Five Reasons to (Not) Be Nervous About Mass Effect 3
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I don't want to beat a dead trinketmonger here, but man did I ever not like Dragon Age II. It showed that BioWare, as a studio, is capable of screwing up a great franchise by messing with too many of the things that made it good in the first place. Sure, Mass Effect isn't Dragon Age. The teams are different. But hey, BioWare still put their name on it, so the fiasco that was Dragon Age II makes me nervous nonetheless.
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Sovereign, the big bad at the end of Mass Effect, was a fantastic bad guy. He/It existed at the periphery of the story, a fleeting image on a computer monitor, a glimpsed shadow in a fragmented Prothean vision. When Shepard finally came "face-to-face" with Sovereign in the base on Virmire, it was a chilling encounter. I loved it. The final battle against Sovereign was an all-hands-on-deck space battle involving the entire Citadel fleet, with Shepard on the ground making calls about how to engage and whom to sacrifice. It was dramatic, and it was a thrilling climax to the story.
I was far less interested in the bad guys in Mass Effect 2 the collectors had no clear personality, just an odd voice that kept saying "Assuming Control." The eventual reveal that they were merely enslaved Prothean drones made them feel even less menacing. And worst of all, the final boss fight agains the giant T-800 Reaper was silly, overblown, and entirely anticlimactic.
Most of the promotional demos of Mass Effect 3 have shown Shepard fleeing and going head-to-head with reapers. But epic boss fights against giant robots aren't actually what I like about Mass Effect. And the one straight-up boss fight the series has so far has been a series low point.
And a few paragraphs on what not to be nervous about:
Everywhere I look, I see signs that the team working on Mass Effect 3 "gets it." (And why shouldn't they? They invented the series, after all.) Those super-terrific, BioWare-written voice messages from Ashley and Kaiden. The decision to make an official FemShep, however rocky the route to the final decision was. The inclusion of male same-sex romance, which had been an odd omission in an otherwise wonderfully inclusive series. (And hey, at least one of the guys working on the game is on the record saying that video games would benefit from more diversity.)
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Here's the thing: Mass Effect is not Dragon Age, and Mass Effect 2 was certainly no Dragon Age II. (Also hey, some people do like Dragon Age II, and they are very eloquent when talking about why.)
At any rate, a few complaints aside, I gotta say that Mass Effect 2 was a bloody good time. I was swept away in to a degree that I haven't been by many games since.
And while it's all well and good to hold Dragon Age II up as a BioWare cautionary tale, let's not forget that the two games are made by different teams. And aside from the fact that the guys behind the Dragon Age franchise are saying some okay-sounding things about their own third entry (weird-sounding multiplayer notwithstanding), the Mass Effect team has already proven that they know how to make a great sequel. Now all they have to do is... do it again.
