Mass Effect 3 Preview

With less than two months to go, you can brush up on your knowledge of EA and BioWare’s Origin-exclusive Mass Effect 3 with this new two-page preview on Hooked Gamers. The article doesn’t appear to be based on any hands-on time, but it’s still a good summary of the info released to date:

For those who have paid attention to the changing style of Bioware’s games in the last decade or so, the change from root RPGs to more action-oriented atmosphere has been relatively clear. This change was most apparent in Dragon Age and its disappointing sequel, but is also evident in the changes between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Basically, the sequel had fewer skills to develop during level-ups and relied more on the gamer’s reflexes than the character’s skills to solve many situations, especially the even tiresomely numerous battles. At the same time, the quests became simplified so that most problems were solved with guns in Mass Effect 2, whereas some diplomacy and higher brain activity were still required in Mass Effect. These developments have disappointed many RPG fans who question whether Bioware is mislabelling its games by still calling them role-playing games.

In Mass Effect 3, this development will unfortunately go one step forward. This time, the less intelligent players will be treated with an Action Mode, where all the decision-making in the dialogue scenes is made automatically and the gamer will only have to worry about fighting. Fortunately, two other modes will also exist: Story Mode and RPG Mode, both of which still let the player choose how they respond in discussions. The former also makes the fights easier for those who only want to experience the story, while the latter will cater to those who want a challenge as well as a deeper RPG experience. However, I must express worry that there even exists a mode where the game makes all the dialogue choices for the player. If all the choices can be automated, does this not infer that the dialogue options are essentially superficial and the decisions that the gamers make have no real meaning to the story?