The Mass Effect Effect

How can the loss of a Mass Effect game-save lead to so much strife? Well, there are two reasons. And the first is simple, I love my Shepard. I didn't want to lose him. The second has to do with the appallingly small world of videogame journalism. And it's highlighted one unsettling problem that a 'year off gaming' might present.


Now that the old PS3 has received a new lease of life (thanks to my trusty hair dryer), I’m back in business with Mass Effect 3. Catastrophe averted. 

Losing a game save shouldn't be such a problem, right? The gameplay in ME3 is unrelentingly satisfying. I’d have been only too happy to play through those opening 12 hours again. Combat has real heft - although things can still get hairy, it's only too easy to dominate each encounter. It's crowd-control and it's fun.

Controlled chaos in Mass Effect 3

The game also benefits from a serious presentational facelift. Looking just as good as ever, it seems that developers Bioware finally hired a foley artist and/or sound engineer to bring the quality of their audio up to match their visuals. Weapons pop and the iconic sounds of the mass relays and reapers are pitch perfect. And those bizarre moments of silence that peppered previous games? Few and far between.

Most importantly, the game feels like a sequel to the original, rather than to its 2010 follow-up. I've been known to ramble on about how much I love (and hate) the first game so I won't labor the point here. With this third release in the series, Bioware have struck a careful balance between the original’s storytelling and its sequel's focus on combat. Shepard’s back in the thick of the action in this one. 

So if the experience of Mass Effect is all good, what exactly is my problem? And no, it's not the obvious one.

It's not that Mass Effect is one of the few games where a player's decisions have meaning, where those decisions carry through successive games in the series. That has been an extremely effective hook - it's garnered the series a loyal fan-base and guaranteed the sales of subsequent titles. It was so successful in fact, that it freed up the development team to make significant changes to how each game felt and played while maintaining a captive audience. Clever.

I can't imagine how my game would have changed if Mordin died in ME2.

Losing my saves would have meant playing through Mass Effect 2 (for a third time) to painstakingly recreate exactly the Shepard I'd lost. I can handle that. I would have done it eventually. I would have gotten round to it.

But here's the rub. Deciding to take your time at a game, to play at your own pace, brings with it a new burden - the fear of the spoiler. And that’s a serious problem for someone who can’t afford to buy new games for the next 12 months. It isn't just spoilers. It has to do with the way the games media casts off titles, at most two weeks after release, in their rush to keep up with publisher's PR.

A 40-hour RPG takes at least a couple of weeks for a normal person to complete right? Even if their console doesn't melt mid-game. Anecdotally at least, it seems that most gamers, with an average age in their thirties, want to play games at their own pace. It seems to me that if our experienced and informed games journalists took their time to discuss new releases critically, they could help to educate the tastes of their audience rather than rushing coverage aimed at the lowest common denominator. Our opinions, of even the best games develop over time. That's what makes Giantbomb's coverage of their end-of-year deliberations so interesting. It's perspective that informs lasting impressions.

Some companions have been by your side for all three releases.

Within days of Mass Effect's release the internet was awash with commentary, and not about the game so much as the reaction of entitled teenagers to its conclusion. Is this really the discussion that the average gamer wants to be involved in? I don't read gaming news, such as it is, except the odd piece of genuine writing that twitter drags to the surface. And I can't afford Edge anymore - pretentious though they may be, I appreciate their perspective. But I listen to a hell of a lot of podcasts.

The lengths I went to, to avoid hearing about Mass Effect 3's ending were ridiculous - a month without twitter and a hell of a lot of hastily paused podcasts. I won't be playing most of this year's heavy hitters. Does that also mean I need to give up the few quality pieces of games coverage out there? Perhaps it does. Leaving new releases behind for a while has brought to the foreground thoughts I've been mulling for a while. Maybe games journalism will only ever be aimed at the tiny fraction of gamers out there with the disposable income and time to play each new release day one. And that's a little disappointing.