Properly Calibrated

Let’s back up for a second. Mass Effect is beautiful, cinematic, brilliantly written, and very clearly built off of the KOTOR game core. You have your main ship, your planets to which you travel to and fro, and your party members that helpfully locate themselves in the same section of your ship whenever they’re aboard. You have your party selection screen limited you to two members, plus yourself, at any given time. You even have the Force (available here in diluted form as Biotics, and given ample lore-based justification).

However, the Mass Effect universe takes that skeleton and branches off entire star systems worth of alternate quests and collectible items. The main planets (four, so far) that contain primary quests are accompanied by a dozen-odd other star systems, each containing planets to land on, scan from orbit, or just read about (each planet is generously given a description paragraph, as well as a smattering of scientific statistics).

However, the farther I venture out from the main quest, the more spotty the game becomes. To be clear, the fact that the planet Eletania even exists is a great step beyond KOTOR’s main-quest-only planet selection, but BioWare seems to have built the scope first and filled it in later. And maybe, right towards the end, they ran out of time.

DISCOVERY: The monkey does not have the module.

You’d think that the monkeys wouldn’t all have the same animation, or that they’d react when you walked up to them, or that, at the very least, the very last monkey in the back of the mine (the one with the module, of course) would do … something. Instead, I get the module and a dozen Geth (bad guys) spawn in the main mine cavern for a nice, nonsensical firefight on my way back outside.

The ragged edge of large-scope, semi-linear games can be a dangerous place. Some are more ragged than others. I’ve cleared out the same pirate base 4 times on 4 different planets, I’ve cleared the same mine twice, and once, I drove up to a distress beacon only to get a dialog box informing me that “the beacon is a Geth trap!”, at which point a dozen-odd Geth spawned out of thin air directly around me. Throw me a bone here, Bioware. Give me a dropship, or a burrowing-out-of-the-ground animation, or something.

Keep in mind that these are all stories from the far reaches of the Mass Effect universe, as far away from the much more polished and varied main quest as the game allows. However, this is a game diary, so I’m just telling it like it happened. Today, I visited a far-away star system, landed on an alien planet, and ran over some monkeys.