Gerald: I'm the kind of player who skips over reading quest text when I play MMOs, and Delsyn is always giving me grief for it. I play RPGs to gain levels, gather shiny new loot, and not to waste my time reading some poorly put-together joke involving a pop culture reference. But one of the first impressions Mass Effect left on me was that this was a story worth paying attention to. I think a large part of it is in the quality of the dialogue sequences. Listening to the voice work is made all the more engrossing thanks to how well the animators nailed body language, something you never see in the videogame world of talking heads and chat bubbles. My natural role is that of a loot-gatherin', xp-grindin' min-maxer, always on the lookout for the next way to make my character as strong as it can get, but Mass Effect has forced me to play in a manner contrary to my instincts, really sucking me into the storyline. What did you guys think of the role-playing aspects of the game?
Fargo: I'm glad we're kicking off with a look at the role-play elements, because here I think the game shines brightest. I find I'm actually taking the time not just to read the story and the voluminous background information, but I'm really stopping to think about and choose my dialogue carefully. That's a real triumph; so many RPGs have three responses to every situation, "good guy" "bad guy" and "snarky." Mass Effect has a lot more subtlety -- there's never a "right" answer. What starts as a quick side conversation with a character can suddenly delve deep into their background and history, the NPCs interact and banter with one another, and in the end I find myself actually role-playing. I think hard about how my character should react. Is anyone else finding that?
Bryn: Fargo's right. The level of thought put into the dialogue tree is pretty amazing. And it does indeed factor in to how much brainpower you want to put behind your responses. While I'm not an avid RPG-phile by any stretch, I decided that the character I rolled would purposely try to seek out all of the most derogatory and inflammatory dialogue I could stomach. So far it's paying off well. I'll usually score bonus items and equipment from threatening NPCs into submission, and this also appeases my inner sadist. I only ever played WoW on PvP servers to gank n00bs, and by extension, I'm only going to play Mass Effect as a heartless bastard, simply to see what the results will be like.
Delsyn: I've never understood what part of "role-playing" in "RPG" people like Gerald don't understand. I'm not talking about going all Ren-faire or anything -- if your Alliance avatar is walking in Horde territory, you deserve to get ganked, but you've entered a videogame in part to experience some sort of alternate reality. How about a little concession to the fiction? That being said, it's pretty easy to do when the world is as compelling as the one BioWare has created in Mass Effect. There's a real sense of heft and weight in this universe's fictional background. I love the various historical entries you find along the way and the dialogue choices, as you mention, really help in this regard. There really isn't a "good" or "evil" path in the game and I find myself constantly surprised how often there are two or more equally good choices for whatever kind of character you'd like to play. This even plays out in the structure of the quests. In the initial section of the main story quest, the player is offered three possible ways to investigate an early mystery. Whichever way you choose will actually affect the other quests, causing characters to move, die, change their attitudes or have whole quest lines disappear. Even the way the cut-scenes and story points play out changes based on choices the player makes. Incredible.
