After a night of unexciting drinks at the local pub yesterday, I thought I could sleep-in today. Guess I was wrong. I got woken up today around 1pm by a friend who needed help with some computer stuff. She had trouble with a wireless keyboard and had been over my place to test it out and confirm that the unit she had bought was indeed faulty. She wanted my help at Sim Lim Square, the local computer mall. I had also wanted to go there anyway so it wasn’t a problem.
So we met and proceeded to get her stuff resolved. In the meantime, I popped by my favourite game store to see if Mass Effect was available (and not sold out). I was in luck, and they had a few copies of it left. Naturally I grabbed one.
I looked at the system requirements before I bought it though, and was half-relieved that my aging 5 year old gaming rig could still play it. It wasn’t “minimum spec” yet, although I suspect that might change in 2009 if I still decide not to upgrade to a newer machine. I also was hoping it would not run as badly as Assassin’s Creed did (It didn’t, much to my relief).
When I got home later, MUCH later, I excitedly installed the game. I wasn’t disappointed. I also had deliberately not kept up with news on Mass Effect or much of its storyline, like someone who doesn’t want to read spoilers on a good movie before watching it. Thus I only knew the basic premise of the game – it’s a science fiction RPG with some elements of squad-based shooters.
The RPG part didn’t disappoint, seeing as it was Bioware who made this game. Upon choosing the “Start New Career” option, I was brought into the character creation screen. I made a short video clip of the process which you can view below:
The game “gets into character” almost from the get-go. You had to “log in” to its fictional “personnel database” to create a character. After creating and customising the appearance, I was thrown into the storyline.
The game plays from a third-person perspective. I suspect this is due to the fact that the game was written for consoles first (Xbox) before being ported over to the PC. Controls are the usual WASD, which seems to have become a standard. This also makes the game feel a little like an MMORPG (incidentally with the amount of depth of the game, they SHOULD have included multiplayer so we can have persistent worlds like Neverwinter Nights.
I am more used to playing FPSes, so I needed some time to get used to the combat system used by this game. This is especially so when it’s a third-person perspective shooter cum squad-based combat. The controls are simple though, although different from GRAW. At first I thought it was stupid that I could order my squard to advance, but the destination seemed random. It was only later on that I realised the destination was where my crosshair was pointed at when I entered the squad-command screen. The good thing is that I could still pan my view around while giving commands to my squad , so I can individually order my squad mates to move to various positions of cover and fire.
The story itself is pretty engrossing. Right now I’m only at the beginning stages of the game – I have just landed on Eden Prime and have managed to reach the train yard after dispatching the enemies that awaited us at various points along the map.
Framerates were acceptable to me, hovering at an average of 15 to 20 frames per second. In firefights, the rates dropped slightly to about 10, but never below 7, so the fights were still ok, unlike in Assassin’s Creed, where 7 frames where the highest I could ever get in the whole game.
More on Mass Effect later, when I manage to get more game time in instead of blogging time! 🙂
