On Authorship And Vision, or More Reasons To Love Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 is brilliant. We all know this. What I'm here to tell you today is that it's amazing for a bunch of reasons that you aren't thinking about, but that you should be. For a primer to what I'm getting at, go listen to our Mass Effect 2 special edition podcast, which you should have already done because our voices are like butter. And because you will finally understand Ben's odd relationship with fish.

We all would have been happy with a Mass Effect 2 that cleaned up some of the more egregious stupidities of the first one (the Mako and the inventory system, for starters) while clearing the high bar set by its unparalleled universe and storytelling. Nobody would have complained. Well, "nobody" in video game terms meaning "a small and easily ignored contingent of haters on the Internet".

BioWare had other ideas.

Instead of applying a few Band-Aids, the team performed major reconstructive surgery. Inventory system sucks? Gone! Mako sucks? Junk it! Progression is boring? Toss it! BioWare took one look at our expectations for the sequel, laughed, and made the game that they wanted to make. And the world is a better place for it.

I respect the studio more than ever for taking this route. It would have been far easier to do the expected, and nobody would've said boo. It takes both serious stones and a strong creative vision to mess this extensively with a successful game. BioWare took chances, set its sights high, and ended up making what will very possibly be the defining RPG of this generation.

Games are too often designed in boxes. The rules creating a military Shooter, real-time strategy game, or role-playing epic might as well be passed down on stone tablets from father to son. Who are you to deny your customers their expected skill points, randomly generated loot, and geometric XP curve? How dare you remove the safety net of a predefined narrative? I know you've been telling me that I'm responsible for the well-being of my team and the world in every RPG ever, but the ironclad plot has always determined who lives and who dies.

By stomping on convention, BioWare demonstrates something that sometimes feels lacking in gaming: authorship. Somewhere in Edmonton there is a vision for what Mass Effect is, how players interact with it, and why the limits that have traditionally bound video games don't apply to it. Mass Effect 2 feels like the antithesis of the designed-by-focus-group pablum that publisher executives love for its predictable return on investment. It's a bold statement by the developers that challenges our preconceptions as gamers, rather than catering to them.

I try to avoid hyperbole in my daily life, but we've been told for years that half of what Mass Effect 2 does is impossible. Every sequel to a game with multiple endings has to have a canon ending to the first one...unless it's Mass Effect. The fate of major story characters who are deeply entwined in the narrative has to be prescribed by the author...except for in Mass Effect. No doubt some of this towering accomplishment is made possible by the enormous piles of money dumped into the project, but all the outsourced art in the world can't craft the kind of compelling, mutable narrative found here.

As you may have guessed, I'm pretty excited about Mass Effect 2. How about you?

Next week: BioWare calls me to let me know that level progression tested poorly in focus groups and EA executives made them streamline the game against their wishes.