When all is said and done, Iâd say that Mass Effect 2 wound up being my favorite of the three Mass Effect games. It wasnât so much the story, the characters, or the gameplay that put it over the topâit was the TV show-like structure.
More than the games that preceded and followed it, Mass Effect 2 felt like playing a season of a really good Sci-Fi TV show. And that, as it turned out, was just fine by me.
Now, donât get me wrong: I liked all three Mass Effect games. I loved the first gameâs austere vibe and its fantastic soundtrack, as well as that exciting feeling of discovery. I thought Mass Effect 3 was a damned impressive finale, a breathless, high-stakes rush that, some unevenness aside, made for a fine blowout for the trilogy.
The folks at BioWare should be proud of the amazing universe theyâve created. But it turns out that rather than constantly rushing to save that universe, what I really wanted was an opportunity to relax and explore it. And thatâs what the second game gave me.
Itâs a matter of pacing. Both the first and third games were framed as a race against the clockâSaren was planning a Reaper attack of the Citadel in Mass Effect and in Mass Effect 3, well⊠it takes about seven minutes for the Reapers start destroying all life in the galaxy.
Mass Effect 2 was positively laid-back in comparison. âGather a crew,â The Illusive Man told me. âHere are some names. Build up a team, make your ship and weapons really powerful. Take your time. No big hurry.â
The door to the endgame (The Omega-4 Relay) is sitting right there the whole time. But although the Reaper attack is still looming, it doesnât feel nearly as pressing as in the first and third games.
As a result, Mass Effect 2 felt more like a TV show than a movie. Most of the game felt like a series of discrete episodes broken up by the occasional âA-Plotâ episode that deals with the season-long story, what Buffy The Vampire Slayer coined the âBig Bad.â In Mass Effect 2, the Collectors were the Big Bad.
Shepardâs death and rebirth were the season premiere. The initial crew recruitments and adventures made up episodes 2-10. The assault on the abandoned Collector ship was the type of mid-season episode that wouldâve aired during sweeps. The back-half of the season contained the later recruitments, the crewâs abduction being the penultimate episode, with the suicide mission as a two-part season finale. Itâs just about an exact structural match.
That structure was fairly rigid. Each crew member had two âepisodesââfirst, the sequence when Shepard would go and get them into his crew, and then their loyalty mission, in which heâd help them with a problem. And while in the end, Mass Effect 2 had easily the weakest A-plot of all three games, I liked the format so much that I didnât really mind.
The loyalty missions werenât directly connected to the Reaper threat, and as a result they felt like a part of the everyday flow of the Mass Effect universe. More than the other two games, I got a sense of what everyday life would be like for the leader of a crew of space-badasses. I liked talking down an assassin in the dark corridors of the Citadel, or engaging in corporate espionage, or figuring out the truth behind a spaceship crash gone horribly wrong. I liked teaming up with a ninja-like cat burglar and to pull off a heist, or helping one of my former crewmates track down the illusive Shadow Broker.
Mass Effect 2 had an opportunity to try out so many more flavors than simply âActionâ and âDrama.â Itâs easily the funniest game of the trilogy, and a part of that is that itâs simply easier to be funny when a giant robotic Sword of Damocles isnât hanging over the head of every living being in the galaxy. The stories were refreshingly varied, from lonely salvage missions aboard teetering crashed space vessels to a game of seduction against a deadly adversary. Mass Effect 2 was a welcomely roomy game.
I initially found Mass Effect 2âs post-mission results-screens to be jarring, but I grew used to them and eventually came to like them. The stat-covered screens broke things up in the same way as the credits at the end of a TV episode, which helped me structure my time playing the game. These days when Iâm watching Misfits or Terriers, sometimes the credits roll and I think âNo! I gotta watch one more episode!â But other times, Iâm ready to take a break. Either way, itâs nice to have the waypoint.
In between âepisodesâ of Mass Effect 2 I would do some planet scanning, or walk around the Normandy getting to know my crew. It was the kind of atmospheric filler that normally takes place at the margins of a good television show; before the opening credits, during an episode subplot, during a well-handled clip-show. The whole thing hit a rhythm that I found appealing for all the same reasons that Iâve come to prefer watching good serialized TV to watching a movie.
An episodic BioWare (or BioWare-style) game could be terrific.
The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that an episodic BioWare (or BioWare-style) game could be terrific. A series of ten or twenty episodes spread out over six months, downloaded to your console or PC and broken up by smaller side missions⊠it could make for a highly enjoyable experience.
The mere idea of BioWare creating episodic games might make many a video game fan cringeâand with good reason. The approach could very easily devolve into the sort of nickel-and-diming for which BioWareâs publisher EA has become known. But while EA hasnât earned the benefit of the doubt yet, if handled correctly, the approach could work very well. It could even allow players to give clearer, more regular feedback to the developers rather than lumping yearsâ worth of effort into one gargantuan game with a correspondingly gargantuan amount of pent-up fan feedback.
I have a lot of affection for the Mass Effect games, and for the universe in which they take place. Iâve always wanted to learn more about that world, not from reading codex entries, but from living there, from having adventures and experiencing it for myself. Thanks to its episodic pacing and TV-like structure, Mass Effect 2 gave me the space to do just that. And thatâs why itâs my favorite Mass Effect game.
(Top photo | Refat /Shutterstock)
