Saturday, November 18, 2017

Interlude - Mass Effect: Andromeda

I have a confession to make. . . I have a secret life. In addition to my 200-odd Steam games, I also have an Origin account. It only has ten games in its library, and of those, I got six for free. And of the four games I paid for, three of those are different versions of The Sims.  But nonetheless, I've been holding out on you.

I'm telling you this because the other day, I was at the store and I saw a copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda for PC on sale for half its usual price, and that's why I haven't made another Majesty 2 post. Over the last 3 days, I've managed to play this one game for 24 hours.

There's this thing that they started doing in Mass Effect 2 where one of the class abilities was the "biotic charge." You target an enemy and fly through the air, slamming you into them at high speed, doing massive damage and putting you in ideal position to shoot them at point-blank range (or, you know, be instantly slaughtered by the enemy's friends, but nothing ventured . . .) It's just about the funnest thing in the whole world and it's only gotten more enjoyable in each Mass Effect game since it was introduced.

That's the primary reason I've played the game so much. I just love flying recklessly around these gorgeously realized alien worlds, tearing into robots and monsters and the like. Combined with plenty of the typical open-world rigamarole to give me reasons to go from place to place, and it is perfectly calibrated to keep me on the hook.

So I like the game quite a bit, but it is a contentious entry to the series and I can see why. Andromeda is simply not as compelling a setting as the Milky Way (fake Andromeda - if aliens are reading this 2 million+ years from now, I'm sure the real Andromeda is great). The original Mass Effect trilogy had a ton of work put into the background lore and it showed. Just about every one of its sci-fi creations was compelling in its own right, and taken all together, they created a world that was both diverse and engaging.

Unfortunately, Mass Effect: Andromeda doesn't seem to do the same amount of work. So far, there are only two new intelligent species compared to the dozen or so from the original trilogy. And unless there's some great lore revelation coming up, they are simply not as interesting as the Milky Way species (again, fictionally). When you compare the Angarans to the Turians or the Quarians, or the Krogans, it's not even a contest - I can't even describe to you why I find them bland, because they have no characteristics that are distinct enough to comment upon. I suppose it's a victory for sidestepping the "planet of hats" cliche by making the aliens be as varied as the humans. But if you can't reduce aliens to a stereotype, then what is space opera for?

And the Kett, as villains, forget about it. They're like the Collectors but less creepy and menacing.

The worst part, though, is that it doesn't have to be this way. They could build upon the groundwork laid by the first three games and just make the setting more diverse, but that would kind of involve not transporting the story two and a half million light years away, where none of the stuff you've established before could possibly have any effect on what's going on.

I understand why they did it. They wanted a free hand in writing a new sci-fi story without having to worry about the baggage and expectations from the original trilogy. Ultimately, though, they set themselves up to fail. In order for Andromeda to work as a game, they had to sell Andromeda as a setting, and that means creating something so utterly new that if feels exotic, spectacular, and dangerous even in the context of an established sci-fi setting. The Helius cluster had to feel like it was worth the 600-year cryosleep. The people in the arks left behind a world of bug monsters and blue psychic space babes and evangelical jellyfish and killer robots from before the dawn of history. So whatever they found needed to be even more exciting than that. And it just wasn't.

I'm still going to play the game to the end, though. What can I say. I love exploration and I love charging into gun fights like a colossal idiot.

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