Mass Effect Hands-on (Xbox 360)
“Everybody loves a talking dinosaur with a shotgun.”
Preston Watamaniuk, lead designer on Mass Effect
“I truly believe Mass Effect is our best game yet.”
Bold words from BioWare CEO and cofounder Dr. Ray Muzyka, especially in light of BioWare’s track record, full of RPG classics such as Baldur’s Gate II and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It's a track record where even its worst games (heya, Jade Empire!) are still significantly better than the competition. After a lot of demonstrations, videos, and presentations on Mass Effect, BioWare and Microsoft finally let us journalists get our first hands-on with the game.
I got to play the introductory chapter, which provides a mix of talking, combat, and level-upping (I even got 25 achievement points on my Xbox Live account, which are now lost on some BioWare-owned hard drive out there). Rather than use a pre-made Commander Shepard, I created a custom Shepard. Right after choosing a gender, you select your basic upbringing and service record. For upbringing, you can choose from spacer (a space Navy brat), a colonist (someone who’s grown up on a planet, but is familiar with the ways of the galaxy), and earthborn (the Mass Effect equivalent of growing up in the ghetto). After that, you can then choose to either be the sole survivor of an assault, a decorated war hero, or a ruthless soldier who gets the job done, no matter the cost. After finalizing a staggering array of facial attributes (lifts, eye tucks, scar creation and removal), I was on my way with my first character, a ruthless spacer dude (later, I played through the intro level again as a female colonist).
After finalizing appearance and background, you choose a base character class from a pool of six options: soldier, engineer, adept, infiltrator, sentinel, and vanguard. The first three are single-skill-focused characters--the soldier shoots things, the engineer uses technology for special attacks, and the adept relies on biotics (Mass Effect-speak for “force powers”). The next three are hybrids--the infiltrator combines the soldier and the engineer, the sentinel combines the engineer and the adept, and the vanguard combines the adept with the soldier. Muzyka himself tends to play as a vanguard, as he likes being able to use abilities such as shotgun carnage, along with biotics like warp. In my playthrough, the dude was an infiltrator, while the woman was a vanguard.
The game starts with you walking around the SSV Normandy, which will be your main base of operations. Even in the beginning, you can get a feel for how your background choices affect the way people talk to you. Everyone I talked to made a reference to either the Torfan incident (when you select the ruthless option) or the Blitz (when you choose to be a war hero). The first few conversations you have also demonstrate the paragon/renegade scale; you gain points toward either direction of the scale based on your actions and conversational attitude. Being lippy to commanding officers and aggressive toward everyone puts points into your renegade meter, while being amenable in pretty much any situation turns you into a paragon. BioWare hasn’t talked much about what besides character interactions could change depending on your behavior.
Conversations in Mass Effect work like this: While characters are yapping, your dialogue choices show up on a menu mapped to the left analog stick. You simply point the analog stick in the direction of the response you want to give (note that the wording of the choice isn’t what you actually say, it merely gives you the tone of what your response will be). In general, you point the left analog to the right for a neutral response, to the upper-right for a “nice” response and to the lower-right for a “jerk” response. On occasion, you can also point the stick to the left to choose dialogue options that will let you investigate a particular subject further; the upper left and lower left choices further your charm and intimidate skills, respectively.
Just a big picture that shows how cool Wrex looks. He is also involved in one of the game’s most significant moral dilemmas, assuming he’s in your party by then.
You can outfit different armors and whatnot to customize the look of everyone. For aesthetic reasons, you can choose to not display the helmet, in case you love looking at the locks of hair you chose for your dude or dudette
A conversation with Nihlus, a Turian (weird reptilian bird-people) Spectre agent, reveals that he has chosen you as a Spectre candidate, and therefore he will be evaluating your performance throughout the mission. After getting acquainted with the game universe (learning that Spectres are basically überelite space cops, who the heck the Protheans are, and how you’re the first human Spectre ever), I encountered some robots and found myself in a combat situation. This is where things get different from a traditional RPG: Mass Effect has straight-up action gameplay. The combat system is essentially the sort of third-person shooting you’d find in a GRAW or Gears of War title; you just hold the left trigger to aim and pull the right trigger to shoot.
Mass Effect features tactical options for more thoughtful players, and this is accomplished via the command wheel. By holding down the right bumper, you get a large circle listing your current active party (yourself plus two other characters) and their abilities. Time is frozen when you hold down the bumper, so when you move your view around, you can point the reticule on a bad dude, and after highlighting a power with the left analog stick, hit the A button to give the “use this ability on this guy” order. You can quickly issue orders such as “Ashley will shoot that guy from far away, I will use overload to disrupt the shields of the baddies, and Kaiden will use lift to make that one guy float in the air.” After letting go, the orders are executed immediately, and you can then use the command wheel to give more orders, or just start shooting and let your party members do their own thing.
After experiencing some zany twists and turns in the beginning (space zombies, combat with robots who haven’t been seen for 200 years, the first appearance of rogue Spectre Saran, aka the main villain), I got to jump around in a couple of savegames that BioWare set up for me. One had an action sequence where I drove the Mako, Shepard’s nifty all-terrain vehicle, around and shot up baddies with the Mako’s built-in turret before stumbling onto a huge moral dilemma involving the possible extinction of an alien race. I also played a combat-intensive area where my characters were around level 25 and higher, and had a huge array of abilities and powers. It’s particularly satisfying to use shotgun carnage (where your shots become giant explosives) to turn an alien robot into a cloud of sparks. After messing around with these savegames and replaying the beginning segment with a different character, I finally got kicked out of the building and was told to wait until the game comes out in a couple months before continuing.
Since BioWare is placing an even greater emphasis on dialogue and character interaction, and because of its history of making some of the most memorable characters in modern RPGs (Minsc from the Baldur’s Gate series, HK-47 from KOTOR), I asked if there was a party member that has emerged as a popular favorite among the team--since I only got to see the trigger-happy Ashley Williams and the sensible biotics-specialist Kaiden Alenko during my playthroughs. Lead designer Preston Watamaniuk instantly namechecked Urdnot Wrex--a Krogan Battlemaster--and summarizes his appeal: “Everybody loves a talking dinosaur with a shotgun.”
Garrus Vakarian, a Turian in your party, shows off a cover system that is quite reminiscent of GRAW.
The Normandy can go to any planet in any star system in the Milky Way. Even planets that don’t matter to the story will have miniquests to make a visit worthwhile.
Are there such things as zombies in space? Yes, yes indeed, says this guy.
