Mass Control 4

 I haven't played Mass Effect or its sequel, and I'm not entirely sure that I want to. Everyone has had their moment of commentary, telling me why I need to be playing these games before anything else, and I can respect that. The game looks as if it has a lot to offer, and I'm particularly interested to see how the game put "choice" into a function of gameplay. Yet, I still have my doubts that this is really a series I want to get into. For as good as the game looks, I just don't think it's the style of play I'm looking for, and with the reviews coming in lately, it's starting to sound like BioWare is trying to sneak into the space that Star Control once resided.

 To be fair, these are entirely different series, but it got me thinking what a truly epic game would be like. Mass Effect doesn't so much put you in the driver's seat so much as his/her eyes. There's a much more personal aspect to that game than anything else, and while you're making decisions that have a pretty good impact on the universe, it's hard to forget that there is a big story that needs to be told. No amount of tweaking was going to change what the story was ultimately going to be about.

 Yet, I can't say that Star Control is much different. There are different outcomes to be found and you do affect the universe you're in with your decisions, but everything is a little bit too general. Sure, you're given immense freedom, but when it comes down to it, telling an alien to "go shoot that guy" as opposed to hailing an alien race and telling them to "go shoot those guys" isn't exactly different. The mood is what is different.

 Each game was inspiring in its own way, but think about what is inspirational about each game. A good portion of what each gamer took with them after playing those games wasn't actually in the discs at all. Mass Effect gave the impression that those ripples you caused were part of a grander, interpersonal scheme, yet the ripples never REALLY took fruition and the scenarios arising from those decisions were really like a combination lock for a murder or sex scene. Star Control II gave this sense of vastness, with decisions affecting MASSIVE areas of space, and an equally massive span of new things to discover and interact with. Yet, there weren't REALLY that many different things out there, and you were still just really trying to accomplish one single thing.

 We got the impression, however, that we were taking part in something else entirely. Maybe that's the plus side of making space related media. All you have to do is make it good enough the first time around, and the possibilities thereafter are endless. Star Trek could feasibly go on forever if it wanted to, because there would always be a story that could be told. Space allows for this.

 If a game turned up that capitalized on what was inspired, and not what was actually there, then you have one of the greatest games ever made, my friends.

 They actually get the premise right, because the premise is only a vessel. You come up with a goal or an endpoint and then you come up with a handful of ways to make a definitive end based off of that goal. Simple enough.

 So, the Death Star is just sitting there, almost completed. Do you start building a fleet to take it on? Do steal the plans? Do you build another weapon to destroy it? Do you sabotage it? Games generally allow things like this to happen all the time, but the trouble is that you're usually locked into one of those paths to achieve victory or you just need to explore until you find one of these solutions lying around. Let's start from there.

 So you want to build a fleet to take it on. What if you aren't friends with any of these people to begin with, like in Star Control? You need to get some allies going, and you need to find the allies. Well, we've dealt with that before. Instead, let's assume that each race isn't one giant hivemind. You head to your allies in an attempt to send your best negotiator, which you recruited from a floating human cruiser that lost a battle and wasn't going to make it much longer. You have to find this guy early on in the game though, or you'll have to find a replacement for him or think of another way to achieve your goal, which is to convince those neutral neighbors of yours to start seeing things your way. On the way, you are exploring one of the thousands of worlds for resources when you notice that someone left some robot drones mining for something a little deeper than the surface. You investigate, and you discover that they are searching for an element you've never heard of before, which actually ends up being the key component of a weapon capable of breaking shields, allowing you to cut up the enemy fleet before making your direct attack against the Death Star.

 So do you steal the plans? Well, you may not have thought this through, because the pilots of the Death Star are the squishy and slimy variety of alien, so spying on them with fleshy humans probably isn't going to work out too well. Yet, as you explore space, you begin to realize that, like the Ur Quan, these guys love their slaves. You happen to come across a small fleet of war-like people that were once enslaved by the baddies, only these guys are free and are at least willing to listen to the prospect of fighting the one species that's more violent than they are. So, just like the Ur Quan, you find that the enslaved portion of that race was free to fight alongside them for the greater cause of dominance. Using this to your advantage, you get them to throw away one ship to surrender to the enemy in the chance that they will come across the plans. You go about your business for a couple of years, thinking that it was a lost cause while you beef up your fleet. You figure that these new allies are the best ones to lead the attack, so you equip them with the new super-weapon you found with the drones. Suddenly, you get a text from that ship you sent out with a request to ambush the enemy at a set of coordinates. You ambush the baddies, rescue your ally, and walk away with the plans. Now you know the Death Star's weak point! But, you gave those "buddies" of yours the super-weapon, so the second you toast the Death Star, these guys rebuild and stomp you with a new, unstoppable version of the weapon you handed over to them. Nice going.

 Maybe you decide that a giant laser cannon would do the trick, using the tactic of fighting fire with fire. Well, that blew a hole in the galaxy when you stuck a warp engine to it. You could have found a way to stabilize all that energy if you talked to those peace-loving supergenius hermits. Of course, you would have had to find them first, which is hard enough considering that they're practically invisible unless you know what you're looking for. Then you thought nanobots would work despite common sense telling you that no, that's clearly not the path for survival. Well, you did it anyway, and overnight the nanobots constructed a fleet out of the Death Star, and you can imagine how many ships that would be.

While you were coming up with ways to blow it out of the sky with one shot, you happen across an outpost inhabited by a race you're familiar with. Being friendly, you approach them, only to find out that they are also being enslaved. Only problem is that they are being enslaved by their own race for reasons that are clearly low on the moral scale. You didn't realize that your allies were completely off your rocker, so you adopt these people and continue to work up plans to sabotage the Death Star. You seem to be making headway, as one of the enemies actually defects to you when you rush to the defense of another set of allies and kill everything in the sky. Amazing, now you might just have a lead on how to stop that thing.

 The allied race mentioned before checks on their slave colony and finds out what you've been up to. In what really turns out to be a day that messed up your grand scheme, they stand their ground and refuse to participate on the plan until you return their prisoners. You refuse, and they break off ties with you completely and go work on their own survival schemes. Great, now you have a new faction to deal with, and it's going to take you forever to come up with a replacement for the ships they invested in your plan. Well, a year later, and the Death Star activates and there's little you can do to stop it since your plan was essentially flushed at that very moment. On top of that, and now you're fighting two wars. Maybe that probe you sent out into the distance reached someone of even greater power, saw the violence, and blew everyone up at the same time. Who knows.

 This is just a picture of what's possible, but imagine what else could be possible if someone really put their mind to it. If something you decide has an effect, those things in turn should also have effects, and if the game is more like Star Control, then you can forget the linear limitations of a game like Mass Effect. It's not even that difficult, because the only thing that a creator would have to do is come up with a master timeline in which basic things happen. The foundation of those two games are quite correct in the way they do things, but in order to bring out true promise, there just needs to be more complexity in the way its done.

 First, I think that having a preset timeline is one of the best ideas in gaming that's almost never used. Sure, we have linearity, and we have time limits, but Star Control was truly unique in that events would take place with or without you. It was simply your choice as to when and where you would enter the heart of the action. I've often thought that there is a good survival horror story waiting to be told in this manner. A set timeline is great when it comes to storytelling, because it's extremely difficult to give weight to a million different actions that could predictably happen. If you have a fully fleshed story happen over the course of time, then you can really put some storytelling muscle behind the narrative. The object shouldn't be to make a storyline so adaptable that it becomes flimsy, because that turns a game into something else. There has to be a story, otherwise you are playing a simulation of something lifeless with no oomph to it, like Civilization. This is also why I love how Star Control never randomized where species would be or where items would be. That, to me, breaks a game, because balance is just as important to a game as it is real life. It's great for quick battles of Starcraft (and even then, it's still iffy), but it's not good to mess with the identity of a universe that needs to remain as strong as possible.

 Second, because a set timeline limits what is possible for you to do to complete the game, you get comfortable with that fact. Whether you nuke, zap, or self-destruct your enemy, you're still blowing them up when the game ends. There only needs to be a handful of ways to beat (or lose) a game like this. The endgame really isn't the most important thing. What's more fun is the experience getting there, and that's where Mass Effect really shines. Sure, you're not finding the supreme beings of the universe because you drove WAY off course for no reason whatsoever, but you are making key decisions on the smaller scale all the time. Star Control gave the sense of things being vast, but in reality, there was only so much to find and do. Filling in those gaps with thousands of smaller things do to goes a long way into making the "how" part of the game entertaining. If you ally with one race over another, there doesn't have to be a huge story attached to each one as long as their roles are interchangable. As long as the circumstances are different in how you get each one on your side, that's enough. Lots of small decisions are always a great thing, and as long as you keep these small decisions separate from the main story, then you can throw in thousands of them without having to render a different CGI scene for each one. You need an ally that will team up with you to blow up the bad guy, and that's really it.

 Finally, flags. Flags are great and terrible at the same time. Flags are often used as a description for unlocking the plot combination, as I mentioned above. If you talk to person A while holding a certain item, then a flag is raised that makes person B appear. This is a good, because it is the foundation of game interaction. If there's a timid alien race out there, it makes sense that making good with their friends will give them a little more incentive to stick around and listen to you rather than running away. What it isn't good for is determining time. If person B magically appears back from his vacation because you waved a carrot at person A, then that's not a good use of flags. A game like this should let things happen regardless of whether you're ready for it. Let's say that there's a planet that could explode in the game. It makes sense that you can make a decision that would save it. It would also make sense that a planet could blow up because of a decision you make. It would even make sense that the planet could blow up earlier or later based off of what you say in the game. What would not make sense is if the enemy had a bomb on that planet and was only waiting to advance the story until after you talked to three specific alien races, unless that was an optional event. Ideally, a good game of this nature would have the good kind of flags every single place you went, because it would make things happen outside of the main story without ever needing to directly interact with it.

 It's not that either game failed in any way. Mass Effect is considered to be a great, if a little predictable, series at times. Star Control II is considered to be a classic even if it is a little empty and flat at times. Neither game has the filler that would really put a good space series over the top. If Mass Effect was more expansive or if Star Control gave you more decisions to make, then I wouldn't be wishing for more. One look at Heavy Rain, and I get the impression that developers out there think that everything either has to be flat and addictive or pristine and movie-like, and that's just not the case. It's relatively easy to put in boatloads of content into a good game if they approach it the right way. I don't need every decision I ever made in a game to be voiced over and rendered picture perfect to know that I did it and had fun doing it, nor do I expect to be given absolute freedom with nothing to do. There's an excellent game in between these franchises. With any luck, if Star Control ever gets revived, it will deliver that experience. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit