It’s not the first time you control the main character in Mass Effect 2, but it’s the first time you are introduced to some of the game’s core mechanics. The research station of Lazarus Project is one of the first levels in the game. Let us dive into the analysis of the first level. When story and gameplay tap into the same feelings and emotions, communicate the same ideas, we feel as if we actually drive the events of the game. And that’s why many players dislike cut-scenes.Īnd of course, agency on a larger scale is harmony of gameplay and story. Conversely, just having something play out without being able to react on it usually fails to do anything to us because we recognize it as something that was “meant to happen”. A good example of that being the opening scene of Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit. can go a long way to establish a sense of agency already. Things like being able to talk to the murderer, tend to the wounds of the victim, call the police, etc. If fact, that’s not that great because players may feel compelled min-max decisions. This doesn’t necessarily have to be something drastic like being able to prevent the murder. So the audience connects much greater to evens they have some agency in. After all, they spent up to 40 hours there.Īdditionally, games are special because they work on the basis of responsibility and not just empathy. But those players care a VERY GREAT DEAL about anything form Mass Effect 1. The second one is something only true for players, who already played Mass Effect 1.
Or perhaps we are told that it’s the murderer that is trying to save or avenge a loved one.
Or perhaps we have children ourselves and imagine them growing up without father. If we are told that the victim is a father of two children, we may think about our own parents. They can flesh out the persons involved, introduce details to open up possibilities of recognizing ourselves or people we know within the fictitious characters. Storytellers can use this to make such scene connect even better. They don’t need to be even human, they just need to behave in a human way. We connect with characters when we recognize ourselves in them. And being mortal ourselves, we understand that this is something horrible. The only thing that makes us care is that a person died. Without any context, that’s rather a weak connection. If any given event is something we recognize as familiar or emotionally relateable, it starts affecting us.Īs an example, let us imagine a scene, where a random person gets killed by another random person. We connect emotionally to things that we can relate to.
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Emotional Buttonsīut before we get into the details, let’s talk quickly what “connecting” means and how to achieve it. So I want to take a closer look at one level as an example how Mass Effect 2 fails to connect on the small scale. Something not about the big picture but the little details. But there is something else that irked me. The story in Mass Effect 2 works mainly because most players desperately WANT it to work. This could be because a thick glue of tropes and special effects is holding everything together. On my first playtrough I never consciously noticed that none of the things I do actually adds up on a grand scale. That’s something others already covered in great detail. Now, one huge issue of Mass Effect 2 is that the main plot actually doesn’t really hold together very well. So let’s take a closer look and find out what the problem is. Even during the game I found myself being slightly bored even though I was going through awesome environments fighting viscous enemies with laser guns and rockets. Somehow, all the things I went trough rarely connected with me. I was utterly stuffed on the one hand, but on the other hand, it didn’t seem to have much substance.
Somehow, the it felt like eating a few boxes of rice crackers. It all comes back to this weird feeling of emptiness I was left with after finishing Mass Effect 2 for the first time.