Electronic Arts

Humanity has left Very few places untouched, such as the deep sea, space, mysterious islands, and more. In opposition to this, lies mass effect and its question of how humanity would fare in knowing the hierarchy of the cosmos, amongst other life. I have always been drawn to the Latin term for chaos, which is cosmos, something Mass Effect deals heavily with. They have you decide new hierarchies, politics, and philosophies and question that if we ever truly did go out into space, would we have been just an empirical force on the spec of the plains we only know, or the amount of power we wield when that day comes?

Mass Effect started its development cycle by Bioware and was published by Microsoft Studios in 2007 as an Xbox exclusive. Nearly five years later, Electronic Arts would release it as one-third of the Mass Effect trilogy bundle on the PS3. Bioware, who had developed the abaft the wide popularity of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sequel, wanted to change some of the cosmetic and technical shortcomings of the second game. Probably one of the best updates from Kotor was the combat system, controls, and customization.

The gameplay is based on three things, your class and stats, dialogue options, and party members. At the very beginning of the game, you are given choices that range from your backstory to the reputation you have amongst the world and your closest friends. The second is the class you want to choose. These classes are soldier, which specializes in regular firearm combat, Biotic, which is a sorcerer-type class, and engineer, which specializes in long-distance firearm training and technology. These three classes build on each other which is a vanguard, which uses biotic and basic firearm training, sentinel, based on tech and biotics and lastly infiltrator, which specializes in tech and combat. With these options and the choices of dialogues from good, neutral, and evil, you can roleplay whomever you and however you want.

Even though these were established in Kotor, they were given a new way to approach the flow of combat, combining an RPG and a tactical strategy-based fabric of the play style. Even though the weapon play is very basic, it is the use of biotics and command lists that spices the overall vitriol towards the third person and even the tactics genre as a whole. As you go throughout the world, you will have upgrades that bring more factors into combat, dialogue, and the ways to finish certain questlines. This goes even deeper into the customization and control of the combat with your party members who have different stats as well. This is only a mere factor in the overall experience of the game, the next biggest, is the vistas and horizons we witness throughout the cosmos. 

Discord user and admin of the Mass Effect server Luce, loves the tactical and strategy-based side of the combat, “As for combat: I love that you can pause the game to plan for things in every version of the Mass Effect trilogy I’ve played.”

The overall art style is mainly mo-capped and real faces that are scanned in, usually, the NPCs resemble the person who they are playing. For instance, Joker, who is your driver throughout the game, is played by Seth Green and looks almost like Seth Green. Probably one of my favorite things is the alien design. They did such a great job at making new designs that are relative to the lore of what the game is based on. Especially with the Turians, they make the outer body look hollow with these glowing, cool colors. Another big part is the armory which is very sleek and sometimes I wonder if the person coming up with the designs was a big fan of 60’s muscle cars because all of them are adorned with racing stripes and have very basic metallic colors. Like the Turians, the vistas use colors such as blues, purples, and greens, or any type of cooler colors such as stars or nebulas. By observing this even more,  the remaster increased its shadows which allowed the colors to pop even more. Even with all these great visuals, the effectiveness only leans on how the game runs. 

A longtime fan of the series and fellow indie game developer, known online as BoomBox81, takes enjoyment in the not-quite-as-stylized art. “Art style is kind of a tricky one, I’d say Mass Effect doesn’t have an art style. Boom continues, “or like it sorta does, but it’s not an especially stylized game or anything nor is it aiming for super realistic graphics.”

The original version on the early generation of consoles calculates that the game runs on a crisp 30 frames per second, with worlds like Ontaheter dropping down to the 20 to 25 range due to its snow assets. But despite that, the new generation of consoles and its remaster on the PC clocks in at a whopping 240 frames per second, with regular consoles being either 120 frames to 60 frames per second. The load times however on the original can be long and depending on the duration of those load times, can witness problems such as unfinished or delayed applications of assets and textures. Fan of the series Mark Collins postulates that they were looking for a certain graphical style, “I think in the original Mass Effect 1 itself it was aiming for a 70s Syd Meadist look and in 2 it becomes a slick cyberpunk sort of pumpkin corruption aesthetic and 3 is a blue gritty 2000s war film.”

Overall, the game does a great job of opening the sandbox of the universe and they put a lot of legitimate science into how everything works, whether it be technology, the planet, or even life forms. Even though the gameplay in the original was very clucky at times, the remaster did a good job at fixing some of the more miscellaneous things that most people skimmed over and I think it’s just a fair contention as to why Bioware has such a great grasp as on modern RPGS.