Effect of Mass

Mass Effect is, like nearly all BioWare games, absolutely stonkingly huge – so big in fact that we’ve not even touched on some of the little touches that make it great, like The Codex.

The Codex is one of those little things that helps to really make Mass Effect purely by being there. It’s like the lexicon in Outcast in that, though you’ll never use it, the game feels that much more complete and rounded because of it, except The Codex isn’t a breakdown of the alien languages but an RPG version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide. The Codex contains everything you ever could or would want to know about the in-game universe.

One of the other things that is probably worth discussing is the intricacies of the morality system. Morality and alignment systems themselves aren’t all that new – they’ve been around in one form or another for years, whether it be the Karma counter of Fallout 2 or the True Neutral style methods of the Dungeons and Dragons universe.

Yet still, Mass Effect brings a new and appreciated spin to the idea which manages to take the idea of player alignment up to another level.


The basic morality of the player is constantly being tweaked and changed, mostly through their dialogue choices and selected actions. These choices are then translated into one or two scales – Paragon and Renegade. The vague wording of them is a deliberate part of the game trying not to force you down a good or evil path – if you don’t see your choices as black and white, you’re more likely to experiment with the shades in between.

Boiled down though, the Paragon is essentially the polite way of doing things, while the Renegade is the impolite way. You can do evil things that will reward the Paragon scale and you can do good things which break social norms and earn you Renegade points – it isn’t clear cut.

What makes this system so clever when compared to other RPG games though is that the two sliders aren’t actually linked. If you earn yourself a boatload of Renegade by punching a commanding officer in the mouth then that doesn’t mean that you necessarily lose a whole heap o’ Paragon.

In fact, based on other choices throughout a conversation, you might come out of it all with some extra Paragon points as well.


The effects of these two sliders are pretty much just as you’d expect admittedly and it’s there that the stroke of ingenuity ends as far as the morality system goes – which isn’t to say that the implementation is bad, just that it is as expected. Pushing the scales too far in either direction will cost you certain quests and NPCs, while sitting on the fence is never an option.

Conclusion

Mass Effect was already an awesome game, that much we knew. It was so good in fact that it managed to sneak its way in to our Top 10 Games of 2007. The question is though, has it got any better since then?

The answer to that isn’t easy, but mainly that’s because there aren’t that many differences between the two versions. There are some positive enhancements to consider like the new hotkey features and a smoother interface, but on the other hand these are balanced out by an awful minigame and the fact that all these changes feel insubstantial and tacked on – where are the new quests and weapons?

The deciding factor then, due to a lack of extra content, should be whether or not the game can win through on the merit of being on the PC – does the actual input of mouse and keyboard make the game better on PC? The answer is yes, but not enough for it to make a big difference.

Mass Effect is an utterly absorbing, massive and enthralling game. As soon as this review is done we’re going to go play it some more and if you’re a PC RPG fan who hasn’t got the Xbox 360 version then this is definitely a game you’ll want to pick up, but the PC version doesn’t do enough to push ahead of the Xbox 360 original and in the end the two will have to settle for being equals.