Choice in most computer games, the Mass Effect series included, is largely illusory. It is too costly and difficult to provide radically divergent branching experiences based on player choice. Choices that truly alter the plot result in exponentially increasing demands on development resources. Just one truly game-altering choice would halve the length of a game that a given budget could produce. No matter what choices you make in the Mass Effect games, Shepard always winds up in the same places doing the same things. It truly does not matter if your Shepard is the sort of person who holds all life sacred or a hardened killer who ruthlessly throws people off of highrises when mildly annoyed. You can overthrow the rulers of the galaxy and replace them with humans in the first game of the trilogy and, to Bioware's credit, that choice is reflected in the subsequent games, but in a way that has almost no impact. In the Mass Effect universe, what you do truly does not matter. However, the genius of Bioware is that the player feels their choices do matter to a degree that is sometimes agonizing! Despite the lack of impact on the plot, there are enough minor details to make you deeply care about how you interact with the game's NPC's.

Bioware has been at the forefront of RPG's/adventure games for quite some time. While their combat mechanics are occasionally rather broken (e.g. Jade Empire), their plots are the gold-standard in the industry. The illusion of choice is a part of their craft that has been finely honed over the years. The Mass Effect universe is not the first impressively deep game-world Bioware has created. They breathed new life into both the D&D and Star Wars universes, and created the Dragon Age universe, which is a notable example of world-building. Consider Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. This is a long series of games extending back into the nineties. The amount of reading material, in the form of in-game books, in this series of games is staggering, but the quality of that material ranges from mediocre to absolutely awful. In the first Dragon Age game, Bioware produced a similar amount of reading material, but every last word of it finely crafted and carefully designed to immerse you in a game-world far richer and larger than actually portrayed in the game. Even the title of the game, "Origins", suggested that this 80+ hour RPG was a mere introduction to a new world. Mass Effect used this approach as well, fleshing out the universe with a Codex that is truly impressive in terms of depth. This supplemental material is insanely cheap to produce relative to the time it takes for gamers to consumer. Hardcore fans will gobble every last word up, but even casual players will feel the depth of the universe that is present even if they just sample a few paragraphs here and there. The choices may be illusory, but the conceptual depth of the Mass Effect universe is not.

The biggest leap forward made by Mass Effect was the dialogue wheel system. Prior to Mass Effect, RPG's allowed players to choose exactly what their characters said. Players would be presented with several options and would read precisely what their characters would say in the process of selection. As a result, it was largely redundant to voice the protagonist. Players who had read what their character was about to say would probably be too impatient for their character to read that text aloud. As a result, games would often fully voice every role but the protagonist, ostensibly so that the player could imagine him or herself speaking the protagonist's lines. The process of reading several (sometimes) lengthy responses also injected unnatural pauses into conversations. The Mass Effect dialogue wheel provides players with a rapid, shorthand way to select responses. Your choices are described by a few words at most, and often in terms of what your character is thinking instead of what he'll actually say. e.g. When faced with a prevaricating NPC, an older RPG might have offered one dialogue choice in which your character spots the lie and tries to draw the NPC into a self-incriminating trap. In Mass Effect, to do the same thing you might choose a response that simply says "He's lying!". The wheel usually provides you with your next choice while other characters are still speaking, so you can carry out a natural, flowing conversation just by making choices that reflect how you feel. The most crucial dialogue, that of the protagonist, is now fully voiced by an actor. The result is that players feel like they're in a movie. Not merely watching, but starring in. They are frequently awed by the eloquence of Shepard's finely voiced responses and feel a tremendous boost due to simultaneously identifying themselves as Shepard. The Mass Effect dialogue wheel let's you feel like you're delivering dialogue like Pacino! It's an utterly ingenious system. To get an idea of how important the dialogue wheel is to Mass Effect, consider Dragon Age: Origins. Origins was released after Mass Effect but was in development for much longer, so it uses the old system with a voiceless protagonist. It feels astonishingly primitive when compared to Mass Effect as a Result.

Video Games are going to take fiction (sci-fi or otherwise) to new heights. The reasons are legion. I can't do them all justice, but consider just this one alone: Minds and time. Movies, like video games, are a collaborative art form that takes many minds to create, but the time they have to convey meaning is limited to just a couple of hours. Novels, on the other hand, can take tens of hours to consume, but are the product of a very small or, most typically, just one mind. Video games are the first art form to emerge in which many minds can engage their audience for an extended period of time. Mass Effect is notable for bringing an immense richness and variety of tropes together and synthesizing a truly meaningful universe that invites open interpretation. It is simultaneously big-budget, pop-culture space opera and a dozen different things, ranging from nihilism to humanism and everything in between. The Mass Effect universe is, perhaps, too complex for any single human mind to have created.

Now that I've spent enough time gushing, let me add one sour note of pessimism: Electronic Arts. EA is notorious for tainting the gaming universe with their sweat-shop productions. Bioware was bought by EA and, as far as anyone is willing to say, remains largely autonomous. The gargantuan size of EA's bank account should have offered Bioware the freedom to do truly brave things, but that is not how EA operates. They expect profits. Hints of cost-cutting and compromise have set into Bioware's latest games. Consider Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3. Where the previous games in these two Bioware properties included multiple cities/worlds to explore, the latest, EA influenced games did not. Practically all non-combat interaction in ME3 is confined to the Normandy and Citadel, while all of DA2 takes place in the same city. Both games could have opened up new areas as the game progressed, but instead relied on stocking the same old areas with a mixture of new NPC's and old, unaltered NPC's. DA2 is especially awful, recycling the same dungeons repeatedly even within the same chapter of the game. ME3 was epic enough for this to go largely unnoticed, and the end of the game was so ballsy that it overshadows EA's cost-cutting. However, DA2 was met with luke-warm reception, largely because so much of the game material was so excruciatingly recycled. One can only hope that EA doesn't continue driving Bioware into the ground.