Atomic Gamer - 10 Things Wanted For Mass Effect 2

I'm sure I've said something about Earthsea here before but I've not read any of her Hainish Cycle books. Though I'm quite aware of them.

Thaurin said:

I see where you're going with those titles and those games did really touch me on an emotional level (well, The Longest Journey). I just think the execution is really hard to pull off in a game. I see games mostly targeting the same things as a book, immersion-wise, but a book has so many more things going for it that a game can never hope to achieve. Effects and cinematics in a movie will be so much better than what is possible in games for a long time. So, it's hard to put down a convincing reality in a game that does not come off as cheap. Complicating things further, a game also has to focus on other aspects and find a balance therein.

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The way I see it, you can forgive a game a lot of things if it has great writing. TLJ has stupid non-logic puzzles (hi, rubber duck); The Witcher has long treks through swamps of respawning enemies; PS:T has mediocre combat; SH2 has stretches of the game where you run through boring apartment corridors, and on and on. That magical balance, I feel, has never been achieved by anybody. So I think that if you're going to focus on story and writing, by god make it real good. If all you're going to spit out is banal cliches echoing the worst B-rate flicks--while trying to present it all as Serious Business with no irony whatsoever--then your gameplay should be amazing. But trying for both tends result in succeeding at neither, and what comes out of it is pretty forgettable.

Going back to Mass Effect, I enjoyed the gameplay much more than most well-received shooters. I enjoyed the RPG aspects of it (dialogue, story) more than most recent RPGs. It will not receive any literary awards, but I enjoyed it. That's important.

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Important to you, certainly, but I don't think it makes ME a particularly good game. Oh, you could very well argue "but a lot of other people also enjoyed it!", but we all know popularity does not an indicator of quality make.

Essaliad said:

What, am I? I thought my comment was pretty tame and a bit lame if anything, because that was all the effort I could bother to expend in response to your dullness. I'm flattered you thought it was a result of long training!

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Out of curiosity, Essaliad, are you English by any chance?

aries100 said:

While we're talking about Mass Effect and sci-fi, space opera and fantasy, has any one of you read, yes read, anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, the grand dame of science fiction? In her books, The left Hand of Darkness and The dispossesed, she examines how a society would be if it were x, yz or x for instance... This just to say that there are sci-fi writers out there who does something original and creative.

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Only the Earthsea trilogy (plus Tehanu, which IMO had a whiff of the potboiler about it). I liked them a great deal, for many of the same reasons I liked Dune -- it was a convincing story in a fantasy world that went beyond the usual Englishmen-in-funny-hats level. Thanks for the reminder; I've been meaning to read some of her sci-fi but somehow never got around to it.

Prime Junta said:

Out of curiosity, Essaliad, are you English by any chance?

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Afraid not. Why?

Oh, just that you have a flair for verbal aggression that is IMO typically English. Cheerful, brutal, and entertaining all at once (unless you're at the receiving end).

Heh, thanks--am glad to entertain. Though I should probably note that many English people I've known are fairly mild.