BioWare

Mass Effect is clearly a continuance of the fine BioWare tradition in RPGs. BioWare’s designs have developed greatly from Baldur’s Gate, and Mass Effect is an obvious descendant of previous designs. Leaning most heavily on the three-character party system of Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, Mass Effect is a story-driven experience in a unique BioWare setting.


Humanity is relatively new to the galactic scene and your character is the first human member of a highly respected multi-race military strike team. As such, he is in essence the first impression the galaxy has of the human race, and your decisions throughout the game will not only determine the fate of the galaxy, but how humans are ultimately viewed by other races. The good-and-evil style from KOTOR and Jade Empire is being replaced with more realistic and vague conversation options.

Apparently most of these decisions are made in various dialogue options, featuring BioWare’s new dialogue system. The new dialogue selection is somewhat different from most designs. Rather than show exactly what the player is going to say, the options are summarized by a phrase. The developers presented this as a fluid and natural conversation system, permitting gut responses to keep the talk flowing rather than weighing every single word – and indeed, the way they played, this is how it worked. However, the lack of exact wording might pose problems. Take the sample conversation we were shown, where the protagonist is trying to get information out of a bartender who doesn’t want to co-operate. The bartender hints at a bribe, and four options appear (paraphrased): “I’ll pay”, “This will cost you”, “I won’t pay”, and “Maybe threats will” (ie, will make him talk).


The vagueness of these options can produce overlapping answers. “This will cost you” can be a threat, or a disagreeable goodbye. “I won’t pay” can be the abandonment of the conversation, or an attempt at drawing a line in the negotiations. The other two options are rather clear, but they do overlap with the explanations present here. In fact, the choice chosen during our demo – “This will cost you” – is a threat and a correct response, at the same time. It means to literally cost the bartender, the player’s party threatens to order all soldiers in his unit to stop attending this bar, thus costing the bartender income.

As you can see, the short phrases create some spice and they obviously would speed up the speed of conversation – often the most time-consuming aspect of playing RPGs. The quicker conversations flow better, as long as the player gets the answers he wants. Given the beta nature of the game and the fact that many months of work remain, we’re optimistic that BioWare will come up with concise yet accurate phrases for conversation options.


The combat is real-time with a pause mode. It plays almost like a 3rd-person shooter, but leans heavily on RPG stats for hit and damage information. The pause mode is exceptionally cool, permitting the player to move the camera freely around the battle map so that he can order his squad mates to assume the correct positions – behind cover and in position to create a crossfire. One the positions are select, you unpause and watch your mates run to their designated areas, engaging their foes. Weapons are suitably futuristic, yet still resembling what we have now, though there is a whole new method of fighting with dark energy.


Mass Effect looks to be a strong evolutionary step forward for BioWare, featuring excellent graphics from the Unreal Engine and the same caliber writing as previous titles with even more maturity and realistic discussions. BioWare plans to release the game in conjunction with Microsoft by the end of this year, but they claim that with their newfound financial independence, they will not be rushed.

Jade Empire PC

Jade Empire for the PC is being developed by LTI Gray Matter and is a faithful translation of the title, with new content being restricted to combat styles, weapons and items. BioWare felt quest or story additions would stick out, so most of the changes have been focused on the technical side of things. One of the major caveats of ports from consoles to PC, especially at this late stage of the Xbox’s lifetime, has been the quality of the artwork. Typically textures are in very low resolution and this affects the graphics across the board. Jade Empire’s art was developed in high resolution and then scaled down for the Xbox, meaning that PC users get all the goodies.

With the textures as the major improvement, system requirements are blissfully low at a 1.8GHz P4/Athlon 1800, 256MB of RAM and a DX9 card capable of 1.1 shaders. Other technical adjustments include improved AI, which has resulted in a re-balancing of difficulty levels, and the addition of a first-person spectator mode (only for viewing, not playing). Oddly enough, BioWare has not decided on a publisher yet, but they hope to release the game before Christmas.