Gaming Weekend: Repetition Edition
The problem with chronicling your game playing is that, occasionally, you run into a game that demands your undivided attention. This makes weekly logs of game time prone to repetitiveness, but rest assured I will soldier on.
Essentially this week has been almost entirely devoted to Mass Effect. I’ve spoken already about some of the ways in which Mass Effect does not always work very hard to convince you that you aren’t playing a game, but the more you play—and I’m roughly 20 hours in with a significant portion of the story left to go as I savor the experience via extensive investment in the side quests—the more of these illusion-shattering moments arise.
It’s kind of everywhere in the game, from the fact that you can expect there to be one and only one explorable planet in any given system to the way that each building you enter has one of maybe three basic layouts with a single point of entrance and whatever you’re looking for is always at the far back, no matter what it may be. I’ve heard some complaints that while the dialogue is uniformly sublime, the presentation of these conversations is often extremely dull, something which no amount of cinematic camera angling can alleviate. It’s even in the way that certain conversations can’t be nudged forward until other game events have taken place.
And listen: None of these things undo the game. But we’re playing this game in a time after Oblivion has existed for almost two years, you know? It’s a world where many of these systems have been replaced by less ham-fisted mechanisms in other games that have similar goals in mind. Which isn’t to say that Oblivion got everything right because it certainly didn’t, but absorbing a player into a world is something that requires, above all else, attention to detail. I don’t envy the creators here: The detail a player like me demands is so exacting that if anyone endeavored to realize it I presume nothing but madness would follow. What I’m saying is that BioWare has chosen to focus on certain elements in Mass Effect that they presume will drive players through their creation: A rich backstory and a fully realized setting, for example. But in doing so they have sacrificed in other elements and the net result forces the player to make a choice: Are you willing to commit to this game? It’s not the kind of thing that pulls you in the way a Portal or even The Darkness does, but it does offer rewards to the faithful.
It’s hard in a way to discuss those rewards because they exist primarily within a wrapper of secrecy that constitutes the plot being unraveled as you play. But in general terms you find while playing that certain things become the carrots that pull you forward: One is those (essentially unlockable) conversation trees which manifest as you achieve various milestones. It’s kind of strange to think of a conversation as a reward since most role-playing games use them strictly as delivery for something the player actually wants like a new quest or a clue as to how to accomplish a goal or at the very least some insight into the main story. Conversations in Mass Effect can and often do have little to do with gaining new quests or expanding the principal plot. They are raw character development in many cases, giving insight into the personalities and backstories in a believable way.
Another strength of BioWare’s particular brand of storytelling is the way in which they apply a personality—or at least specific traits—to your character, Commander Shepard, but leave it malleable enough that you can craft a persona from the framework. What this does, far more so than a game like Oblivion with it’s generic and undeveloped protagonist whose personality exists only within the mind of the player, is fabricate an actual character rather than a mere avatar. I appreciated the fact that Oblivion allowed me to construct these elaborate mental scenarios and left me free to assign various traits which had no in-game equivalent because it was, essentially, literal role-playing. But Mass Effect’s effort to not just give you a blank canvas and let you fill in a few broad details but to actually give you the ability to nudge and guide a set of loosely related foundations into a fully-realized protagonist is pivotal to how you experience that world. In my case I am beginning to realize as I play that Emma Shepard is becoming as real and as intriguing to me as Luke Skywalker.
In many ways, she is more interesting than the film heroes that obviously inspire the characterizations of the player character in Mass Effect because I’m guiding her in the quest to save the galaxy. Were I put into Luke Skywalker’s shoes when Ben Kenobi told me my father was killed by Darth Vader and that I should join the fight against the Empire, perhaps I wouldn’t have bothered with Han Solo and his cranky co-pilot. Maybe I’d have thought my mission was of greater significance than some legal hassles and a pesky morality so I might just have stolen a ship to take me to Alderaan. It’s a benefit of the medium.
The last thing I want to mention about Mass Effect, and this will probably be the last thing I have to say about it in Gaming Weekend in general other than a few notes about progress in the Other Games section going forward, is that I don’t know when it became acceptable but I’m getting pretty sick of texture pop-in. I saw it first in Halo 2 but since then it’s become more and more prevalent in games and I don’t understand it. Mass Effect looks gorgeous… about 70% of the time. The rest of the time it looks like an unfinished mess because you’re constantly seeing untextured geometry as you wait for the admittedly rich details to hurry up and apply themselves. I don’t want to see my character without eyebrows or walk down a featureless corridor for five seconds. It needs to stop being acceptable to have whatever method developers are using to shoehorn more fidelity than these systems can handle show this much of the graphical guts to the player. I love the graphics in Mass Effect and the character models are among the best I’ve ever seen but along with all the other things that are out there obliterating the fourth wall, I don’t need one more constant reminder that this is just a video game because I keep seeing armor that looks like poorly spraypainted jumpsuits.