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BioWare, developers of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, showed off an early build of their new action/RPG title Mass Effect at this year's E3. This game is the first part in the new epic trilogy that takes place soon after humans take to the galactic stage. Consequentially, most people you encounter have only heard of the young race and you will be a large part in setting first impressions. You play as a Specter, a member of the a highly-specialized defense force. You and your two teammates are part of an elite police squad who have discovered that an ancient and dark evil is starting to reawaken and return to the galaxy. But information on this evil is sparse, so your team will have to scour the systems for clues on who and what this evil is.
The game can be split into two distinct parts: the first part is the main story where you will talk to people and fight off enemies in order to find out more about the core gameplay. The other aspect is the exploring capability. You literally have the entire galaxy as your playground and you can travel from star system to star system, planet to planet, doing all of the exploring you want. When taking to the stars, you plan your route by first jumping to a solar system, then establishing orbit around a particular planet and finally using a map to set down and start seeing what this planet has to offer. The world can either be filled with life or hold host to an untold number of ancient ruins.
If you were to encounter enemy forces, then you can command your two team members in a wide variety of ways. When you see a group of enemies ahead of you, simply switch to the squad command view and direct your teammates to where they need to be. In the demonstration, the developers put a teammate on each side of an enemy force, flanking them and setting up a strategically strong cross-fire. The team then made quick work of the foes and with a quick command called his teammates back to him. Along with a wide range of conventional weapons, players will also be able to use biotic powers and science-based magic, and technological powers all powered by dark energy (which also seems to have a connection to this ancient evil as well).
The game's story will have you taking part in tons of conversations, and the game isn't afraid to get up close and personal with these talks. Where most RPGs keep the camera back, there were many times when we were treated to closeup shots of the characters interacting. The characters' facial expressions and emotions, along with these close-angle views, really go a long way to pushing the cinematic feel that BioWare is trying to pull off. BioWare also tried to make the conversations themselves feel a bit more real time. Instead of displaying the actual text that your character will say when confronted with a dialogue choice, you will instead see the various initial "gut reactions" that you get when talking to someone. For instance, if someone is not being very forthcoming with information, you will see choices like "Don't bull $hit me" or "Let's try to work this out" and several other possibilities, but when you select a dialogue choice, you will get a piece of dialogue that is much more fleshed out. The demonstrators pointed out that this system not only adds to the momentum and action of the conversation like never before, but it becomes a bit of a mini-game and allows you to quickly read your choices and make the same decision you would in a real conversation.
But be careful what you say and how you treat the other characters in Mass Effect, cause like the name implies, decisions will have repercussions. Remember, you are one of the fist humans many of these people have ever met, so how you act will determine how these individuals or races perceive the entire race.
At the demo, BioWare made a point in saying that they will make as much use of the Xbox Live Marketplace as possible. They plan to have downloadable content ranging from small things like skins all the way up to entirely new solar systems. BioWare also said that out of the box (without the downloadable expansions) we should expect 25-30 hours of gameplay if you stick to just the main story, but if you want to do all the exploration, the amount of time you could put in this game can be infinite. |
