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| Mass Effect; A few years old, but new to me | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 18 Nov 2009, 13:43 (346 Views) | |
| Neraeos | 18 Nov 2009, 13:43 Post #1 |
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Council of Darkness
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After seeing Ankhanu's review of Dragon Age: Origins, and his comparison to Knights of the Old Republic, I figured I would throw in my two cents about the transition game between the two of them - Mass Effect. I bought this a couple of months ago, but only got it working a few nights ago due to an installation that required an internet connection. That required buying a wireless card for my gaming computer; not a big deal, but a tad annoying nonetheless. I got it working, and was immediately engrossed by the story. Humanity gained interstellar starflight after finding technology (called the Mass Effect) on Mars. They started expanding and ignited a war with the first species they came across via a misunderstanding. That war quickly ended, and humans are now the black sheep of a very loose interstellar alliance. Your character is trying to become a Spectre, which is a sort of MI-6/CIA agent that operates outside of the bounds of law of the interstellar alliance; a race that gains a member as a Spectre gets considerable prestige, and the humans really need this in order to be more respected in the galaxy. The known galaxy is a much smaller place than Star Wars. It's still huge, but there's a whole lot of xenophobia, and the loose alliance is just that - loose. There's no galactic parliament beyond this alliance, and there aren't hundreds of thousands of species in it. There are also very dark, weird, and mostly unknown things beyond in the even darker reaches of space. I get a vibe that's more like a Peter F. Hamilton hard sci-fi novel than the more light-hearted Star Wars vibe. I really get the "space is dangerous" vibe. Based on other reviews I've read, it gets much more complicated. The learning curve is gentle, though, and though it keeps throwing new information at you, you get enough practice with previous concepts that you're never lost as to what to do. Gameplay starts on your ship, which is a very interesting place. There are probably somewhere between 30 and 50 people on it, some of which you can speak to and interact with. Getting to the speaking portion, you get various options as to what you can reply with. Typically you might get three options for a replhy - the top one is the "nice" option, the middle is neutral, and the lower is the "mean" option. This works sort of like the light side / dark side in KotOR, but instead is a sliding scale of pragmatism that determines how npcs interact with you. I'll wager that some of the conversation options in Dragon Age: Origins add increments to a scale like that behind the scenes, particularly if the options seem to do nothing in terms of storyline. You then go planetside on a mission. Combat is in real time, though you can (and often do) pause it in order to activate special abilities and to issue orders to your teammates. It is sort of like KotOR, but much more in the vein of a first person shooter. I thought the combination would be much more jarring than it turned out to be, so I'm happy with it so far. I have just come to the point where the story stops being linear and allows you more freedom, so I can't comment on that yet. This will be of interest to explorers (I'm like that too). In the end, I think that Mass Effect significantly improves on the KotOR series -because- it is not in the Star Wars universe. When you have no expectations of how a universe is, when you are unfamiliar with all the races (and there are a massive bucketload of them in this game), and there is no such thing as jedi, the Force, Coruscant, Tatooine or blasters, you end up having a genuinely fresh experience. In my opinion, Bioware used what they learned from working on the Star Wars franchise, used the industry clout they acquired from making those games as awesome as they did, and made a new game with their own ideas, free of the canon straightjacket (which they may have strayed from; is KotOR canon?) that working in the Star Wars universe imposes. The technical improvements aside, I highly recommend Mass Effect simply for the world-building efforts they put into it. |
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| Ankhanu | 18 Nov 2009, 17:30 Post #2 |
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Dark Lord
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KotOR is canon, yeah... it created its own canon, and it's been integrated. I've heard really good things about Mass Effect, but never really looked into it. It sounds pretty interesting and I may just have to look more seriously :) I like dark settings. The interaction system sounds pretty much like in Dragon Age... KotOR too, except Knights uses a Dark/Light side alignment thing while DA is more like Mass Effect where it's experience driven. It's not really a new design idea, I remember some of my C64 games having that sort of thing in them, and definitely the Fallout series did. It works nicely though, to let you customize your game experience. |
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In Real Life ™, people who aim to maximize their potential for lethality are called "dangerous psychotics" and are typically avoided by everyone who isn't forced to endure their company until someone has the opportunity to put them away or else put them down. No one likes that guy. Don't play that guy. Donate to Ankhanu Press | |
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