Video games long before Mass Effect offered players branching narratives, but BioWare chose a more ambitious path: making the varied plots in multiple releases interconnected to make each person’s playthrough of all three games feel unique to them. For example, choosing to kill Wrex in the first Mass Effect means he won’t exist in ME2 or ME3, thus altering crucial plot developments in those games. Dialogue choices and split-second decisions in the first Mass Effect would affect the stories in the latter two titles, meaning every single move you make reverberates throughout the whole cycle. Īrguably the most innovative feature in the Mass Effect trilogy, the one that elevates its status from “good set of RPGs” to “games we’ll remember forever,” is its approach to emergent narratives. But to truly understand what it meant to play games on the Xbox 360 and PS3, what players wanted, what artists wanted to create, the ways large corporations sought to package their content, and the conversations around gaming at large during that time, there’s nowhere better to look than Mass Effect. To be clear, I’m not making the argument that the original three Mass Effect titles were the “best” games of that era, nor would I claim they’re necessarily the most interesting or influential. (For more information on the series as a whole, check out Amanda Tien’s great Mass Effect series summary.) Having just completed Mass Effect: Legendary Edition as part of this summer’s backlog challenge, it’s now abundantly obvious to me that Commander Shepard’s adventures through the galaxies would make the most sense. Despite the apparent frivolity of such an endeavor (and the weirdly specific terms surrounding it), you have to pick something. All other gaming software from those years (let’s say 2006-2013) would subsequently cease to exist and survive only through images and archival footage. Some kind of official governing body overseeing the preservation of historical artifacts of cultural import has tasked you with selecting a single video game series from the PlayStation 3/ Xbox 360 generation of consoles that best describes that era of gaming and placing it into that capsule. Let’s say you had to bury a time capsule that would be opened roughly 50 years in the future (assuming the world as we know it still exists in some form and hasn’t become uninhabitable due to the unfettered spread of deadly diseases and climate change). Spoilers ahead for a trilogy that ended a decade ago.
23! For this latest edition, I’ll discuss the Mass Effect series, as the controversial Mass Effect 3 was one of my choices for this very site’s Summer Backlog Challenge.
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