When Mass Effect was released, I noted that I would love to see a game like this (or, really, this very game) with much of the combat stripped away, putting the gameplay emphasis on the already-excellent dialogue system that provides a framework for hugely enjoyable social interactions. You can help characters, confound them, double-cross them–it was, and it remains, the best part of the game for me.

But I will say this: while I would still be enormously interested in a game–many games!–such as the one I describe, I picked up Demiurge Studios’ PC version of Mass Effect this week and it almost feels like a whole new game. The combat, while still not the draw of the game for me, has gone from being alternately tolerable and irritating to being, for the most part, enjoyable.

That sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it’s not. I am hugely impressed with how Demiurge has handled this, across the board. Interface systems have been hugely improved, and the sheer amount of constant control you have over your weapons, abilities, and teammates is empowering. As much as I have no doubt BioWare designed Mass Effect from the beginning for an Xbox 360 controller, the company’s dozen years of PC history remains evident and, in my opinion, been allowed to more fully shine through in this version.

After all, Mass Effect features a whole lot of stuff–teammates who can be proactively directed if you desired, some half-dozen categories of equipment, all of which can be upgraded, a full skill and ability tree, plenty of items to collect, lots of simultaneous quests to track, and so on. It isn’t, obviously, the most complex example of its genre, but there’s a lot of mechanical meat on its gameplay bones, and I feel more in control of it here.

Admittedly, all of those buttons and options can be disorienting at first. That’s just part of the unfortunate but intrinsic unfriendliness of the PC as a gaming platform, and even for someone like me who has been playing games on the computer for longer than he’s been playing them on anything else, it is the type of thing that, in this multiplatform age, makes one wonder, “Why aren’t I just doing this with a controller again?”

But then I remembered that I had a similar reaction with the Xbox 360 version, but from the opposite angle–I felt initially frustrated by feeling like I didn’t have enough of the game’s options at my fingers’ immediate disposal. In both cases, I eventually got over it, but after that initial period the PC version feels more natural. (And I should note that, these days, I undoubtedly play more core games on my consoles than on my PC.)

In short, it feels like Mass Effect has come home. It makes me sincerely hope that, now that BioWare is, for better or for worse, part of The EA Machine, and not signed with Microsoft under a first-party publishing agreement, Mass Effect 2 will see a simultaneous PC release.

(On that topic, it is fairly baffling that Microsoft continues to claim it wants to reinvigorate PC gaming, but also continues to delay PC versions of its high-profile games, despite the fact that both Windows and Xbox 360 are Microsoft platforms. Does Microsoft really think its Xbox 360 sales would be dented so heavily as a result of a simultaneous ship? And if so, what does it matter, if it still results in more people buying Microsoft-published games on Microsoft gaming platforms?)

My podcast co-hosts and I spoke with Al Reed of Demiurge Studios during our most recent episode, and I wish I would have had played the game already by that point so I could have been directly complimentary rather than simply optimistic. I did broach the topic of Mass Effect 2’s PC version shipping alongside its 360 version, and he was enthusiastic if nothing else. EA seems to be consistently more receptive to the PC lately than it has been in quite some time (it even announced a PC-exclusive followup to the critically-praised but commercially moderate Crysis), so I’m hopeful.

As an aside, I’m personally more excited about the PC platform than I have been in quite some time. Good games are coming out, the indie scene is booming, digital distribution is gaining a stronger foothold, publishers are taking more of an interest, and Valve made an encouraging pitch for the platform–very much in Valve’s own self-interest, of course, but encouraging nonetheless.

So, if you have any personal investment in the PC as a gaming environment, be it financial, nostalgic, or on principle, you owe it to yourself to reward developers who treat the platform right. I didn’t come close to completing Mass Effect on Xbox 360, but I suspect that won’t be the case this time around.

Tags: bioware, demiurge, hell yeah, mass effect, pc, ports

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.