Mass Effect 2 editorial

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Mass Effect 2 – You got your 3^rd-person-shooter in my RPG!

A full review of Mass Effect 2 is forthcoming on Gaming the System.

The internet has very specific opinions about what certain products should and should not be. The problem is that it has an awful lot of said opinions and the annoying tendency to make them known at every conceivable opportunity. It’s no surprise that Mass Effect 2, the first blockbuster release of 2010, is raising eyebrows in more ways than one, but is the mewling justified? To answer that, we’d first better find out what exactly is being said.

A few days ago, I had a confrontation with someone on IRC. As is the way of the internet, this confrontation devolved into mudslinging around thirty seconds after it began, but a couple of interesting, if questionable complaints were raised. I decided to scour Google and see if these were common issues, or the ramblings of a deranged angry internet man and sure enough, the hits were plentiful. The internet is one giant vocal minority.

When is an RPG, not an RPG?

This is what it boils down to. There are certain people that believe Mass Effect 2 sacrificed too many RPG elements from its predecessor and became at best a fancy cover-shooter and at worst, a Gears of War rip-off. Hyperbole and enraged, impotent screaming aside, is there any merit what-so-ever to these accusations? Let’s take a look at the so-called ‘RPG elements’ of the original Mass Effect

 

This is the internet, put down your weapon and come out of that convenient piece of cover immediately!

 

The concept of the RPG genre is in a constant state of flux so it’s a little difficult to pin down precisely. At its core, role-playing games are about playing a role, yet this covers almost every game ever made, so the net is cast too wide. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that RPGs involve slaying bad guys, earning experience points, completing quests and gaining levels and loot, as well as having conversations with people. RPGs over the last five years have often incorporated a morality system of some sort, with basic good and evil responses to certain situations and dialogues. RPGs also tend to involve inventory management, deciding which items within your burgeoning loot sack to sell or dispose of and which to use. Stats come into play at this point, affecting your choice of gear as well as the effectiveness of your skills. Ahh yes, skills, often taking the form of special attacks tied into cooldown or resource based costs, sometimes both. Am I getting close to a definition of the modern RPG?

Mass Effect meets all of these requirements. Killing bad guys and completing quests earns you experience points which in turn level up your character. Levels lead to enhanced skills and progress through the game leads to better gear. There is, of course, a morality system, though it isn’t as black and white as previous Bioware titles, providing the nebulous concepts of paragon and renegade as opposed to good and evil. Skills take the form of special attacks tied to lengthy cooldowns, which are affected by your stats and advance as you level up. Add in some extensive dialogue and you’ve got all the elements of a modern RPG. Mass Effect tried to be more than that however, adding a cover mechanic and demanding that the player aim and shoot as opposed to simply click a button. While the combat is more simplistic than a pure third person shooter, it isn’t standard RPG fare either.

The consternation arises from the changes made in Mass Effect 2. Firstly, the inventory system is gone. As opposed to carrying around hundreds of items, you are asked to choose a loadout before going into a mission. Each member of the three-man squad can carry 2 weapons and Shepherd gets an extra heavy weapons slot on top of that. Weapon mods no longer exist, though weapons can be upgraded en-masse via the research system and special ammo types are available as specific skills tied to certain characters. Stores no longer buy items from you and sell a much smaller selection overall. The number of items that can be picked up is vastly decreased. You won’t find crates and lockers full of guns anymore, only the occasional ammo clip, credit cache, ship resources and research data. The method of gathering some of these items is also different. Hacking is no longer tied into your stats, now success is determined entirely on the basis of a couple of mini-games. In terms of levelling, the number of skills available has decreased quite dramatically, though each skill takes much longer to master, unless you choose to do so at the expense of the others. Maxing out a particular skill results in a divergence in which you are asked to choose between 2 variants of the skill.

 

But I wanted an extra 1% damage on this Cryoshot! MY PRECIOUS RPG ELEMENTS!

 

The illusion of choice?

At first glance, many of these changes can be seen as deviance from the modern RPG formula but there is a method to the madness. I finished a play-through of Mass Effect 1 a couple of days before Mass Effect 2 came out, so I remember vividly what the game was like, as opposed to viewing it through rose-tinted spectacles. To see exactly why the inventory system went the way of the dodo, one has to look at how awful it is in the original. It’s little more than a huge, disorganised list which went on and on with no space limit what-so-ever or categories to help manage it. While equipping items is easy enough, selling them is a different matter entirely. I recall visiting a store after a particularly long mission and spending twenty minutes trying to sort through the seemingly endless sack of junk that my kleptomaniac Shepherd had picked up. Fifteen, yes fifteen versions of the same type of ammo and that was just a tiny fraction of my inventory. I could have opened my own outlet, an Interstellar Cash-and-Carry, a Sam’s Club in Space, buy ten polonium ammo upgrades and get a free milkshake.

It’s not just a case of quantity, but of redundancy. While it sounds great to have a large number of ammo types and then ten marks of each, granting a gradual increase in effectiveness, it’s pointless if the vast majority of those ammo types are worthless. Even on the harder difficulties, there is little reason to use anything other than armour piercing and anti-personnel rounds, bearing in mind that covers almost all of the enemies you’ll face in the game. A flat increase in damage, while boring, is always more effective. Weapons and armour also have a vast selection of manufacturers to choose from but the choice is little more than a phantom. The equipment is so similar in terms of stats and benefits, that most of it ends up being flat-out worse than your current gear in every respect. There is no choice to be made there, it’s just a case of using the best item you have access to at the time. A wider range of stats would have made a world of difference, for example, a high damage but low accuracy weapon, or a weapon that could fire for a great length of time without overheating, yet lacked stopping power. This isn’t the case unfortunately, so all that variety is for nought.

 

OH PLEASE BRING BACK THESE KIND OF RPG ELEMENTS

 

Mass Effect 2 contains far fewer weapons and armour choices, but each one is distinctly different from the last. The often garishly coloured armoured suits are replaced with a modular design which can be retrofitted with different parts. Colours are fully customisable, as are patterns, materials and a variety of other cosmetic features. In terms of the weapons, a prime example is the vast difference between the two games comes with the first two heavy pistols you acquire early on. The initial pistol has a reasonable rate of fire and stopping power plus features a moderately sized clip. The second pistol on the other hand is a big, heavy, 6-shot magnum called the Carnifex Handcannon which excels at headshots and punching through heavy armour-plating but suffers from massive recoil and slow firing speed. Ammo capacity can also be an issue for this gun because hey, ammo is now an issue in Mass Effect 2. It’s easy to forget that the original Mass Effect had ‘hundreds of weapons’, yet only 4 types and a handful of graphical models.

This phantom variety rears its ugly head once more in terms of the skills available in the original Mass Effect. The vast majority of skill-ups simply add stats which is a particularly boring way to progress. Skill redundancy was also a huge issue with heavy overlap between Shepherd and his squad-mates. Several classes were also crippled by a lack of weapon choice, my engineer for instance could only use pistols which I was getting sick of the sight of by the end of the game. My engineer in Mass Effect 2 can use heavy pistols, sub-machine pistols and a variety of heavy weapons. Combine that with the fact that different guns feel, sound and fire differently in Mass Effect 2 and an extremely important element of RPGs comes into play, choice.

Walking in the shadow of titans

Here’s the rub, RPGs should not be so rigidly defined. In reality, an RPG is about playing a role and making choices. The very best RPGs have given the player the opportunity to make choices which have a great impact on their game experience. One of the finest RPG experiences on the PC was not strictly an RPG at all, it was a hybrid title. That game is of course Deus Ex, masterfully melding the FPS and RPG genres as well as giving unprecedented choice and freedom to the player. Mass Effect 2 is an example of an extremely small but ever-evolving genre of RPG-hybrid titles which grasp the core elements of the RPG as a concept and combine them with a style of game-play that feels genuine as opposed to tacked on. Mass Effect suffered from a clunky combat system that was held back by the trapping of so-called modern RPGs. It focussed too much on stats and inventory management and not enough on what really mattered, choice. As great a game as Mass Effect was, Mass Effect 2 is a leaner, meaner package that exemplifies what made such platform classics as Deus Ex and STALKER great, reminding us that RPGs are not just about sacks of loot and min-maxing your numbers, but about becoming immersed in a role and making real, game-changing choices. If that’s the way that some RPGs are going then sign me up, there is plenty of room for both schools of thought as we’ve seen by the exceptional sales of both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, polar opposites in terms of gameplay but both sharing the same emphasis on personal choice and character interaction.