Thoughts from the Half-Way Point: Mass Effect 3

Unless I opt to move my 360 into my room, the NCAA tournament is going to put a massive damper on my ability to play Mass Effect 3 over the next several days. As such, I figure this is as good a time as any to sit back and reflect some on the experience so far. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but at this point, so much of the game depends on what you've done before, that there are only a few plot points that would obviously follow no matter what your Shepard has done.

That's really the first mark in the game's favor. After so many decisions in ME1 seemed to be largely without consequence beyond the cosmetic in ME2, everything you've done before suddenly takes on added significance. More important, the blatant good/bad dichotomy has lessened remarkably, as the bulk of decisions seem to be much more grey. To this end, even the Paragon/Renegade divide has been diminished, with many decisions simply serving to enhance your "reputation" -- a catchall that contributes to both scores. I finally have a compelling reason to revisit Mass Effect 1 and alter my decision making at certain junctures just to see how certain quests change and how that will affect my ability to prepare the galaxy at large.

The increased value of your decisions wouldn't matter if they didn't continue to contribute to strong storytelling, though, and I'm happy to say that they do. The overarching plot is, of course, a bit generic (help prepare an army to challenge a seemingly unstoppable enemy), but the power is in the setting and the bond that each player gets to establish with it. There are so many characters at this point and so much history that we've been exposed to that it's hard not to feel an attachment when a familiar face pops up or when you get closure from a character or event that you expected to be left by the wayside. Of course, not every character can be included in a satisfying way. Some additions are brief and seem forced in as nothing more than an excuse to let some secondary or tertiary character saunter by as a reminder of their existence and then contribute unseen to galactic readiness (this holds especially true of any character that showed up exclusively in DLC). But, we can't expect miracles from the writers, and satisfying everybody was never an option.

Honestly, I only have two real complaints about the story so far. First of all, too many characters have changed or accomplished too much since the end in Mass Effect 2. The game tells us that it's been six months since Shepard turned him/herself in for trial on Earth. How in the hell have some of these people picked up the positions they have since then? Grunt, Jack, even Garrus: I'm looking at you. Second, the game really needs to give a better glimpse into Cerberus' motivations. It sounds like that's going to play a much more serious role going forward. For those of you farther into the game than I, a certain major plot event just took place on the Citadel. I get that it's not meant to make immediate sense from the perspective of the player/our characters, but there's no coherent attitude/belief system of which the player is aware that would allow the event to make sense. People make choices for reasons other than "wouldn't it be dramatic if...", and that's the only attitude that could possibly seem to be driving the Illusive Man at this point.

With the important part out of the way, it's time to talk briefly about gameplay.

In terms of controls, we're mostly looking at a fine tuning of the systems in place in Mass Effect 2. Gunplay sometimes feels a bit loose, but that happens with most 3rd person shooters. The improved mobility is nice, and I find my infiltrator using his cloak to sprint up and beat down fools as often as to pick out a careful headshot. The changes made to armor sorts of abilities -- each carrying the option to purge the added defense in order to gain some other temporary advantage -- are fun and make them seem more active. I also like that these armor abilities (along with the infiltrator's cloak) don't incur their cooldown until they are purged or their period ends. It makes it a lot easier to use traditional powers in conjunction with these prolonged effect abilities. Combat, in general, is as fun as it's been, and that makes multiplayer a much better option than anybody would have expected.

First, though, I have a couple of complaints about things at the design level. The least important but most glaring of these is the new resource collecting system. You run around star systems using your sensors in an attempt to ping for things that could be useful in the preparations you're supporting. This isn't so bad by itself, but each time you run a scan, you make Reapers more aware of your activity in the region. Do it too often (basically, 3 times), and they're off and chasing you and you need to get your ass out of the system! Except...you don't. The game autosaves each time you enter a system. There's no good reason not to just go around firing off your scanners like crazy, determine where everything is, Reapers be damned, let them catch you, and then have that autosave reload so you can fire off your scanners in the two or three places you need to to collect everything from a system. It's a silly waste of time that tries to add a sense of high stakes and consequence where there are none.

Slightly more annoying is a shift in combat similar to some things I complained about in Dragon Age 2: namely, inexplicable waves of enemies. Reinforcements will jet pack in or jump down from balconies or come through otherwise sealed doors at every opportunity, just to inflate challenge. It makes it nearly impossible to develop any high level strategy the way that you sometimes needed to at the upper difficulties of Mass Effect 1 and that were occasionally beneficial in Mass Effect 2. It keeps the action going, and things are fun enough that I don't mind too much at the default difficulty, but I'm going to be cursing up a storm during my inevitable Insanity attempt. In the prior two games harder difficulties just started to feel natural once you adapted to what they expected of you. I don't see that happening here because the source of difficulty is different.

Finally, the designers seem to have responded in the worst possible fashion to the complaints that Mass Effect 2 lacked side quests. There are now dozens and dozens of meaningless fetch quests you can go on (largely connected to the new resource system) and lots of time consuming, fluffy interactions available at the Citadel (and possibly other hubs if there are any). The fetch quests remind me a lot of Dragon Age 2 and the various weird things you would find while you were going about your adventuring only to suddenly know that somebody would give you money/experience for them. In this case, at least you overhear conversations about the things to know that you're looking for them, but it's similarly arbitrary. The more traditional quests, while at least providing some sort of context, but they mostly involve talking to a sequence of people/terminals and then getting some sort of payoff when a tertiary character from some previous sidequest in a previous game shows up at the end.

The good news is that, other than establishing mood, all of these serve simply to increase the resources you can bring to the fight with the Reapers, meaning they can be avoided without consequence if you just sink some time into the multiplayer!

I haven't done much with the multiplayer so far. Spent an hour or so going through a few rounds with Andy before I'd really gotten into the single player. I'm looking forward to going back. For the most part, it's class-based horde mode with unlockable persistent upgrades in the form of both level gaining and new equipment. Each player gets to control a stripped down version of one of the base classes, each with three hotkeyed abilities and two weapons (or at least the Sentinel only gets two weapons, maybe the Soldier gets more?). You're dropped in hostile territory and confronted with a series of randomized enemy waves and objectives and asked to survive as many as you can, up to 10. The longer you last, the more experience you get and the more you improve the ability of the galaxy to fight off the Reapers. Good stuff, and I'm eager to do more once I buy a Gold subscription again (note to MS an EA: the 2-day pass you shipped with the game succeeded in ensuring that I'll reup for a full year in short order after letting my account lapse).

All said, I'm roughly 20 hours in, and I'm thoroughly enjoying Mass Effect 3. There are decisions that confuse me and a lot of additions that seem to exist purely to occupy your time, which is frustrating after 2 was so tight and focused. Still, I love this setting and these characters. I'm eager to see how the story of Commander Shepard wraps up in each of the four iterations I've created for it. I'll be sad to see it come to an end.