Retronauts - 545: Mass Effect

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Captain Jeremy Parish assembles a crack team of galactic heroes (Wes Fenton and Diamond Feit) to venture into territory never before explored by Retronauts: BioWare's sci-fi role-playing classic Mass Effect. Romance options and plot branches abound! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

I'm Jerry Parrish, and this is my favorite podcast on The Citadel. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jerry Parrish, and this is my favorite podcast on the Citadel. God, weren't you even listening? Yes, this week we are talking about everyone's favorite franchise on the Citadel. Mass Effect. And this was supposed to be a, what was it, 15th anniversary episode, but that would have had to have happened last year. And by gosh, life did not find a way. So it didn't happen. So now we're having a 16th anniversary retrospective, which is nothing. It's just a chance to talk about Mass Effect. And here with me to herald this non-momentous occasion we have in the same physical space as me, not the outer

space, but like the recording space. Same emotional space as well. Yes, absolutely. We're very cleft. I'm Wes Fenland, senior editor at PC Gamer and longtime friend of the show, I hope I can say. Have you been on the show? I've been on the show. I think you're not just a friend.

You're a participant. A small part of the podcast legacy. It's a listener. You also bought the company. and a recording with us from might as well be outer space at so many thousands of miles away greetings

this one is called Diamond Fight and this one is very pleased to be part of this recording now what is the name of that species that you is it the Hanar? That's the Hanar! Yes. Hanar Best Hanar.

Are you the Hanar cop whatever the name was? Look, I feel like as out of respect for our listeners I'm not going to do the entire recording as a Hennar, but in my heart, in my heart, I would, I would do that in a drop of a hat. Don't they have that like reverse audio processing on their voices also? Yeah, Greg, you, you got free time, right?

Greg, just make me a Hennar for the entire episode. The whole podcast. That's right. It's just the reversible coder. Let's not do that, actually. But this is actually a weirdly auspicious day to record about Mass Effect because just this morning, Eurogamer, published an article talking about the birth of the trilogy and speculating on its future.

So that's pretty wild. We did not coordinate this whatsoever. I don't have any connection to Eurogamer anymore at all because I got sick of working for that company and left to go do independent things. And it was a good choice. I have a lot of respect for Eurogamer. And I'm grateful that they publish this article. But it's a coincidence is what I'm saying.

You went rogue. I did go rogue. I was a renegade. Not a, not a paragon of games journalism whatsoever. Although, I can't think of anything that I did with that was a massive ethical violation when I was a game journalist. So maybe I wasn't a paragon. There was that one time where you were talking to Shigeruimuoto and you just pushed him out a window. I thought that was uncalled for. But I mean, you never pistol whipped anyone in your career. I just Shigarimuoto. And then he made the Mario movie as revenge. Just kidding. I haven't actually seen the Mario movie. I just thought that since, you know, everyone else on Retronauts was hating on, I might as well get another fun, too.

But I genuinely have no opinion. So let's not talk about that. Let's talk about Mass Effect instead, which is a game that, by gosh, I really loved. And I haven't played it since 2007, but it's one of those things that just really, really stuck in my head. Like, I just remember this game so well. I was so engrossed in it and really just I fell in love with it. and wrung every drop of content out of that game because it was so good. I think the sequels, too, really helped, like, cement it in folks' minds,

even if you didn't love either Mass Effect 2 or Mass Effect 3, I think just their existence and the fact that they were able to keep that story going, kind of made at least me love the first one all the more over the years. Yeah, I remember when, you know, I heard Mass Effect was good, and then people talked about Mass Effect 2, like it was some sort of, you know, divine creation, you know, from up on high the mountain. So that kind of convinced me, oh, I should try this series before it gets too long. So definitely the reception of Mass Effect 2 convinced me I needed to play Mass Effect 1,

even though I didn't get around until later. But we could talk about that later. Yeah, I was, you know, in the Games Press by 2007. And Mass Effect was very much the kind of game that I probably would have reviewed if someone else hadn't already gotten to it. But people kept telling me, Jeremy, you need to play this. A lot of people I really respected were like, this is your kind of game. So even though I didn't review it, I still made time for it, which never happens.

That's impossible. But I did. And I would play it for a couple of hours every night. This was on the back room of my apartment that I rented. So it was very small. I had this little, gosh, it was like 17 inch, 720. Samsung TV and a pair of headphones and I just played it

and just immersed myself in that tiny little window of almost high-definition content. As if Mass Effect wasn't blurry enough, you got that extra LCD blared on top. For sure. And you know, it's fine. The elevator rides just gave me a chance to kind

of relax and catch up with work and then I'd get back into playing the game. It was cool. Yeah, but no, it just really, really, like everyone who said that was right. This was extremely my jam. It was very much a video game made for people who loved Star Trek and were wondering why wasn't Star Trek doing anything at this point. Because it was then in that sort of interregnum between the unceremonious ending of Enterprise and the relaunch with the 2009 movie that catapulted the series back into people saying, oh, this is actually okay.

So it's pretty safe to say this was the Star Trek game everybody kind of had always dreamed Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it makes sense because, you know, BioWare had just come off of making a really great, like maybe the great Star Wars game, Knights of the Old Republic, which was partly successful because they said, what if we didn't give a damn about the Skywalker's and just made a story about conflicts between Jedi and Sith and the galaxy and a totally different. different time with, you know, familiar aesthetics and experiences and, you know, that's very true to the Star Wars series, but actually gets into the morality of Jedi and gives players a chance

to decide, will they fall to the dark side or will they stay on the path of light? And it was amazing. People loved it. People talked about how great it was. It was just like, you know, after attack of the clones and, you know, kind of going into Revenge of the Sith knowing, this isn't going to be amazing. Cotaur was this chance for people to really immerse themselves in Star Wars in a way that maybe the prequels didn't allow them to do if they were

an old school fan. And then, you know, Star Wars went its own way and did its own thing. And BioWare said, fine, we'll make our own star something with hookers and blackjack. You know, forget the Blackjack. It's just hookers and Star Wars. Star Trek.

There's slot machines. Oh, yeah, yeah, there's slot machines. Okay, sure. But, yeah, it's just the kind of game that just grabbed me. And it does a lot of, it did a lot of things at the time that were very inventive, very innovative. A lot of those things were very messy. And didn't necessarily work out. But it tried. It swung for the fences and really kind of defined what a, you know, a console triple A role-playing game could look like.

And, you know, when you looked at this and compared it to Final Fantasy 13, they came out a couple of years later. and underwent such a difficult, tumultuous life. It just felt like, oh, wow, yeah, like, these Canadians, they get it. I don't know about those folks over in Japan, but Canada, they understand where role-playing is at. Way to go, dentists. Yeah, for better or for worse, I think Mass Effect is part of a series of games, which I think you could also include Bioshock and Portal, where, you know, where these games that really hit people very hard, had a lot of personality to them,

had a lot of, you know, found a lot of fans outside of traditional gaming, honestly, especially as my spec went on. I saw more people talking about the story and, you know, the relationships and that sort of stuff. And I do feel like this kind of stuff was actually part of the ammunition that led to the fire of sort of like, oh, Japanese games are bad now, because I feel like as these games were rising and getting so many people's attention, Japan, Japanese studios were sort of struggling with the HD era. They were like, oh, we can just make, we'll just make a really pretty version of our old games, right? Right? And no one's like, uh, I think, I think you need to, I think you need to try a little harder. So I feel like this is, this is sort of the, uh,

the vanguard, if you will, of that sort of part of that movement where we were sort of like, oh boy, the games are great over here and not so great over there. And, you know, it all balances stuff out eventually. But I think this was, this was a surprising time where I think everyone's kind of taken off guard, but whoa, this is, this is role-playing now. This is exactly when, not turn-based games started having the, The word cinematic started appearing in articles and PR discussion points and trailers and stuff, right? It was like this was the era of the cinematic game finally being like within developers' graphs. They could use Dutch angles and all kinds of fun stuff in their cut seats.

I don't know how cinematic the original Mass Effect really was. It, you know, it has all the hallmarks of a bioware game. It's got the kind of shot reverse shot. Yeah, shot reverse shot. and then the characters kind of stiffly move into frame, and they animate a little bit while they're talking, and then they, like, awkwardly, mechanically rotate and go out of frame. The animation was not quite there yet.

But, you know, even with all of that in mind, it was just, it was so big and immersive and grand, and it tried to combine action game mechanics, you know, third-person shooting with genuine role-playing elements. Like, it still had, those astigial die rolls that games just kind of stopped doing after this. Probably the last BioWare game to do that. If they did it after that, it would have been really well hidden.

But this game, you could kind of still feel it in there. No, I mean, absolutely, and we'll talk about that. But it really did feel like kind of the culmination of everything that BioWare was working toward. They'd worked on licensed properties like Dungeons and Drag. and Star Wars, and then they created their own original game with Jade Empire that it had its fans, but it wasn't quite, I think, what people necessarily wanted, and I think they kind of struggled in terms of some of the content there. But with this, they kind of went back to, you know, familiar territory, very traditional Western sci-fi fantasy, big ideas, and, you know,

like a chance to kind of redefine what a morality system actually means. And they really, you know, flaws aside, technical glitches aside, kind of mechanical, sloppiness, schluter issues aside, they really got it right, you know? And it's just one of those releases that really sort of cemented 2007 as one of the all-time great years for video games. Diamond, you mentioned earlier, what was it? portal and

Bioshock. Those were both 2007. Crackdown was 2007. It really felt like two years after the advent of HD consoles, developers had already kind of found their footing, and they were still kind of, you know, stumbling with some technical issues. Didn't Oblivion

come out? No, I think that was 2006. Oblivion was early 2006. Yeah, like March or May or something like that. But I mean, you know, developers were really delivering these fully baked products. Was GTA A4, was that 2000E? Yes.

That sounds, that sounds good. So, yeah, you kind of had all these big releases that were really testing out the boundaries of HD and the potential inherent in it. And in a very satisfying way. And it makes sense that a lot of them had computer gaming in their background because, you know, PCs had already sort of worked into the high-definition space, you know, with max specs on games. that was basically console HD. And I think that, more than anything, explains the kind of disparity, the gap between Western development and Japanese development. It wasn't like, oh, Japan doesn't understand, you know, high-definition graphics. It was just their pipelines were built around standard definition consoles.

Whereas Western Studios had already moved into the high-definition space with PC games, and that's where the focus was. So this was a natural transition for them. And you have, you know, BioWare who started with kind of the top-down, was it called the Infinity Engine for Reader's game? Yeah, for the CRPGs. Yeah, yeah. And then that kind of evolved into 3D with Cotor, which was janky as hell. But then Jade Empire was less janky and Mass Effect was even less janky and, you know, also more ambitious. Like with this game, they were like, let's tell a saga.

Here's the first part. But this isn't all of it. There are plans for the future. And, you know, they kind of took a. Star Wars sequel approach to the trilogy. Like, we kind of know what's going to happen maybe in the second game, and the third one is going to happen, but we don't know what's going to happen. Could also maybe throw a little lost comparison in there and that they were setting up some

big, you know, potential galaxy's size of the streets. I don't want to accuse them of being full JJ Abrams here. Not full JJ. Definitely not full JJ. No, they, I think they had a pretty good sense of what things were about. Just they hadn't necessarily figured out all the answers. So maybe that comparison is fair. One third, JJ.

But yeah, whereas JJ was just like, I'm going to throw ideas out there and someone else can figure them out like you did about the Star Wars movies. In this case, it was more like, we've got some big ideas, we're going to throw them out there. And then we're going to figure it up. We're going to pick up the pieces. So they didn't, you know, I don't think they wanted to paint themselves into too much of a corner.

To your point, they did have some pretty good consistency over the three games of the people making them, the people in charge of the games. I think you really feel the absence of Drew Caprician, who is like one of the lead writers on the first game, but we can talk about the other folks who worked on them who were there for all three. And like, you definitely get to see them pay off, you know, the stories and the characters that they wanted to. You know, another strength I feel of the mass effect, the first game, especially in compared to Star Wars, that the game, you know, this game is essentially, it's all but announcing it's the start of a series. Like, you know, when it ends, this story ends with this game, but it's very

clear that something else is going to happen next. Like, they, they clearly had ideas on, the table. But the way this game plays out, it starts, you know, it starts with the ground running. Like, we don't, we don't start with humanity discovering the mass effects. We don't start with, you know, Commander Shepard growing up on a farm somewhere. Like, Commander Shepard is already on the move. They're already, you know, got training. They've got, they've got, they're on board the ship. You know, all this stuff's already happening. So I feel. like, kind of like the first Star Wars movie, like, you know, quote unquote episode four. When this saga starts, so many pieces are already in place and we just sort of, as the

audience, we get introduced to it through these characters, most of whom already have their jobs, already have their backgrounds, their skills, and it just sort of goes out from there. So it's not, nothing on the, there's nothing, there's no real ground floor here. Just like everyone's already, everyone has the knowledge they need to, you know, move on. But they're just going to learn new stuff. They're going to meet new enemies. and develop forward. Yeah, kind of beginning

in Medius Res the way it does. They really kind of picked up the best ideas from Squares RPGs in a way because starting with Final Fantasy 4, you have these kind of fully formed, competent characters doing cool stuff

as you begin the game. Like, oh, here's the after report of our attack on a town full of wizards. Or, you know, hey, let's go blow up a nuclear reactor and, you know, bomb the hell out of this entire chunk of a massive city. You know, that's a kind of cool thing that made Final Fantasy so compelling.

And they do that here, where you start out and, you know, there's like a little bit of set up, some dialogue. But when the game really begins, you are a fully realized veteran soldier who is on a mission, you know, already in line to become, you know, like this specially, basically like the 007 of space. Yeah. Maybe CLE 007. So, yeah, it's almost, you know, kind of doing the same thing as Casino Real, which was around the same time, where you have a new James Bond, and you see, you know, the kind of way Bond becomes Bond, like the kind of litmus test. But it's clear at this point that he has already been in the Secret Service for a long time.

He just hasn't necessarily committed a kill. But he does that and then he becomes, you know, 007. And it's kind of the same thing. Like, this is how this experienced season soldier, Shepard, becomes a specter, which, not to be mistaken for the James Bond Spector, thank you. They might have read some Fleming books, is the feeling I'm getting. You know, there's a funny degree of, there's kind of an amateurist charm, I think, to the beginning of this game.

Like, a lot of things in Mass Effect, looking back at them, like, they're a bit, they're a bit clunky, but they worked well enough at the time. And, like, you go through the character creator, which is pretty hideous in terms of the character options you get if you don't use the defaults. You get to choose, like, two or three background variables. Did you grow up in space? Did you grow up on Earth? And, like, did you survive, you know, a battle or something? And then immediately after the character creator, you get this voiceover from this guy being like, you know, is Shepard ready to go into battle?

And they just regurgitate the facts that you just gave them, like, one minute ago. And it just feels like, okay, we could have maybe spaced this out a little bit. But, you know, they were like, we're ready. Let's throw them in. Let's get in there. Let's go. But those details do come into play throughout the story. They do.

They do. It's not like you get the info dump at the beginning and all the background elements you entered for a shepherd or forgot. They did a really good job of peppering that stuff in over really all three games in the end. Yeah, there's a lot of hooks. So, Wes, you mentioned the key personnel, like the kind of people, who are involved. Do you want to walk us through the talent behind Mass Effect? Yeah, I can talk about a few of them. Drew Carpician was the lead writer on Mass Effect 1, and he left

I think partway through development of the second game. I'm not sure how much of it he was there for. Casey Hudson, I think, was kind of the overlord of BioWare. He had been there for, not of BioWare, sorry, of Mass Effect. He had been at Bioware for quite a few years at that point. I think kind of working his way up the ranks. And then there was Mack Walters who was actually the person that Eurogamer interviewed that you mentioned at the top of the show who I think is still at BioWare or has only just very recently left if he's not still there. He worked on Anthem, so he's, you know, he's been there for a while. I think he also

worked on the legendary edition re-releases of Mass Mac Trilogy, which came out last somewhere in 2022, is that right, for the anniversary, I guess. There were a bunch of other people who worked on these games, of course. Eurogamer, sorry, no, TechRadar a few years ago wrote a good oral history of the series so you can hear from a lot more of the folks who worked on the gameplay, the cinematics, all of that stuff. But I don't know, for me, I really gravitate towards the writers, you know, the Drew especially, because I think there's a tone to this first game that we'll talk about more that just isn't

quite there in the sequence. to kind of combine a whole lot of influences. It feels very much of its time. Like we've mentioned, Star Trek. But it feels like there's a lot of far escape in here. The writers have said the idea was Jack Power in space. So kind of leaning into that 24 thing. Yeah.

But, you know, that was not in my memory of Mass Effect, but as I went back and kind of rewatch some of the cutscenes and some of the dialogue and stuff, it is striking how kind of aggressively, like raw, raw war elements of that game are. Like, those aren't the parts that I remember, but it's definitely, it's definitely in there. Yeah, and this wasn't, you know, by a U.S.-based studio, but they still, you know, there's still a lot of that splash effect. It was in the culture at that time, for sure.

It really was. But, you know, it's not like commandership or waterboards anyone. And really, the 24 element is not so much like, you know, are we going to kill? humanitarian war crimes in the name of preventing war. It was more like here as a character who is thrust into a difficult situation, you know, with existential threats facing them. And they want to do good, but leave it to the player to decide, like, how they go about that.

Do they try to walk, you know, like a morally pure path? Or do they take a more pragmatic approach? And so, you know, again, that builds off the morality system that we saw in Cotor, which was, you know, like, am I going to be a nice Jedi or am I just going to randomly kill a Jawa? And it's nothing so trite as that. It's much more like ultimately you are trying to save, you know, galactic civilization. That's good. But what's the best way to get there when you're dealing with hostile species, when you're dealing with people who know a lot that they're not letting on and who don't necessarily. like you and have no motivation to stop you. But, you know, it's not that you can become

good or evil. You're Paragon or Renegade. You are like the moral, shining example that everyone can look to and say, ah, this is it. This is a true hero. Or you can be someone who gets the job done and you get your hands dirty and maybe people don't end up liking you and a lot of people die along the way that, you know, we're counting on you. But in the end, you save the There's some begrudging respect there for you getting it done. Right, exactly. So I have to ask, how did you play Mass Effect? Diamond, did you play Paragon or Renegade?

I stuck mostly to the Paragon approach because I was, you know, as you said, you know, you can actually become outright evil in this game, but you can be really rude, you can treat people with disrespect, you can be kind of racist towards your, you know, You can view aliens as somehow, like, beneath you, like, humans are so great, which is, like, the story itself presents humans as somehow special, which is, you know, I think very much a Star Trek thing. It's like, oh, you don't, you underestimate humanity. But I really enjoyed being able to talk to, like, my goal, and I think this is partly selfish, because I don't think I'm great at these kind of action games. So I wanted to find situations where it's like, oh, if I can tuck my way out of this danger, I would love to do that. And I found that doing the Paragon route, Just gave me a lot more conversation options, and I know in particular, there's one mission in particular that I know you're supposed to go to some compound somewhere where a bunch of, you know, enhanced people have, like, secluded themselves with one leader. And like, if you go to this level, you can tell the entire structure is set up to be a firefight. But if you go in there and your

paragon level's high enough, you can just talk your way to the guards, talk to the guy in charge. Like, you know, you're in some trouble here. Why don't just give yourself up? And he's like, you know what, you're right. And you just walk out of there and mission accomplished, which I think is really nice. Yeah, it feels like they were kind of trying to do the Deo-S-X thing, where, you know, if you put enough specs into charisma or whatever, then you can, you know, unlock different dialogue options and talk your way out of conflicts and that sort of thing. But instead of being, you know, like a spec-based system, the statue builder really just,

you know, about your combat efficacy. Instead, it's more like the choices you make and the approach you take, the, you know, the dialogue as you have, that's actually, you know, the actions you perform as opposed to the numbers you tweak on a stat screen, that's what actually changes the relationship you have with the universe and with the world or with other people. Yeah, there was a charm stat that I think would unlock some extra dialogue options, but it was not nearly as significant as the Paragon or the renegade options it would unlock once you hit certain degree. of, I mean, basically consistency, right? The more paragon you were, the more paragon you could be. And, you know, if you wanted to be a bowl of plain oatmeal saving the galaxy, you could choose a careful, neutral path and be, like, spineless and worthless. But it was much more interesting to go one way or the other.

Yeah, I ended up with some renegade qualities because I know there was, there was least one mission I accepted because I think it was someone invited me to go somewhere that was technically illegal, but it, like, had some interesting research going on. And I was like, oh, yeah, I'll do that. And, like, the game made me renegade points. Like, oh, I guess it's technically illegal, so I shouldn't be going there, but it sounded like it was, you know, an intriguing mission. And also, I think at one point in the game, there's a, there's a bug where you can, like, get tons of points in both categories. You can just max them both out. So I think I took that route just because I wanted to have all the options

on the table, which was fun. So I was going back, I was watching my, actually was re-watching my playthrough, and at the end, I was bouncing between Paragon and Renegade kind of whatever sounded right. So I do appreciate, I'm glad I took that choice to just sort of game the system, but I think in general, I was mostly, I was mostly following the, you know, the quote unquote good path in that I wasn't actively rude to people, but, you know, if a villain tells me, oh, you know, I'm in charge of the situation, I feel like I have the right to tell them, you know what, you've, you've screwed the pooch here, buddy, you've got, you've got no options. Just throw your life away.

I cheated in a different way in that I played through the first two Mass-Fed games twice, completely differently. Once I played solo, and then once I played with a friend, and we would take turns and watch, I mean, they were really movie-esque in that they were very watchable.

So I went down the like renegade Femm-Shep path and then did kind of a more milk-toast paragon male shepherd run as well. But I think I enjoy the renegade path more overall. I remember there being some funnier moments or more dramatic moments

where you were just kind of a dick, but it made for a funnier cutscene or, you know, a more entertaining bit of dialogue. Okay, you described Paragon as milk toast, so we know where your bread is butter. Whereas I was like 98% milk toast. No, milk toast is the neutral path. Yeah, that's right.

I don't know. Like, I've discovered that when I play video games that give you dialogue options, I always feel bad about being a jerk. Like, I just can't be a dick to people, even if they're just imaginary numbers on a screen. They're just polygons and, you know, scripts. I don't care. Like, it's still, it's just not in my nature to be like that. You didn't want to let the council die at the end, though. They'd been so mean to you the whole game.

But, you know, that's, it still doesn't mean they should die. No, I really kind of took the Paragon approach. And there were times where I would choose a renegade option just because I was like, in this moment, that seems to be the right thing. And yeah, it was good. Like, it's the first time I've ever beaten a game by talking the final boss to death. Like, commit, not only, like, I'm going to spoil it here. I didn't just talk the final boss to death.

I charmed the final boss into committing suicide. Like, that was, that was a quintessential. Star Trek moment. That was Captain Kirk talking to the M5 supercomputer and getting it strapped into a logic loop, basically saying like, what you are doing is wrong and bringing out, you know, just a moment of clarity in the villain to realize, you're right, I'm being mind controlled. There's no escape for me. I have to end this. And I didn't think I could do that. But then I did it and was like, huh, well, that's, that certainly makes this final conflict a lot easier. That's just evidence of how much of the RPG core was still in this mass effect. And I think

it kind of got diminished over the course of the series. You had fewer and fewer of those moments. And I remember having some frustrations in later games, too, where if I actually tried to be a bit more nuanced in my decision making and didn't have enough points in either Paragon or Renegade, I actually was kind of locked out of a really, you know, like, important line of dialogue in a key scene that affected whether somebody lived or died, which was a frustrating payoff after, you know, two or three games. But in the first game, they really did, I guess with less baggage, right? Because they didn't have to consider how you had behaved in the past. They really let you mold your character in a pretty satisfying way within the limitations

of a 2007 binary, you know, good or not so good system at least. I also thought it was, it was very clever that, you know, when you're in those dialogue scenes, and it has, you know, you have potential to do something that is specifically Paragon or Renegade, they have the dialogue option sort of highlighted to show you, like, what path is on or whatever. And if you don't have enough experience or skill points in those chapters, you can still see them, but they're blacked out. So it sort of gives you early on, it gives you a sort of hint that's like, this is how you could be playing, which I feel like was a nice sort of, just sort of a very simple gesture to the player to sort of let them know. It's like, these are the options on the table if you, you know, if you want to pursue them. So, because I think it's there very early on. There's stuff in the Citadel, like, when, you know, there's no way you would have enough points to do any of this stuff, but it's still there. So it's like, I think it's a very gentle guideline for the rest of your gameplay. It's like, this is what could be happening. So just keep this in mind.

And that's a hub that you get to return to throughout the game, right? So you might have the option to do it later on and it gives you a little carrot to chase. We're going to be able to be. Yeah, and one thing that I appreciate about the way the dialogue is set up is that when you get the dialogue option, it's not just giving you the verbatim quote that you're exactly going to say. Instead, it's saying, like, it's like a summary. It's, here's the gist of your response. And sometimes the writing doesn't really convey what you're actually going to say.

say? And that's frustrating when you think you're going to respond one way and then the actual voice line of dialogue is something totally different. You're like, ah, that's not what I was after. But on the whole, it's more like kind of giving you a vibe and you're sort of pursuing that vibe. But, you know, a big part of why I play Paragon is because, again, this is very much like Star Trek in so many ways. And the Star Trek, like the true Star Trek spirit is about, you know, accepting all life and trying to do what's best for everyone. The renegade, again, it's not necessarily evil, but the renegade path is very self-involved and it's very pro-human. Like, humans first, let's, you know, let's put them forward. And that's, you know, it's easy to map that onto real-world scenarios, whether that's like, you know, America first.

or whites first or something like that. And that's, I'm not into that. And, yeah, having those options laid out there, that doesn't appeal to me. But the Star Trek, you know, utopian approach of try to figure out a way to work things out is very much, you know, a thing that I love about Star Trek. And when you see Star Trek characters venturing into racism, like Star Trek 6, where Kirk is like, I could never forgive the Cleons, I killed my son. ultimately that's wrong.

When, you know, Picard has a freak out about the Borg, ultimately, that's the wrong approach. When Captain Archer is like, boy, them Vulcans, sure do try to keep us down, I hate them Vulcans, that's ultimately the wrong approach. And ultimately, you know, in the end, Star Trek characters come around and realize there's a better solution, usually. I think something that they struggled a little bit with in the writing of the main story of the game was that very human-centric approach. any dialogue you have with your captain and with like the human ambassador, it's all very human focused and like what is our human relationship with the aliens, which is a good thing to explore, but like they kind of always come off as assholes and it's very much like how do we get ourselves forward. But I think the key thing that they really succeeded with in this game is

as you molded Shepard in all of the side quests and in your interactions with characters kind of off that straight and, you know, main part of the plot, you really got to make those decisions to be more open-minded, to be inquisitive and interested in these other species. And, like, they really started to pay off that sort of noble Star Trek envisioning of a better galaxy, a better world. Yeah, and I feel like Anderson, like, kind of your captain, former leader who's played by Keith David, he tends to kind of follow your lead in a sense. Like, the moral direction that you take, Anderson's skews in that direction.

But Udina, the ambassador, he's basically just like, hey, we've got to be Earth first. We got to prove our place here in the galaxy, so do whatever it takes for Earth. And, you know, in the sequel, you've got the smoking man. I don't know, what is he called? The Elusive Man, the Smoking Man. That's X-Files. Yeah. And by the end of the first mass effect, I was basically like Udina's worst enemy because, you know, he's, he's just after this kind of ethnocentric approach, which I wasn't really into.

But, you know, they do at least kind of set that up by saying this galactic civilization has been, you know, in cahoots for a few centuries. And humanity has just kind of fallen into the space race. We're like the shitty teenagers on the scene. Yeah, like we have a lot to prove for ourselves. And, you know, this kind of gets back to it. again, Star Trek with Enterprise, and, you know, the core premise there was, hey, humanity is finally able to do warp speed, but the Vulcans have been overseeing things, and they don't think you're quite ready yet. So it's kind of proving your metal. And, you know, there's a little

bit of a chip on the shoulder, understandably. I think you also kind of saw that in Farscape, where the protagonist, John Crichton, is the only human in this quadrant of space and is by far like the least powerful, least capable creature out there. And everyone else is like, oh, that, that's pitiable human. Like, there's an episode I remember where they're like looking at something that's across the room and everyone can see this like tiny little microscopic detail. And he's like, I don't know what you guys are talking about because humans have the worst eyesight in the galaxy.

But in the end, you know, the idea is that humans have this inquisitiveness, this ingenuity. You know, it's why we're always running circles around the Borg and they can't seem to get the best of the federation. It's because there's this innate element of humanity, like a drive to press forward and discover and, you know, come up with great solutions for things that I feel like the past 10 or 15 years has really disproven exists within our species, but, you know,

back in 2007, it still seemed like it might be there. A great trait of a good leader and a good human is to surround yourself with better people slash better species, what you get to do in Mass Effect, right? Like, the crew you assemble is largely non-human. But you can choose not to bring a lot of those people on. I guess that's kind of surround yourself. Like, your team can just be you and Kydin and Ashley.

You're just like rolling deep with humans. But that's such a boring way to play. Can I just go back to Deina for a second? Because I really feel it's important to bring this up. Because like you, Jeremy, I do try to be nice to people in video games. Certainly in real life, you know, I've got an AI speaker in this house, I always say thank you when it gives me information. You know, even when it's the wrong information, I say thank you.

It's just more sarcastic. And Udina is one of those characters who just, like, he got under my skin really early on and, like, we had a very antiquitous relationship. So it did give me a great pleasure, you know, at the end of the game when you meet at least in my game, I saved the council and they're like, oh, thank you so much. You know, it's definitely this time that we had a human on this council. And like, well, you've, you've walked so hard. I feel like your, your recommendation would mean a lot to us, and we're like, yeah, Anderson.

And O'Dina is right there. He was like, what are you talking about? And I was like, dude, no way, O'Dina, no way am I giving you any props here. I hate you so much. I think in one of my playthrues, just to see what would happen, I let Oudina be on the council. And that has to be like a 2% of players' choice to make that. Because I feel like he is just, he is there to be hated, and he's very hateable. He is slimy.

mentioned that, you know, humans are kind of the Johnny Cum Lately's of the galaxy. And that gets into the core premise of mass effect, which is that the entire galactic civilization is built around the mass relay technology that is kind of the core of

intra-galactic travel, interstellar travel. They don't really have warp speed. Instead, you have these basically magic gates, stargates, if you will, that you leap through, you take your ship through and it transports you elsewhere in the galaxy. But it turns out none of the species that make up the Galactic Council

had anything to do with these mass relays. They were out there. They were discovered. They just existed. And humanity entered the sort of galactic scene very recently when they discovered that the moon Karon surrounds Pluto, which is also now a moon, I think, or a non-planet of a moon. Yeah, it's a moon of a non-planet, just like a, you know, a 50-kilometer ball of ice

was actually, inside of that was a mass relay. And so that gives us entree into the galactic scene. The Citadel, the main kind of like hub, is effectively the hub of the hub of the mass relay system. So, you know, everyone else has had all this time to kind of find their place and get along with each other. And then all of a sudden this disruptive, obnoxious pinks. skinned bunch of, you know, hooligans, enters and starts, you know, saying, hey, give us a place at the table. And they're like, do you deserve a place of the table? So, you know, this is kind of this game represents a key moment for humanity where basically, you know, their team of

007s that represent the best of the best of every species. Finally, humanity has kind of been given the opportunity to, you know, put a foot in the door, like test the water. they adopt their own spectre, or, you know, not adopt, but establish their own specter with the aid of other species, you know, their approval, and that's Commander Shepard. So you, as Commander Shepard, are kind of a test case for whether or not humanity deserves to be in, you know, to have a place at the table. Do you get to sit at the big table, the big kids table or the little kids table? I think your, the game is set like 30 years post a war with,

Iturians, who are one of the major races on the council, just in the galaxy, and also is the race of, I don't know, everyone's favorite Mass Effect character. I guess not everyone has a favorite that is the same because there's so many great characters, but Garris, who is one of your squad mates, is Eutrient. And, yeah, who doesn't love Garris? He's the best. Yeah, the alien characters in this game are so much more interesting than the human characters. like you have Kydin and you have Ashley you kind of start the game

as a shepherd squad mate but I felt no attachment for them like Kydin is he has biotic powers which you know is basically like space magic yeah and gives him the ability to like you know cast space magic spells

at a distance but he has the personality of a warm bowl of vanilla pudding he's just there he's like oh this is a person I could put on my team if I need to flesh out the numbers. Then you have Ashley, who seems kind of cool at first, but then you start listening to what she says, and you're like, oh, where were you January 6th? Like, you don't like anyone except humans, and that's a little off-putting.

You're kind of a space racist, your space caring. You know, people always bring up the space racist Ashley and can't defend the space racism. I will say you do curb it. She does become an enlightened character over time. her around. Most people kill her off for that reason. Personally, I killed off Caden because he's voiced by the same actor as Carth Onassis from Cotor, from Knights of the Old Republic. And if you ever play a Sith play-through of Knights of the All Republic, he is the most aggravating character in the universe because he's a very noble, rebel soldier who's just constantly disapproving

of everything you do. So as soon as I heard that voice, I was like, oh, no, this guy is not coming with me. You know, one of the things that bugged me about Caden, which, by the way, if you look the way it's spelled, you know, to me as a Japanese speaker, it looks like Kaidon, which means just like stairs, which I think helps emphasize his boringness. Yeah, you just walk all over him. Yeah. It's like, it's not that he was that, like, offensive to me as far as boring. Just because I played as a female shepherd, whenever you talk to Caden, the model, you know, the female model of, of Shepard enters the scene like she's ready. like she's ready to throw down with him at any second and I was like geez you the game is like

clearly pushing him as a potential hookup so hard and I'm like what this this guy is so boring even Ashley who's like kind of a jerk and I yeah I didn't like her even she like she's more interesting you know like I think you know if I'm Shepard on that ship like I'm thinking about boning Ashley more than I think about boning kindness because he's he's he's so lukewarm I just didn't, I felt it was, it was disingenuous for the game to meet, to expect for me to even think about, you know, a relationship with this man. And he just, he, you know, no, I just, I did not feel that at all. And then Learra shows up and fan artists were sated for the next 20 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, absolutely. I also played as a Femmchep. And I think maybe, you know,

some of that did factor in there. I was just like, this, this dude is not worth, worthy of my character. She is a galactic ass kicker. And he is this, you know, bowl of pudding. no thanks. But also, like, I never used him in combat. I never took him in my squad. There were other characters who could do what he could do better and also do other things, whereas Ashley actually was a really good physical combatant. Not as good as Rex, but, you know, she was pretty versatile and pretty capable. So at the time, I was like, yeah, I want to get this guy off my ship so the game can stop trying to like bait me with a relationship that clearly does not deserve to happen. but also like I'm never going to use this guy in combat so off you go please go set off that nuke for me thanks good boy good boy go on but yeah in hindsight now I'd probably be like you know I'm just never going to Caden Caden whatever I'm never going to talk to you but actually I need you to go set off that new thank you Anyway, I've grown up over the years there was there. Anyway, I've grown up over the years. But the important thing is VR was there.

So, yeah. She was the best until Tally became an option. The alien crew members that you get to recruit over the course of this game are, I don't know, either universally great. I guess there's probably a bit of a hierarchy there, but Garris is your kind of corporate police buddy who's kind of sick of the paperwork, sick of the regulations on the Citadel, and is like, I want to go make a bigger difference in the galaxy. So he parties up with you. Rex is the big gruff, you know, sort of a Klingon equivalent, but so much more attitude to his personality. very Wharf in the sense of like he's extremely terse when he talks, but he's way more

cynical. Warp is kind of like pure, noble, like Paragon in the Klingon sense, whereas Rex is like, yeah, whatever, you know, he's more of a mercenary. Yeah. Warf is a deep romantic, really. You know, he loves opera. He does. Whenever he hooks up with someone, his first thought is, we should marry. It's like, no, Rex would not

Rex is not that kind of person. Yeah, I don't think he ever becomes a romance option. Cowards. But, but yeah, Garras, that was a character that people really liked. And so he kind of evolved into a much more important character in the sequel. And the first one, there's not really much in the way of possible interspecies romance outside of Leara. But Garris is definitely one that I feel like fans just for. him into becoming an option in the sequels.

Like, there was just so much love and enthusiasm for Garris, because he's, you said he's like, you know, kind of like corporate cop buddy who's over it, but there is like an innate nobility in him. Like he does have that kind of, you know, he's kind of got the war of purity, like

the warrior spirit, but it's much more buttoned down. He doesn't, he's not bristling with it. It's more like, he's kind of the voice of morality and reason in a lot of ways. He's like, he's willing to get his hands dirty. He'll break the law, but he does definitely have that, you know, moral core that never really waivers, I think. Yeah, I mean, he's kind of, you know, like a space bug man, and he really kind of feels like the equivalent of a Cardassian, whereas he has that kind of morality, like the moral complexity,

not so much of like, you know, a goldicot, but maybe like, ah, crap, what's his face? You know, the doctor's boyfriend. Garrick? Yeah, Garrick. yeah like he's not he's not that you know that evil but i don't know i kind of see something there where he's like he presents himself in one way but he also has this kind of pragmatic streak like garris would probably assassinate the romulan commander behind your back without you knowing it and just save the day for you he's the only character i think who is

in your crew in all three games or can be i believe i think that's how he can be in can she be in aspect two as well. I guess she's not in the squad. She's not the suicide. Yeah, you get to meet up with her and Rex in the second game. But yeah, I think Garris is your only mainstay through all three games. And he definitely, by the end, it feels like you've kind of gotten to go on a buddy cop, you know, journey with this guy in addition to everybody else. But he's the one who's kind of there with you through it all. Right. But it's very important to note that no matter how much you like him, his DNA has reversed trality from humans so do not ingest. No matter how much you want to. That was a conversation I did not expect. But I do appreciate, we're getting on to Mass Effect 2, which we're not going to really talk about in this episode. But I do appreciate Morden and his forthrightness. Like, no boundaries that guy. He just tells it to you like it is, gives you the full story.

They really luxuriated in their sort of sci-fi roles that they could put these characters into over the course of the series. But this first one, you got a pretty good taste of. the interesting races they were coming up with in this world that, to their credit, don't map, you know, one-to-one on Star Wars or Star Trek, you know, Learra's character is like, they're fairly Vulcan-like, but they kind of have their own thing going on. I think, I don't know, I would say, they're long-lived, right? They're very sort of, I guess it's not that they're non-emotional. They don't have that aesthetic quality to them. That's true. That's true. Aesthetic. Aesthetic. Yeah.

But they do have sort of, they're kind of reserved, I think, largely. And they're sort of the wise ones, you know. But I think most of the races in Mass Effect, they managed to do something pretty unique with them. I think the Rex is probably my favorite for that. The Krogan's, right, who have basically been all but wiped out in a mass extinction event because they were huge. assholes, basically, and everybody else in the galaxy was like, we got to get rid of these guys, put them in their place. I feel like Talley and the Korans, Korians, yes, Korians, are probably the most unique

of the species, but they don't really, they don't map onto anything else that I can think of in other popular sci-fi. Maybe there's, you know, something like Babylon 5, which admittedly I've never seen, that has an equivalent, but I really feel like she's very unique. Her people and their story is, you know, it draws. more from Earth lore, like the Romani and, you know, the Jews in exile and that sort of thing, like looking to those cultures that are nomadic and displaced and kind of making their own way in the galaxy. Yeah, so they have like they're a giant flotilla where basically all of their

people live, right? And they also have the interesting trait of being very, very susceptible to germs or disease. So they kind of always are in their environment suit, which I think is what makes so many people were drawn to Tali, because there was always this air mystery about her, right? You don't really get to see her face. She's hot, but her feet make me think she's maybe a chicken. I don't know what's going on there, but I'm into it. No, Tali was great. Liora, I realized, like, as a character and as a species, it's kind of pandering, but sometimes I don't mind being pandered to a little bit. Like, she's basically got the, the anime Onee-chan personality.

Like, she's a little bit of your kind of naive, younger sister-type character, and you're a little bit protective of her. At the same time, she's, like, three times as old as Shepard. She's, like, a hundred years old. So it's kind of like baby Yoda being 50. Like, you know, at some point, you got to just mature, you know, but, but, you know, that's, it's kind of going for, like, the kind of protective big brother, big sister thing, depending on which genders you play as.

Also, her mom is Deanna Troy, which doesn't really have any connection to anything, but, you know, it's the Star Trek connection. Yeah, I think one of the strongest aspects of Mass Effect, and the one reason I think I think about this game so often is the fact that in building their own sci-fi universe, they managed to create such a wide variety. And again, also, because it's like this video game, so they don't have to work with, they don't have to take a human actor

and just put some forehead on them and like, okay, now you're an alien. So they got to create these species that really, really do have a lot of variation. Like, the crew you have on your, you know, on your ship are generally humanoid, you know. They've all got the same number of limbs, more or less. But their heads in basically the right place. But they're sort of, you know, they're still like, you couldn't realistically have, you know, actress play with these people.

But they also have all these other aliens who are involved in things that are absolutely impossible. Like the Elkhore, the Elkhore, like these giant, like, elephant-looking things who also have the amazing trait of, they talk in monotone. nor to express themselves. They prefix everything they say with an emotional state. So, elation, it is so nice to see you again, Shepard, borderline erotic. You know, it's just, I love that about them. But I think what's interesting is that in giving you all these different races, you know, you learn about these races, you learn about these races relationship with one

another. And they also manage to give you, the ones you pair up with are the ones that have the most direct connection to the plot you're involved with, you know? Like Talia, her people, are the ones who made, who actually developed the Geff, who are these sort of robot species, who are sort of the initial antagonists, you know, of this game. You learn they're working for someone else, but, so she's got this relationship with them, and the Rex, you know, his, his species was involved in a massive war early on, and then the council and sort of everyone else decided, oh, we need to wipe these people out. So they're sort of slowly dying out of like sort of a lack of fertility. But that, of course, comes out later in the game where it plays into

the plot. So I feel like they did a really good job of giving you this broad swath of people, some of whom don't really matter to the plot at all but are interesting, but the ones you meet the most are absolutely deeply involved in the story that you're working with, you know? And as far as the Salarians, who I think Mark Mear compared to like Steve Busemi, which is kind of spot on, like, they don't matter that much. And, you know, I think you meet, a salarian comes up in part two, and he's a lot more interesting. But like, as far as my aspect, one, they're just kind of like, they're just these guys, you know? They're just around. Yeah. And then you also have a lot of interesting alien species that you don't ever get into the party. But you mentioned the Elkhore. There's also the Hanar who are like space jellyfish that are like very ethereal and kind of float around and very serene. And don't forget the Volus who are a little dwarf guys who always kind of sound maybe high or like they're definitely trying to like get a scheme off on you most of the time. But they're kind of just a little befuddled most of the time.

Yeah, there's the Rachinae. I compare them to Ferengi in my head. They don't look like Ferengi, but I feel like they have some Ferengi aspects and that they're always, I think like Rex, they didn't be very cynical. Like, the one you meet on the Citadel is kind of like, oh, humans, what are you going to do? Like, you know, and the El Corr ambassador steps up for you, which I thought was very nice. It's like, oh, disappointment. I don't think you really believe that. Each of the characters has their own kind of combat efficacy also.

Like, you have some characters who are just pure physical, like Rex. All he can do, he's a dinosaur with a shotgun is how Terry Nguyen described him once. And that stuck with me. He's like this stocky, bulky. lizard guy with this big shell armor thing on his back and he runs around with a space shotgun and he just blows things up and that's

what he's good at. And he says Shepard in a really low, slow voice. The best line of dialogue in the game. Shepard. Rex. And then, you know, at the other extreme you have Caden, who just basically can only do spells and is kind of

useless for weapons-based combat. And, you know, other characters kind of combine the guns and the biotics, of course, you know, Shepard can, you know, as the main character, the playable character, you have the ability to specialize in whatever you want. You can go down different paths

in terms of combat efficiency. So yeah, so you can kind of build this party and customize it the way you want. You can choose characters based on who's going to be best in the field, but also like, I just really like this

character and I want them to be with me always, because they're my bro or they're my, you know, my gal or I certainly want to shack up with him even though it's not a romance option. The combat is such an interesting part of this first mass effect. I don't know how you remember it. I remember the movement, the aiming, the controls being really clodgy, really like, you know, baby's first FP, you know, a third-person shooter that BioWare was trying to make. But there is something in it that I think they lost in the sequels that I still love in that

that first game, which is the flexibility that it had really more of an RPG sensibility and how you were able to build your character and the weapon you used. You could just kind of put together any parts of like build a shotgun, build a sniper rifle, and then put different types of ammunition or something on it. So like I ran around and the first mass effect with like a shotgun that fired rockets basically. And it was like I could shoot it once and then it would instantly overheat. But it did like a huge amount of damage. damage. And I was really bummed in the sequels when they became much more competent shooters from just a gun feel perspective and all that stuff. But they kind of lost some of like the

the fun messy playfulness of this first game. Yeah, I think the messiness, they just couldn't figure out how to make it streamlined enough to be usable because it has the looter shooter kind of feel to it and you're just constantly getting drops. And you don't even have to pick them up. It's just like you end an encounter and all of a sudden you get this list of stuff. And At some point, it's just like, hey, your encumbrance is too high. You've got to get rid of a bunch of the stuff. And so every time you get into a fight, you're like, oh, God, I got to go through the menus. And it was just really clumsy.

Which took so long. I think scrolling through every menu item was like about a full 10 minutes per item. No, it was a few seconds. But it would take so long to get through that menu. You know you have a Band-Aid on a game design problem when there's a button to turn all of your items into goo or Omni gel, right? Like, if there's a delete all button, you know that they're like, well, we got to do something about this problem. Let's just put this on here and hope people forgive us. Yep. I think one of the big things about the combat, the huge change is that kind of turned me

off a little bit. It's one reason why I actually haven't finished Mass Effect 2 yet is that in Mass Effect 1, all your guns are basically operate on this sort of heat sink system where it's like, you know, the more power you use, the faster you shoot, the hotter it gets. And then if you actually overheat your gun, you can't use it for a little bit. But otherwise, you basically have unlimited ammo, and as you said, you can sort of choose what kind of ammo type you want any time. You can basically pair your guns and create these offensive options.

Whereas in the second game, it's like every gun has specific kinds of ammo, and you can run out of ammo, and you have to be careful. You have to look for ammo sometimes. And to me, I was like, the shooting does feel better. These guns feel better. But I'm like, I don't really enjoy this granular sort of, oh, I need to make sure I've got enough... I've got to have ammo for this fight.

Like, no, I don't want to wear my ammo. I want to just run in there and see what gun works best, what gun feels best. So, because everything's stat-based, it's kind of like you can equip characters with guns they aren't really ready for, and the penalty is, like, they're sort of less accurate. But if you put enough things into stats, and if you have a good enough gun, it almost doesn't matter. I feel like at the end of the game, I had characters using guns they weren't technically assigned to, but because the guns were just so...

strong. It just, it didn't matter, which was just, it was fun for me. And, you know, and again, I would, and then I put, like, the, the, I forget, is it poison or like acid rounds or whatever? And, like, yeah. Like, and then you're just disintegrating enemies. It's like, yeah, this is good. I'm disintegrating pirates. All is right. One thing that I think is really lost in the sequels is the unpredictability of combat. I mean, in, in Mass Effect 2 and 3, you walk into a space and it's a large, a large square full of waist-high boxes. And you know, know, well, I see cover points and I see places for people to shoot at me from. So this is going to be a combat encounter.

We were firmly in the gears era at that point. Yeah, Mass Effect, one really doesn't have that because cover doesn't really factor in. And combat can take place anywhere. There's a much more seamless feel to the game. I mean, a lot of times you'll be, you know, exploring the planet or a moon or something in the Mako, which we haven't even talked about yet. But you can go out and you can fight these characters that like pour out of a building on foot. But also, you can just drive around to the macko and blast them.

You could run them over. Or you can blast them from a distance with your, you know, recoilless rifle and mounted on the top of your space dune buggy. And all of those are valid options. And some of them are more fun than others. Do you want to like get down and wait in and, you know, have your biotics, do tactics and stuff? or just want to blow the shit out of a bunch of geth from a distance because you're in a space dune buggy and who's going to stop you? It's great. There's definitely an early story mission where I remember the way the planet is set up, you're supposed to get out of the vehicle to go on foot and then you get ambushed by all these, you know, gath or whatever. But if you're persistent, if you're not a quitter, you can get, you can volley that goddamn buggy over like a wall or something and just get it inside the area.

you're not supposed to drive in? And then when the ambush hums, you just blow everyone away and like, all right, mission accomplished. I have a vague memory of that. I think I did exactly what you're talking about. But I have to share a macro story. So one of the weird things about this game, they were trying to deliver on that promise of like, you know, a massive galaxy you can explore, right? That manifested in a bunch of procedurally generated planets that were just barren wastelands that you could kind of drive around and have funny physics events with, right? With your your space buggy. Somehow, when I played Mass Effect the first time, I did not realize that the Macco has

both a machine gun and a cannon on it, which I think were bound on the Xbox, like the right bumper and the left bumper, something like that. So I spent 30 hours of Mass Effect driving around on these planets in the buggy using this machine gun, which overheated in about five seconds to fight all the random enemies did not understand why, you know, my vehicle's getting destroyed all the time. I've got to drive away from combat, repair it, like to use all this Omigel, wait for my gun to cool down. And then at some point, you know, 20 or 30 hours in, I like tapped the other shoulder button, fired off a cannon and was just, just astounded that that was there the whole time

and felt also a deep shame in that moment that I had somehow not realized it was there. Yeah, I mean, for the most part, the Mako is, it's not that interesting to drive around these barren planets. But it was worth it to me because every once in a while something would happen. There would be like, you know, a dune sandworm pop out and be like, hey, and you can blow it up and get cool stuff. Or occasionally you would find like these weird side missions where, you know, hey, here's like a totally interesting thing that's not significant to the plot, but it's out here and you can do it. or, you know, occasionally just find a point that you can interact with and it gives you like a plot dump of something that's totally irrelevant and, you know, totally not germane to the main plot, but it seems to be seeding story ideas for the future that, of course, we're never followed up on. The one that really sticks in my mind is the one on the moon when you go to Earth's moon. And there is just this one point where you can read, I don't know, like something that gives you this huge text dump.

It's kind of ominous and like hinting at the origins of humanity. And the sequels do nothing with that. It's just forgotten. But it was so intriguing. And I was like, ah, this is why I'm driving around in my space noon buggy because I wanted, you know, stuff like this. I can't wait to see where this goes. The answer was nowhere, but I didn't know that at the time. I think the main, often the enemies that you run into on these little side missions, when you go to a random outpost or whatever, are the human serberus operatives, right, who are just these kind of generic bad guys, you know, doing whatever, smuggling, some kind of stuff.

And they do end up, that was something that in this first game, they really didn't have a plan for them. They were just like, we need some kind of throwaway baddies. And then in the second game, they become, you know, a huge part of the story. So that was a really cool thing that came out of those side missions that at the time felt very frivolous, but it really paid off later. I got to say, I hated, I hated the driving as far as, like, from a gameplay standpoint, but I loved exploring all those, like, every time I flew to a new, you know, solar system, I would find, I'd immediately check every planet, you know, some of them only just give you, like, some of them only just give you, like, a weird text up, like, this planet is 7,000 degrees. Don't land here. like, oh, okay, come on. But every system had at least one environment you could explore. And yeah, a lot of them were empty and didn't have anything huge. But it was always the fun of, like, what is out here, what's here? Some of them were very pretty. I remember I took a lot of

screenshots of my, you know, like, I'd park myself on a mountain and then try and angle the camera to get like another moon out there or some kind of star system. I love doing that aspect of the game. And also the fact that you can get, you can get yourself in trouble. Like, I I looked it up ahead. Before the recording, there was a place called Tun Tao. And if you go to Tun Tao, there's a bunch of pirates who have this sort of encampment. And they're really aggressive. They've got a lot of guns. And I ended up there early on in the game, and I just got wiped out multiple times. I could not, I could not get past these pirates. And way later in the game, I talked to Rex, and Rex, you know, if you talk to your crew members casually in between

missions, you get to know them, and eventually they give you some information, and sometimes they give you a quest. So eventually, if you talk to Rex enough, he's like, oh, yeah, my family's to have this antique piece of armor and some pirates stole it, and I'd love to get it back someday, but I don't know. And you can do this for him. You can basically go with him and get this armor back, and it turns out the Tuntow pirates had his armor. So I discovered this side mission way early in the game when I wasn't ready for it. So when I finally went back there with more experience, and with more knowledge, and also the fact I also noticed this time that the

pirates had a big fuel tank that I could overload and blow up half the pirates. So to me, I love that kind of stuff, and I feel like it's very relevant, you know, as we're talking right now, you know, the entire internet is on fire with tears of the kingdom, not to date things, but like that's the kind of game where it's like, you can wander that entire world, and yeah, a lot of it's empty,

but you can also find, you know, a den of monsters that you're way not ready for. And you can uncover a space that, you know, just has a weird curiosity, and it might be part of a side quest later on. You don't know. And, like, that's the, the exploitation part of this game is one thing I love about it. And I was, again, one more reason I didn't get very far in Mass Effect 2. I'll get back to it. But, you know, if you explore the galaxy Mass Effect 2, you'd just spend, like, items on fuel and you get to a star system. And, like, all you can do is take samples of these planets. Like, oh, okay. I've got a core sample of Ice Planet. Great. I want to drive on Ice Planet. Or explore it, at least. I don't want to drive on it. Give me a better vehicle, please. Yeah. And they gave you back a little bit of that in Mass Effect 3, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't the open-ended experience. I mean, I think you kind of found in this generation a lot of developers were like, have an open world, have an open experience, do whatever you want. And then realizing like, oh, the consequences of that, it's just too much. We can't balance it right. We can't, you know, make the content sharp enough to do that. I mean, you look at daggerfall to sky. Iron, like the way they just keep cutting back in Elder Scrolls, the amount of the scope and the openness, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Like, Daggerfall has an immense world, but is it interesting? No, not really. You look at Grand Theft Auto, and, you know, GTA3, I just always loved finding weird exploits and ways to, like, hack the system and do things with the open world to pitch missions in my favor. And by the time you got the Vice City and San Andreas, they had really taken that away and were like, no, no, you know, you're on a mission now. This is instant. The whole world is resetting before you start this because you were doing things like parking a car in the escape path of people you have to chase and blocking them off so that you could just go and kill them like fish in a barrel. And that's not how we want you to play the game.

So play the game the way we want it instead of the way you want it. And I think, you know, things have gone back in the other direction with more open games, you know, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, among others. But, you know, it's really been kind of this back and forth where developers have to kind of figure out, like, how can we actually make this possible and workable in a way that is, you know, still going to be fun for players and make them feel like they have a lot of freedom even if they actually don't. And so you kind of end up with, you know, going from the original Mass Effect to the Ubisoft formula where it's, you know, you've an open world, but really you just go up into Towers and then go to Quest points. And that's pretty much all. I think that was a big criticism of Andromeda, the fourth Mass Effect game, where they tried to give you more of the open world exploration. But again, it just wasn't really interesting. But I think this first game, it just came at the right time where our expectations, our standards for these things were.

so different than they are now. And they could kind of get away with this being pretty groundbreaking at the time where it did have this degree of freedom, but it was also paired with a very, you know, produced story with these big cutscene, you know, set piece moments throughout it. And they managed to keep the player choice and interesting RPG stuff woven into that while still having, you know, their elements of bombast in there. And like they kind of just, even though every piece of it is kind of messy, all of the pieces are there and they all still work. Right. If you look at why the current Zelda games work in a way that this game doesn't, you know,

with the kind of openness, it's because, one, there's a lot to do, like, a lot of just small instance things or, like, designed things for you to find and to do. But also, those games are so much about interlocking systems. And I went back after, you know, a six-year break from playing Breath of the Wild recently before Tears of the Kingdom came out and going back into it kind of with like a blank memory I was really overwhelmed by

just, not overwhelmed but just amazed by how many systems work together and work together in cohesive and sensible ways and I just I don't think the technology the programming, the

hardware power was there during the Xbox 360 era to quite do that. Not that the switch is necessarily that much more powerful than Xbox 360, but you know, it's just having one, you know, enough memory, enough RAM to keep all these things stored and active. You know, think about all the things that just vanished after you did them in Skyrim. Like you'd go back and, oh, I did this thing and now it's gone. What happened to that? Yeah, it's just they were, they wanted to get there. But the, the whole

thinking and the technology and the experience there just wasn't quite where it needed to be. Yeah, I mean, even the games that were doing that at the time, you know, the DASXs of the world are very much limited in scope, even if the systems are very deep, right? And Mass Effect was definitely not shooting for that. But yeah, that's not something we were seeing in 2007 on consoles for sure. This game was already struggling just to, just to run at something approaching 30 FPS on the 360. Yeah. Yeah, it's very telling how, you know, you find the Citadel early on, and you hear characters and text describes how massive amounts of people live on different parts of the Citadel and these entire civilizations that I live there,

but, like, you only spend your time in the combination, you know, UN and shopping mall, which is, like, very sparsely populated, relatively speaking. So it's like you never see these masses of people, and, you know, when you do go to someplace, like a club or something, mostly you just see, like, a dozen or so people who are very stiffly dancing in place. And I do appreciate that you get to dance with them, which is always funny. Shepard dances like Elaine from Seinfeld. He or she is terrible.

Yeah, so having seen Gundam now, which I hadn't at the time, like, oh, the Citadel is basically a bunchie. It's, you know, there's the idea of like this massive environment kind of trailing. off in the distance, but you're, you know, sort of in the, I guess, high security spaces where only certain people can go. So that kind of limits what you can do. Yes, the elites. But still, you have to respect the core, the central ambition that Mass Effect was built on, which is the idea of an action-style role-playing game with massive player agency, the ability to make choices to perform actions to commit acts that have irrevocable permanent consequences, and not only to account for all of those things in this game, but also for those things to carry over into

Mass Effect 2, and eventually 3. And, you know, the promise was that the choices you make along the way will create radically different outcomes at the end of Mass Effect 3, which, you know, people are still very salty about because that did not happen. But, I mean, realistically, Could it have? No, there's just, there's so much complexity with these systems and these choices and all the things that have to carry over. And it's amazing that they did that at all. Like, you know, that kind of thing had existed for a while, you know, wizardry, you could carry your party from one to the other. But it didn't affect the plot. It was just like, oh, you don't have to start from level one with your party. You could start for level 10 now. Sweek it in, you know, you can make a few choices in the first sweep it in and then carry over. that save file and this week it in two and it would affect like hey can Grimeo be in your party or is he dead? And a couple of other

things but the scale and just the sheer number of variables that carry over from Mass Effect 1 to 2 to 3 and 2 introduces lots of new variables. You have basically 12 party

members who may or may not live to see the end of the game. All of those characters have to be accounted for in Mass Effect 3 You know, you start with just Ashley, Rex, and Kiden in, or Kaden in Mass Effect 1, who might be dead at the end of Mass Effect 1. And then, you know, Mass Effect 2 has to account for those. But then you have your whole goddamn suicide squad, you know, your dirty dozen who may or may not be alive in Mass Effect 3. So the makeup of the world, you know, the core characters you can talk to is radically changed. You know, Mass Effect 3, you kind of get substitute characters.

for the ones who have died. I don't think, was it Morden who didn't make it in Mass Effect 2 for me? I lost one character, and I think it was Morden. And there's just like, hey, I'm Morden's assistant. And I will tell you all the stuff that Morden would have told you if he were alive. But he's not. So I'm going to give you all of his dialogue. Oh, man.

But still. Because you get a great payoff for Morden in three. I think that's who I lost. It's been a while. But still, the thing is, like, they still had to record, you know, alternate dialogue for an alternate character to deliver the same plot exposition and get you to the same place, regardless of what happens, this is not free. This is not just like lazy developers.

No, it's like we have to pay people to write and we have to pay people to rig animations and create character models and we have to pay voice actors and we have to pay, you know, editors to get that stuff in there and programmers to make sure it all lines up. That stuff is really, really expensive. I mean, just imagine the whiteboard flowchart for every, like, design, right? Where it's like, well, okay, if they had made this choice in one of the first two games, what dialogue options has effect? If these characters are alive or not, you know, what does that affect? Like, props to them for being able to make Mass Effect 3 at all by the time

that they did. Yeah, I mean, it's a bummer that the end of the game, at the end of the saga, comes down to pushing one of three colored buttons. But, you know, Mac Walter said in one of his interviews, as oral histories or something, that if you look at it, there is more dialogue. more text, a bigger script for Mass Effect 3 than for 1 and 2 combined, because they had to account for all these outcomes. Like, did you let the Rachnai Queen die in Mass Effect 1? Well, that didn't matter anywhere else in Mass Effect. It didn't matter in Mass Effect 2, but hey, if you let the Rackney Queen live, guess what? The Rackney Queen joins your armada, and there's a whole, like, story event with the Racti. Did you, you know, did you make peace between the

Quarians and the Geith? You got Legion on your team, but what was the outcome of that? Well, that's going to affect the makeup of your Armada at the end of Mass Effect 3, and there's events for that, and it's going to affect the outcome of your relationship with Talley. Like, there's

just so much that is established here and carries into future games. It's absolutely mind-boggling that they thought they could pull it off. Like, no, you madmen, this is not possible with the resources you have. the amount of money that it's going to cost, and yet they tried it, and they did a pretty

damn good job of mostly getting it right. And yes, it kind of fell down in some of the broad strokes and the points that people were really looking to and paying attention, but all the other stuff that went into it. Like, it really is kind of about the journey rather than the destination. I mean, has there been a game before or since that really promised that degree of continuity across the saga? No, because it's madness. Well, I absolutely want to bring this.

up because I think it's very relevant. You know, this is 2007, so about five years later, you get the Telltale Walking Dead game, which I feel like, you know, well, definitely not an action game, that was a game that was basically built on the promise of, oh, your choices matter, your choices matter.

The game is constantly telling you, you know, Kenny will remember this, you know? And if you compare those two, there is just so narrow in its scope, you know, like the very first end of the first chapter of Walking Dead, you get to pick, oh, someone lives, someone dies, and it's supposed to be this big deal. Oh, I save this person, this person dies. But whoever you save dies almost immediately at the start of chapter 2. So it's kind of like, oh, okay. So that's how you're handling that. And I feel like one of the reasons that I do love this game and the fact I do think about it a lot is because there is so much happening here, because they really tried so hard to give you this wide birth and a broad outcome of how many different things can go wrong. You know, yes, there is a simple thing where you have a

and Ashley or Caden, one of them has to die. Like, that has to happen. But then you know, to this late game moment where Rex might die, but he also might not. Like, it's pretty, it's pretty much up to you. And it's weird how the game characters almost turn on Rex in that moment, which I was kind of shocked by. Like, they're like, oh, I don't know if I can trust this guy anymore. It's like, wait a minute.

It's Rex. It's our buddy. So I absolutely saved Rex for that moment. And, you know, I do, it's the reason I do keep thinking back and I want to go and play more of the sequels because I know. So much of this stuff carries forward, whereas, like, the Walking Dead hyped this thing so much, and this, it's all very superficial in Walking Dead, you know, someone lives, someone dies, but it's always going to be like, it's always going to have the same characters at the end of the game, you know, you're not going to, you know, you can't save, you know, anyone who wasn't going to be saved in Walking Dead. It's just, it's how it's how it's how it's how it's just how it's how it's how it's just how it's how it's how it's not quite reach there, but Man, they gave you a lot of space, and I love that. Yeah, they didn't give you Earth's Moon, but they gave you, like, Phobos, and that's still

a moon. That's impressive. Yeah. Like, that's, you know, that's better than an asteroid. Come on. It's absolutely a reason why people love this series, right? And I think what also makes it, in a way hard to, everybody has their favorite game, but it's hard to talk about just talk about them in isolation because the whole package matters so

much to what happens in the first game and what happens in the second game. You know, people, I don't know, I feel like there's something in us innately that loves a payoff in a story. You know, like think of everything everywhere all at once, you know, this movie that was written in such a way to layer in all of these references and jokes and side plots. And then every single one of them gets a satisfying payoff at some point in the movie. And that's why people love that movie so much, right? And Mass Effect pretty much was able to pull that off as a game trilogy. Yeah, everywhere, everything all at once. the very rare occasion where you have a Chekhov's butt plug, you know?

Like, that's incredible. we haven't talked about so far really there's two things we talked about the geth but we haven't talked about sarin and we haven't talked about the reapers and as you play the game you know you start out thinking oh no the geth they're bad news they're

you know transhumanism bad the robots want to kill everyone that's bad they're going to turn us all into like robot zombies no one likes that but it turns out the geth aren't the main villains there's a man behind the man and so you have to fight

you know sarin A guy that you thought at first was trustworthy and cool, because he was another Specter. It was, but he's the 007 that went bad. He's the, um, he's the Alex, 006. Yeah, 006, yeah, was that his name? Shawnee. From, uh, Skyfall. Trevelyum.

Oh, I was thinking of, I was thinking of Golden Eye, but. Oh, okay, you're going old school. I'm going new school. I'm sticking in the, you know, I mentioned casino royale earlier, so I'm just going with the, uh, the Daniel Craig era. But, yeah, like, you know, so you've got the, the, the, the, 07 gone wrong, the 006. But that's not the

main villain. There's actually a man behind the man who's behind the men, whatever. Anyway, there's basically Cthulhu is out in space, floating around between galaxies, waiting to have some tasty mortal snacks, just chomping down on human civilization.

And so, yeah, the longer you play, the bigger the scope of the plot, until you're basically fighting evil space guys. who's awakening from its 50,000-year slumber to devour all civilization again. Can I drop a great, maybe my favorite line of writing from this game is when you get to have a little chat with the reapers before you try to stop them from eating everybody. And they say, you exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it. And like, that's a good villain line right there.

Yeah, there's like in the first mass effect, the reapers, really do have that chathonic old god quality where they are just unknowable they don't explain their reasons for acting and behaving the way they do no one knows why every 50,000 years they wipe out all civilization in the galaxy it's a mystery it's unknown and uh you know the sequels eventually pull aside the curtain and it's a little bit banal honestly um you know at the end when you fight the Reaper baby that looks like a human embryo it's a big

it's yeah it just doesn't it doesn't really I don't know you go from like Space Chithulu to like space dancing baby it's unga chaga but it's not working for me

Jeremy I was going to get parallel to the Dark Zucker series because what else am I going to do here but absolutely you've drawn two parallels now because in the Capcom fighting game series that came out a full 10 years before this game, you had a robot character, and he was part of a race of robots that only existed to, they slumber on earth for thousands of years of time, and they awaken to sort of reset civilization in favor of Mother Nature. So they're kind of

reaper-esque. But now you mentioned fighting a giant baby. That's just fetus a god from vampire savior. So there's two, clearly, clearly the bioward people ripped Capcom off. Dark Stockers are not dead. They're in Mass Effect. Well, and also it has uncanny similarities to the flood and the halos in the Halo series. You've got Prothians and Prometheans also. Yep. Yeah, the precursors and forerunners and Ford Explorers and whatever else, I don't know. Okay. But Darkstalkers. Yes, Darkstalkers. I agree. And also Street Fighter. I'm sure Street Fighter works in there somehow.

I think maybe the reason that I have the fondest memories of this. this first game, even though I do very much love Mass Effect 2, is just, ultimately, it's so much easier to write a great mystery than it is to write a great conclusion to a mystery. And it's so much more exciting to get thrust into this new world and all the possibilities of who the reapers are, why they're doing what they're doing, how this story is going to play out. And the conclusion that they ended up coming up with is much less satisfying than that the initial spark of wonder and curiosity that you get from this first game. Endings are tough.

And when I'm like editing a book or putting together, you know, a big article or something, I get like 95 of the way through, 95% of the way through and then I'm like, well, time to go do something else. I don't even have to like resolve a mystery. It's just like, oh, these last bits are going to be so painful, so agonizing. And I don't know why that is, but it's just a human. conditioned, I think. But really, it's also very on brand because, you know, clearly the people who made this game had a deep love of Star Wars and Star Trek. And, you know, they lamented

the fact that when they made this game, both Star Wars and Star Trek were kind of slumbering or languishing. And it's like both of those franchises have dabbled in these sort of big mystery things and they fumble them every single time. What does God need with a starship? Yeah, it's just, you know, I mean, you still love them. I mean, I think, you know, we're still kind of coming down from the high of, you know, Star Trek Picard season three. And that, like, that didn't quite pay off what it promised, but, like, it did okay. But it also, we also all remember what happened with, you know, the rise of Skywalker. Is it, uh, so it just, what, what's that? What, what is it the rise of Skywalker? I've never heard of that before. It's a movie that came out

and, gosh, gosh. I would have heard about it if that was real. You're just kidding. Yeah. Sorry. It's too bad they ended Star Wars after episode eight. Broom Kid. Broom Kid. Brum Kid. Brum Kid, yeah, he's going to save the galaxy. Yeah, but, you know, the core premise of Mass Effect is kind of that all galactic civilizations are a little bit stupid because they discover these ancient relays created by an impossibly advanced civilization that is now extinct. And at no point does someone say, you know, this could be bad if a civilization capable of putting together this technology. that exceeds our understanding, couldn't survive. What does that mean for us? It's probably no big deal.

Let's just move into their city that's been floating out here in space for untold millennia and is in perfect working order because of a, you know, a little servant species that keeps everything up and running even when no one's around. That's probably normal and good. Yeah, let's make this the seed of our power. That seems the way to go. Pay no attention to the spider bots. Except, I don't know.

I feel like that is something that our society would do. But I would like to think that the alien races are a little more in light. You can't just leave a perfectly good mass relay on use. It was just sitting there. It's just right there, yeah. Yeah, Jeremy, you say that now, but wait until you find out where Steve Jobs found the first iPhone. Let me tell you. I thought God delivered it to him on Mount Sinai.

Nope. Oh, no, that was the iPad. That was the tablets. Never mind. He found a working prototype in a mine somewhere. He's like, this is good. We'll just make more of these. But then he delved too deep and too greedily.

Yeah. Costum's life. All right. I'm sorry. I wasn't going there, but okay. I'm sorry, everybody. That was uncalled for. That was very renegade of me.

There is a lot of stuff that I like about the initial mass effect story. Even if you can look past, you know, the fact that Liarra is basically the only person in the galaxy was like, I wonder what's up with these mass relays and these trothians and all this stuff. Well, okay, it turns out. It's not so good. But she does have a very personal role in the story, which I think is cool. I feel like it's kind of rare for you to have a party member whose, you know, parent is like directly involved with the kind of the core conspiracy of the story. So is there anything we want to talk about before we kind of wrap this up? I feel like we've talked a little bit about the kind of

combat and like why the schluting system doesn't necessarily work, but we haven't really talked about the fact that this game looks like a third-person shooter, but it's really not. It is a turn-based dice roll RPG, the like of which, you know, kind of got

to start video game-wise with Baldur's Gate, and this carries that through. And it was really kind of the last time before Mass Effect 2 said, oh, this is actually just be a third-person shooter with cover and aiming But it's interesting because they're still aiming in mass effect.

And you can still, you know, kind of like the accuracy of your shots still matters. You can even crouch to, you know, shrink your targeting radical. It's not as overt as that, what's that Sega series, Valkyrie Chronicles? Oh, yeah, yeah, the Alkiria Chronicle. Vakiria, excuse me, where it's like you have the sort of combat and aiming, but then like it's absolutely random whether you hit the guy or not. So like, you aim to their head, good luck. Whereas it's way more involved in this game. You do choose your position.

You do get to aim. You do get to decide what weapons you're using. Do you want to use your magic powers? Do you want your squad to back you up here? So it's a lot closer to a third-person shooter. But ultimately, yes, there are a lot of factors beyond your control. But it's both bad or it's a double-edged sword because you can also manipulate the system and you can also take your chances. And sometimes using the wrong weapon works out.

So, you know, hooray. You can still feel that like computer RPG DNA in there where you can press a button to basically pause combat and give, you know, orders to your squad mates tell them to use their abilities and stuff. And they're kind of dumb. So sometimes you have to tell Caden to use his bionics on somebody so that you can take their shield down or whatever. I think they got a little better at that stuff as they went on, but it increasingly became more and more actiony where I think in the later games, even that you don't even pause. It's just like it slows down time, right, as you're giving commands. So, yeah, this one, you still feel that them kind of figuring out how to make an action game, and they sort of made like 30% of one.

Yeah, and it was confusing to some people. To me, like, it felt intimate, like, instantly familiar, even though I hadn't played previous Bioware games, because Final Fantasy 12 did basically the same thing in, you know, 2006. So, like, this was very much on my brain. was like, oh, yeah, I'm into this. But a lot of people did approach it as a third-person shooter. And I remember, bless his heart, Dean Takahashi wrote, I think, a preview of the game or like a hands-on.

I think it might have even been a review, fortunately. I don't think it was because I think he was only, like, a little ways into the game before people said, hey, look. But, you know, he just approached it as a third-person shooter thinking, oh, like, gears of war or something. and didn't seem to realize that it had, you know, RPG systems. There was an equipment system. You could, you know, go into menus and choose all these commands and change your armor

and upgrade your weapons and stuff. So he was trying to get through, like, you know, the first mission without any of that stuff. And it gets really hard, really fast if you don't understand the systems. I think he had not put in any points. If you don't put points in them. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not intuitive.

in. If you come into this from a Gears of War perspective, from, you know, Call of Duty 4, why would you think, oh, yeah, I need to go into the menus and I need to assign points to things? Because the idea of, you know, like hybrid systems like this and, you know, RPG infusions of skills and abilities and stuff, that just wasn't part of the video game lexicon at that point to the degree that it is now. Like, this game kind of helped push in that direction. But at that point, there was still kind of this classical divide between action games and RPGs. And this dared to kind of cross over between the two and wasn't entirely successful in it. But, you know, it did enough of both that it kind of took people adjustment on both sides of the fence.

Were you used to RPGs? Well, now you kind of have to worry about, you know, position and in combat space in a different way than classic Xcom because you also have to like zoom in and you know kind of use targeting reticles and scopes and things like that. And if you were an RPG player, you probably weren't super used to using the right stick on a controller to aim. Oh my God. What was even that? But you know, if you were coming from an action perspective, it probably never would have occurred to you to, you know, assign skill points or to swap out ammunition for stat types or to use your magic spells, which, you know, cause you to overload electronics or to levitate things. You know, there's take down shields. Like, you're not

using magic and the classic ice fire lightning sense. It's more like it's a, it's a, it's, it's a scientific, sci-fi vocabulary. So, you know, you're hacking systems and things like that. And I don't know, maybe, you know, bioware or bioshock had just come out. So maybe people, did kind of get that. But even so, this was still kind of that next step. It wasn't a pure first-person shooter, third-person shooter like Bioshock was. I think there's maybe been a 15-year slow-motion like Monkey's paw curling here, where I remember at the time being so excited for an RPG becoming more of an action game. And now we have all of these games where, like you're saying, everything is an RPG now, right? And it's like, oh, great, another open world game where

they've just thrown in a skill tree and stat points and all of this, you know, just corrupt. onto it to blote out their open world game. Like, please just let me, you know, play an action game sometimes. But at the time, it was very exciting. I remember downloading trailers and little, I don't know even know what you would call it, like almost a mini documentary that they made about this game on the Xbox 360 dashboard. You know, I'm downloading my sweet HD 720P footage where it was sort of like a narrated explanation of the new ground-breaking features in Mass Effect, you know, and they were showing

the camera angles in conversations. They were showing off the dialogue wheel where it gave you more of a vibe instead of giving you, you know, a whole two sentences of text you had to read. And they were really hyping this up as like the next thing for RPGs. And it was kind of clumsy, but it really was that in the end. Was the video narrated by the Codex narrator? Because that guy has a great voice. I wish I had looked it up before the show, but I remember it very, it really made an impression on me. Like, it made me want to play this game very, very badly.

I went through every single Codex entry just to hear that dude tell me about some dumbass planet that I would never visit again. It was great. Yeah, I guess it's definitely high time we shout out the cast. It's really a all-around great cast for this game. Obviously, we have to talk about Jennifer Hale. I think this is one of the all-time – I mean, it's – it's – the character itself is kind of a blank slate because you get to choose what she does, but she brings such a great energy to her role. And, you know, I've read defenses of the other guy, Mark Meier, who voices the male Shepherd. And, you know, he said he tried to play it more strictly by the book because he viewed Shepherd as sort of like an uptight military type who would, like, loosen as this series went on.

But still, for me, I played it as as Female Shepherd. I feel like Jennifer Hale just nailed that role. Just loved her in it. 100%. We've actually had Jennifer Hale on the show and talked to her. But, yeah, her work as Shepard was fantastic and just had so much more charisma than the very dry approach that Mark Mere took, which is not a knock on a skill. Like, he had reasons for doing that. But, you know, it was just a case where I think maybe the voice director should have kind of gotten them on the same page and said, hey, you know, she's taking this approach.

maybe you should also do that. But, you know, a big part of what makes Femm Shepard work is that she has the same dialogue as male Shepard. You know, romance subplots aside, in almost every case, the lines that she recites, that she reads, are the same as Mark Mears. And it was really unusual to see a female version of a character treated exactly the same as the male version of the character. She doesn't wear revealing armor.

There's no cleavage window in her in seven suit. You know, her specter uniform isn't like of a unit heart or something. She doesn't have a zero suit. She wears like feminine crafted armor. It conforms to her body shape as opposed to a male body shape. But that's the only difference. And she gets to make the same choices, be the same kind of leader, mess up, or, you know, be tough and be ruthless. in the same way as the male

counterpart. And, you know, aside from the fact that she has the option to Romance Caden, like, everything about her is just, you know, on par with the male version. And that's uncommon. That's uncanny. Like, that just wasn't a thing in video games.

Especially because if you think it at the time, you know, if they wrote the character as a woman, they almost certainly would have had at least one subplot, if not a major character, like, have some sort of, quote unquote, realistic sexism. It's like, oh, go back, whole, you know, women belong back on Earth. Like, no, there's none of that crap, you know.

And it reminds me of Ripley in the Alien series. You know, they famously, that character was not written as a woman, but Sigourney Weaver took that role. Sogorni Weaver nailed that role, and she proceeded to play the hell out of it for multiple sequels because she's great at it, you know? I think it's actually a little unfortunate that this still stands out as such a significant thing, because the only game that immediately comes to mind for me in this kind of of big-budget RPG action space that is kind of comparable as like Assassin's Creed Odyssey

did a similar thing. And I remember it feeling like a pretty big deal when that game also had a fully voiced unique male and female character and that people were choosing between much like they were male shepherd and female shepherd. And I'm sure that that's not literally the only game that, you know, has done this since then, of course, there are other games that let you choose your character, but it's still kind of a rarity to kind of pull it off at the scope that this game did and, like, really deliver on the quality of the character design, the quality of the writing, all of that

stuff. But even that, even that had to follow the real-life sexism moment of the Ubisoft dude getting up there and telling us how it was harder to animate women, you know? 100%. It's just, it's so tragic that we can't, this can't be more of it. And even then, even with the mass effect, because you got to build your own character, but there was still this cover image of Shepard as a specific

kind of man. Yep. And that image kind of stuff. Yeah. Generic ass marine. Which looked like so many other games at the time. And it wasn't until the third game they even gave you an alternate cover, which I think was like, but it was way too little too late by that point, I think is unfortunate. Yeah. And

the male is kind of the default. Like that's you know how most people play because that's just what the game gave you at the outset, unless you chose to be female. So it's kind of a shame. But, you know, when you look at the performances, it ultimately comes down to a question of, do you want to play as Janeway or Chacote? And, you know, I feel like there's only one answer there. Poor Chacote. He got a raw deal. On so many levels. But, you know, boring-ass character. That's amazing, by the way. Twice this month I've recorded

an episode retronauts and we brought up Chacote. How about that? Wow. That's probably more than anyone's mentioned him in the past 15 years. All right. Anyway, yeah, like the cast is great. There are some pretty well-known actors in there. Seth Green plays your ship's navigator, pilot, Joker. But there's a lot of people who were either new actors or were just, you know, seasoned voice actors that you wouldn't recognize from television.

But you also have your Keith Davids and your Marina Sertises and, um, Carrie Ann Moss? Was she just in the second game? Okay. Never mind. Forget it. No carry on Moss for you. I think I heard Armand Sherman is one of the council members.

Oh, no kidding. Okay. Yeah. I think the Salarian of the council, it sounds a lot like Armid Sherman to me. I could be wrong there. Anyway, yeah, it's really well cast. Very good writing. You know, some of it's a little clunky on the tongue.

But for the most part, like it just, it's compelling. It's fun to watch, to read, to listen to. You know, there's a lot of incidental dialogue. Those interminable elevator sequences that mask the loading, they at least, you know, throw in some banter in there. So, you know, it's just a fun game. And it's a shame that a lot was lost in the transition into the sequels. It was probably inevitable.

And, you know, switching Mass Effect 2 to more of a cover-based shooter, hiding the RPG elements was probably the right choice for popular and uptake, but there was something just really special about this first game. And it's still like, I really ought to go back and revisit it sometime because, you know, that one playthrough so long ago has still stuck with me. And not a lot of games, there's not a lot of games I can say that about. Just so many scenes are just seared into my memory after one playthrough. Got a shout out to the composers who I think are Jack Wall and Sam Hulik.

I don't know if they did the trilogy, but they did. the first game and like if there are uh if there's an award show called the synthies or something out there like they deserve like every you know they deserve to sweep them because god the soundtrack for this game was just like the perfect you know late 70s early 80s cynthia but then also the kind of bombastic brass comes in sometimes just like completely set the tone for this game and I can listen to that galaxy mat song just for forever and ever Yeah, we got a quote from one of those interviews we linked to in the notes from Steve Sim, who said, one of our most influential songs was Love on a Real Train from Tandrine Dream.

And I feel like, yeah, they definitely nailed that aesthetic they were going for of, you know, classic futurism of this, you know, it's, we think the future's going to be like this and we think it's going to sound like this. And even though by 2007, we realized music had changed a lot, like, no, no, we still want this for our space opera. Yeah, and the great thing is that you don't even have to look that up because our editor, Greg, is going to put that in here. He's just awesome like that. So please enjoy some actual tangerine dream. And you can say, whoa, that's Mass Effect music. Anyway, I think that's, I think that about wraps it up for us. We've talked for nearly two hours about one video game.

My God, how often does that happen? Actually, it happens a lot. But that's just Retronauts for you. Mass Effect. A good game. We can say a lot about it. I mean, I didn't even talk about the fact that how much I love the way. once you ascend to Spectrehood and get past the prologue, you're kind of let loose in the Citadel.

And there's all these side quests and stuff you can do. And you can, I literally spent like six or seven hours just running around the Citadel doing as much as I could before I even began to move the plot forward, which probably made me a little overpowered because you do all kinds of stuff that gets you experience. And it's not just combat. It's like talking to people, performing side missions. You get experience for doing so much stuff. on The Citadel, and it really kind of underscored for me the fact that, hey, this really does want to be a role-playing game, where it's not just like, you're going to get better by killing stuff. It's, you're going to get better by doing everything you can possibly do, having an experience.

And that was great. I loved it. There's just so much there. And it's even like, I got to say, the first time I died in my Playthrow of Mass Effect, it was on the Citadel in that weird quest where you meet a, like, a sentient computer. and, like, if you do it wrong, it blows stuff up and it kills you. Like, I didn't realize that could even happen on the Citadel. But, yeah, there's an actual threat there, which I thought was amazing. So I do love the Citadel.

I love the exploring. I love how you meet someone. It's like, oh, yeah, I heard this. I heard this some kind of a, there's a problem out in the, you know, the Avalon system. And then, like, later on, you can find the Avalon system, and maybe you find a side quest there only because you talk to somebody about it. I just, I love that aspect of it. Absolutely.

Yeah, Mass Effect. Amazing game. Love it. I would love to see the series make a return, although I still haven't played Andromeda, and I guess I probably should. So, uh, I just wait for the next one.

I don't know. I feel like I want to get the experience. People I know were kind of down on it, but I don't know. I'm not necessarily going to be down on it myself because I'm like different things. So optimistic. I know.

Just like the first mass effect. Yeah, exactly. I'm a paragon here. I'm no longer a game reviewer, so I can afford to be nice. Anyway, that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks Wes and thanks Diamond for joining me for this conversation.

It was really enjoyable. And I think at some point we should talk about Mass Effect 2 and 3 also. But I guess you need to go ahead and finish those up. I do. Yeah, get through those and we'll revisit this topic sometime. Can you devise a suicide mission for us for the second podcast? You know, we've got to get all the questions, get all the topics just right or not everyone makes that out of the room alive. I've got to, no, no, no.

I'm going to do all your loyalty missions first, but that'll greatly enhance your likelihood of survival. Yeah, anyway, so this has been retronauts. You can find retronauts on the internet, pretty much anywhere you can find podcasts, and listen to us weekly for free, sometimes with advertisements, and an iffy bitrate quality,

because that's just the nature of things, retronauts. But, hey, guess what? If you like higher video or audio quality and you don't like advertisements and you like bonus stuff. The good news is that you can go to Patreon and support the show because we are largely Patreon-supported by listeners such as you in a PBS sort of way.

Go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. Subscribe for a few bucks a month. And you get every episode in a higher bit of quality with no advertisements a week ahead of everyone else. And for a couple bucks more, you also get bonus episodes every other Friday, bonus mini-podcasts and columns by Commander Fight here, and that's weekly, and also Discord access. I honestly think it is probably too good a deal. We probably should have charged more for the bonus exclusive content, but Patreon makes it really expensive to change tier pricing. So guess what?

You are in for a great deal. There's so much exclusive stuff if you sign up. So that's my pitch. Patreon.com slash Retronauts Wes. Where can we find you on Internet? Yeah, you can find me on PCGamer. I also am running a newsletter about emulation that is free that you can sign up to read if you want, write a new one every couple of weeks,

talk about cool stuff happening in the emulation scene, as well as fan translation, stuff in the Mr. FPGA scene. We should have gotten you for the episode that just went up yesterday about Mr. and analog pocket and emulation. Alas, alas. Well, I'll just have to come back for another show. But it's called read-only memo, and you can find it at read-only memo.com. And Diamond, what about you?

Oh, geez, the cops are coming. Sorry, everybody. I should go. Hello, everybody. My name is Diamond Fight, and if you are a retro-unzel, you already hear me on so many things, as Jeremy alluded to. But I also want to shout out the fact that we do a monthly community podcast, which has been a lot of fun. We started it this year in 2023, and with God's help and my voice, we will keep doing it every year. here, because I have so much fun talking about old games and doing this business.

If you want to find me on the internet, pretty much anywhere, look up Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that's my last name, C-L-U-B, that's a place where you can hang out in space and dance. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, doing retronauts here. Amazing. You can also find me at Limited Run Games, not doing retronots, but doing stuff with retro games and books, which is very cool. And, of course, you can find me on my YouTube channel

talking about retro games, old games. That is what I do. That is Jeremy Parrish on YouTube. Amazing, right? Yes, absolutely phenomenal. Anyway, this has been a great conversation. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Thanks again, Diamond and Wes, for your time. And this is me signing off, saying that no matter how much a journalist denoise you, do not punch them. Thank you, Jeremy. I'm going to renegade. Good night, jerks. Thank you. Thank you.