Shepard anyway? I mean, erm.. That’s what I want to know. Because… they should be shot. …idiots.
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Oh good, the geth weren’t a terribly dull enemy or anything.
*sigh*
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Mass Effect is shelved until I get a PC which can consistenly run it at more than 10fps. :-(
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Myeah popping caps into geth wasn’t really that satisfying…
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As someone with intimate experience of the name, Shepherd is obviously the best version. But I wish to congratulate you all on having hit most of the various spellings on this very page. You’d have to be going for the outlandish Sheppheardes etc. next.
And it’s a teaser, trying to get useful info from it’s like trying to formulate QED after finding a muon and nothing else.
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My post got deleted because I thought the second most over rated RPG in recent history was mediocre?
What mediocre mod work. =(
“Mass Effect is shelved until I get a PC which can consistenly run it at more than 10fps. :-(”
Heyy at least it runs better than on the console.
“Heyy at least it runs better than on the console.”
ba dum tishh
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I finished Mass Effect in 1.5 days. I wish the game where a bit longer. Like several weeks, months, or years (Morrowind lasted to me several years).
To quote Blade Runner:
Tyrell: [Tyrell explains to Roy why he can't extend his lifespan] The facts of life… to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it’s been established.
Batty: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship sinks.
Batty: What about EMS recombination?
Tyrell: We’ve already tried it – ethyl, methane, sulfinate as an alkalating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.
Batty: Then a repressor protein; that would block the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn’t obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation, and you’ve got a virus again… but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Batty: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy. Look at you, you’re the prodigal son; you’re quite a prize.
Batty: I’ve done… questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraodinary things; revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn’t put you in heaven for.
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Maybe I’m just drunk but sonically, that’s one of the best trailers I’ve seen/heard in a long time. Do indeed want.
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I think I must be the only person who thought that Mass Effect was a horrible game.
I quit when I got to the point where I was an errand boy for some middle manager so I could get a parking pass. I got killed in a firefight, and rather than run back and forth and wade through those boring conversations again, i just put the disk back in the box and never touched it again. I don’t feel like I missed anything.
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My problem with it is basically this. It wasn’t game. It was a decent, but overly long sci-fi story with a lot of boring walking bits in the middle of it. The actual game part of the game (combat) was fiddly and irritating and made me want to quit every time it started.
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Yeah, the combat was pretty awful actually.
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A worrying implication ? Shepard is obviously not dead, he just disappeared, bla bla bla….
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Actually, another worrying implication that you may have not picked up:
It says “Known Alien Associates” and lists several NPC companions from ME1 — the phrasing of the text may (or may not, but hey, this is speculation) a bit of xenophobia on the part of the people doing this scan, perhaps even something of an Orwellian crackdown. May have to do with the Terra Firma political party introduced towards the end of the first game, which the player had a
(MINOR SPOILERS)
choice in supporting/not supporting for Earth elections.
(END MINOR SPOILERS)
Or I’m just rambling — but I figured that was interesting.
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I thought the general idea behind the combat was great, I always enjoyed the ability to pause and have a think about which guy to send up into space orbit and who’s weapons to lock down and so on. It was just a shame it was so easy that you generally didn’t have to take a tactical approach and your AI buddies would do some silly things like stand and shoot at potted plants every now and then.
If they make the locations (other than the major story ones) a bit more interesting and varied, fix some combat glitches and make the side quests (with the exploration attached) actually fun, this could definitely be the best thing Bioware have done since the first KotOR.
*Big ME1 spoiler*
There’s loads of stuff that could have been better, but the fact that you can convince the bad guy you’ve been chasing around the entire game to shoot his own head off in the end made it all good for me :)
*end spoiler*
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Good f’ing god. The Angry Fallout Men have infested the remainder of the Internet. Disgruntled about everything; basking in the golden light shining out of yesteryear’s arse.
The shite from your childhood is identical to the shite of today, except that you were more easily entertained, learned more easily, and were bad at virtually everything. That’s what being a child is like. You could sit through the interminable level grind in Final Fantasy III because you were a kid. You could whack rats in a cave with a stick in Fallout when you were a kid. You spent hours on things like that, wasting your time on the vast oceans of poor game design between islands of fun.
You don’t tolerate that now, of course, because you know better. Except that now you pretend that, for instance, Fallout’s talking plants and porno didn’t exist. Or f’ing Minsk from Baldur’s Gate. Good f’ing Christ, eventually we realize that Goonies wasn’t the Oscar-worth movie we thought it was, why can’t people recognize the same thing in video games? It’s a new art form. It was newer when you were a kid. And it sucked even more than it does now.
Oh, except for Planescape: Torment. That was pretty cool.
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This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know when the next patch for Mass Effect is coming out? I’d rather not have to install a new driver every time I want to switch between it and Left 4 Dead.
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re: dadio
It’s noteworthy that with Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect which you cite, the majority of their content “didn’t matter. At all.”
And yet, they DO stand as arguable representatives of the best of PC gaming today.
These games are not at all like the best games of 10 years ago, which were basically fledgling explorations of anything new and different then the electronic versions of all previous non-pc games.
For our elders, every aspect of great tabletop play (chess, D&D, monopoly) was a tangible element to the game, some more crucial then others, allowing you a near infinite ways to solve and win.
Is it a bad thing that todays games have so much “non essential” content? The juxtaposition of immersion, technology, and elements of choice demand it. The real world is full of non essential crap, so in GTA I can just run the storyline, or hey instead I can bang a hooker and paint my car.
Games today are *not* where I’d hope they would be 10 years ago, imho the blame solidly on consoles rather PC’s being the development platform of choice and marketing depts directing content along side developers. But to demand that all aspects of a game drive you toward the goal of completing it, is foolish. It’s what makes something like the original Fallout so much more amazing then other games at the time. Unfortunately we haven’t come as far as we could have since then, but the pure thrill of playing ME for the first time nailed the same feeling I had with Fallout.
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I liked Mass Effect’s story, even if it was a pastiche of almost every major pop culture SF you could think of. The Geth are the Cylons, the Reapers are Stargate’s Replicants, etc
My life for Ai-Earth!
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@Acardiac: Then why do most people I know who played the original Fallout for the first time within the past two or three years – people like me – agree that it’s better than just about every modern RPG? Obviously it’s not nostalgia.
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Pantsman: How many people do you know who played Fallout for the first time within the past 2-3 years?
And what *other* RPG’s have these people missed out on? They honestly don’t sound like poeple I’d trust to judge a RPG if it took them that long to find Fallout. I would certainly take their opinion that “games were better in the good old days” with a grain of salt, given that they apparently didn’t play RPG’s in the good old days.l
Anyway, the plural of anecdote is not data.
You and your unnamed friends are not representative of the entire human race. And Fallout is not representative of RPG’s “back then”. Yes, Fallout is an awesome RPG, but 1)
it was better than other RPG’s back then just as much as it’s better than other RPG’s today. That is because it’s a good game. Not because RPG’s today suck, and 2) it was not perfect. No, really. Have you played it recently? How much time did you spent trapped in a corner by your sidekicks? How much time did it take you to transfer enough money to buy expensive items? (remember the interface only allowed you to add 999 caps at a time to a trade)
But even disregarding these flaws, you can’t use *one* good old game as proof that games back then were *generally* better than games today. That one game may be an outlier. It may be the *only* decent game that existed back then.
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And the above goes for you too. The best games of 10 years ago had plenty of crippling flaws too. And back then, the genres were by and large pretty well established, and certainly not “explorations of anything new and different”.
10 years ago we were just getting over the wave of the endless 2.5D shooters from hell. You know, Duke Nukem, Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Hexen and the dozen other games I forget the names of. RTS. The Ultima series was winding down, Final Fantasy was churning through the same repetitive gameplay and the same repetetive stories, the Might & Magic series of RPG’s was coming to a close as well, after half a dozen games with not much innovation. And all of them had tons of “unnecessary sidequests”, just like ME and Fallout 3.
We can even go 20 years back. Back then we had hordes of Pacman clones, hordes of Tetris clones, hordes of Space Invaders clones!.
And some 15 years ago, we had the endless swarm of Sonic/Mario clones. Everyone and their uncle wanted to create a brightly coloured fast-running “mascot” for something. Remember Zool? Jazz Jackrabbit? Giana Sisters?
No, the past was not some magical golden age of gaming. The majority of games were uninspired crap. There were a few gems, yes. But you know what? There are also a few gems in today’s gaming landscape.
But some people are too deeply entrenched in nostalgia and bitterness to notice.
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Aren’t those concept shots by Craig Mullins? Sure looks like it.
Very good stuff.
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That logo is terrible
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I’m not sure it’s just nostalgia. The thing is, after Fallout was released it seemed entirely possible that an RPG would come out to top it. It never happened, but it was still a possibility.
Nowadays it’s tough to even find an RPG that isn’t really an action game pretending to have RPG ‘bits’.
So it’s not to say that the RPGs that were actually released were any good, but with games like Fallout, Planescape, Baldur’s Gate… the genre felt like it had forward momentum. Nowadays it just feels dead, with vultures picking the last chunks of meat off of its ribs.
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The nostalgia/rose tinted argument is frequently easy, dismissive bollocks. I’ve taken to just tutting and rolling my eyes when it is wheeled out yet again. Not to mention a lot of people weren’t kids when the games were released.
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Couldn’t agree more, Nick. Creme Eggs bloody well WERE bigger and better when we were kids.
I loved Mass Effect but I approached it as a fan of Sci-Fi, not as a fan of the works of Bioware. While I knew it was a Bioware game I didn’t bring any expectation baggage with me and was giggling with delight the first time I got dropped onto the surface of a world in the Big-Trak, er, rover buggy thing. My soul dreams of such things and I was ecstatic to see such a hi-fidelity adaptation arrive on my PC.
lol@The One True Shepherd. Mine, too, was red haired and pointy chinned and, lo, she did also get it on with the blue alien chick…and there was much rejoicing (the bloke was persistent but as he was also the only character in my troupe I utterly despised I fought him off in the rudest manner possible).
Mass Effect 2 can’t arrive quickly enough. :)
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Mass Effect was one of the most pleasant surprises of recent gaming memory for me. I’m usually completely turned off by silvery-sci-fi nonsense. Which is undoubtedly what Mass Effect is, while being one of my favourite games of 2007/08.
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“There was a simplistic black and white morality to it which was completely transparent. ”
I disagree. This was the first time Bioware had any success in transcending the transparent good/evil paradigm. It wasn’t perfect, but “Paragon” and “Renegade” map much more closely to law and chaos than good/evil. At least you didn’t have the extreme dichotomies of saintly/kill-puppies that you got with Light/Dark and Open Palm/Closed Fist.
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I hasten to add that I enjoyed Mass Effect.. just not the combat and I was very sick of the geth by the end.
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I reckon Shepherd dies but is cloned, Duncan Idaho stylee.
Would be a good reason to set you back to square one with skills etc…
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Shepherd should have saved more often, tbh.
(Actually, this is something that is slightly incongruous about some games with quicksave – if your character dies so often and yet you can just load again, why do you have compulsory death in the story? Tomb Raider being an example)
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@Gap Gen: That’s because there are few games with diagetic save file management.
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Anthony Damiani says:
“I disagree. This was the first time Bioware had any success in transcending the transparent good/evil paradigm. It wasn’t perfect, but “Paragon” and “Renegade” map much more closely to law and chaos than good/evil.”
I think my main problem with the system (which is true with most sliding morality scales) is that the dialogue was always separated into good and bad options. You want to be friendly then select the blue option, if you want to bad select the red option. This was made even worse and more necessary by them not bothering to write up the whole thing you would be saying and just assigning two or three words to each option.
Although KOTOR always ended up dolling out some arbitrary good or bad points for the decisions you made, a few times they were able to achieve some blurring of the lines between the black and white options that were on offer. It may have been rare, but in Mass Effect it was non-existent.
I also have problems with the fact that the good and bad options always created the same successful results. There is no need to measure up the character you are talking to. Apparently, even people with the strongest convictions will be turned around by someone they have never met before who has given themselves enough points in a particular category. If I remember correctly, not even the Jedi Persuasion power was that powerful, but even if it was at least it had an explainable reason behind it.
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Most people who bitch about Fallout being better than better than its modern day offspring (including the sometimes insipid Fallout 3) don’t do so out of nostalgia for a previous time, but a longing for programmers that believe that gamers can be intelligent, thinking adults with a vocabulary surpassing 8th grade.
Intelligent stuff is still being made (Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Bioshock etc), and the shit of today is arguably more entertaining, impressive shit than the shit of yesteryear… but when modern games make too many concessions to younger gamers and stunted adults it… well… frustration is more than justified, especially when a generation that has never experienced a truly challenging game becomes the new breed of programmers.
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Is challenge really of utmost importance in this medium any more, though? Really?
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Oooh! Binary decisions with little impact with a TWIST! :)
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For the record, Mass Effect was an attractive little distraction with a few glimmers of brilliance amongst a sea of slog and poorly masked simplicity. Great to see such an emphasis on engaging dialogue, even if the sense of choice was utterly superficial… and all the aliens spoke Ontarian.
Also, I hated the game when I played as the male Shepard. I tried again as the female Shepard and Jennifer Hale’s voice acting gave more meaning to the story than her own script.
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@bhlaab:
Yup, the ’2′ clashes horrendously with the lovely clean original logo. Which is probably the effect they were after, but it doesn’t make the new logo any less ugly. John’s alt-text says it all, really.
Rather looking forward to shepherding my Shepherds through ME2. I can bitch and whine endlessly about the problems with the first game, but I still had a fun time with it and am intrigued as to where Bioware will take their, somewhat derivative, tale of space bastardry next.
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Re: Lewis
Gameplay aside (and Mass Effect stripped its gameplay and player choice down to its chilly knickers), a story-driven game must challenge your mind only a little to be engaging in the least… otherwise it becomes a tediously pretty spectacle like Dreamfall.
If a game doesn’t challenge you, intellectually or emotionally, you’re just left with the noise and spectacle of it… but I guess that’s enough for some. Hell, it’s enough for me on more days than I’d like to admit.
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NOO! Now everytime I replay that mass effect I always think of my character’s dead’s scene:D. If only they tell us when this game will be released…
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@Momo the Cow
I don’t get your point, Dreamfall was ace.
Ok, it could have been better if there was some challenge to the game rather than simply moving from point A to B. Still, I think challenge is something that should be secondary on the minds of game developers. Of course, this is just my personal opinion and there are plenty of people that game purely to over come a challenge. I’m more in it for the experience a game has to offer.
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Games without any sort challenge are sort of boring to me. To me the “experience” they offer is one of being a bit bored really as they fail to use tricks from other media where you just see the good bits. They are too padded out with boring game bits.
I didn’t like Mass Effect too much. Maybe that’s because I expect too much from the future; being the optimistic embrace the future sort of person that I am.
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The nostalgia/rose tinted argument is frequently easy, dismissive bollocks. I’ve taken to just tutting and rolling my eyes when it is wheeled out yet again. Not to mention a lot of people weren’t kids when the games were released.
Please retreat to No Mutants Allowed and take all of your friends with you. HTH.
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Oh come on, that trailer…soooooo cliche.
1) Sheppard is severely injured, which brings him back to a level one state;
2) Sheppard has amnesia and will rediscover himself throughout the game;
3)They are pretending that Shepard is dead to yank our chains and provoke and emotional response; the in-game justification will be that Shepard can operate more secretly if the enemy thinks he perished (maybe in the battle at the Citadel) and so can’t hunt them down anymore.
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“Good f’ing god. The Angry Fallout Men have infested the remainder of the Internet. Disgruntled about everything; basking in the golden light shining out of yesteryear’s arse.”
@acardiac
Quality comment :)
Fallout was a great game in it’s day, but with modern game engines and increased processing horse power the necessity for developers to continue to go down the route of mindless aping P&P RPG mechanics to provide in game event resolution is becoming more and more redundant. You as the player see what the character sees, you direct the character to hit what you want them to hit. You decide whom you will ally with as much by their expression and tone, as you do their words. The avatar is a conveyance, but you truly play the role. The roots of future CRPGs aren’t found in more games like fallout, they are found in titles such as Deus Ex, Farcry 2, Boiling point, VTM:B, The Witcher, and GTA IV. Games that actually take advantage of advancing computer technology, rather than eschewing it.
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I don’t know, I thought Baldurs Gate was terribly dull too. Certainly not what I’d call “forward momentum”. The same old gameplay in the same old story in the same old setting. Bleargh.
I’d far rather play Mass Effect than that.
But yes, Fallout and Planescape did innovate, and they were terrific games. But they’re not exactly representative of a general trend. They were two kick-ass games in a sea of mediocrity. The only reason you even remember them is because they stood out so much. You don’t remember the dozens of crappy average RPG’s of the period. You could say that those games haven’t been topped since, but so what, they haven’t been topped *before* either. They’re not part of a downhill trend, they’re a single spike in an otherwise mainly flat line of average-ness. Most games have always sucked.
You can find innovations in any period. Sometimes these innovations lead to huge breakthroughs and the Best Games Evar! Sometimes they lead to incremental improvements. Sometimes they create a foundation that’ll only really show its significance 5 years later, when another game builds on top of it to create something truly great.
I love Fallout as much as anyone, but I don’t have any illusions that it was perfect, that *everything* has been downhill ever since. There are aspects of Fallout that no other game has managed to do better. But there are also aspects of Fallout that are a joke by today’s standards.
And Planescape? It took me a month or so before I was able to appreciate it. It wasn’t exactly beginner-friendly. And the story took *ages* before it got interesting. Is that what you call perfection?
It seems ironic that on one hand, people are saying that “today, RPG’s are really just action games with RPG bits stuck on”, and *in the same breath* they’re able to accuse today’s games of not innovating.
RPG’s today suck *both* because they’re not Fallout, and because they don’t try something new. You want forward momentum at the same time as you want things to stay the same. How does that even make sense? Trying to be Fallout implies doing nothing new. Doing something new implies not being like Fallout. You can’t have both.
Trying to draw more action into a RPG is far more innovative than sticking with the same old recipe that was used 10 years ago when Fallout was made. Today’s RPG’s certainly do experiment with new ideas. You might not like the outcome, but that doesn’t mean the experimentation didn’t happen. Mass Effect dared to be different than your RPG classics of 10 years ago. Perhaps the result isn’t as good as Fallout was, but the willingness to deviate from that tried and true formula is certainly not a bad thing. The genre is not dead. It would be dead if everyone singlemindedly tried to replicate what Fallout did 10 years ago. We’re lucky they don’t.
Of course, most of the results of this experimentation will be inferior to Fallout, but isn’t it a testament to the strength of the genre that people *still* carry on experimenting? People keep believing that it’s possible to improve the genre, and they keep searching for the magic idea that’ll make it possible.
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i’ve just spent ten minutes staring into the middle-distance imagining a Duncan Idaho next-gen RPG. Or jesus please a Paul Atreidies one. If that happened in my lifetime i would die a happy man. It won’t though. Balls!
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It’s a new art form.
Yes, well. They’ll always be people who adore abstract art, think Mona Lisa is beautiful and appreciate a picture of Jesus covered in excrement. All of which I find crap.
I like Fallout 2 and Fallout 3. I can’t actually decide which one is ‘better’. I love Baldur’s Gate 2, I will choose that if offered in a choice with Fallout 3.
Mass was ‘alright’ for me. Jade Empire was ‘alright’ as well. I think Baldur’s Gate 2 was better than those as well. I almost think Kotor 2 is better than Baldur’s Gate. Maybe if and when that Team Gizka? people finish their project.
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jalf said: “But there are also aspects of Fallout that are a joke by today’s standards.”
Which aspects are these?
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Did you miss the part where you shoot at rats at the beginning? Did you ever give Ian a submachine gun? How many times did you reload to save Dogmeat from going through a force field or get jumped by out-of-level raiders or the Hub’s fetch quests or collecting gecko skins or radscorpion tails or the useless allies, talking plants, “hurr-hurr super mutant rape,” sawed-off quest stubs that don’t function right and disappearing cars and crashes to desktop.
Okay, now I’m going to get assaulted by the basement-dwellers in oily sweats who claim that not even Fallout 2 was “real fallout,” but there were parts of that game that were not absolutely perfect.
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Mass Effect was ruined by the lead character being called Shepherd. Couldnt they have picked a name like ‘Maverick’ that hints at decisiveness and success? ‘Shepherd’ just makes me think of loneliness, sexual deviancy and suicide. At least they let me choose the first name. I called him German.
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“You don’t remember the dozens of crappy average RPG’s of the period.”
the RPG genre was nearly dead when BG was released.
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The problems often mentioned in ME are the same problems given with all RPGs – notably the presence of pointless and ‘Fedex’ missions/chores. These have always been present in RPGs- even in the good old days.
I recently gave up FF3 on the DS because I couldn’t believe how much of it was solid-weapons-grade-chore! Ironically young players, often slated as being too ‘hyper’ to concentrate on long games, are much less phased by tedious games than older players who can usually be more critical in their approach.
At best, these sidemissions can get you interested in the rest of the universe- but they’re usually so inconsequential that you go back to the main quest only to find you’ve blasted through it in 5 hours.
ME is almost entirely carried by it stylistic direction- as a game it’s tedious- as an interactive film it’s a lot of fun.
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as a game it’s tedious- as an interactive film it’s a lot of fun.
Ha, that sums up my experience with most RPGs, especially the olde-school consoles ones. Lately, I’ve been scratching the RPG itch with 4X games of all things. Civ IV is much more enjoyable if you play as a maniacal evil bastard who nukes innocent cities for laughs. See also: Tom Francis’ GalCiv2 diary.
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@acardiac
Truth. I think handling the utter ineptitude of the buddy AI in fallout probably accounts for about 30% of the game time. The uncanny ability of them to all either shoot you, each other or friendlies is frustratingly tragic. As someone rightly pointed out, back when you were a kid, you’d tolerate that shit because you didn’t know any better, and even if it took you 20 attempts and you’d see it through because you were too dumb to question it. Who save the truly lifeless has time for that these days.
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OMG You Killed Shepard! You Bastards.
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Most overrated game of 2008 was Mass Effect.
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Another thing about Fallout is, well, it’s at least as derivative as Mass Effect. I’m not sure I’d qualify that as a flaw of either of them, really, but slagging off Mass Effect for being somewhere awkwardly in-between Star Trek and Babylon 5 disregards the fact that Fallout is pure pulp, wot with its green-skinned super-mutants, vault dwellers and desertified brown world. I don’t think the designers would try and claim they were doing something especially new with the game’s setting.
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hes not acttualy dead! Here Is proof, check it out! http://masseffectonline.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4&pid=6&st=0&#entry6
It also awnsers all other speculations! Check it!
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i really doubt they would kill him because when u start the game it says ur id is incomplete due to ur n7 covert status i think this is just a teaser to the prolouge like everyone thinks your dead in a huge dam battle then you get back to the citadel and bac to the big mission. plus the makers said the entire trilogy was centered around this guy look it up and then they said to keep ur saves so i really doubt they would do that crap and kill him i meen these are the guys that made the first one they wouldnt make a big story mess up like that
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