Mass Effect PC (and no XBOX360 controller support)

Well it finally came out on the PC and it doesn't support the XBOX360 Controller for Windows.

---- Begin personal controller whine ----

I had to get Xpadder to make it work, even though looking to the far left causes camera problems. I know that Bioware wanted to create a real port of a console title and not just a sloppy replica but why would you take away controller support from those who want to use it? I read on the Bioware Mass Effect PC forums that some people were wondering why you want to use a pad controller for the PC. Well, here's a few reasons (some of which I've already mentioned in earlier posts):

1. I like adjusting the character's speed with analog sticks ESPECIALLY in real time shooter games.

2. The pad has less buttons and thus is easier to find what you're looking for.

3. The pad is mobile and you can sit back on your chair.

4. The rumble effect adds a nice feeling.

5. The XBOX360 controller is one of the best controllers ever created (button-wise and ergonomically) right next to the Gamecube controller.

The only down side is that with a mouse you can aim better, but since the game was made on a console first what's the big deal? It doesn't seem like they changed the game mechanics regarding combat. Usually developers take away auto aim (which compensates for the pad control) on PC versions, that's it. Controlling Crysis on a pad is hard, controlling Assassin's Creed is not. I've played enough Goldeneye on the N64 to be a pro with the pad (obviously beating mouse + keyboard combo players in deathmatches is a different story) and it's all about learning to use it. People whine about console controllers being inaccurate when they're not even giving them a chance. But why try harder when you already know how to use something else? That's why this goes both ways, why not have keyboard and mouse support for console games? Consoles have USB ports nowadays. You could have K+M listed next to those people's names who are using that combo just like in Mario Kart Wii you get a wheel next to those who use the wheel because supposedly you don't control as well with it. Maybe create a filter to create servers that only work with game pads then. But maybe you're spreading out your user base too much then. I still want pad support BACK in my single player RPG.

---- End personal controller whine ----

OK, the game itself is great in every other way except a few key issues.

Aesthetic design. The textures are lovely, some areas look absolutely amazing, but it comes nowhere near the worlds you had in Anachronox for example. Even Beneath A Steel Sky (even though that was a 2D game) did the "futuristic world" better. You need some real life sense in the world and right now it really feels like a console game. You're running at times through empty corridors just so textures can load and you have less to load. The Flux bar in the fairly beginning of the game is a good example, the dance floor is behind a staircase and the whole place is fairly empty not to mention the U shaped weird path (probably for area loading purposes on consoles, but it just comes off as a useless twist in the road and feels like a very oldschool solution when GTAIV shows it can be done in other ways, maybe it's just the unreal engine's limitations) that leads to the bar. You need room for your AI buddies to run around in, that's true, but they already get stuck on crates during firefights. Anachronox wasn't as good a game as Mass Effect but I had a more fun time exploring the world with it's shady alleys, appartment complexes, red light district, bars, clubs, etc. It felt real unlike Mass Effect. Making simple soul-less rooms with nice textures and slapping some people in (some of which talk) doesn't make a lively world. GTAIV did this nicely btw, but I'm sure everyone knows this already. GTA3 did it very well already. The world needs believability and in Mass Effect I was hoping the next planet I went to would look more realistic or feel like home up to some degree (we're on alien planets, of course they can't look too real, but you need to have a certain sense of fake reality that makes the player feel at home, but maybe everyone just isn't so into architecture as me and they'll shrug this off as another Internet whiner bashing a great game). Mass Effect never felt real, it felt like a video game. On a console.

That's why I wanted to use the XBOX360 controller too, to not unknowingly associate the keyboard and mouse control to something more complex that you usually find on computers. But that's just my personal problem between console ports.

Another problem I have is with the UI. I never played the XBOX360 version and I understood Bioware made big changes to the UI of the PC version (one of the reasons XBOX360 controller support wasn't included) but currently it's a bit messy at first. The character equip screen could have the gun mod and maker info in tooltips when you mouseover them, it could also show all 3 group members' equipment at the same time and under it one big inventory for all the mods you have gathered so you could drag and drop them from there. If screen space is an issue in lower resolutions then have one character at a time with arrows on the left and right to scroll between your current group, and/or all group members' names at the top (because we tend to read from top to bottom, unless you really want to cater for Asian needs too). They've added shortcuts, like in a few recently analyzed games here WoW and AoC, to the numeric buttons for the PC version. This way you can set special traits to them and access them faster than on the XBOX360 through the dial menu, but I feel this doesn't alter combat too much, although with mouse aim I'm sure you can be more effective on the PC, but this game isn't about high scores.

The map is a bit odd and you can't zoom out completely in some areas which means there's almost always something to scroll. You get side missions but accessing your logs to see what you needed to do/where you needed to go could also be simplified by showing the mission on your HUD that you just picked up. I know this WoW quest-grinding methodology isn't exactly the best way to show objectives in a game where you should have been following the conversation leading up to the task, but some simplification like this could've been used. I also understand that Mass Effect tries to keep the core gameplay UI itself clean except for the radar, but why the hell doesn't the radar show a map then with all objectives and objective arrows pointing in the right direction if you're not near it?

Shepard gets flashbacks during a few points of the game and during these you see some real life footage of micro chips/circuit boards. It's a bit on edge with being done in bad taste (remember old adventure games with static backgrounds and real actors that didn't look like they fit in at all?). It's not bad but it's borderline. I never liked Red Alert's cut-scenes. Yeah, the mighty Kane isn't so mighty. It's like calling David Hayter a good voice actor.

There are lots of planets but only a certain few progress the story. Some you can't land on and others are generic landscapes where you get little missions to drive around with your Mako vehicle (which behaves very oddly but works) and do some kind of gathering, killing, etc. They're good places to find some nice gear for your team but might get a bit boring if you want to play through again. I found it odd you had "character classes" in this kind of fairly linear console RPG. I just chose the default John Shepard guy and went from there. Although I did regret not changing his first name to Jack early on but what can you do. The other characters in your party are pretty dumb and fights rely on using them well. Sometimes one of them doesn't follow me, they get stuck on crates (like mentioned above) and they get themselves killed by running out in the open a lot.

Your allies should take cover too but they don't a lot of the time, especially if you command two of them in the same place. One of them stays standing behind the other one in the open saying "destination blocked!" or something. The game has 2 things that are taken directly from Gears of War (UE3 engine) and those are the running effect (camera perspective zooms a bit) and the cover mechanic. There are obvious stone slabs and whatnot scattered around and when you press up against you when wielding a weapon, you take cover. It's not a bad thing but it would be interesting to know how these mechanics came to be implemented into the game.

I know the "Silent Hill" grain filter brings a certain fuzzyness which is good (without it things would look too .. sharp and "machine-like" if you have any idea what I'm trying to get at) but the odd shadows at the left and right sides of the screen are weird. I hated the same effect in Burnout Paradise where it occurred at the top and bottom. I don't know what the idea is, maybe it's to focus on what's going on in the middle of the screen but it's not good. These are things that different people feel differently about but it really annoys me just like it does in Burnout Paradise. Some people found the Bloom effect in Age of Conan to be annoying, I thought it was great, although too taxing on the system to keep on. Maybe this shadow thing in Mass Effect could've been limited to cut-scenes.

Animations don't interpolate well at times. Once again. When talking to an NPC and they finish their sentance, before they start the next one their head will usually clearly jump back to the default position. It's a subtle flick but it would look better if it moved smoothly.

Everything else in Mass Effect is great though. The story is interesting, the races are very well created (graphics and story) and explained in the Codex you carry with you. You can really learn a lot about the world and the world itself is interesting and doesn't feel fake (I mean backstory and lore, not the level design). And it's good that you don't have to read any of the codex if you don't want to. If you do however, you'll get some nice knowledge of the world. And a well designed world it is, with depth and attitude just like Bioshock.

The gunfights are good enough and even though I haven't found the modifications and level-ups to be that interesting with their WoW type "talent trees" of sorts, I'm sure they complement the gameplay well enough in the long run. Aiming is smooth and there are enough variables to keep things interesting with bullet damage, recoil, over-heating, etc. Some fights are hard though and cause frustration. I don't know if I'm supposed to be in the area yet or should I come back later. The enemies don't have any level showing and the damage numbers are hidden so you don't really know why the hell you keep dying all the time. Are the enemies too high level or do they scale? Whatever the case is, it's not explained well enough.

Conversations are very well done I have to say. The characters have personalities and are interesting to look at. Sometimes they aren't animated perfectly but in a game with so much speech as this one, it's good enough and they do show a lot of personality at times with subtle gestures like lifting an eyebrow. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune did it better but we're talking about a completely linear story and thus more time to focus on every spoken word for the development team. One thing I really like about Mass Effect's conversations are that before the last line of text has ended you get your little circle of topics (which is a lot better on the pad than with a mouse) from which you can choose a short phrase refering to generally what you will ask next and in what tone. General/main topics appear on the right whilst additional questions appear on the left. They're short enough for you to read them whilst still listening to the NPCs last lines of speech so that you can choose one even before the NPC finishes talking if you want to, this way your character is ready to continue talking without any interruptions in between immediately after the NPC has finished. It's fast and fun. People don't have a lot of useless things to say either which is good. There's a lot of talking but none of it is irrelevant.

The thing with dialog is that you can either say good things and be the good guy or you could say bad things and be the bad guy. How you handle situations determines what kind of person you are and that's nice. The system is very similar to Bioware's previous similar title Knights of The Old Republic (KoTOR). That got me thinking about the other similarities and it actually boils down to the reason I never finished KoTOR, the level design. It was the same as in Mass Effect, uninspirational mostly and linear without enough reality blended in. Theres a lot to the conversation mechanics though and that keeps it interesting, depending on how your good and bad sides are, your character might say something a bit different to what you expected through your own reply. Sometimes things do get a bit irritating when you can't say what you really want to say because either the option isn't there or it's there but it's greyed out (meaning you need to spend more talent points in charm or intimidate skills). That's annoying and they're taking this a bit too far in that respect.

I kind of wish the camera angle would be more like in Resident Evil 4, a bit over your shoulder but still showing most of your character's upper body. Currently your character fills too much of the screen in default stance (weapons holstered). When you take out your weapon the view changes to a more RE4 type of angle, which is good to emphasize action.

Oh, and as for texture loading issues on the XBOX360 version, I've only had it happen once or twice and only for a few seconds at most. Nothing compared to Age of Conan. The Unreal Engine loads textures when you enter a new level in Unreal Tournament 3 so with this limitedly seamless world (elevators load sections somehow but sometimes you get loading pauses with a disc icon in the middle of the screen in addition to the elevator ride) I guess it needs to load textures at some point. All in all I'm fairly happy with how little loading the game has (or how well it's been hidden) with the Unreal Engine (highly modified engine I'm sure) even though I think the core engine itself doesn't support seamless gameplay directly. Update: I've started seeing low resolution textures on cut-scenes (like a shirt on an NPC). It might be that the textures ARE low resolution but I'm more inclined to think the engine didn't load the high resolution version. I stayed and watched but it never got around to doing it either, so I'm not sure.

There are also some problems with shadows. Sometimes they flicker on character faces and look grainy due to the post-processing filter. The characters look good otherwise though, except Shepard seems to have a dumb look always. It's because of his eyes and if they were more squinted and not as wide open, he wouldn't look so "out of it".

And I want cooperative multiplayer. It would've made things so much more interesting. I want cooperative multiplayer in every game though. When one player starts a demo both see it, whatever, it's doable but needs to be kept in mind from an early stage of development for engine limitations (of which there are none in UE3, except if Bioware modified it a lot) and gameplay mechanics like physics, puzzles and boss fights to name a few.

I like Mass Effect for the story and its slight resemblance to Anachronox and Deus Ex, but the world just isn't convincing for me. It looks great with Unreal Engine 3 running it but sometimes you feel like you're running down an empty corridor just because of console limitations. There are rooms that repeat themselves and empty areas with a few chairs and NPCs. I want to see it to the end though but it's slightly uninspirational. That's the only real flaw that I can think of, the others are just minor things only noted because this is a game design blog game analysis and not a fucking game review. The "levels" need more free roaming space (I'm not talking about the boring looking empty planets you do side-missions on) and need to be more logical/closer to real life. Once again, I understand it's alien technology but you can't make empty boxes as rooms and claim "these aliens had no sense of design!" when clearly the design team had a lack of inspiration/time. It's still a game but it needs to feel just real enough to take you on a journey. That journey is a fairly uninspirational cliché space rampage (the textures and architecture isn't that hard to come up with when it's all been done before already) but with a very interesting story and some nice gameplay mechanics.

Update: Looking back at the game later on, I think if it didn't have the excellent story that it does I wouldn't have even played past the first few hours. The fighting is mediocre, levelling up doesn't seem like something you want to specifically strive for and the level design is terrible as stated above.