I was a fool to ignore Mass Effect for 17 years
After 17 long years, I have finally gotten around to trying Mass Effect. For the entirety of my childhood and well into my teenage and later years, I had heard about this supposedly great game made by a once-amazing studio, but never ventured to play it for literally no reason.
But now, having played the first game for a few hours, I've come to realize my mistake and how much of a fool I was for sleeping on what could very well be my favorite RPG yet.
Those of you who have visited the site before and read up on my ramblings should know by now how much I love RPGs. I constantly highlight all the good and bad things about each individual RPG I come across, analyzing them from head to toe and theorizing about what could've been done better. This genre is thus a special one to me, one that I continue to scrutinize even outside of work, searching for that one game to rule them all.
I cannot fathom how many times I had googled “good RPG like game X or Y,” always failing to take into account the amazing games that were made by the pioneers of the industry. Sure, I had played a lot of BioWare games, including those it had made over 20 years ago, like the Baldur's Gate titles, but I never, for no particular reason, tried out Mass Effect.
When I was in elementary school, I'd come home, get online by whatever means I had at that time, and read up about all the great games I could not play (on account of my crappy PC with a Rage 128 GPU and less than a gig of RAM). Mass Effect came up time and again, alongside the likes of The Witcher 2, Skyrim, and so on.
Everyone who was anyone in the RPG sphere played this series, praising its story, romance options, and choice-and-consequence systems, which I was intrigued by but never really captivated. In time, I would get a better PC, start playing games religiously from around 2013 onward, beating The Witcher 2 and 3 a dozen times, playing even Skyrim, Oblivion, and everything in between. Not a single Western RPG had been left unexperienced, that is, except Mass Effect.
And it wouldn't be until these past couple of days, in the big 2025 (right at its very end) that I'd finally pick the game up.
Man, have I been missing out.
I initially expected this to be a game with a pre-set, silent protagonist in a run-of-the-mill sci-fi setting not far removed from anything I'd read, seen, or played before. It would turn out that no, Emilia Shepard isn't silent, and while she's half-pre-written (much like V in Cyberpunk 2077), the roleplay options remain nonetheless endless.
The graphics in the Legendary Edition are nothing short of breathtaking, whereas the art direction and style are a whole other story in and of themselves. From the cutscenes to the traversable areas to the nature of this amazing world itself, I keep finding myself just staring at things, which are no doubt even more beautiful when displayed in HDR on an OLED screen.
Everything in this game seems to have been meticulously crafted with the utmost care, while even the most rudimentary prop in the environment carries artistic merit. The voice acting, writing, story—everything is beyond fantastic. It has gripped me with a force greater than I had thought possible, finally scratching that RPG itch I have long carried with me (i.e., ever since Baldur's Gate 3 came out).
And it's only the first game. There are three of these things, coupled with dozens of DLC that come pre-installed with the Legendary Edition, and I've only begun to scratch the surface of this stellar (pun intended) experience that stretches out across the cosmos, or at least our rather big milky chunk of it.
It's a refreshing moment in my gaming career, so refreshing that I had to tell you all about it. So far, I've yet to find a single flaw in the game's design, which was likely refined a bit over the original 2008 release. In particular, I am quite taken aback by the fluidity of the combat, the smooth movement, and how satisfying fights actually are.
RPGs are keen on telling you a story, but often sacrifice mechanical depth for the sake of a good narrative.
Mass Effect delivers on both and does it more than well, and is sure to keep me up for countless nights until I, too, can join the conversation about how great BioWare used to be.
The post I was a fool to ignore Mass Effect for 17 years appeared first on Destructoid.
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