Xbox 360
After a rough start, this console is definitely coming along. There were a lot of games shown, though only a few interested me personally. The graphics are definitely good in everything I saw, but there's just this annoying feeling like something in that hardware is holding it back a bit – there's always either aliasing or low frame rates--or something of the kind making the games look less smooth than what I saw in the PlayStation 3 pavilion. By contrast, the PS3 graphics that were playable (almost) all looked totally effortless, anti-aliased, and running 60fps. This could just be a false impression, but that's honestly what it felt like.
Mass Effect
Type of demo: playable, driven by developer, group
Length of demo: 20 minutes
Location: BioWare meeting rooms
Overall impression: positive
I got a behind-closed-doors demo of this by BioWare, much like GameSpot, IGN, etc. This is, by far, the game I'm most excited about at E3 (okay, other than Metal Gear Solid 4, but that was all trailers). Mass Effect is an action RPG set far in the future. First, the demonstrator showed a storyline gameplay sequence, with the main character, a sci-fi super-badass and his two helpers (a human female and an alien) getting some information from a bartender in a 30-mile-long Halo-esque space station. The graphics were running using the Unreal 3 engine. Characters looked awesome, with creased faces, and the space station had a dark, menacing sci-fi look to it. Overall, the art style was actually quite a bit like Halo cutscenes that take place on space ships, but obviously pumped way, way, WAY up for Xbox 360 hardware. There was, however, some aliasing and some fairly distracting shadow artifacts.
In this story gameplay sequence, the developer showed off the game's dialogue system. The twist here is as follows. When someone says something to the main character, the player gets choices on how to respond, a-la Star Wars: KOTOR. However, the choices actually given on-screen are short, like thought patterns: "I don't think so," "Don't make me hurt you," etc. The idea is for the player to quickly pick the answer, since it represents the emotion behind the answer, at which point the character actually voices this using a longer sentence – one can't tell what that's actually going to be, as it converts the emotion of what the player picked into actual wording, which may invoke concepts and context that haven’t even come about yet over the course of the game. For instance, if I pick the choice “Tell me, or you’ll be sorry,” the actual spoken line may involve an elaborate threat based on the heretofore unknown personal background of the person with which I’m speaking. The idea, I think, is to eliminate lengthy reading and make the dialogue flow smoothly and in real-time, as much as possible. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I have seen this technique used once before, in the flawed but landmark adventure game Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit in
We went through a couple of conversations like that. Cool. Then, the dev showed the Mass Effect world map, with hundreds of worlds, which can be explored at any time, supposedly. He also said there would be downloadable worlds on Xbox Live, but couldn't say anything about the pricing. Finally, he went into a dungeon for a storyline-advancing crawl. This dungeon was again Halo-esque in its size. It was an overgrown man-made structure, clearly meant to have an ancient look to it. The view during fighting is a Resident Evil 4-like over-the-shoulder one, which makes it look like a shooter. Upon detecting some enemies in the distance, the player then did the coolest thing – he paused the action, then teleported to the female and alien minions and picked two spots for them to move to in order to flank the enemies in the next fight. He then unpaused the game. The two henchmen circled around and helped kill the enemies more easily due to the flanking, using a piece of deformable overhead terrain to do so.
While this glimpse of combat was fleeting, some impressions were definitely made. Artistically, it looked like Halo far more than Jade Empire. The selection of main weapon is made to appear much more intimate than doing the same in previous BioWare games, because of the over-the-shoulder view. The henchmen control feature looked like it adds a nice tactical touch that makes this RPG feel more like a tactical shooter than a D&D-based, well, RPG. We were also told the gun aiming would be done in real-time, without lockon.
The demo also revealed some tantalizing possibilities in terms of the game’s storyline, which is, as usual, one of the most promising aspects of this BioWare game. The player takes the role of Shepard, an agent in charge of protecting the galaxy against threats. He believes he has discovered something in the universe’s past that is so dark and vast, that it may have the direst possible implications for life in general. (Yes, I know, that’s very vague, but what can I do?) What he’s trying to prevent, as this agency’s only human member, is so awful that things seen as “evil” or “immoral” by the average Star Wars fan may be acceptable means to an end. Thus lies Mass Effect’s morality system, which BioWare promises us to be far less black-and-white than what has been seen so far in its Star Wars and other games. In particular, it was mentioned that Shepard may get a chance to destroy an entire planet in his quest to prevent the Really Bad Thing from happening. Naturally, that choice may not endear the rest of the world’s species to humans.
The game has no release date, but the plan is to release it “within one year,” with two more games in the series to come out before the Xbox 360’s lifecycle ends. While this is currently a 360 exclusive, I would pretty much count on a PC port to come out at some point, given BioWare’s recent history.
