Mass Effect Extended Hands-On

Sep 17, 2007

Commander Hali Shepard doesn't have time for idle chatter.

Standing on the bridge of the SS Normandy, the ship she commands, the Systems Alliance Military special-forces officer snaps at her gossiping men, ordering them to shut up and act like soldiers. There's an urgent transmission coming in and she needs them to focus. They quickly comply. They know better than to cross her.

The conversation didn't have to go this way, but that's how it played out during the first five minutes of our experience with Mass Effect, developer BioWare's biggest and most ambitious role-playing game to date. Like two of the company's most beloved games - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire - Mass Effect is about choice, and you're faced with some of your biggest decisions as soon as you press the start button.

We chose her name (Hali), her look (beat-up supermodel), her background (rough-and-tumble) at the outset, and before we knew it, we were effortlessly playing her as such.

We've been peeking at Mass Effect in slow trickles for more than two years, but recently BioWare invited IGN to their Edmonton, Canada, offices to play through the first hour of the game. We finally got our unfettered hands on the massive RPG's character-creation tools, combat system, movement, menus and everything in between. While we were there, we also got a peek at some never-before-seen segments of the game, including the Citadel, the hub of galactic activity; Ferros, one of the game's many uncharted worlds; and a few other hidden gems.

BioWare has shown off the Mass Effect character-creation process before, so we won't re-hash it in detail here. But we will say that it departs from most standard RPGs straight from the start screen. In many such games, you type in a character name and move directly to a skill allocation system. Do you want to add two points to dexterity or three points to constitution? Should your paladin start with strength of 16 or 17? Mass Effect has such a system, but you won't even touch it until you've fought a few battles. BioWare wants to tell a great story, personalized for the character you create, and the early setup sequence hammers that intention home.

So far, BioWare has shown us only a male version of their hero, so we took the opportunity to create a female Cmdr. Shepard, a ruthless military veteran with shoulder-length blond hair, piercing green eyes, a hint of makeup and a nasty scar over her left eye. We're not sure how she got it, and we're not sure she'd tell us if we asked.

Born to military parents, she grew up hopping across the Milky Way from base to base and enlisted as soon as she was able. She quickly built a reputation as a tough operator who gets the job done at all costs, and she's about to learn that the Citadel Council is considering making her a Spectre, an elite enforcer tasked with keeping the galactic peace. An Infiltrator by trade, our Shepard specializes in stealth, decryption, technology and long-range combat.

Her background may sound like nothing more than a fun story, but this is Mass Effect, where who you are defines what you say, what others believe about you and, so we're told, possibly the fate of the human race.

We found that creating a character this way - choosing her look and background at the same time without a load of messy stat screens - helped invest us immediately in her story. We hit the OK button, and as the game's haunting electronic music swelled and the title screen opened, we watched our very own Cmdr. Shepard stride onto the bridge of her ship, all business. Chills.

After a brief interaction with her crew, including pilot Joker, played by Seth Green; and navigator Kaidan Alenko, played by Raphael Sbarge, who also portrayed Carth in KOTOR, Shepard listens in on a distress call coming from the surface of the planet Eden Prime. Tasked with finding a mysterious beacon, Shepard, Kaidan and a turian Spectre agent named Nihlus land on the planet and head into the thick of combat.

We won't tell you exactly how the sequence ends, but let's just say Shepard ends up back on the Normandy with a splitting headache and a lot of questions.

But before Shepard can make her way safely back to the ship, she and her fellow party members square off against a phalanx of aggressive space zombies and Geth, a lost race of intelligent machines that have been corralled by a rogue Spectre called Saren. It was our first extended opportunity to try out Mass Effect's combat system, and we came away impressed and a bit overwhelmed.

Like its dialogue system, Mass Effect's approach to combat is to give the player layer upon layer of choice while trying to make the mechanisms for making those choices as streamlined as possible. Both systems are based on "wheels" - the dialogue wheel for conversation (more on that later), and the weapon wheel and power wheel for combat.

The latter two work like this. When you first round a corner and spot a group of enemies, they'll each sport a red triangle above their heads, signaling that they mean you harm. If you think you can take them down with some simple run-and-gun moves, just squeeze the right trigger and fire away. Your squadmates will follow suit. But if you want or need to be more tactical about the situation, hold down the right bumper to bring up the power wheel.

While the wheel is overlayed, the screen pauses instantly, Matrix-style. You can still see the action and rotate the camera a full 360 degrees while the wheel is up. The power wheel shows each party member and their available powers (special abilities that can damage enemies, sabotage devices, heal party members, etc.), and as you rotate the thumbstick, you'll be able to cycle through the powers available to each party member. When you come across one you like, click the A button to choose it. Repeat the action for each member, and you'll have stacked up a chain of events that will be unleashed when you release the right bumper.

As you choose powers, you can (and should) rotate the camera with the other thumbstick in order to direct the mojo you're choosing onto specific enemies. Powers are effective on their own, but they can also be chained with other party members' powers and weapon attacks for maximum effect. For example, if you direct a Vanguard in your party to lift an enemy into the air with the throw power, you might switch to the weapon wheel and direct a soldier in your party to shoot the helpless critter while it's in the air. What's more, party members react not only to where you tell them to shoot, but also where you intend them to shoot. If you tell a Sentinel in your party to throw an enemy across the room and direct another party member to shoot it, the bullets will follow the enemy on his flight path.

We played our Cmdr. Shepard as an Infiltrator, a class that mixes some aspects of the Soldier class with the tech powers of an Engineer. At one point during our Eden Prime shootout, a berserk Geth goon lumbered toward us suddenly at breakneck speed, leveling his weapon and threatening to run us down. Shepard was toting a pistol at the time, so we quickly hit the left bumper to bring up her weapon wheel, pulled out our shotgun and buried a round in his chest at the last minute. We also could have used our overload tech power to quickly shock him into submission, but hey, we panicked.

Although its combat is technically real-time, Mass Effect's hybrid fighting system brings some of the best elements of turn-based, tactical combat to bear on what is essentially a third-person shooter. From what we've seen so far, the system is fairly simple in theory but takes time to fully master (which we didn't in the two short combat segments we were allowed to play). In the build we played, we didn't have the option to use in-game tutorials, but you will, which should make the combat system significantly easier to wrap your brain around.

Movement in Mass Effect feels like a blend of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Rainbow Six Vegas and Gears of War, which is to say you have an over-the-shoulder view of your character, you can take cover behind objects by holding the thumbstick toward a wall or object, and you can hold down the A button to run quickly in short bursts before you get fatigued.

In our brief combat time with the game (much of its first hour is filled with dialogue), the movement controls felt a bit on the floaty side, and we had trouble at times maneuvering Ms. Shepard deftly around corners. The cover system felt a bit inconsistent as well, and it took a bit of effort to figure out where and when we could duck out of the way of whizzing bullets. But the more we played, the more accustomed we grew to moving around in Mass Effect, and we hope the aiming, moving and ducking will gel after more time with the controls.

Speaking of gel, it abounds in Mass Effect. When you take damage, you'll need to apply medi-gel to heal your wounds (your party will also heal intelligently, using medi-gel when you do if they need it), and you can hack into computer systems with omni-gel, useful for opening doors and containers via a minigame. And although the combat wheels provide tactical control over the immediate situation, Mass Effect also has a traditional equipment screen where you can outfit your party members with weapons, armor, implants and other items, all of which, if visible, will show up on your character and in cut-scenes.

A quick check of our inventory system showed we were packing a sniper rifle. Sniping is an unlockable talent for Infiltrators, and getting good at using it requires skill leveling. When we tried it out as a level-one character, the scope's crosshairs were almost impossible to keep trained on our enemies, weaving across the screen like a drunken sailor. Developers told us that the rifle's aim becomes steadier and steadier as the Infiltrator levels up. It's a good thing, too, because it took all our considerable hand/eye coordination to nab just a handful of headshots.

We had fun test-driving Mass Effect's combat system, but much of what we saw at BioWare's Edmonton offices was story-related. The character interactions were unlike anything we've experienced before. The speech wheel, which pops up on the screen during conversations with party members and NPCs, is insanely simple to use, and hitting responses becomes second-nature quickly. In most RPGs, when a character addresses you, the game presents you with a list of possible responses. You choose one, and your character either speaks that line word-for-word, or it is implied that he or she said it verbatim.

In Mass Effect, the dialogue wheel gives you two or three terse response choices on the right (always consistently mapped in tone) and sometimes follow-up questions and charm/intimidate options on the left. Choose one, and your character speaks a line of dialogue that's similar in spirit to what you read but in her own, unexpected words.

From what we've been able to play so far, the experience is refreshing, and we actually looked forward to hearing what would come out of our Cmdr. Shepard's mouth next. And because we were playing as a "ruthless" character, some of the responses were definitely surprising.

In fact, we watched Mass Effect community manager Chris Preistly and project director Casey Hudson play as a similarly aligned (and far more advanced) Shepard character, and one of the dialogue exchanges resulted in Shepard putting his chrome to the dome of a particularly unsavory NPC named Fist in the Citadel and shooting him down in cold blood. Ruthless indeed.

While Priestly and Hudson roamed the Citadel, we glimpsed tall trees growing in the massive space station's vast interior and watched aircars zip past the windows. Later, in a rocky oceanic setting on the planet Virmire, we saw an alternate ending to a shocking scene we were shown at E3. Again, we can't tell you what happens, but here's a helpful hint - put points into Shepard's charm and intimidate skills if you want to be able to diffuse extremely touchy situations down the road.

Later in the Virmire sequence, you'll be asked to make a fateful decision. Do you send one of your party members along with a group of Salarian soldiers on what is essentially described as a suicide mission? It could be a death sentence, but it's a gravely important operation. Who would you send? It's situations like these that, from what we've been shown, appear to keep the tension in Mass Effect buzzing.

It's hard to get a true feel for most games in just an hour of gameplay, and a miles-deep epic RPG like Mass Effect is definitely no exception. We could spend pages talking about NPC body language and eye movement (it's usually startlingly real and in rare cases falls a bit flat), driving the Mako (few things are more satisfying that bouncing around in a tank and running over robots), radar jamming and map waypoints (they exist), and creating a hot female character (oh, it's possible). But that would just be scratching the surface.

For now, having only seen a small portion of the finished game, we can say it stands poised to deliver an incredible RPG experience that feels like you've dropped a character of your own conception into an interactive sci-fi film. We've heard complaints that Shepard's voice acting comes across as somewhat muted when compared to that of NPCs and party members. We haven't seen enough of the game yet to definitively make that call, but to us Shepard's delivery seemed to make sense. Why would a seasoned military officer and candidate for one of the most elite positions in the galaxy be flamboyant and over-the-top? Our Cmdr. Shepard spoke in measured, stern tones with a hint of anger underneath, perfect for a lifelong cold-as-ice spacer.

We've also been assured by Mass Effect head writer Drew Karpyshyn and project director Casey Hudson that the so-called uncharted worlds in the game, far-off planets and moons that can be explored at will, tie in to the overall Mass Effect story somehow and won't feel like empty fetch quests. After all, Shepard is on a mission to save the galaxy from impending doom - she shouldn't be taking the time to hunt for treasure on the outermost moon of Beta-17 Prime.

Graphically, the portions of Mass Effect we saw were quite impressive. Characters' faces were in sharp relief, gas giants swirled ominously in the sky above planet Ferros and the overall game had an intentionally film-grain feel, a feature BioWare's Jarrett Lee told us can be turned off in the game's options menu if players want a crisper look.

The first hour of Mass Effect succeeded in thrusting us into an engaging universe full of people we care about and worlds we want to explore. Given more time with the game, we hope the movement controls, aiming mechanism and cover system would have clicked quickly into place, making our combat experience feel completely smooth. Until the full game is released, we won't know for sure. But for now we can unequivocally say that Mass Effect is an RPG we can't wait to see more of.