What developers could learn from Mass Effect 3

At the same time as Bioware were working on Mass Effect 3, they were also working on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It shows, with the latter styling itself as an evolved version of World of Warcraft, mixing the best of Bioware’s single player titles with a vast and exciting universe. If you read our Old Republic review, you’ll know that there’s very little that I think we’d want to change (with the exception of that pesky install/download size), but there are indeed things that the developers could have brought over from Mass Effect, things which MMO developers everywhere could perhaps do with learning.

Space is Big

Perhaps I’ve been playing the wrong sci-fi MMOs, but it always seems that there are only a few locations – known space and everywhere else. Known space contains an array of places to visit, they look madly different and might have some unique (and angry) locals hanging around, but they’re all relatively safe to visit. Unknown space is a mystery and will possibly be revealed in a future expansion pack or left as a boundary to your adventure. Now the truth is that there probably aren’t all that many planets to visit in your average MMO and chances are they’ll follow a pretty strict set of guidelines – jungle planet, ice planet, fire planet, desert planet, ancient tribal planet – and it is here that most of your adventures will happen. Everything else is a mystery.

The universe of Mass Effect, however, is filled to the brim with stories and planets are different shapes and sizes. No matter which part of the galaxy you visit, there’s plenty to see and do to the point where you really don’t need to expand into “unknown space,” because the vast majority of the mystery is entirely within the planets, moons and space stations within travelling distance. It’s difficult to want to explore outwards, when there’s so much exploring inwards. In Mass Effect, space is big. There are definitely places you can’t travel to, but it doesn’t matter, because the galaxy you’re travelling is big enough.

Depth is Key

For everything people have said about Mass Effect 3’s ending, few people have complained about the events leading up to it. I’m not talking specifically about the story - which to be fair has its fair share of fan service, tragedy, twists and turns – but about the general depth of everything around you. Not only is there hundreds of planets that you can see on the galaxy map, but each has a part to play in the universe, something happened everywhere, whether it’s a great source of minerals or a famous battle. In the Mass Effect universe, nothing is thrown in for the sake of it being thrown in, everything has its place and that turns the galaxy into a living breathing place.

But not only that, each race you come across has its own history, its own architecture, its own way of living, of feeding, of reproducing. It doesn’t matter if you come across a generic looking planet or a race you thought you knew everything about, there are always further layers waiting to be peeled.
The average MMO suffers from the opposite of this: crazy looking creatures with only a very basic history: “how long they’ve been around, how they lived peacefully until something bad happened and how they reacted to it.” For better worlds, and we need better worlds quite desperately in MMOs, the world needs to evolve above “everything was peaceful until it wasn’t.”

Action is important

Bioware hit it big with Knights of the Old Republic; they got a huge following and supported their fans with Jade Empire – they were brilliant games. It wasn’t until the Mass Effect games that they became a developer capable of selling consoles, a developer to whom other developers are supposed to look for inspiration. No matter how big they were with Knights of the Old Republic, there’s no denying that they’re almost as big as the galaxy they created thanks to Mass Effect. And while it’d be naïve to say that the series has been so successful because it’s an action-RPG instead of a straight RPG, it makes a world of difference to the gameplay and, in my opinion, makes it that much more enjoyable.

Now there’s lot of reasons that action segments to MMORPG games are being slow to come in. Presumably it’d need a user-base with better hardware, it’s be harder to do in a shared instance; it’s not impossible, we’ve seen examples of it, but it’s harder and the payback that you get usually isn’t good enough to warrant all that extra work. Nobody is going to start playing an MMORPG because they’ve managed to make a mediocre real-time action system, without the need for numbers and stats or the same animation time and time again. On the other hand, a really good action system, for whoever manages to bring it to the genre, will be more than enough to put that MMO on the map and bring in the players.

Conclusion

These are just three reasons that Mass Effect remains one of the best-loved franchises this generation. There are a lot more and checking out any given review site’s opinion will let you know that it’s a series to watch. But more than that, as MMO gamers upgrade their hardware and the average shop-bought computer manages to pack a little extra power, as ISPs start bumping bandwidth, Mass Effect will be the sort of game developers look towards replicating online. And with good reason, despite internet controversy it remains a huge seller this generation and one that Bioware and their supports should be proud of.

There are games already making the leap graphically, you need only spend a couple of minutes of Youtube to see some great examples of pretty looking MMOs, but it’s the leap in gameplay that needs to come sooner rather than later. The action MMO and the MMORPG need to merge, and whichever developer manages to perform such a feat is likely to be the Blizzard of the next-gen MMO.

Special mention

A couple of weeks ago I played Star Trek Online and, funnily enough, it gets everything so, so right. While it could probably do with a little bit of polish, especially in terms of shaking off some of those more old-fashioned devices, it is for all intents and purposes, a fantastic example of the sci-fi MMO genre. If you get chance to give it a go, even if you’re not a Trekker, I strongly suggest you do so.