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Game Talk: The Leap Between Mass Effect 1 & 2

    Mass Effect was an sci-fi action RPG developed in by BioWare and published by Microsoft Game Studios on the Xbox 360, and EA on the PC and PlayStation 3. It's sequel, Mass Effect 2, was released in 2010, and was also developed by BioWare, and published by EA for the PC and Xbox 360, and later ported to the PlayStation 3 in 2011.

    When I first played Mass Effect 1, first released on November 20th, 2007, it was a few years past that. The game had come out, received some good attention, but it had just passed me by. It was not until '08 or '09 that I finally could be bothered to pick it up. But when I did, it quickly become my biggest time sink; cruising the Milky Way in the SR1 Normandy with friends and crew alike filled the bulk of my days, such a luxury was for a fourteen-year-old dropout. But those days are ones I look back fondly on, driving around in the Mako, clunky and awkward as it was, or fighting my way through the worlds that were plot critical; saving or damning the colonists of Feros, or uncovering corporate secrets in hidden labs on Noveria. That first blind playthrough will likely live rent free in my head the rest of my days, along with halcyon joy of my late youth.

    Not to say that the game was perfect, or even completely sound technically. The gunplay even then was janky, clunky, and somewhat awkward in the hands. The lines read by the actors have almost a feeling that they were all cold-reads, each still sounding like they are trying to figure out who and what their character is. My favorite moments were when a line that was supposed to be yelled or screamed, was just spoken loudly in a normal voice. But I feel that these flaws endeared the game to me more, rather than detracted. I concede that this might be rose-tinted nostalgia.

    So when Mass Effect 2 came out, it felt like a polished action movie, with good direction given to actors who now sounded like they knew where they were, and a sleek and redesigned combat system that felt more contemporary with the cover-shooter genre at the time, and even so still now. The best improvement, of course, was that it was no longer necessary to seemingly rub your face along a surface in order to snap to cover. The hub worlds where we now spend most of our time, such as Illium or Tuchanka, were fuller with custom assets to reduce that feeling of copy-pasted environments that was common in the first game.

    This polish, though, comes at a bit of a loss. Gone is the sense of openess that came with just beng able to explore most of the planets in a pseudo-open world. Sure, in the first game, the planets that had the ability to be explored were largely desolate, barren wastelands with only the odd pirate or generic alien animal spread randomly against a spray painted height map, only occasionally broken by reused assets of mining equipment and buildings that look like the equivalent of space mobile homes, but especially in that first playthrough, it felt like anything could be out there. That can't really be expressed in a well-designed traditionally designed game world. It's just hard to manufacture wonder.

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