Popular Mechanics' Best of E3 2007 Awards
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BioWare's 2003 roleplaying game, Knights of the Old Republic, was a lesson in how to do Star Wars right. Compared to the laughable dialogue and wooden performances in the prequel movies, BioWare's characters and plotting seemed masterful, helping the game become one of the most beloved RPGs of all time. Mass Effect is the company's most ambitious project yet, with an original sci-fi setting, a scalable map of the Milky Way that you have to see to believe, and tons of worlds for you to explore (BioWare won't give an exact number). The graphics are way beyond most RPGs, and what we saw of the narrative (a star-faring, quest-filled story circling around an escalating conflict with a race of robots) was quality stuff. Countless development hours went into motion-capturing realistic facial movements, to allow players to possibly catch a moment of doubt flitting across someone's face, and to finally address the fact that even the most meticulously rendered characters in games tend to look like reanimated corpses once they start talking. Mass Effect is also morally complex, and not just in a Light/Dark Side of the Force way. Players are forced to make truly though decisions, like whether to sacrifice a single person for the greater good, and the outcome of some of those choices will alter the game's ending. But again, it's more complex than it sounds instead of a few possible endings, BioWare describes the game as having a "matrix of endings." So instead of a final scene that triggers either a good guy, bad guy or somewhere-in-the-middle conclusion, major plot points throughout the game will compound to form relatively unique endings.
