Baldur Effect

The first Mass Effect starts much closer to what I talked about in my video, while later games started to break away from worldbuilding in favor of making things more convenient for the player. Let’s break it down.

1. Characters with their own motivations.

Most of the characters in Mass Effect 1 obey you much more than in Baldur’s Gate 2, but this makes sense. They signed onto your mission, and unlike the fantasy medieval wild west, that means something. When they take up residence on your ship, and join your organized military crew, things are different. It’s more Star Trek than Firefly. With one big exception. Wrex. And he plays it to perfection, and dissents when his desires come into conflict with Shepard’s. It ends with a violent confrontation on Virmire. My first time with the game I didn’t have the paragon or renegade points to talk him down, so I had to put him down. The worst part is I loaded an earlier save, re-invested my points in paragon, and saved him because I liked him so damn much as a character. It’s a decision I really regret. It would have been a much more powerful story if I left him murdered on that beach.

Mass Effect 2 is much more Firefly. Your band of rogue space-shippers answers to no one. This time all of your party characters have their own issues they need dealing with … like, if it’s okay, maybe if you’re not doing anything at the moment. Oh, you’re busy? It’s fine, it’s not like I really care if my twin sister gets kidnapped by my psycho dad. Maybe if we have time later. What’s next? Visiting your ex-girlfriend again? Okay, sure, I can come with you.

2. Dead ends

It’s pretty easy to compare the city of Ahm to Mass Effect one’s citadel. Shops are scatted around here too, and it’s necessary to backtrack through areas, so it feels like they have a purpose outside of being visited by Shepard. Even though it’s a tiny playable space representing a massive space station bigger than any city on earth, you can look off into the distance and get hints of how big it is and how many people live here. It’s not as real as Amn, but it never could be, because:

1. Amn is a much more easily representable. It’s a city, a medieval kind of city, which we don’t expect to be massive, but smaller than modern cities. The problem with setting your game in space, is all the space. Everything has to be so big to fill it.
2. Mass Effect, being a 3D game with lots of voice and animation, could never be as big as Amn. When you increase the fidelity of your world, you decrease how much of it you can make.

But I still like the choice to go spacey science fiction, especially in 2007. The 3D art of the time, and arguably still today, was much better at producing shiny spaceships than dirty divebars*. Mass Effect One still looks great, in my opinion better than the later Dragon Age Origins does today.

Back on topic, the shrinking citadel just didn’t feel that way in later Mass Effects. It felt designed to make it easier for you to get around.

*I think this is a big part of why I liked Amn. The 2D art is so suited to making it look messy, dirty, cluttered and real. It also explains why I never really had the same fondness about Neverwinter Nights.

3. Being able to do anything, but the world punishes your bad decisions.

Okay, even Mass Effect One doesn’t let you do this like BG2 does. Sometimes you can attack civilians but like your teammates, they just won’t take any damage from you. When the game does give you a choice, it’s a dialog wheel choice, presented to you like a specials menu at a restaurant. In that BG2 quest it felt like cooking up your own creation.

One such choice early on is what to do with the nightclub owner Fist. If you kill him after he’s already surrendered to you, there’s no consequences at all. Even good-boy Kaidan doesn’t care. And that is before you’re given the title of Spectre and given cart blanche to do anything you want, answering to no one. Okay so you’re supposed to answer to the council but you can hang up on them during every phone call. It’s ironic that the narrative put you in a position of unchecked power where you can do almost anything, but the game’s systems tell you exactly what you can and can’t do.

ME2 and 3 tried to address the lack of player choice with the interrupt system. In cutscenes it flashed either blue for paragon or red for renegade, saying “HERE PUSH A BUTTON YOU CAN DO SOMETHING NOW!” But they chose exactly what you can do and exactly when you can do it. They were pretty cool but they just weren’t me, the game was pretty much playing itself.

4. Puzzles you can fail

This is where my memory fails. I remember there was extra information you could get by hacking computers, and this could lead you to destinations that gave you more loot. But I’m not even sure which Mass Effect that was.

You could fail the suicide mission in ME2 and warscore in ME3. Both of these didn’t involve figuring anything out, but rather doing absolutely everything in the game, checking it off a list one by one.

You could fail at resolving the Geth / Quarian conflict peacefully, but that all came down to having enough paragon or renegade points and having both Tali and Legion still alive (which depended on doing all their missions in ME2, again just checking things off lists).

I can’t remember figuring out anything for myself over the three games. Mostly I remember following the objectives and doing exactly what I was told, and anything I missed was just more signposted content I didn’t get around to. But actually come to think of it, Baldur’s Gate 2 did the same thing, outside of the one quest I used in my video. But that’s why I liked the quest so much I made a video about it.

Conclusion

The first Mass Effect was great, I loved it so much I emailed my brother and told him it was the best game I’d ever played. Yes, I loved it more than Baldur’s Gate 2. It didn’t do everything I liked from BG2 but it didn’t have to, it succeeded in many other ways that BG2 fails.

I absolutely hated Mass Effect 2, right from the start. If I’m being honest it wasn’t about this whole worldbuilding thing. It had more to do with them removing all the characters I loved, even the ones that stayed. The Garrus I knew was gone, and in his place stood emo-Garrus. They replaced nerdy scientist Liara with a hardboiled detective doppelganger. Hell, they even did it to my alliance-loyal Shepard.

But after I pushed on anyway I still found myself struggling to enjoy the game, for all the reasons listed here. It got rid of any last vestiges of Baldur’s Gate 2’s DNA. With the Mass Effects, Bioware kept part of Shepard for themselves and compromised their world for your convenience. In BG2, they handed over the player character completely while firmly maintaining the fiction of their world.

I don’t really blame them for that though. It seems to be the only way to make a big budget modern RPG work. Yeah, I know, I need to play the Witchers, but without character creation they don’t exactly hand over the player character either. I’m slowly becoming an old grey-haired white guy in real life, it’s not who I want to be in a fantasy.

Oh well. Let’s see what they do with Andromeda. They seem to be going back to ME1 in some ways, so I’m looking forward to giving it a play, despite the negative press.