Free Candy For Everyone

I finished Mass Effect last weekend and felt like I had to close out the saga with a few parting thoughts. This second playthrough clocked in at under 20 hours. I only did side quests on the main quests planets - no landing on random worlds and driving the Mako around for hours. I had more than enough of that the first time around. I did add in the downloadable Bring Down the Sky mission since I was being very complete about everything. So here goes, in no particular order, my final thoughts (well, I think they’re final) on the game…

Achievement Design
We all know I love achievements. They’re one of the top reasons for me to pick Xbox 360 over PS3 when buying a game. Maybe even the top reason! And Mass Effect did one thing with Achievements that I thought was brilliant - actual in-game benefits for attaining an achievement! I don’t know if any other game had done that before, but it makes a lot of sense. Rather than a tacked on requirement of the platform, why not make it an actual reward inside the game itself? Benefits included extra experience earned, less damage taken, special items unlocked in a store, and on a more problematic note, unlocking a particular talent tree for use on all future characters on this profile.

As I mentioned before, you’d have to play through the game at least three times to get all the achievements. No question about that, one is for completing the game on hardcore difficulty, which is only unlocked after beating the game on normal mode, one is for completing the game on insanity which is unlocked after beating the game on hardcore. So yeah. But really, did Final Fantasy X-2. Any reward that you can miss by making one mistake at a point in time and that you can miss is just frustrating. In FFX-2 there was an optional side dungeon. To get to it you had to complete about 7 optional side conversations and story elements so it would be unlocked. I was cruising along with the help of a FAQ to make sure I didn’t miss any, when I realized at one point that I had missed one. It was ridiculous - there was a cut scene, then I was left to my own devices on my air ship. I went INTO THE WRONG ROOM and it triggered the next cutscene and I missed a window to talk to the character I needed. Completely unforgiving and it really bugged the heck out of me.

I feel like these achievements share the same unforgiving problem. One, they’re unclear. What does playing “most of the game” mean? Does that mean I can skip a few missions with them and still get it? Does that mean I need to do some number of Mako side quests? I’m thinking that’s what it was, but without any indication of the true meaning of it I wasn’t going to get it. And to be honest, it requires you to play the game in an unnatural way. Rather than getting to experiment with different party members you’re forced to stick with just two and darn well hope you picked ones that will work out!

Soldier class is blech, biotics for the win!
I played through the first time with the basic soldier class because I thought it would be a bit easier. Truth is, it wasn’t and it was kinda boring. My second time through I played as an Adept which is the pure biotic class (it’s sort of like a Jedi - you can push things, lift groups of enemies, create a “singularity” that whirls them all around in the air and more!). The Adept was so much more interesting. On top of being able to shoot things with my gun (eh), I could use all these cool powers that became totally devastating as I upgraded them. There were a few moments where I managed to use the singularity power on about 5 guys and they just went whirling in the air helplessly as my party peppered them with bullets. It was pretty darn awesome. The main thing I liked about my soldier playthrough was that getting the Shotgun kill achievement let me unlock the shotgun skill for my Adept so I was able to use a more deadly weapon than that class would normally be capable of. But overall it was just so much less interesting to only have options to shoot, shoot better, put up some shields, take less damage. Big whoop.

Really, the characters look great
The more I play other games on the Xbox 360, the more I appreciate how well done the characters are in Mass Effect. The facial animation is stellar, the characters look closer to human than anything else I’ve seen in a runtime environment (ie not in a pre-rendered cutscene), and I was actually able to get used to the uncanny valley glitches.

Maybe I have more thoughts on the game but I can’t recall anything much. I have to say I feel totally and completely done with the game. I have no desire to play it anymore at all. I came, I saw, I conquered. It’s done, I’ve moved on to Lost Odyssey. I’ll share my thoughts on that in the next week or so. But here’s a teaser… I’m totally liking it so far!

I completed my playthrough of Mass Effect this weekend. Total logged time played, 35 hours and 19 minutes. I did almost every side quest in the game. Well, at least all the ones I found. When I was done I only had about 2 collection quests I hadn’t quite managed to complete.

I have to say I changed my opinion on what I loved and hated a bit as I put more time into the game. I definitely got better at combat. I still hate the Mako. And I realized that there’s a NORTH arrow on the minimap, so it’s really quite possible to use it for navigation if you keep your eye on that.

I was a bit annoyed because I didn’t get some achievements I was expecting to get. There are achievements for playing through the most of the game with each of the squad members, and I swear I played through almost exclusively with two members. But right at the start, I was trying different ones out. Apparently, it’s a mission count thing, not a time played thing, because I probably used the members I had for 30 hours, but I didn’t get the achievements. Oh well, what can you do?

I’m still not quite done with the game, I started it up with a new main character, since I played as a woman the first time I was curious to see how it played as a man. I know that it’s the same, but I wanted to hear the dialogue, pick the “dark side” and be a renegade instead of a paragon. At least for a little while. And I also wanted to try out a different character class. So I’ll come back and give some more thoughts (if anyone can bear more thoughts on this game I’ve already written several essays about) once I’m really truly done.

As promised, I’m following up on yesterday’s post about what I liked in Mass Effect with what drives me nuts about the game.

The Bad

Combat
Yes, combat. You know how chocolate and peanut butter are two great tastes that taste great together? Well first-person-shooter and talkie-talkie-role-playing-game are two great tastes that appeal to very different people. And they don’t taste great together. And to be honest, I’ve spoken to people at work who do like both those types of games and they still are not a fan of the combat.

Basically, combat is a shooter. You have 4 types of guns to choose from: pistol, assault rifle (machine gun), shotgun, and sniper rifle. When in combat mode you have a targeting reticule and you can hold down the left trigger to zoom in for more accuracy, right trigger to fire. There are elements of Gears of War. You take cover by getting close to obstacles, and you can duck to take ducking cover. When in cover, holding down the trigger will cause you to lean out so you can shoot. What’s all this tactical shooting doing in my RPG???

I have never had to save so frequently in my life. I save before and after every single military encounter. I clear a room of enemies, I save. I come upon a door with enemies behind it, I save. I die in almost every battle several times before I figure out how it works and get through it. Maybe other people find combat easy, those FPS playing people. But I don’t play those games for a reason.

Today I was playing and thought I was maybe finally getting the hang of combat. I cleared two bunkers for a quest with minimal difficulty. I was figuring things out! And I was even using the shotgun which is a little harder to handle than the assault rifle. But then I got to the third bunker and I think it must have taken me 10 or 15 tries to get through. It was just ridiculous. I actually exclaimed “I hate this game!” at one point. But I eventually got through.

The Mako
The Mako is the all-terrain vehicle you drive around whenever you’re on a planet surface. This dislike point encompasses two issues, actually. The first is the mechanics of driving the Mako. I mentioned it earlier, but realistic physics does not equal fun. Driving around trying to shoot things and move at the same time is maddening. I’ve definitely gotten better at it, but it’s still not fun. It’s just frustrating.

The other problem is the whole idea of the Mako. There are many planets you can land on and they all basically look the same. Different colors of bumpy, rocky terrain. A small map you drive around and pick up a few items scattered in the corner. Just give me the items and drop me into the combat, why do I have to drive through vast tracts of nothing?

The User Interface
Argh! Ok, let’s start with the inventory. Let’s see, what kinds of inventory items do we have? 4 weapons, weapon upgrade, bullet upgrade, armor, armor upgrade, biotic implant, tech implant, grenades = 11 types of items. Well, there’s only one place you can scroll through every single item you are carrying and that’s at a store when you go to sell them back. And there’s no way to sort them in this view at all. You can turn any item into omni-gel, a useful item that is used to repair the Mako and blast into safes and such. You cannot turn items into omni-gel from the store screen. A normal inventory usage pattern would be to try to find the cheapest, most useless things I’m carrying so I can sell them. To do this *not* at a store involves going to the equip screen, selecting a particular slot (pistol, shotgun, armor, etc) and then I can see only the items of that type. This is where I can turn it into omni-gel. I’m getting frustrated just trying to explain how it works. Let’s just leave it at the fact that I wish I could see all inventory items, sort by cost, sort by type, sort by rank.

Next UI issue is the minimap. This thing is entirely useless to me for navigation. It’s a circle where up is always the way you are facing. There is no indication of global directionality. You can see enemies on it, and that’s about the only thing it’s useful for. But there’s a fullscreen map in the pause menu where I can see a target location. But once I unpause and take two steps I have no idea if I’m going the right way anymore. If they just made up north, always, I’d be able to make sure I was going in the right direction. Sigh. When driving the Mako I have to pause and check the main map every 5 seconds to make sure I didn’t veer off course, which is easy to do in that bouncy-trouncy-un-fun-fun-fun vehicle.

Another map that could be improved is that galaxy map. This is the map on your ship that you use to navigate to other planets. Well, ok, this issue is really more about your quests than that map. Basically you have a quest log called the journal full of all you main and optional quests. Each entry tells you where to go, but there’s no easy way to figure out which quests are in the same area. I’d love for the quests to be called out on the galaxy map so that when I go to a system I see what I have to do there. One of my co-workers was telling me he was actually writing them all down on a piece of paper so he could plot where to go. Come on, are we really back to the time when they included a pad of paper with your RPG (yay, Might and Magic old-school!).

Striving to be un-gamey
Ultimately, a lot of the UI issues stem from this one, I think. This is something we talk about at work a lot. “That’s too gamey,” someone will say. Meaning it’s a mechanic that is purely something people do in games that, when you think about it, doesn’t make sense at all. It has no basis in reality, it’s just something you do in games because… well, people have been doing it in games. This is a good goal. But to give an example of where this is a problem, when you are on your spaceship you can choose to outfit your teammates with items. But they’re not in your party at the time, so you can’t cycle to their equipment in the normal squad UI. Instead, you outfit them by going down a (very very slow) elevator and getting to the crew lockers. These are all lined up, and you have to open each one individually to get to that person’s equipment page. This may be a cool way to do things in an un-gamey way, but it’s just added time for me, really. I want to be able to equip and deal with that stuff quickly, especially because that’s not really a fun part of the game. It should be easy and done with so I don’t dwell on mechanics too much anyways.

There were other things I was going to say about being un-gamey, but I’ve been rambling on for a while now and I’m losing steam. I’ll come back to the topic if I recall what I was going to say.

Anyways, I’m still playing, still intending to keep playing. So despite this lengthy diatribe, the love in this love-hate relationship seems to be stronger.

I am still playing Mass Effect. I’ve been talking to people at work about the game and been getting some interesting reactions. The first person I told that I’m playing it asked “Do you love it or hate it?” Apparently, those are the choices. I answered “both”. But most people have a pretty extreme reaction to the game. And I completely understand that. My reaction is extreme, but I think I’m kinda more entranced than anything else.

The Good
Here’s what I like about the game.
The visuals
It sure looks pretty. Well, the environments are rather bland. Spaceship, space station. Ice planet, rock planet. But the people look great. All the cinematics are done in game, which is really remarkable. What’s that mean, joe average reader asks? A lot of games pre-render the cinematics. They are essentially just movies, being played back, like something you’d watch on a dvd player. There’s nothing calculated, everything is static and cannot change. But cinematics done in engine mean that they can customize the movie for you. I got to decide what my main character looks like. Hey, I even got to choose to be a man or woman. Whatever armor or weapons I put on are visible on my character in game all the time, even in the movies. I can choose which 2 party members are in my squad, and whichever ones I choose will be in the movie with me. It’s an impressive technical achievement.

At first I didn’t like the cinematics that much. The faces move, but not enough. There are problems with the lips not always syncing up to the words. But the more I play, the more I don’t notice that it’s not perfect and just get immersed in it. The camera angles, the lighting, and the general cinematic flair they have to all their cut scenes is impressive.

The story
I’m not saying that the story is revolutionary or anything. But for a video game, it’s a great story. It’s interesting, and the attention to detail is astounding. Everywhere you turn there are optional items to interact with that give you more information about the universe you are living in. Every time you speak to someone you hear their voice, you don’t read their words. EVERY line is recorded. And considering you can play as a man or a woman, and there are some other options to choose about your backstory, some lines must have many different variants. It’s astounding, really. I can see how you could power through the game in 15 hours or so, but I’m 15 hours in and feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I could just bolt on through the main story to the end, but that would be cheating myself.

The achievements
Let’s not forget about the compulsive, brilliant system of Xbox 360 achievements. One of the first things I do when I end my first play session with a game is to go to the Xbox dashboard and check out what all the achievements are for the game I’m playing. Mass Effect has some more devious achievements. I don’t even think it’s possible to unlock them all without playing through the game three times. That’s a lot of playing. I suppose you could sprint through on your second and third playthrough. But I don’t think I really need to play more than once. In any event, I’m constantly motivated to play just a little more to get to the next achievement. Or to try something I wouldn’t normally do (using a shotgun, I want my assault rifle!) so I can earn an achievement. Of course, achievements are a Xbox thing, so all X360 games have them. But still, it’s definitely contributing to my desire to play the game.

Tomorrow, I’ll deliver the bad news: what I don’t like about the game.

I’ve been playing a ton of different games recently, and I’m starting to question how much fun gaming actually is. I mentioned before that I’m playing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Overall, that game is rather hard. By that I mean that the actual battle are tough. Overall, this is actually a pretty interesting thing. If you use the right attack, find the enemy’s weak spot, the fight is a cakewalk. For example, if the enemies are weak against fire and you throw some their way, they fall over, you pound them into the ground, and the fight ends in mere seconds. But if you don’t happen to have a fire spell handy and they get their attacks in, next thing you know 4 enemies have cast ice on every member of the party. That’s frequently enough to kill you.

Well, ok. I can live with that. You get careful, you always work to get into a situation where you attack first. You always use the proper attack and don’t just get careless like you can in a lot of other RPGs (Final Fantasy, for example). But I draw the line at instant death spells. There are enemies in the dungeons that cast a spell that’s effect is instant kill. It doesn’t always hit. But when you come across a group of several of these enemies and they all cast the party version of the spell that has a chance to kill everyone on your side, chances are good that they will kill you. And then the game is over. The other day I lost over an hour of dungeon crawling progress because of that stupid spell. If I were a controller-throwing kinda gal, that controller would have been out the window. Oh, and of course you can’t save in the dungeon at all. So it wasn’t a “you-should-have-saved” kinda thing. I was almost about to get to a point where I could save my progress when kaput, kabam, deadsie is me.

In response, I’ve decided to take a break from Persona 3. I really like the game and I want to go back to it excited, not resentful. So to fill my console RPG needs, I finally started playing Mass Effect. This is a game that has me constantly asking, “Does anyone really think this is fun?” I have a serious love-hate relationship going with it. On one hand, I’m intrigued by the story. I’ve played for about 12 hours and spent whatever time I could exploring every nook and cranny of the main first city you get to, the Citadel. I spoke to everyone in there, did every side quest I could find. Then, options exhausted, I boarded my spaceship and was given a huge map. The galaxy was my oyster. I could touch down on any planet. I could go anywhere! There were 3 possible main plot missions to take next. I decided to go pick up the last party member, and possibly stop for a sidequest along the way.

When you touch down on a planet that isn’t inhabited, you are in this land cruiser thing called the Mako. I hate that thing. It’s like some sort of dune buggy. It has impressive physics - it bounces over hills, it steers like I expect a buggy to steer. But I can’t maneuver the damn thing at all. It has a turret on it, and you turn the turret by turning your camera. But your movement is camera relative. So if I want to aim the turret to the right while moving forward, when I press right on the camera stick, I end up changing which direction I’m moving in too. I don’t know, it confuses the heck out of me. The first planet I landed on had some giant Dune-esque sand beast I had to fight IN THE MAKO. After about 10 tries, I gave up. I tried in the Mako. I tried on foot. I tried both. Forget it. And turns out I probably shouldn’t have been on that planet anyways because my skill was just not high enough to interact with the items there. In addition to the sand beast, there was a mine full of enemies that I tried and tried and tried to kill. Probably way more than I should have tried before giving up. It was maddening. I died many many times. But I did give up and went back to the ship.

So off I went to main plot land, finished some stuff, drove the Mako some more and got angry at it. Then back to the Citadel for more talkies and side questing fun. Yay. And now I’m off doing another main plot area. And every time I drive the Mako I just keep asking if the developers really thought this was fun? Unlike Persona 3, you can save anywhere in Mass Effect. Hallelujah. Because I die the first time I enter just about every single combat situation. Combat is real time. You’re shooting guns at enemies. You can pause and select special abilities, but you need to be seeking cover and checking for good lines. Your teammates can get in your line of fire, unfortunately, and sometimes you get into theirs and they won’t move. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m saving the game every time I clear a room of enemies so I won’t have too far to re-do when I die. I can’t remember the last time I died this much in a game. And it just makes me ask again, is this fun?

I’m still playing the game. I woke up this morning and just sat right down to play Mass Effect. I only put it down for a few hours to play my weekly Sunday night World of Warcraft. And after that I picked it right back up again. So they’re doing something right, but I think my level of anger is rising. I don’t know if this is a game that is actually making me happy, or that I just need to beat.

Anyways, I’m just wondering about these design decisions. Some of these choices seem totally punishing. Why does combat need to be so hard? I guess some people probably think it’s totally easy and are calling me a n00b right now. But I’m an RPG player. I shouldn’t need twitch reflexes and the ability to get my enemy into my crosshairs. Especially not when I’m playing an exceptionally talkie, story driven game.

Grrr, argh.