With Mass Effect, I was unsure what to expect. Knights of the Old Republic being the only other Bioware game I previously played. There were plenty of barriers preventing players from enjoying the Original, including but not limited to: a weak cover system, after being released a year later than Gears of War, and the infamous Mako. Mass Effect was one of the first titles I picked up for the Xbox 360, due to joining the seventh generation of games consoles in 2008. Despite the aforementioned problems, I fell in love with the game, the characters and the side quests were where my interest lay. The main storyline was inferior in many ways to the more consumable “assignments”, which piqued my interest in the game due to them not being a cliché ridden Science fiction.
So onto Mass Effect 2, I decided to purchase the PC release above the 360, several factors entered into this including cost and system preference. I had not finished a Mass Effect play-through on PC , however I was informed of a site with multiple save games for the original. Following this I chose one similar to my original character, I was set to go. Boy was I in for a surprise, Mass Effect 2 includes some of the biggest changes I have seen in a sequel for a long time, they kept very little of the core the same, at least with the combat, yes it shares many systems with the original, the refinement, of which, is great enough to warrant my statement. All of these points have been mentioned by others, so I shan't expand on this.
The characters in the second game are fantastic, far superior to those in Mass Effect, their backgrounds and development arcs were surprisingly fleshed out. Relationships between various crew mates seemed quite quite transparent, following the same formula for the occurrences. The character progression was simplified to a great extent compared to it's predecessor, I can see why they did it and it is no way a bad decision, I would have preferred a more complicated advancement system. These slight disagreements aside, Mass Effect 2 is easily the best hybrid of an RPG and an action game I have played.
With the end of the game, as in Knights of the Old Republic there is a possibility of losing a number of your squad, through decisions you make during the game, or during this section. So with my relationship with several of the characters, I spent a decent amount of time choosing who shall do what, with no knowledge of the outcomes. This leads me to my next point, there are several different results for the outcome of who lives and who dies. The outcome I experienced was favourable to that of fellow gamer Marek Bronstring (of Sega and Idle Thumbs). I have no idea of how many overall outcomes there are with this combined with the other decisions which are made during the game, I expect they are in the hundreds however.
My main interest is how this is all dealt with in the 3rd title in the Mass Effect series. Will they simply ignore the characters who can die, or will they create multiple situations where encounters between multiple characters from the two currently released titles can exist. I sincerely hope that the latter is the case. It may not be the massive jump forward that I predict gaming will have, though it is a definite push in the right direction.
