2012 Review – In defence of Mass Effect

It’s interesting to watch the tide of opinion turn on a game. Last year it was Skyrim - in 2012 it was the turn of Mass Effect 3 to suffer the brunt of revisionist commentary.

Alas poor Morton.
Source: Bioware

Games coverage is driven by hype and with time enthusiasm wanes. Impressions of a game can pivot quickly from positive hyperbole to negative.

The complaints leveled at big-name releases aren’t always core to theor experience either. There were some bizarre criticisms leveled at Mass Effect 3.

Some commented on the pacing of the game - they found it odd that Shepard and his crew had down-time mid-mission, or that they would take side-missions off the beaten path. Casablanca, Apocalypse Now and Zero Dark Thirty are just some examples of the slow rate of progress during missions in war.

Other complaints are more valid. The sense throughout the game that Shepard is a small cog in far-reaching machine was well conveyed. So why did the story descend into chosen-one nonsense with the future of the galaxy resting in his hands?


Who can tell? But defaming a game, or in the case of Mass Effect - three games, on the grounds that its conclusion didn’t live up to expectations, is to diminish the value of the experience over all.

What is important in games’ criticism?

• The mechanics 
• The story 
• The extent to which the developers deliver the experience they set out to create 

Games where mechanics and story are tightly-knit are best at delivering a consistent experience. There are two areas where core and peripheral aspects of a game get conflated:

• core mechanics vs devices used to bulk out the experience 
• the central narrative vs minor story details 

I played Batman Arkham City in the run up to Christmas. The game reviewed well back in 2011 but drew complaints for not doing enough with its setting. And for littering its environment with too many side-quests.

Arkham City's setting added to the sense of being Batman
Source: Kotaku.com

I played the game to once again experience the feeling of ‘being’ batman. The larger environment allowed me to assess situations from a distance, to come at enemies from any number of angles, to swoop down, to surprise foes.

To say that the streets were too empty is to miss the point. To get distracted by the seemingly endless number of entirely optional collectibles and side-quest is equally unimportant. Developers Rocksteady built a world and a story to facilitate the experience that they wanted to create and in that they succeeded. Then they layered additional content on top which could scarcely detract from the core story.

What’s to be said in Mass Effect 3’s defense?  If Batman’s problem was in mechanics not core to the gameplay, ME3’s problem is in story details not central to its narrative.

The strength of the Mass Effect series was always in its character interactions and never in the over-arching story. The first game’s plot was by-the numbers sci-fi. The much beloved second game had an appalling story devised as an excuse to introduce a whole new cast of characters.

Where the game shone was in the moment to moment interactions, in building the trust of your crew. Mass Effect 3 delivered, bringing back every character that mattered and reflecting your interactions with them in previous games, even if it couldn’t reflect every decision you took in its overly complex game-world.

It’s important when looking on a game in retrospect to consider what the developers saw as core to the experience, and then to look at whether they’ve done anything which might detract from that.

In a game like The Walking Dead the story takes precedent and at times the gameplay gets in the way. In Arkham City, it’s ‘being’ Batman that matters, and all the peripheral content can’t really impact on that.

With the Mass Effect series, developers Bioware bit off more than they could chew but each successive release improved on the core systems of combat and player driven story telling.

And I can’t fault them for that.

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Note: I played Batman Arkham City through PlayStation Plus, thanks to a free month of the services provided by Sony Computer Entertainment.