Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Announcement
Mass Effect 3 was officially announced. It is due out Holiday time 2011 - so it looks like Q4. I personally can not wait to finish the story.
Music
The music in Mass Effect 2 - and the sound effects really contributed to the game in a way not often seen. It's been a long time since the music and sound effects have caused me to quite literally jump out of my seat the first time only to land in a sprawl on the floor ... and watch my character get torn to shreds by the swarms of evil aliens ... but that's beside the point. On some levels you can get in game news broadcasts about things related to you or your mission. On other levels you get music that is pure creepiness. Imagine walking down a dimly lit "dead" alien ship that is lovecratian in it's history only for thing to turn out to still alive and not very happy. I died a lot during the first run through of that mission. Overall the music is one of the best scores I've heard up there with Halo 2 and Eternal Darkness.
Bad Aspects
The only aspect I personally found frustrating with the game was mining for resources. I wasted far to many hours of my life sitting there scanning planets in different solar systems looking for resources to upgrade my shit. Planets can have 4 different elements to mine, and planets range from stripped to rich with the elements. Out of my 19 hours of gameplay in my first run through ... at least 3 hours were solely me mining for elements. However after you beat a game and start a new one with the character used to beat it already - you get a nice bonus of 50K of each of the elements ... which is nice since the max needed for one of the elements is only 38,500 albeit it is the rarest and hardest to find element.
DLC
The DLC for Mass Effect 2 is rich. There is quite a bit of free dlc .. the rest is sadly purchasable. There are new levels, new weapons, new armour, and new characters. There is even a new ship for various planet side quests. Some of the new levels explore things mentioned in the game, and Bioware has announced that the continued release of DLC will explain the storyline between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.
Modding
It's interesting to note not a lot of modding has taken place for Mass Effect. Various texture work and balance tweaks and things of that nature but no major mods. KOTOR 2 had levels that were never completed by the developer, completed by modders and made available for download - other games like the new Fallout's have tons of mod ranging for new weapons to brand new full stories .. or even altering the original genre of the game. Mass Effect 2 has none of that. It doesn't even had a mod site of it's own.
Culture and Mass Effect
This game has not really been out long enough nor have had the right kind of exposure for it to creep into culture yet. It's not like other Bioware games where it's something that culture can already relate to like the various Star Wars KOTOR games or a dystopian world as found in Bioshock. Mass Effect is more of a targeted game though I firmly hope everyone will eventually play it since the story line is so addicting. In a few years we may see things start to leak into our pop culture but theres nothing right now. The only thing that has happened are 3 books that have been written and several comics all of which expand the universe and the backstory.
Relationships
In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, you form relationships with different characters. Some look at you as a leader ... some a lover ... and some just look at you as a mutual ally. None the less you build relationships. Both games operate in relatively the same way - as gametime progresses you may continue to speak to the other characters and eventually new dialogues and other options open up. The romance in the first game does not always carry over to the first game though. You either sacrifice your lover in the first one, have her become obsessed with killing another character in the second or the last option may carry over, I actually have not had a game continue with the first one with that particular option and I doubt I ever will since the first game is way to long. Though in the second, it is possible to form new sexual or "love based" relations with characters and it is again possible to have them die during the final mission.
Death (Spoilers)
Death has three components in Mass Effect 2. There is death at the beginning where you get your ass spaced. There is death during gameplay where you just get to reload at the most recent savepoint. Lastly, there is death during the final mission ... said death is permanent and carries into Mass Effect 3 though how I do not know.
The death at the beginning leads with your character spending two years getting himself rebuilt by Cerebus. Though the first death is heroic and cool since you save your pilot when your ship gets attacked and you end up getting spaced.
Death during actual gameplay is interesting in that it's like most modern games where you can just reload but gameplay can be so very very hard at higher levels that you simply die in minutes. Without the reload there would be no way to complete the game.
Your teammates can also die but you get a special power called unity which allows you to revive them in midcombat at the cost of 1 unit of a not so rare item. Or at least at the highest level of the ability it only costs 1 unit. Still it changes how you play - especially at higher difficulties since it is sometimes better to send a teammate in to die, draw the enemy out, revive the teammate and have them flank the badguy. It's saved me more than once especially on the smaller, denser levels.
The final part of death is the one that scares me the most personally. You can literally kill off a character you've spent two games developing. Your character has certain relationships, armour you;ve found, weapons ... you have an attachement with your character only for him to be torn from you at the end. I have no idea how it will work in Mass Effect 3 if you have a save where your main character died, but it will be interesting.
The death at the beginning leads with your character spending two years getting himself rebuilt by Cerebus. Though the first death is heroic and cool since you save your pilot when your ship gets attacked and you end up getting spaced.
Death during actual gameplay is interesting in that it's like most modern games where you can just reload but gameplay can be so very very hard at higher levels that you simply die in minutes. Without the reload there would be no way to complete the game.
Your teammates can also die but you get a special power called unity which allows you to revive them in midcombat at the cost of 1 unit of a not so rare item. Or at least at the highest level of the ability it only costs 1 unit. Still it changes how you play - especially at higher difficulties since it is sometimes better to send a teammate in to die, draw the enemy out, revive the teammate and have them flank the badguy. It's saved me more than once especially on the smaller, denser levels.
The final part of death is the one that scares me the most personally. You can literally kill off a character you've spent two games developing. Your character has certain relationships, armour you;ve found, weapons ... you have an attachement with your character only for him to be torn from you at the end. I have no idea how it will work in Mass Effect 3 if you have a save where your main character died, but it will be interesting.
Morality
This post is all about Morality in Mass Effect. Similar to a lot of other Bioware titles and some other games ... you have dialogue options and choices during quests. Save this alien ... stab this man in the chest with some form of electrified wrench ... this list goes on. Even during the first game during character creation - you choose to make your character a hero ... or perhaps a man willing to do anything needed to accomplish his goals. Morality therefore becomes very ambiguous during gameplay. Sometimes its more beneficial to be evil - something I discovered when playing on the harder difficulties. If I stab the mechanic in the chest then its all the easier to defeat the final boss of that mission since the mechanic didn't fix his ship. This leads to some very interesting questions that have to be asked as little as I like doing so.
What sort of morals is the game teaching us?
Why is being bad/evil sometimes the more beneficial options?
How do these morals crossover into real life?
I don't have answers to these, it's something everyone needs to answer for themselves.
What sort of morals is the game teaching us?
Why is being bad/evil sometimes the more beneficial options?
How do these morals crossover into real life?
I don't have answers to these, it's something everyone needs to answer for themselves.
Brief overview of Storyline (Contains Spoilers)
The storyline for the Mass Effect series is utterly mind blowing. At first it sounds like a mixing pot of bad science fiction cliches - hateful aliens, ancient aliens trying to tell us something, enslaved aliens, aliens trying to commit genocide. Just a bad mix of cliches all around. Yet, Bioware pulls it off. It's that simple. Bioware took all these cliches and made one of the best games ever out of them.
The game follows the story of Commander Shepard who's background is fairly customizable during character creation. Basically you play as Commander Shepard - you become the first human galaxy wide agent for the basically specieist alien council. Your purpose is to figure out why a bunch of alien built robots are back and attacking planets. You go around and build your team and as you do so you may complete numerous side quests most of which have some little background details on the universe you are playing in. Eventually you discover that the alien robots are working for some other older, nastier alien robots that are hellbent on wiping out life in the known universe ... again. Turns out these aliens have been doing on a cycle for eons and the alien artifacts of the ancient aliens were all about transmitting the data of what the hell happened to them as sort of a warning. Eventually you fight this rogue agent you've been chasing - who happened to be controlling the first group of evil alien built robots and in turn was being controlled by his flag ship which happened to be a member of the ancient genocidal alien race.
In Mass Effect 2, the story takes a couple of fun twists. First, you end up working for a human blackops group you ran into a few times in the first one called Cerebus - said group is all about Human Superiority and doing what it takes to ensure humans come out on top. Cerebus is the only ones to believe you about the evil genocidal aliens so they help you out. Then it progresses like the first game - assemble a team - do some quests - eventually do the main story line ... though this game will force you to do some certain main story missions at x-times in gameplay whether you want to or not. Also you have to pay attention to keep upgrading your ship since the last part of the main story involves attacking the other group of aliens the evil genocidal aliens enslaved ... who happen to be the ancient aliens from the first game who were trying to warn the current species of the galaxy ... can you say plot twist? Also, if you don't upgrade your ship and your party memebers weapons ... people start dying during the final mission. It can be a bit of a problem to suddenly have your team knocked down to like 4 people at the end of the final mission ... or for your character to die at the end ... then you don't get him in Mass Effect 3.
The game follows the story of Commander Shepard who's background is fairly customizable during character creation. Basically you play as Commander Shepard - you become the first human galaxy wide agent for the basically specieist alien council. Your purpose is to figure out why a bunch of alien built robots are back and attacking planets. You go around and build your team and as you do so you may complete numerous side quests most of which have some little background details on the universe you are playing in. Eventually you discover that the alien robots are working for some other older, nastier alien robots that are hellbent on wiping out life in the known universe ... again. Turns out these aliens have been doing on a cycle for eons and the alien artifacts of the ancient aliens were all about transmitting the data of what the hell happened to them as sort of a warning. Eventually you fight this rogue agent you've been chasing - who happened to be controlling the first group of evil alien built robots and in turn was being controlled by his flag ship which happened to be a member of the ancient genocidal alien race.
In Mass Effect 2, the story takes a couple of fun twists. First, you end up working for a human blackops group you ran into a few times in the first one called Cerebus - said group is all about Human Superiority and doing what it takes to ensure humans come out on top. Cerebus is the only ones to believe you about the evil genocidal aliens so they help you out. Then it progresses like the first game - assemble a team - do some quests - eventually do the main story line ... though this game will force you to do some certain main story missions at x-times in gameplay whether you want to or not. Also you have to pay attention to keep upgrading your ship since the last part of the main story involves attacking the other group of aliens the evil genocidal aliens enslaved ... who happen to be the ancient aliens from the first game who were trying to warn the current species of the galaxy ... can you say plot twist? Also, if you don't upgrade your ship and your party memebers weapons ... people start dying during the final mission. It can be a bit of a problem to suddenly have your team knocked down to like 4 people at the end of the final mission ... or for your character to die at the end ... then you don't get him in Mass Effect 3.
Intro to the blog
Well, this is a restructuring of my original Mass Effect 2 blog which for some reason refused to eventually let anyone view it ... including myself. The purpose of this blog is to look at in depth the Mass Effect series and in particular Mass Effect 2. This blog is for the art-250 class Video Games & Culture at Hartwick College.
General Information:
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 1/26/10
System: X-Box 360
General Information:
Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 1/26/10
System: X-Box 360
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