Mass Effect 2 debrief

Before I say anything else about Mass Effect 2, I'll say this: I played the whole thing. I can't say the same about many games, especially those that nobody is paying me to play. All told, it took just under 30 hours. I explored every star system I could get to. I completed every mission I found. Whatever criticisms I am about to make, that counts for something.

After all of it, I'm still not sure what to make of the game. None of my complaints about ME2's interface ever subsided. Quite the contrary, I kept discovering more of them. Some of the choices that BioWare makes, while not terribly significant on their own, defy logic. Consider: To upgrade your equipment, you need to mine planets for natural resources. This takes the form of a fairly boring mini-game.

That picture is from the PC version, but it looks the same on the 360 version. I'd like you to take note of the graphs on the right side of the screen. The one on the top shows the prevalence of each type of mineral as detected by your crosshair, which you can see on the surface of the planet to the left. As you move that target around, you'll see spikes and dips in the measurements.

You can tell, relatively, that you're likely to find a certain element when there's a spike. But you have no idea how much. There are no numbers assigned to each step on that scale. Further, the Y-axis is represented in a quasi-3D way, seeming to lean into the screen and away from the player. The vertical segments shrink as the chart gets higher, which may indicate a logarithmic scale, but probably not. Lastly, the graduations fade into nothingness instead of reaching a hard upper limit. It does not make sense.

At least that scale doesn't really need to make sense. All you need to know is that when there's a spike above Palladium, you fire off a probe. Boom -- you've got Palladium. The designers have exchanged usability for flashiness, sure, but it doesn't really harm the experience. Your goal is to mine for resources, and you can do that.

Such is not the case with the green bars underneath it. Those indicate, or are supposed to indicate, the quantity of each element that you already have. The quantities are represented as bar graphs -- they start empty, and fill up with a solid green color as you acquire more of each resource.

It may be hard to tell unless you click on the image above, but take a look at those bars and the numbers beneath them. The bars for Iridium, Platinum, and Palladium are all full, and yet their actual quantities vary: 35149, 41613, and 42602. respectively. Furthermore, the leftmost resource bar appears at least half-full, yet the count is only 14660. What's going on here?

After playing the whole game, I can safely say that the answer to that question is: who the hell knows. All of the bars fill up by the time you get about 25000 of each resource, but there is not actually a limit to how much you can collect. By the later stages of the game, I was rolling deep with about 150000 of everything. The bar graphs had long since ceased to be useful.

There I go again -- I intended to write a post about my fairly positive top-level impressions of Mass Effect 2, and ended up dissecting a minor point. It's not that the game rose or fell on the basis of the mining mini-game, it's that the minimal information that the mining mini-game needed to communicate to the player was totally garbled.

I thought it was perfect when, at the end of the credits, I was presented with another choice. I could either continue the game I'd been playing, and finish exploring the galaxy and completing sidequests, or import my powered-up Shepard into a fresh playthrough. Pretty basic, right? But when I saw the button prompts, I was only about 70% sure which was which. There was "(A) Continue" and "(B) Main Menu."

In other words, only one of the button functions I was presented corresponded to the options I'd been given. The other one bore no relation to what I might have been trying to do. The description of my choices had not included the main menu. I had no idea what might result from my inputs, thanks to the confusing, contradictory, and incomplete information on the screen.

And that was Mass Effect 2 in a nutshell.

Year in Review: The best of the blog

Above: Actually the best of Insult Swordfighting.

All this week, we'll be recapping the year that was. First up: the best of Insult Swordfighting, 2010.

It's been a strange year. My output was lower than usual. I spent a couple of months without playing anything at all. When I did play games, I often felt uninspired, or even gloomy. Without making things weird between us, I'll just say that a lot happened this year, personally and professionally, that made me question the role of video games in my life. But it's all good. As we head into 2011, I'm excited about the way things are going, and I'm looking forward to playing and writing a lot more.

Without further ado, here are some of the better Insult Swordfighting posts you may have missed from 2010:

January: Bayonetta. How is it possible for one game to be so awesome, yet so embarrassing?

February: I returned from the disabled list. If you're wondering, I have made nearly a full recovery. The doctor and my occupational therapist both told me that it's extremely rare for people to heal so well from this type of injury.

March: I made the first of many impassioned defenses of Heavy Rain. And I spent way too much time writing about PAX East. Speaking of which, I still haven't gotten my pass for the next one.

April: I was about to vanish from blogging for awhile. One reason was Peggle.

May: N/A

June: What's with the collectibles in Alan Wake? Plus, my banned review of Splinter Cell: Conviction finally saw daylight.

July: I think a lot of people thought I was trying to stick it to Ebert, but actually this post was about how much I disliked Limbo, and the critical conversation surrounding it.

August: Seriously, I didn't like Limbo.

September: Why did Metroid: Other M wait until after the closing credits to get good?

October: 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die is released, becomes a runaway bestseller, and revenue from its sales through my Amazon Associates account makes me an instant millionaire.

November: "The Year in Swooning" is always fun.

December: My vendetta against BioWare knows no bounds. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I stayed up until 4:30 AM on Sunday playing Mass Effect 2.)

Tomorrow: Year-end superlatives.

Mass Effect 2

Above: Mass Effect 2 cast members plan their revenge against me for this post.

In advance of turning in my list of the year's top games, I decided to play a little catch-up this weekend. What better place to start, I thought, than with Mass Effect 2, one of the best-reviewed games of the year, and one of my favorite excerpts from this year's "Year in Swooning" quiz?

Despite Chris Buffa's command that I buy it immediately, I skipped ME2 the first time around. You may remember that I hated the original. That's not a word I use often, or lightly. I seem to have a mental block when it comes to BioWare, and it didn't seem fair to me or to them to keep reviewing their games when I'm just going to say the same things over and over. So Maddy reviewed ME2 for the Phoenix and loved it, and I went about my merry way.

Still, with the year ending, people starting to tweet about their best games of the year, and the price having dropped to $20, I figured: what the hell. Let's give Mass Effect 2 a try. I picked it up on Friday and put about six mostly painless hours into it over the weekend. Without question, it is a huge improvement over the original. But I remain baffled by so many of the design decisions, most of which have the effect of making the game hard to play. I don't mean that the game is difficult in the traditional sense, I mean that performing the most basic actions is always twice as complicated as it needs to be.

Over a year has passed since Krystian Majewski's epic three-part dismantling of the interface in Mass Effect 1, and despite minor improvements in this regard, that's still your best resource for understanding how and why Mass Effect 2's interaction design fails. When it comes to maintaining a consistent control scheme, to conveying appropriate information to the player, and making it easy to parse your character data, BioWare doesn't get the most basic things right, not even by accident.

This is but a sampling of the problems I encountered in my time playing Mass Effect 2.

Press A to confirm, or press B to... confirm?

Mass Effect 2 likes to change what buttons do from one screen to the next. By now, it is accepted convention that on the Xbox 360 controller, the green A button means "yes," "accept," "confirm," and so on. The red B button means "no," "deny," "cancel," and so on. Sometimes this is the case in ME2, and sometimes it isn't. When you select a costume for Shepard, the icons helpfully tell you "(B) Confirm." I think this is the first game in history to do that.

In other screens, the game doubles up on functions. At the end of each mission is a debrief screen that runs through your stats. When you scroll to the last menu option, you read "Exit (A)." And at the bottom of the screen, you also read "(B) Exit." That's hardly game-breaking, since it's hard to imagine what else you would want to do at that point. But it's BioWare's approach in a nutshell: never use one button when two will do.

Bait and switch

There are two primary modes of playing Mass Effect 2. Either you're walking around and talking to other characters, or you are shooting other characters. Both modes look exactly the same. They control the same, at least as far as moving your character goes. They transition from one to another seamlessly. Yet, when you move from one to another, certain buttons swap functions. Some things stop working. It is bizarre.

In non-combat play, clicking the right stick will bring up a static map (clicking the left stick will bring up the map, too -- again, why use one button when two will do?). Clicking the right stick again will not exit the map, despite how much sense that would make, but that's not really pertinent to this point. If you have an objective, you can click the right bumper to bring up a little arrow on your HUD that'll point where you need to go.

Once you're in combat, this changes. Now there's no map screen at all, and clicking the right stick brings up your objective arrow instead. This is necessary because the right bumper has been re-mapped to activate your ammo power. Makes sense, right?

The worst part of all of this is that I might have gotten the details wrong, but I would never be able to tell.

If the light is red, move ahead

Games can communicate information in lots of different ways: through text, through color, through sound, through force-feedback. When an interface is designed well, all of these elements work together to tell the player a story in the blink of an eye. When it is not, they will provide confusing or contradictory information to the player.

The best example that I saw in Mass Effect 2 came the first time I entered a mass relay, which is the device that lets you jump to another star system. The screen showed me a zoomed out galaxy map, and I could move a crosshair with the analog stick to select my destination. When I highlighted the nearest star system, I heard a buzzing noise, and a red line appeared connecting that system with the one I was on. "Whoops, guess I can't go here yet," I thought, and exited the map to try to figure out what quest-critical task I had not yet accomplished.

It took me three trips into the mass relay to realize that nothing was preventing me from proceeding, and that a tiny "travel" icon was also appearing at the bottom of the screen, along with the buzzing and the red line. This could have been avoided with a "ding" sound and a green line, don't you think?

Iconoclastic

Mass Effect 2's icons make no sense. When you're in combat, you can give your squadmates orders by pulling up a wheel that is studded with icons representing everybody's special powers. It is impossible to tell just by looking what any of these powers are. Even when you point the cursor at one of them, it's still not easy to tell because they all have sexy names that don't reflect their actual function. (Why is the command to heal your squadmates called "unity" and not, you know, "heal"?)

So in order to tell what anything does during battle, you have to scroll around reading fine print, most of which is hidden from view until you highlight a specific part of the radial wheel. This is a stunning feat of communicating as little information as possible to the player, while still taking up the maximum possible screen real estate.

(Just to rep Krystian's article again, he did a much better job of demolishing Mass Effect's iconography than I ever could.)

Ordering off the menu

Trying to navigate the menus in Mass Effect 2 feels like you've stumbled into an M.C. Escher painting. They never go where you expect, and they're full of extraneous information that doesn't help you accomplish your goals. You can read detailed paragraphs about your weapons, but you can't compare their stats side-by-side when you're selecting your loadout. That's the most important function I could imagine these menus serving, and it's just not there.

Or take the process of making upgrades. You access a console on your ship that brings up a top-level list of available upgrades, broken out by category. But the top menu item isn't selectable, and it isn't an upgrade. It provides a general description of what upgrades are. It looks like a menu option -- it just doesn't behave like one.

As you scroll down through the menu, detailed descriptions of each category display in a box to the right. I get that a lot of people who play games like this are interested in lore, so I'm not too bothered by so much of the screen being taken up by information that seemed superfluous to me. But guess what happens when you select one of the categories: in the next sub-menu, the first highlighted option is, again, a description of that category, which tells you nothing you didn't already know. But it does take up the first spot in the list, despite not sharing the same function as the other items below it.

Once you make an upgrade, you are booted back out into the ship, and must re-enter the console. You can't go immediately to the next upgrade you wanted to make. Which makes sense. Who would go to the upgrade console wanting to make upgrades?

That really got out of hand fast... I think Brick killed a guy!

Whoops! This was supposed to be a short post. I didn't even cover every problem I encountered, and remember, I only played for six hours. As with other BioWare games, I felt like I was playing a video game that was made by people who had never played a video game before.

This is probably a good time to go for the deathbed salvation and say that, despite it all, this time I can at least see what other people like about Mass Effect 2. Visually, it's a massive upgrade over the first, with vibrant alien worlds to explore. The storyline seems like pretty standard space opera stuff, but there's nothing wrong with that, and various individual scenarios I played were well paced. And the characters and dialogue trees remain the game's best achievement. Unlike in the first game, I started this one as FemShep, and I don't regret it. It's really nice to be able to play as a female hero who isn't defined (confined?) by her gender.

Will I keep playing Mass Effect 2? Maybe. I hear it gets better as you go along.

Quiz: The Year in Swooning

Match each of these games with the breathless quotation from its review.

1. Bayonetta
2. Mass Effect 2
3. Heavy Rain
4. Battlefield: Bad Company 2
5. Red Dead Redemption
6. Super Mario Galaxy 2
7. Halo: Reach
8. Rock Band 3
9. Call of Duty: Black Ops
10. Donkey Kong Country Returns

A. "A knockout in just about every way it can be... you owe it to yourself to rush out and buy this."

B. "There are so many aspects... that make it an experience above and beyond all other open world sandbox experiences that we can't even begin to list them all. Some of the reasons that stand out are a wealth of content, a beautifully rendered and detailed world, an interesting and engaging storyline, a fantastic roster of characters with their own personalities, great and believable dialogue, the ability to experience the game world online with or against others; the list can go on forever. Rest assured that this is one of the greatest game we've played in 2010 so far, and possibly ever."

C. "There is simply not a better, more complete shooter on the market, and with all this content, there isn't any way you can find something that you cannot sink your teeth into."

D. "I have never played anything so momentous or revolutionary... In the coming years I expect the game's influence to be felt throughout the industry in terms of gameplay, storytelling and interactivity. This is a game that deserves all the plaudits it can get. So please go out and buy [this game] and reward those that have made such a groundbreaking videogame event."

E. "Far exceeded our expectations and is without question one of the best games we've played. Use whatever positive description you'd like. System seller, potential game of the year, landmark achievement; just make sure you buy it immediately."

F. "With a ton of incredible levels to conquer; gorgeous, perfectly designed graphics (wait until you see the first sunset level!); retro-inspired music; and smooth, flawless gameplay, videogames don't get much better... I can't recommend this game enough."

G. "Easily the best FPS I've played in a long time. Dialogue that makes me want to watch a feature film starring these guys. A virtually flawless single and multiplayer experience."

H. "One of the best first person shooters this year, and is obviously a must have for any action fan. Intense, gory and quite brilliant, maybe it's not refreshing but at the same time it's a stunning game."

I. "Across-the-boards perfection [that] can't be measured by any scale. It's simply in a class by itself. This is where games need to go for my money... A modern-day masterpiece."

J. "This is a rare occasion when the hype can actually be justified; ...quite simply, a masterpiece."

ANSWERS:

1. I (Play Magazine)
2. E (GameDaily)
3. D (Boomtown)
4. G (GamePlanet)
5. B (Level7.nu)
6. J (Gamestyle)
7. C (ZTGameDomain)
8. A (Atomic Gamer)
9. H (3dJuegos)
10. F (Destructoid)

BONUS SECTION:

Which game is Destructoid calling close to perfect?

1. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
2. Rock Band 3
3. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
4. Deadly Premonition
5. Limbo

A. "Judged as a piece of entertainment, as a game that consistently surprises and amazes and leaves jaws hanging... It's pretty close to perfect."

B. "About as close to perfect as you're going to get."

C. "It's warm and satisfying with a near-perfect consistency throughout."

D. "It delivers a near-perfect competitive experience, in a way that few games... can."

E. "...as close to perfect at what it does as a game can get."

1. C (link)
2. B (link)
3. D (link)
4. A (link)
5. E (link)

Compiled with thanks, and apologies, to Metacritic.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Because a links post is easier than generating new content...

-If you haven't been keeping up with Gamer Melodico, a new site led by Kirk Hamilton, one of the nicest guys on the internet, you should. This week he posted a hilarious video of Commander Shepard's anti-press tendencies. Hasn't this guy ever heard of the first amendment?

(The temptation to play Mass Effect grows ever stronger. I must resist.)

-Mike Walbridge has some advice for aspiring game writers: give up. Mike's not wrong on most of his points. It's hard enough to make any money writing about video games, never mind make a living off of it. The competition is fierce. It's a constant battle to get paid what you're worth when there are thousands of other people out there willing to work for less. And yes, writing about games changes the way you play them, which is not always for the best. It's all true.

But it's also true that if you love writing, and you love games, and you feel like you have something to say, you should say it. Maybe nobody wants to pay you, or publish you. Say it anyway. Start a blog. Write for the love of writing. It's not always easy, and sometimes the well of ideas is dry. That's okay. Do it anyway. Write when you can. Play when you can. Do it for the love of the game, and some kind of success will follow.

Just maybe get a day job, too.

-Gus Mastrapa wonders if he's too old to compete with the youngsters in online shooters. This is a great piece, ringing with truth. When I was a teenager, I put hundreds, if not thousands of hours, into Quake II Capture the Flag. It's the only game I've ever really been good at, and it's only because of the practice. That was a luxury I had back then. I don't have that luxury now. At the age of 28, I've accepted that I will never really be good at a game again. That's fine in single player games, in which you don't have to excel in order to complete them. But it does make multiplayer tricky.

It's fitting that Gus quotes Valve's Chet Faliszek, who worked on Left 4 Dead, because I've found that as I get older, my interest in cooperative experiences like L4D only grows. It's not multiplayer that I'm tired of, which is what I thought for awhile, but the grueling competition you find in the average deathmatch. What's the point? I'm old and slow, and I'm comfortable with that.

-Lately I've been playing more and more online games at sites like Kongregate, and feeling like there's a whole world I didn't know existed. For some reason I just assumed these were spammy, worthless aggregators, but it's not the case. There's some great stuff out there, most of which can be consumed in bite-sized chunks. This week's recommendation: I Remain, a point-and-click adventure set in a zombie apocalypse. It's pretty creepy.

-I hate Google Buzz. Do you hate Google Buzz?