Reactions to Mass Effect 2
By Jake Kessler

I recently finished my second playthrough of BioWare’s long-awaited sequel to its hit RPG/shooter, Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 picks up where the first game leaves off, shortly after the human Commander Shepard saves the Citadel space station from the terrible threat of the Reapers. I played the game on the PC, although most of what I observe should apply to console versions of the game as well.

In this article, I will discuss several aspects of the game, including what’s changed from the first Mass Effect, how the game’s narrative is handled, and its controversial romance system. A word of warning before we proceed: There may be some light spoilers of both games, particularly during my discussion of Mass Effect 2’s plot. If you have not yet played Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2 and you want to be surprised, perhaps you should skip over those sections.

Mass Effect 2 at a Glance

If you’ve never heard of Mass Effect 2, the game is a loose hybrid between an RPG (role-playing game) and a first-person shooter. Like its predecessor, Mass Effect, it takes an average of about 20-25 total hours to complete.

The combat system in the game is based around shooting enemies with weapons and using different class-specific special abilities, many of which carry over from the first game. Abilities in the Mass Effect series are grouped into three ‘schools’ or categories: basic fighting abilities, like specialty bullets or shots; biotic abilities, which are telekinetic in nature and include lifting or throwing enemies; and tech abilities, which involve using technology or interfering with enemy technology. The six classes available in both games (listed in order of complexity to play) are combinations of these schools:

• Soldiers—pure fighter class
• Infiltrator—hybrid fighter/tech class (sniper)
• Vanguard—hybrid fighter/biotic class (Jedi)
• Sentinel—hybrid tech/biotic class
• Adept—pure biotic class
• Engineer—pure tech class

The main arc of the game involves recruiting new team members based on a list of dossiers provided at the beginning. The player must seek out each individual on the list and convince them to join the mission.

So What’s Different?

Several things have changed in BioWare’s approach to Mass Effect 2 over the first game. To start, there is nowhere near the amount of optional ‘side content’ that there was before. The core game still takes about 20 hours and change to beat, but where earning the Completionist achievement in the first Mass Effect might have added another 10 or more hours to the game, in Mass Effect 2 the optional content takes less than half as long.

Many of the mechanical systems in the game have also been simplified in order to streamline the player’s experience. For example: rather than sift through an arsenal of literally dozens of almost-identical weapons and armor sets, the player only has to manage a few set variations on each piece. The entire buying and selling of gear process has been removed, with NPC shops now only selling a small number of upgrades and souvenirs. In a large sense, the combat aspect of the game as a whole has been heavily stripped down; Mass Effect 2 seems to involve more talking and less shooting than its predecessor.

The other big difference worth mentioning is the scope of the missions. In the first game, the progression of the game revolved around a number of primary missions, each of which was composed of multiple elaborate sublevels and took several hours to complete. These missions felt like acts in a play; they were long and heavy, and the player had a real sense that the state of the game had changed after each one. By contrast, progression in Mass Effect 2 is broken down into a much larger number of bite-sized missions, each perhaps 20-40 minutes long. Presumably, this approach is intended to make the game more friendly to people who only have an hour or two to invest at a time, although the downside is that each individual mission doesn’t feel all that important.

The Adventure Continues

As I’ve already alluded, the story in Mass Effect 2 takes on a slightly different scope over the original. Being a sequel, the new game is built on the assumption that the player probably already played the first Mass Effect. This means that the burden of world-building—establishing things like who Shepard is, what the major races in the galaxy are like, and where humanity fits into things—is not as large, and not as much time has to be devoted in-game to illustrating it.

Mass Effect 2 also takes on a darker look and feel in some ways from the first game, with the player’s Commander Shepard now working for Cerberus, an enigmatic pro-human paramilitary group Shepard previously fought against. This changes the way Shepard is treated by his companions and by the galaxy at large—Cerberus is hated and feared in most circles, and teaming up with them costs Shepard some former allies. Working for Cerberus changes the setting of the game as well: most of the action now occurs in dark alleys and empty warehouses, or on remote colony worlds—in short, far out of the public eye. Whereas in the first game Shepard was the hero and poster child for both humanity and the larger galactic community, this time around it’s supposed to be a secret Shepard is even alive.

One way this manifests is in the elimination of the Citadel as the main plot hub. (In case you’ve forgotten, the Citadel is a massive, city-sized space station that serves as the de facto capital of the galactic community. It’s ruled by a Council of ambassadors from various races.) In the first Mass Effect, roughly the first five hours of the game were spent running around the Citadel, completing various micro-missions and having NPCs tell you either how wonderful you are or how much humanity’s public image was riding on your success. Only after the first act of the game was finished was the player released into the larger ‘open world’ of the game and allowed to travel to other planets.

By contrast, in Mass Effect 2 the player is given a ship and released into the ‘open world’ as soon as the prologue (roughly the first hour of the game) is completed. The successive missions of the game are based around smaller hubs on different planets, rather than on the singular megalopolis of the Citadel. There is also less interconnectivity between missions and planets—that is to say, there are fewer reasons to return to a planet once you leave. From a gameplay standpoint, this approach serves to eliminate a lot of time the player would have spent running back and forth all over the Citadel or between planets, theoretically replacing that time with actual gameplay.

Characters Welcome

Mass Effect 2 tends to be somewhat more disjointed than its predecessor. This is largely due to its handling of character recruitment. As I’ve already pointed out, the majority of the game is spent seeking out and recruiting each of Shepard’s various squad members. Each of these characters has his or her own backstory, which manifests in an initial mission Shepard must complete in order to recruit the chararacter, and a secondary (optional) mission Shepard can complete to gain the character’s full loyalty. The missions and backstories are well crafted, but they don’t connect well with one another or with the larger plot of the game. These are ten strangers who don’t really have anything in common except that they are specialists at what they do and Shepard wants to recruit them for the larger mission. The result is a series of unconnected mini-stories that fall within the same continuity but don’t directly tie back into the main plot, similar to questing in games like World of Warcraft. If Mass Effect was a five-act play, then Mass Effect 2 is procession of short skits.



(This is a backwards step, in my opinion, from the way character recruitment was handled in the first game: there, you encountered and recruited team members as you went along, and they joined up with you because for the most part they each already had a vested interest in the larger plot. Liara T’Soni, for example, ends up working with you in order to help take down her mother Benezia, who is one of the central villains—Liara has a vested interest in her mother’s downfall, and therefore in the larger mission. Contrast with that the character of Jack in Mass Effect 2, who has no connection to the threat of the Collectors, who actively distrusts Cerberus and wants nothing to do with you, and whom you break out of prison and strong-arm into working for you specifically because she’s a talented biotic.)

One final thing that helped make Mass Effect’s story so immersive but is lamentably absent from Mass Effect 2 is the force of personality behind its main villain. In Mass Effect, the chief antagonist Shepard is pitted against is Saren, a rogue warrior who once held Shepard’s own rank of Spectre but who has pledged himself to leading the forces of the enemy. Saren is not the ‘big-bad’ or ultimate villain in the game’s story; he is more a Darth Vader sort of character, a majordomo who serves as the face of the enemy for the player. Saren’s interactions with Shepard are some of the coolest scenes in the game, and they help to breathe personality into the enemy.

Mass Effect 2 has no such character; the ‘big-bad’ Harbinger and his minions the Collectors don’t really have any face-to-face confrontations with Shepard as the game progresses, and it’s harder for the player to relate to that conflict as a result. Replacing this interaction is a series of mini-boss encounters in which Harbinger possesses a random Collector and transforms that unit into a more powerful enemy. When this happens, Harbinger has a series of one-liners he shouts menacingly at Shepard—such as “This hurts you,” and “If I must tear you apart, Shepard, I will.” Shepard doesn’t respond to these declarations, however, so that element of conversation is never present.

Similarly, the gratification of finally getting to fight and defeat Saren at the end of Mass Effect is denied here; Shepard will have killed dozens of Harbinger’s avatars by the end of the game, and there is no final battle against Harbinger himself. That moment of closure is put off, with Harbinger himself escaping as you fight some other giant monster instead. The game’s resolution bears a resemblance in this way to that of The Empire Strikes Back—the overall feeling is that the real confrontation with the enemy remains just around the corner in the trilogy’s inevitable third installment.

Love Me, Do

One feature that’s back in Mass Effect 2 is the steamy romance system that garnered so much controversy in the first game. Perhaps in reaction to that backlash, the romance scenes in this game have been cleaned up a little over the original. Characters in Mass Effect 2 keep most of their clothes on, and although sex is referenced and alluded to many times, it always takes place off-screen. This is a significant change from the original game, which included several PG-13 love scenes (characters clearly naked and going at it, but no particular body parts visible).

As a consolation, the sequel does include an interesting feature that becomes available after beating the game. Assuming both Shepard and the player’s chosen mate survives the final mission (more on this below), the player can then call his or her lover up to Shepard’s cabin for a bizarre sort of cuddle session. The love interest appears seated on the couch, and the player can interact with them in several scripted ways: the player can either seat Shepard next to the other character on the couch; or get the other character to sit on Shepard’s lap; or else get the two of them to lay next to one another on the bed, fully clothed and holding each other’s arms. In each of these sequences, neither Shepard nor the other characters speak at all. The overall feel of the scenes is rather strange, and more like playing with dolls than watching real people interact.

One other interesting omission in Mass Effect 2 is the awkward confrontation that could arise in the first game if the player pursued multiple love interests. In the first Mass Effect, this triangle would come to head shortly before the final mission, with the two prospective love interests cornering Shepard on the ship and forcing him to choose between them. In Mass Effect 2, by contrast, this decision is not as strongly forced. In the event that the player does pursue multiple lovers, at some point they will each refuse to speak to Shepard any further until Shepard dismisses one of them. Not only can this decision be made at the player’s leisure, but the losing party tends to be rather unfazed by the rejection, agreeing with Shepard that it’s for the best that they remain just friends. The result of this change is that the weight of that decision over whose love scene to watch is largely defused.

Live and Let Die

A similar decision that is taken somewhat out of the player’s hands in Mass Effect 2 is the choice of which characters live or die in the story. In the first game, the capacity existed for several characters to die in the progression of the plot. The first of these was Wrex, an alien crewmember who becomes outraged when Shepard is tasked with destroying a facility which could cure a terrible disease that affects Wrex’s race. Depending on the choices the player makes in that confrontation, either Shepard is able to calm Wrex to the point where the alien goes along with the mission despite his reservations, or else Wrex turns on the group and Shepard’s team is forced to kill him. The second such decision comes later in the same mission, when the player must choose one of two team members to rescue in a limited, leaving the other behind as a nuclear bomb goes off. In each of these instances, the deaths of the characters is directly on the player’s hands, as the player made a conscious choice of who lived and died.

Life and death decisions are handled somewhat differently in Mass Effect 2, as Shepard is never again put in a position of deciding whether to kill a character off. Instead, whether or not each character survives the game’s climactic final mission is contingent on a series of indirect decisions the player has made previously in the game.

First, in the cutscene that leads into the final mission, a ship-to-ship battle occurs between Shepard’s flagship the Normandy and the hive-like Collector ship. Up to three characters can potentially die during the battle, as different parts of the ship sustain damage depending on which upgrades the player has or hasn’t researched. Which characters are at risk in this sequence is somewhat randomized, but if all the necessary upgrades to the Normandy have been researched prior to launching the mission, everybody survives.

Next, when Shepard and his team reach the Collector base station, the player has to divide up his surviving characters into multiple groups that will infiltrate the station separately. The player must choose a tech specialist to sneak in through a duct, and a leader for the secondary team. If the player chooses a character who is less than optimal for the job (or if Shepard hasn’t completed one of the chosen characters’ optional loyalty quest), then either the chosen characters or someone they are responsible for will die. Finally, in one of the last sequences of the mission, the team regroups and again divides up: a biotic specialist must escort Shepard’s team through a dangerous area, while a secondary team must lead any rescued prisoners back to the Normandy. Again, if the player chooses a character who is less than optimal for the job (or if Shepard hasn’t completed one of the chosen characters’ optional loyalty quest), then either the chosen characters or someone they are responsible for will die.

So the choice of who lives and dies is still in the player’s hands in Mass Effect 2, but the choices and their consequences have a less direct relationship. These choices this time around are more like leadership decisions—which team member to trust with which responsibility. The most significant difference here is that, unlike in the original Mass Effect, it is indeed possible to save everybody (earning the “Nobody Left Behind” achievement) if the player completes all the optional loyalty quests, fully upgrades the Normandy and chooses the right individuals for each job.

One Easy Thing I’d Change

Not to nitpick here, but one very simple thing I’d have done differently would be to make the opening cutscene skipable. It’s one of the few sequences in the game that the player can’t skip past by pressing the spacebar, and it can be aggravating to sit through if the player wants to start multiple characters. Between the opening sequence, character creation and any loading screens, it’s a good fifteen minutes after starting a new game that the player actually gets to shoot anything, and being able to cut that down on repeated playthroughs would be nice.

Final Thoughts

Mass Effect 2 exemplifies well-polished and compelling role-play narrative complimented by enjoyable shooter-based combat. It is a strong sequel that won’t disappoint most fans of the original Mass Effect (although some players might miss the more intricate nature of combat from the first game). Despite the differences I’ve highlighted between the two, the new game is still lots of fun to play. I have myself beaten the game twice and I am now a third of the way through my third playthrough.

All in all, Mass Effect 2 is a strong continuation of the Mass Effect franchise. Being that it does rely heavily on the themes, settings and events established in the first game, I don’t recommend the new title as a point of entry for players who are brand new the series, but if you played Mass Effect and loved it, you’ll probably love Mass Effect 2 just as much.

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