More things that bug me about Mass Effect
You thought I was done? I’m not. Remember how long I went on about Kingdom Hearts 2?
The game plays fast and loose with its physics. Every world tells you before you land on it what kind of gravity it has, but it never matters — low G or high G world, the dune buggy handles exactly the same: like it’s made out of frictionless silly putty. It slides and bounces like a crazy machine. And if that’s not enough for you, it also seems a bit loose on the situations that require a space suit. You can be out crawling around on the Citadel exterior, and, rather sensibly, you need a suit. Shepard even has a dialogue scene in which he tells everybody about it. But when you’re up on the docks, apparently exactly as exposed to space as you are when you’re in the maintenance grooves or whatever? No suit needed.
Now, I’ll buy that, in that exact situation, there’s a magical force field that ships can go through but, like, atmosphere can’t, and that’s why you don’t need a suit out there. Fine. But riddle me this: why is it that, when you’re standing in the council chamber, and spaceship debris bashes through the big window and a large chunk of the wall — outside of which is that exact maintenance groove area you just suited your way through — it doesn’t disrupt the atmosphere in the council chamber at all? No vacuum forms, nobody needs suits, nothing.
While we’re talking about the council, anybody happen to notice that for high-powered, galaxy-ruling oligarchs, they sure aren’t very concerned with security? They have this giant Citadel security force, but every damn time I have a meeting with them, they’re totally cool for me to walk right up there all covered with guns and grenades. That doesn’t fly with the oligarchs here in the United States of Earth, but the absolute rulers of the whole galaxy are cool with it. Go figure.
On a related note, anybody else notice that C-Sec never managed to spot the fact that the floating hover-chair the evil mastermind in Mass Effect: Galaxy rode around on was actually, like, a tank armed with biological weapons? You’d think they’d check for this shit before they let Dr. Proton there meet with the council, but apparently they don’t. Or maybe they ostensibly do but they’re just awful at finding it, kind of like the future galactic version of the TSA. Grats, by the way, to the TSA for completely not finding the prohibited items I managed to get onto the airplane last month through the cunning subterfuge of, like, putting them in my suitcase. On top.
The game usually does a great job of creating the illusion of player choice; most of the time, it really seems like your actions are shaping the way the game unfolds (even though, of course, they’re not). But the hundred billion sidequests are kind of totally exempt from that philosophy; they all exist just completely in isolation, and nobody ever hears or cares about what happens, even down to the point where, if you do the quest involving Admiral Kotaku’s death, all the other mobs will still talk about him as though he’s alive. Hell, Captain Anderson will continue to give you directions to where Kotaku would be if he hadn’t gotten killed.
There are hachievements to be had. They’re not integrated Steam hachieves, but that’s to be expected, since the Steam release was a late-life sort of thing. Many of the hachieves aren’t clearly explained, though most of the time this is to havoid giving spoilers right there in the damn menu, which I heartily endorse. The real problem is that, when you earn a hachieve, the game pops up a message saying so. But it doesn’t tell you which one it was, or what you did to get it. And there’s no way to access the hachieves screen without exiting back to the main game menu.
The way mobs walk away after conversations is troubling. They look very sinister and purposeful; for a fair long time after I started the game, I was way suspicious of pretty much everybody, because when I was done talking to them they all seemed like they were heading off on some evil mission. Spoiler warning: they’re not. It’s just weirdly animated.
There’s no way to skip the cutscenes other than deleting or renaming the movie files themselves, which apparently doesn’t cause the game to crash — I disabled the minute or so of intro movies just fine. But, seriously, BioWare. That shit should be skippable.
I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and I was staying on the fifteenth floor of the MGM Grand. The elevator to the lobby took, what, fifteen seconds? Yet, even with future elevator technology being presumably more advanced, it takes about a full minute to get from the hangar to C-Sec. And guess where Citadel Fast Travel doesn’t have a fucking terminal? That’s right: the hangar. The exact place it damn should, since every trip to the Citadel involves landing at the hangar and then returning to the hangar when you’re ready to leave. So you have to take the minute-long elevator ride down to C-Sec every single time, and then again on the way back out. And why exactly the dick is the elevator to the Alliance hangar right in the middle of C-Sec, anyhow? That’s, like, kind of a weird place. And does no other race have a hangar? I guess not.
You know what bugs me? The Elcor. Specifically, it bugs me that there are exactly three Elcor in the entire game, because they’re awesome and there should be more. Also: there should be more Hanar. More Elcor, more Hanar, more less Batarians.
I realise they’re basically just the C’tan, and the C’tan never had a reason for what they were doing, but would it really hurt to give the Reapers some kind of motivation? They just destroy shit because… they do. They just come on over, gather up their army of Necrons Geth, and kill everybody. Then they’re done for the day and go home to kick back and play like the Reaper version of Wii Sports Resort for fifty thousand years. Not that that sounds like a bad life.
It’s possible over the course of the game to fix like every single thing the Citadel races have ever done wrong, up to and including the complete genocide of the Tyranids Rachni, except you can’t do anything about the Orks Krogans and the genophage (incidentally: "geno" is from the Latin (originally the Greek) meaning "sexual / reproductive," and " phage" is from the Greek meaning "eater," so am I the only one who reads "genophage" as meaning that the Krogans were infected with oral sex?), which is probably the thing you care about the most. And apparently there’s a point in the game at which you may have had an opportunity to do something about it, but, for whatever reason, the game doesn’t allow you to pursue that avenue.
There’s a big major plot point involving messages left by the extinct Protheans detailing the stuff they left behind to help fight off the Reapers next time they come back. Fine and dandy. The only trouble is: the game’s main antagonist is relevant to the plot because the Reapers (which are machines) needed an organic being to interpret the messages, since they were encoded in such a way that only organics could decode them. To which I say: fuck the heck? Gloss over how stupid the whole idea of magical data that can’t be interpreted by machines is. Didn’t they encode and store those messages on these beacon gadgets? Which also play them back? And are, incidentally, machines? So machines can store, reproduce, transmit, and just generally encode, decode, and process this data… but only organics can actually like observe it? Fuck the heck are you even talking about, BioWare?
Squad AI isn’t all it could be. The biggest problem (other than squadmates running directly into the line of fire) is that your squad will often abjectly refuse to take point. And say you’re playing a sniper build — you’re a complete support gun. You need uninterrupted time to line up your shots where you’re not getting lasered or biotic shocked or whatever the hell. But your team absolutely will not go out there and lay down any covering fire or anything. They’ll stick behind you while you try to snipe. Which is even more egregious when you consider that squadmates almost always choose the assault rifle — whether they’re trained to use it or not — and then pick distant targets to shoot at. I’ve had dudes in melee tearing my squad apart while they uselessly try to spray assault rifles at other dudes across the room. Occasionally the AI will use the pistol or the shotgun, but I’ve only ever seen Liara use the sniper rifle. Maybe small sample size.
Incidentally, "biotic" is a real word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
And, hey, the game makes a big deal of the difference between "VI," which means "Virtual Intelligence," and "AI," which you goddamn well know what it means thank you very much. VIs are okay, but AIs are severly restricted for… some reason that isn’t explained. But, seriously, what’s the difference? Merriam-Webster defines "virtual" as "being such in essence or effect though not formally recognized or admitted." So the main difference is that we lie about one of them and heavily regulate the other? I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the galactic government’s position, but the game heavily implies that there’s some real, substantive difference between the two, and I have no idea what it is.
