First Impressions of the Dialogue in Mass Effect

Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy is easily the most requested series of games for one of my storyline reviews. I finally purchased the bundled trilogy a few weeks ago and recently began playing this epic, space-opera RPG. I’ll reserve any judgments on the storyline until I’ve finished the entire series, but in the meantime, there is one element of the game’s storytelling that I really wanted to examine more closely .

Like most modern Western RPGs, Mass Effect uses branching dialogue trees as one of the primary methods of character development and role-playing for the gamer. Throughout most conversations with NPCs, the player is given several choices of things that Commander Shepard can say to further the plot. But what sets Mass Effect apart is that unlike other Western RPGs like Skyrim or Fallout, the player doesn’t get to choose exactly what the main character will say. For example, a minor character may tell you that her husband has died in a recent battle, and you chose the option “That’s too bad,” but what your character actually says may be something like “I’m sorry for your loss. How did it happen?”

These type of ambiguous choices are in stark contrast to the clearly defined list of possible statements that can be found in other RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon’s Age, both of which are also developed by Bioware. As I tried to think of a similar, dialogue-heavy game with ambiguous options, the best comparison I came up with were the Tex Murphy Full Motion Video adventure games. These games also relied heavily on interesting dialogue between the actors to engage the player, who would often get just a few vague prompts to determine where Tex would take each conversation.

There are a couple of problems with selecting a character’s emotional response rather than what they will specifically say. My biggest issue with this method is that it’s not always clear how Shepard will interpret the vague guidance that I’m giving him. On more than one occasion, I gave him a prompt that I thought would get him to say something in a particular way, but he went off in some weird direction I was not expecting. For example, there’s a potential love-triangle at one point in the game, and I was trying to gently break it off with one of the characters. I chose an option that I thought would be considerate, but ended up choosing her instead! I had to reload the game and give the nastier prompt, which actually resulted in Shepard being incredibly considerate anyway.

My other main complaint with this style of dialogue selection is that the options occasionally make little to no difference at all, or are so similar that it seems irrelevant for me to choose one of them. I swear there were a couple of times that my options looked like this:

1. Um…

2. I don’t know.

3. Couldn’t tell you.

And I know that on at least one occasion when I reloaded an earlier save file and tried a different choice, Shepard said the same thing, regardless of which prompt I used. Luckily, this kind of illusion-of-choice deception didn’t happen very often, as it could have easily been a game breaker for me if overdone.

All that being said, I found the dialogue of Mass Effect to be some of the best and most engaging writing I’ve seen in an RPG, and I think part of it comes from the mystery of the dialogue trees. Just like the old Tex Murphy games, there’s a sense of discovery as I watch each conversation unfold before me in a fluid, cinematic way. It also helps that Shepard’s responses are all fully voice-acted, meaning that my prompts are often just momentary pauses in the conversation, rather than a combination of a voice actor talking at me for a few lines before I have to read all my possible responses and choose the best one. Granted, I never felt like I really was Commander Shepard in these conversations, but that’s ok. I’d rather have a well-defined protagonist to follow, especially if I can choose his emotional reaction to significant events and determine what sort of hero he’s going to be.

This leads me to my favorite story-related element of Mass Effect thus far, the Paragon/Renegade system. In most games that have a morality system for the main character, the player usually has two very clearly defined choices that will either add to their morality rating or subtract from it. In this type of game, NPCs will often react to your character based on their morality rating, and games usually reward players for a score that is either very high or very low. Of course, since I don’t want to play a murdering candy-stealer when I’m gaming, I always pick the good guy responses in situations like this, which usually means I have to nobly refuse all my hard-earned quest rewards and roll over for every bully that I encounter. But not in Mass Effect.

The Paragon/Renegade system tracks your positive and negative decisions separately on two different scales, meaning that I can choose the good responses the majority of the time and still indulge myself a little without being harshly penalized for it. For instance, at one point in the game Shepard was confronted by a rear admiral with a chip on his shoulder who told me to get out of the way as he prepared to do a surprise inspection of my ship. I can’t describe the guilty pleasure I felt when I told him to get lost, and the game didn’t punish me for it! He blustered for a moment and stormed off angrily, but there were no gaming penalties, and Shepard’s reputation as a nice guy and a war hero was only slightly tempered by a developing image of a rebel who didn’t take crap from anyone. This type of narrative-driven character creation was incredibly well-executed, and was just as much fun as deciding what combat skills I would increase at each level up.

As I said, I’m still fairly early on in the game’s storyline. I’m only about twenty hours or so into the first game, and I know that I have a lot left to go. But if the game stays true to this kind of guided-narrative style, I’m definitely looking forward to following Commander Shepard’s ongoing adventures throughout the galaxy.