Ten years later, everything about big-budget video games feels so much safer. Your experience is yours, but it’s also disposable. As far as the galaxy knows, Commander Shepard is dead anyway. It is not shy about this either - the story builds up to a "suicide mission" no one is expected to come back from. Unlike a lot of sequels explicitly built with a third game in mind, Mass Effect 2 isn’t careful with its toys or precious about its ending. Your choices from the first game matter, but mostly serve to deepen grudges or make your life more difficult. Narratively though? Mass Effect 2 was reckless as hell. From a dry, mechanical standpoint, that's what Mass Effect 2 does: Everything feels much better and is less of a hassle to do, the tedious parts of the first game are gone, the good stuff dialed up. Iteration is the name of the game: slowly taking the systems you've built and refining what could be improved, ditching what doesn't work, and adding a handful of exciting new things to boost sales. Mass Effect 2 immediately pisses in the first game's Kool-Aid.īig-budget games don't do this - not in 2010 and definitely not in 2020. By playing the sequel, you are setting the legacy you made in the first game ablaze. Few familiar faces are willing to join you on a mission to stop a grave threat, and you must gather a team of outcasts from the margins of society. Everyone you knew has heard of your demise, and is suspicious of your return. You are saved by, and coerced into working for, Cerberus, a terrorist organization. Then, as you pick your jaw up off the floor, the game rebuilds them, but everything is wrong. It's such an admirably mean trick: Mass Effect 2, the game that said your choices were going to matter, immediately kills Commander Shepard, the character you were supposed to be invested in. This is the funny part, though: Mass Effect 2 immediately pisses in the first game's Kool-Aid. Everyone was curious to see how well the developers at BioWare held up their end of the bargain. Mass Effect 2 didn't need any advocates when it released ten years ago.Īs the sequel to a wildly popular sci-fi role-playing game that stressed how players' choices wouldn't just matter, they'd carry onward to each game in a planned trilogy, interest in the game wasn't limited to fans of the first.
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