The video game Mass Effect was a great leap forward in video game storytelling when it debuted on the Xbox 360 in the fall of 2007. Now BioWare, the company that made the game, is hoping to make another great leap with Mass Effect 2.
The sci-fi game is part two of an epic trilogy, and it debuts on Jan. 26, but Electronic Arts, which now owns Edmonton, Canada-based BioWare, gave a sneak peak of the game’s first couple of hours in San Francisco this week. I got some hands-on play and interview Ray Muzyka, co-founder and chief executive of BioWare, and his art producer, Adrien Cho, about how they approached the sequel.
Muzyka, predicatably, says this is the best game that his company has ever made. EA and its investors have very high hopes for the game, considering that EA bought BioWare/Pandemic in 2008 for $800 million. Mass Effect 2 is a very big part of the answer as to whether EA got its money’s worth or not. (EA just shut half of the acquisition, Pandemic studio).
I’ll have to withhold judgment until I play the final game. But from what I saw in the preview, Mass Effect 2 looks like it will be outstanding, mainly because there’s a lot more action and drama at the outset. There is a sense of crisis and intensity that the first game didn’t have.
“The vision of our group is to create emotionally engaging game play,” Muzyka said. “You’ll see the intensity of the scenes is a lot better and the overall quality is higher.”
The beginning of the game is almost like walking into the action sequence in the middle of a film. It’s a genre-blender, combining the story of a role-playing game and the action of a first-person shooter. The first game was well done, but it had some flaws. The action wasn’t nearly as fun as many shooter games. And there weren’t enough planets to explore in the galaxy to satisfy hardcore RPG fans.
The original story was good. Commander John Shepard had to unravel a mystery about a forgotten race, the Reapers, that threatened to wipe out all life in the galaxy. Shepard recruited alien allies into his party, each of them with separate abilities. Along the way, he had to chase down a rogue agent, resolve ethical conflicts and make the right choices about what path to pursue, often when there was no right answer. It was emotionally wrenching; you had decide whether to kill or save an ally. The outcome of the game turned out different, based on the choices the player made. What is interesting about this new game is that it remembers the choices you made in the first game and changes the story of the second game to reflect that.
I managed to play the original game for eight hours and write a negative review of it, only to be told by gamers that I had managed to play it all wrong. I played it as if it were a shooter with nonstop action; I failed to notice I could stop the action, think about the situation at hand, and then assign my powerful allies tasks to do in a firefight, vastly improving the odds of survival. I didn’t notice you could also gather experience points and give them to your characters to improve their special abilities.
Upon being corrected, I went on to play it for a full 20 hours and retracted my original review, giving it a better overall rating. I reminded Muzyka of that this week and he laughed it off, saying that there were plenty of gamers like me who played in a confused way because the game design allowed them to do so. The game sold millions of units and got an average review score of 91 out of 100 on Metacritic, a review aggregator. So I didn’t really do much harm.
“You had an impact on the way we made Mass Effect 2,” Muzyka said. “The way you played the game wasn’t really wrong. We had enabled the kind of mode of play. It’s a lot more evident in Mass Effect 2. We tell you in your face that these are your abilities and here is how you use them.”
Mass Effect 2 has a much tighter design. There is no tutorial, but in the first half hour of the game, you learn to do just about everything, from making use of the experience points you’ve earned, acquiring objects and changing weapons, recruiting and negotiating with allies, and using them to their fullest in firefights. All of this teaching is done as the story advances, so you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time, Muzyka said. There is also a lot of action at the outset, starting with the destruction of Shepard’s vessel, the Normandy, by a strange Reaper starship.
The shooting part of the game is a step up from the original Mass Effect. But the shooting still isn’t as smoothly handled as it is in typical first-person shooters such as Modern Warfare 2. It’s pretty hard to hit anything while you or something else is moving. That means you pretty much have to take cover and hide while you slowly pick off your enemies. Those enemies move around a little bit to make it hard for you, but they aren’t moving really fast.
The story will likely take players more than the 20 hours it took to play the last game. Muzyka said there are side quests that have nothing to do with the main narrative. They take place on uncharted planets off the beaten path and may last a couple of hours. That came about because of feedback about the relatively shallow side quests in the first game. That’s the kind of pure adventure that role-playing game fans love. What that means is that the universe of Mass Effect 2 is a lot more filled out with details that make it a more believable experience.
Shepard has to unravel a mystery and recruit a team that will make it through what is expected to be a suicide mission. If they succeed, they’ll stop the Reapers and save the galaxy again. This may sound familiar, but the whole game has had a retrofit. It plays faster. There are no more long elevator rides that clumsily disguise memory loads. Instead, you get to see more interesting things when memory loads, and the load times are shorter. The game moves fairly smooth on the Xbox 360, with only a few instances of slowdown that I saw.
Muzyka said that the game took two years to make and it actually had a bigger team than the last one. It would have been easier to make a less ambitious game, reusing a lot of the older graphics engine and animations. But that would have been the worst strategy, Cho said, because it would have disappointed fans.
Muzyka said that the game industry is going through tough times and big changes now. But his company made a bet that investing more heavily in a higher quality game that didn’t rehash old territory would be rewarded, even in a tough market. My guess is that BioWare’s approach to this sequel will pay off. As for Mass Effect 3, Muzyka says the company will take in the feedback and try to make another great leap above the sequel.
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