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Mass Effect's Aftermath
1up is republishing a short interview with BioWare's Casey Hudson, the Project Director for their sci-fi epic Mass Effect. The piece originally ran in EGM, and covers a few nagging details left behind by the project, things like "What happened to the ability to interrupt people?", or "What's up with the UI?". "Hudson: Well, the item comparison is probably a lot better than KOTOR's because we now show you a graph that compares [the stats] of one weapon to another. As you can imagine, the inventory-management system for a role-playing game is probably one of the biggest and most complicated systems. It's actually one of the drawbacks to giving people so much to do and so many things. We didn't get much negative feedback during development with the inventory screen, although [if stuff doesn't work right], that's definitely something we want to fix in the future." That's a really deft way of handling that question, but I have to say: despite my deep and abiding love for the game, the user interface is an affront to Tufte.
Please buy this pedestrian and overhyped game so it can sit next to Bioshock on your "shelf full of Xbox 360 titles that only look good relative to the sh*t library that is 'next gen' gaming"
OH WE REVOLUTIONIZED THE WORLD WITH OUR MAGICAL "use d-pad to pick item" TECHNOLOGY!! Weeeoooo
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Really? ....And hand it to the content team.
Admittedly it's a little more complex than this, but not a lot; There's the GUI to add on and the characters equipped items, but that's not particularly complex either. But for nuts and bolts, the above code really will hold all the data about the characters inventory.
I liked mass effect, but really, it's not that complex to produce.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Had to play it through twice for it. 2x by the consort on Citadel then once each by Ashley and Liara. Doing the blue chick made me feel cool like Captain Kirk.
Trolling is a art,
GAH! I can't! I just can't, it's too easy to slip into the low-brow humor...
Must...resist...joke...
Personally, after only about an hour of play, I kind of liked the way that the inventory and barter system worked...the interface is quite easy to work with. In my opinion, the ONLY two things missing is the ability to filter/sort your stuff, and a raise on the relatively low item cap limit (towards the end of the game, you start seeing the message telling you that you are close to capacity rather frequently) Other than that, I think the inventory system was quite effective and easy to use (yes, even with it's very "made for console" design)
Granted, it isn't the best system out there by any stretch of the imagination, but it was still fairly easy to learn and use.
Living With a Nerd
I just hope they make more sex scenes, and make them more detailed, vivid, and kinky. I'll show a video of the scenes to Kevin McCollough and Jack Thompson, and tell them that I let my 5 yr old son play the game.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Mass Effect's inventory system works pretty conveniently after about a half hour of getting to know what's going on. It is certainly better than KoTOR's . I hope they include party influence in ME2 like Obsidian put into KoTOR2. Mass Effect was probably the coolest and most innovative game I have played since KoTOR, since they both redefined the pinnacle of console gaming. Anybody who gets a chance to play Mass Effect should definitely play it, but be warned, playing Mass Effect will control your life as long as you are playing it.
A struct is a class in C++, except that members are public by default instead of private.
I am not aware if structs violate any public decency laws, however. I prefer only letting friends see private members.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the engine evolves for the next game. Any improvement is going to seem really significant if most of the engine is the same.
Mass Effect's effect?
Yes, the dialog system does look interesting... it is lacking an important feature, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ironically, I just started playing Mass Effect last night (yeah, I put off purchasing a 360 for a long time. Finally broke down and picked up the Arcade package + ME on the way home from work yesterday).
:). I loved KOTOR (1 & 2) and Jade Empire though, so I'm sure I'll slip into Mass Effect eventually.
I've put about 45 minutes to an hour into the game so far, but I can agree that to someone new to the game, it's a bit of a confusing interface. Then again the *only* game I've played in the last year and a half is WoW (which I'm taking a break from now), so just about anything different feels odd at this point
Only thing I can't stand at all, and this may be changeable, but I had being zoomed so close the the char. Makes me feel almost claustrophobic or something.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm actually in the process of writing my review for Mass Effect right now, I've found it's one of the hardest reviews to write in a long time. The game does a lot of things really, really well: story, universe, history, characters, dialogue, graphics. But in pretty much every category I review I can pick out some really big blemishes.
Take the graphics for instance, the game is beautiful and the characters look relatively real, their facial structure is complicated enough to basically do any kind of movement realistically. The environments are large and well textured... when all the textures are there. The game (maybe more Unreal Engine 3) suffers from some really nasty texture draw-in as it layers the textures. Some cutscenes will start and the characters will look nothing like their actual appearance because all the textures and bump/normal mapping hasn't been performed yet. A few seconds in and finally everything will look "right," but that's after some obtrusive pop up was performed that can be quite distracting. I would rather have had a few longer loading screens than that, honestly.
A lot of people complained about the elevators serving as load screens in the game, I never really had a problem with them. In most, your fellow party members will talk amongst themselves or you'll hear a radio report. The problem I had was they put an elevator on your ship that was a mandatory ride! This elevator must only travel about 15 feet but it takes at least a minute to ride. And if you want to buy anything on your ship or talk to most of your crew members, you must ride the elevator (and then of course ride it back up). Annoying, and I really only think it was necessary because of all the particle and graphical effects they were doing in the engine room.
Another complaint I have is with the inventory system. It's not that bad when you're equipping people, usually you only have a few shotguns or sniper rifles to pick from. The problems start when you have a lot of a certain type of item. Like upgrades. You'll usually carry a lot of different upgrades around because you never know if you'll need them. The item are arranged in basically a non-sorted order (I think sorted by when you obtained them...) so you'll find yourself scrolling through scores of items to find the one you need. Scrolling is NOT fast, either. This issue is multiplied when you go to a shop. If you want to buy or sell something, the items are not organized in a way that you can easily buy only pistols or only armor. No, they're ordered in ascending order according to price if you're selling and descending order if you're buying. There's no other way to sort them. It's incredibly obnoxious and makes item management the single worst thing about this game.
My final complaint is about the Mako ground transport vehicle and the subsequent side missions. Well, really my complaint is more about planet/level design than anything. Every planet is riddled with high mountains and usually the items of interest are stuck in these mountains. The Mako vehicle is surprisingly capable of climbing peaks, etc. but it is still really annoying to go from point A to point B. This is a little harder to describe if you haven't played the game but imagine playing Halo and driving the Warthog (a much looser version at that) over all the mountains in your way to get to your next checkpoint.
Okay, even though that was a lot of complaining, Mass Effect was still awesome. Those are my stand out issues with the game and I have some confidence they will fix most of them with its impending sequels. Mass Effect is still a must play game, especially for science fiction fans.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Here's the real aftermath, I'm very pissed at Bioware because they've all but abandoned the PC. They make watered down games for the consoles, then if we're lucky a year or so later it gets ported to the PC....
Mass Effect, like Final Fantasy XII, has the behind-the-character camera in way the wrong place.
All you can see of Cmdr. Shepard or Vaan is their butt. The rest of the world might be the most wonderfully realised piece of CG art you'll ever see, but if you can't detach the camera from the hero's backside, it's all for naught.
I'd been on the Citadel for three hours before I realised I'd never looked up. Do you have any sense of how tall the the room leading towards the council panel in the Citadel Tower is? C-Sec seems to be infinitely tall, but you can't tilt the camera up high enough to see.
Honestly, I couldn't see a damn thing.
I agree that they really dropped the ball when it came to the inventory system. I liked the game a lot, but that was despite great annoyance with the inventory. Why can't I find out the number of items I have before you start complaining that I'm running out of room? Why is there a pause at each item so I can't quickly scroll through a list?
I think the bigger problem though, is that the whole system of money and items is just broken. The only things I ever bought were the Specter guns and the MediGel/Grenade capacity upgrades. Anything else you might want you'll find dozens of in the crates you come across, and all the while there is a large number of quests that only serve to dump more money in your lap. You found a rock? Here's 16 000 credits. Look inside a "Malfunctioning Object" and you'll find 50 000 worth of weapons.
It was a stupid, simplistic way of dealing with the loot. Luckily the story was good enough to overlook it. But then why even bother having the loot system if it adds nothing to the game?
When I began playing Mass Effect, I knew it was mostly very well reviewed, but I hadn't read any specifics (on purpose, to avoid spoilers). And I agreed with the numerical values in said reviews at first glance; the game is definitely a lot of fun, and well done overall. However, after having watched my brother play his "good" character most of the way through the game then playing my evil character through on my own, I was certain the thing it'd be losing points for every time was the dialogue system. How confused I was to discover it touted as a major selling point!
For those unfamiliar with the game, you're given up to six responses in any dialogue, represented by a short sentence (usually 5-6 words) indicating the gist of your response. The problem arises when, quite often, this tiny summary bares little or no resemblance to the several paragraph response your character actually chooses. It became a running joke between my brother and me: he'd take a guess at what he wanted the character to say, pick the option, and we'd laugh as Shepherd just randomly shot off in some totally unrelated direction.
The only real control you have is in the good/evil dialogue choices. When you're presented with the response wheel, the upper left choice is always the good ("Paragon") choice, the middle left is always the neutral choice, and the lower left is always the evil ("Renegade") choice. The three on the right side are a crapshoot. So given that your character will say whatever the hell he wants to regardless of what you think the summary implies, after about an hour into the game the player realizes he just needs to pick either Paragon or Renegade and always select that option. It's not long before you stop reading the response text on the wheel altogether.
As for the aforementioned neutral option, that's a suckers bet, and might as well have been left out. You can play a neutral or balanced guy, sure, but doing so nerfs your character. Basically, if you're an asshole you get Renegade points and you can threaten people better, and if you're a pansy you get Paragon points and can cajole like a pro. Almost without fail, any time you're allowed to talk your way through a situation, you'll be able to do so with either threatening or cajoling at a certain level. The point being that if, rather than getting either one or the other to "10" you got them both to "5" (Renegade/Paragon are opposites, but it's possible to build up both point pools; it's not a scale), at some point you'll start seeing all dialogues as being solvable by either threatening at level 6 or cajoling at level 6, meaning you're screwed; that'll teach you not to be an archetype!
For that matter, what does "Paragon" and "Renegade" mean? You can't be super-evil; there's no option to just go nuts on your own and start murdering people like traditional games of this type (Fallout + evil char + sledge hammer = kill every NPC in the game was fun as hell). It seems like your choices are more between the D&D "lawful" versus "chaotic," but it really doesn't fit this definition, either. And it varies from scene to scene; sometimes the "bad" option is you being a jerk, sometimes it's following your own rules, sometimes it's following the letter of the law to an insane and hurtful extent, sometimes it's being selfish, etc etc etc. At first glance, you might think this is nice, since you can sort of role play your character: as long as the "evil" option keeps changing what it means by "evil," you can just pick it when it fits your vision of Shepherd. But that's the thing: regardless of what they actually say, the bottom left option results in Renegade points, and the top left option results in Paragon points. So even playing a narrow, "always good" or "always evil" character, you'll find yourself totally in the dark as to what your ethics actually are!
Oh, and while we're at it, whomever decided to make the "skip spoken dialogue" button also automatically select the middle option needs to be fired. Basically, it means that
There's no need to be rude, I was just stating my opinion. Ad hominem arguments are fallacious.
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One of the more frustrating things I've found on my 2nd/3rd playthrough, is that there's many instances where you choose the paragon/renegade option, and it makes zero difference on what is actually said. Ditto when you've got a left/right choice (if you know what I mean). I do like the way it's done, when it's done, but I hate that it appears as though you can change what Shepard says at all times.