It has been almost three hours since I last shot someone. This is a Mature-rated video game – Mass Effect, from Canadian studio Bioware – so this peaceful period full of interstellar diplomacy must be approaching a record.
But then Mass Effect, an Xbox 360 title that was four years in the making in Alberta, is all about opening doors to brave new worlds. This science-fiction epic creates a compelling narrative – a serpentine, branching plot with engaging characters and big ideas – and then supports it with a powerful and customizable play system.
It is the game, in short, that I have been imagining, hoping and waiting for since I saw Space Invaders 25 years ago.
Before breaking all that down, however, a little context is in order, because there is something remarkable happening across the board in interactive entertainment: A lot of gamers are finding experiences they have been hoping for in this fall's avalanche of releases. Mass Effect is hardly alone in blazing a new trail.
Assassin's Creed, from Ubisoft Montreal, re-imagines all the components of the modern game and delivers them in a blur of beautiful action; Nintendo's Wii and its motion-sensing controllers launch some genre-bending puzzle solving in Super Mario Galaxy; on Sony's PlayStation 3, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune makes the player the star in what would be a summer blockbuster if it were a film; and Crisis, a first-person shooter for PCs, is a science-fiction game that's so high-tech it would have been considered science fiction itself a few generations ago.
It's a hyperbolic season, obviously, but with new technologies and resources as talented people are drawn to interactive creation, it is fair to say games have rarely been this interesting. (On a business and personal note, that last paragraph required far too much hermetic effort. The industry needs to stop clustering the majority of its releases in one two-week period; some of its artistic advances, and sales, are inevitably going to get lost in the holiday shuffle.)
What made me settle in with Mass Effect this week is its emphasis on storytelling. Bioware, which was founded in 1995 by three medical doctors, has been ambitious with its narratives in the past, most successfully in 2003's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The Edmonton-based studio specializes in giving the player choices that influence how the story proceeds, via everything from dialogue options to which weapons and abilities are maximized.
Mass Effect, as it name implies, multiplies those choices. The story, about a human soldier joining an elite interplanetary security force to track down a rogue agent, features roughly 22,000 lines of recorded dialogue, enough to fill more than 20 feature-length films, from voice actors such as Seth Green (Robot Chicken) and Star Trek: The Next Generation's Marina Sirtis.
The dramatic work is very strong on a micro level; digital characters emote and deliver well-written lines while the camera shows off impressively sprawling backgrounds, and the situations that arise out of them have real depth. After playing it for over 20 hours, I found the story to be accessible – Casey Hudson, Bioware's project director for the game, accurately calls Mass Effect “Star Wars for grown-ups” – and yet it has the scope to survey a broad range of science-fiction works and real-world issues.
As a soldier, for example, do you try to help embattled colonists find water or do you fight off the synthetic insurgents surrounding them? Do you kill the last surviving member of a race with a bad reputation – a bug-like queen who brings to mind Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game – or leave it up to the government to decide her fate?
As for the stuff you get to do rather than watch, players can select a male or female character and dictate everything about their appearance, abilities and equipment, as you can for the various squadmates picked up along the way. The many branching choices allow you to shape the hero, or antihero if you prefer: The game tracks your morality level using a “paragon” and “renegade” points system, and there are romantic subplots that push some boundaries back here on Earth. (One of them got the game banned in Singapore because it involves a human woman and a genderless alien who looks female. Oh, to be a lawyer assigned that appeal.)
When you feel violence is necessary, Mass Effect unleashes a combat system that mixes a third-person shooter with a deep role-playing game such as Oblivion or Final Fantasy XII. How you play is, again, down to personal choice — and you won't be very good at first because your character is inexperienced — but by the midpoint your agent is using bionic abilities to throw crates, heal friends and generally cleanse the universe of evildoers, however you define evil.
It all adds up to a game that I can't wait to play again using a different guide (I'm thinking my protagonist next time will be a female version of novelist Richard Morgan's recurring hero, Takeshi Kovacs). Even in a year with more than a few medium-changing experiences waiting in the wings.
