Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel on Mass Effect 3

If you haven’t yet got enough of the discussion around Mass Effect 3, Spiderweb Software designer, programmer, CEO and all-around indie RPG guru Jeff Vogel has posted two articles on his personal blog describing his thoughts on the game, including its ending. The first one covers the good points, and focuses on the universe, gameplay and more, while the latter one devotes itself to the ending.

While it’s not anything especially new, it’s interesting to see his thoughts on the game all the same, given that there haven’t been too many developers outside of BioWare that have spoken about the game since its release. Suffice it to say, he’s a bit more sympathetic than many other commentators have been.

Here’s a snippet from the first of the articles:

The Gameplay

Tight as a drum. Except for occasional problems finding walls my character could hide behind, the game plays well. It’s fast paced, fun, and full of exploding things.

I do wish that there was more variety in what you could do. I desperately miss the vehicle sections in Mass Effect, which were great for breaking up gameplay. They had their problems, but, honestly, I think the game would be much better if those sections had been improved instead of dropped entirely.

The Ambition

The world of Mass Effect is a huge epic full of intractable conflicts. There were a lot of them left at the end of Mass Effect 2. The developers decided that, in ME3, they would all be settled. This makes the story of ME3 one of the most ambitious and far-reaching of any game I’ve ever played. It’s a very generous gesture to players, a bit of fan-service to make sure that no lingering issues, even ones that could easily support a whole full game on their own, remained.

This choice was a little problematic in the execution. The ways these plots were settled felt a bit perfunctory. By the end of the game, there was no problem so enduring and thorny that it couldn’t be solved by one guy fighting his way down two long corridors littered with chest-high walls. Still, the game wanted people to leave the series content, and it did its best to give the fans what they desired.