ASHLEY! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

That was an excellent bit of storytelling. Ashley's so nice and I liked her so much, and I was romancing Kaiden because he is also really nice and likeable, and the game made me choose; made me send one of them to certain death. Powerful! Just having Ashley die wouldn't have meant as much as forcing the player to, in effect, kill her.

I think I buggered up the Liara romance at one point, because I never got the "choose between us" scene that I had read about on the Mass Effect wiki. Presumably what choked it off was the point where she said "you have some sort of relationship with Kaiden" and I said "he's very special to me" or some such, rather than being more non-committal. But he was special to me. He's so lovely.

That said, the consummation was a bit of a letdown -- not the sex scene as such (it was fine, and more would just have been awkward), but the way he kept being so damned cautious even when we were millimetres away from boinking in the cockpit. When you're on the verge of having screw-the-regulations-this-next-mission-will-probably-kill-us-all sex, the last thing you want is for your partner to call you "Commander" in a diffident sort of way as if you hadn't been flirting openly with him since the beginning of the mission.

To summarise my verdict on the game:

The Good:
-excellent voice acting
-beautiful environments
-space exploration!!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!!!
-INCREDIBLY well-realised setting
-remarkably sensible science for a videogame -- better than many hard sf novels, and better than any sf TV series I can think of
-likeable and diverse NPCs
-something which I don't think there's a word for which I will discuss later on; it's about the choices you can make as a character
-decent story
-lots of good sidequests
-diplomacy! (This is not a plus for everyone, but I love games where I can talk people out of doing the things I don't want them to do, rather than using brute force all the time. My ideal RPG character is a fighter/mage/diplomat -- in this game "biotic" substitutes for "mage", of course.)
-great dialogue
-bouncing around in the Mako on unexplored planets
-JOKER! I mentioned the NPCs already, but Joker deserves his own mention. I love him so much. It's a real shame he wasn't romanceable, but I guess it's just as well; how would you make love to him without breaking all his bones?
-racial, national, and gender diversity among the human NPCs
-good combat that leaves plenty of room for different tactics
-useful and intuitive journal system

The Bad:
-some sidequests get VERY repetitive (go to planet, drive around in the Mako till you find an Alliance base, kill Geth/Rachni/biotic terrorists, lather, rinse, repeat)
-environments ditto -- mostly the research outposts and bases and mines -- they all have exactly the same layout, with slightly different configurations of boxes on the floor. With the research outposts and military bases I can handwave it as the Alliance using standardised prefabricated units to build the shelters for their exploration teams, but that doesn't work with the mines. How hard would it have been to come up with a slightly different layout? If they'd even had two mine layouts instead of one, it would have been less notable.
-the way the inventory works is... really, really dumb. You can't drop anything or choose not to pick it up; if it's available to you at all, you have to either take it or reduce it to omni-gel, and useful as omni-gel is, it's really tedious to have to press X and A every time you run across something you don't need. Which happens a LOT in the later stages of the game. I should have the option to just not take the things I don't want, and it's stupid that I don't.
-not to mention, there was just too much stuff around. Maybe this is because I was playing on Easy difficulty; I don't know. I ended up with a million credits and nothing to spend it on, because it was so easy to pick up and carry ridiculous amounts of saleable gear.
-the button-pressing minigame for decryption is... well, I don't mind it when you're unlocking a crate or something like that. I can rationalise it as a slimmed-down representation of the hacking process. But you play the exact same minigame to survey mineral deposits, and that's just dumb.
-I played the game for over 35 hours, and I'm still not clear on how upgrades work. Consulting the manual was no bloody use.
-Driving the Mako in a wide-open environment with debris piles to investigate and no particular demands on my time is fun. Driving the Mako along a narrow, twisty channel with a certain death fall awaiting me if I go too far to the left or right, while being shot at by Geth armatures, in the middle of a story-crucial mission, with no possibility of saving along the way, is not fun. Guess which one's optional?
-also, long load times, but I don't mind those so much.

The game managed its story well, by which I mean: while the story itself is mostly linear (the order of the three major plot-crucial missions can be shuffled), I didn't feel like I was being dragged around on a leash, and while there were lots of terrific optional sidequests (and I did most of them), I didn't get that "You have to save the universe! But first, my cat is stuck up a tree" feeling I've gotten from some other games (worst offender: Oblivion).

Having an in-game justification for the minimap was a stroke of genius. That's what I call an aid to immersion.


On a more general point: it occurred to me while playing the game that designers must be constantly trying to strike a balance between first-play value and replay value. They're not always mutually exclusive, but with an RPG there's always the problem that on your second playthrough, you already know what the story is, so you can't get the thrill you got the first time around, and almost no RPG has enough depth or complexity in its story to make it worthwhile to go through a simple replay that introduces no new elements. (Notable exception: Planescape Torment, which looks significantly different the second time you play it, even if you don't change The Nameless One's behaviour at all.)

To maximise replay value, you have to include things like real choices -- by "real choices" I mean choices that have an effect either on the game world or on your character, where you must take either path A or path B and not both, and where it does make a difference which path you take. Other things that increase replay value include: unlockable benefits (e.g. you can only play Mass Effect on Hardcore difficulty after playing the game through completely at least once); different means of resolving the same quest that depend on different skillsets (Arcanum is a game that plays very differently if you play a technologist than if you play a mage); having to choose from a selection of NPCs to form your team (i.e. you can't have all of them with you at once); and morality meters, which may or may not overlap with "real choices", but definitely affect the flavour of the game (in Mass Effect, it's Paragon/Renegade; in KOTOR, Light Side/Dark Side; Torment had nine possible alignments which affected which items you could use).

To maximise first play value, you have to make sure that there is no essential element of the game that is blocked off from a player who makes particular choices -- be they story-related, related to character skills, NPC-related, or what-have-you. And oftentimes, it seems that the things that frustrate me about CRPGs are the story and level design elements that get fudged in order to increase first play value at the expense of replay value. There's no particular reason why every option should be open to every character regardless of their skills. Sure, flexibility is good -- it's nice to have the option to either pick the lock of the door or blow it up with a grenade -- but in some cases, I feel the game should just say "look, this bit's for people who can shoot guns. If you can't shoot a gun, bugger off." Life is not perfectly flexible, and when games are perfectly flexible so as to conveniently fit whatever skillset you happen to have, I feel condescended to. I don't have to get everything on my first playthrough, guys. Not if that means breaking my suspension of disbelief.

I also tend to think of cutscenes and voiced dialogue as maximising first-play value, but in the case of Mass Effect, I'm not so sure. Maybe because they put a lot of effort into making sure that the actors doing the dialogue would be good, and would have a diverse range of voices; and the dialogue itself is well-written, and the choices your character makes, both in action and in dialogue, change what other characters say.

I certainly intend to replay Mass Effect at some stage, though probably not for a while; I want the experience of the first play to fade a little bit so that the whole thing doesn't feel like so much deja vu. It's a flawed game in some ways, but the flaws are mostly minor and technical; overall, it's superb.