Mass Effect 2 E3 Preview

It’s Mass Effect, except more extreme. Extreme weapons, extreme dialogue pop-ups and general extremeness all around. BioWare loves to work in extremes and Mass Effect 2 takes that extreme to a whole new level. First, the weaponry. If you haven’t seen the extended trailer, then you haven’t seen the devastating mini-nuke, which as you might expect, spits out a small mushroom cloud in its aftermath.

It’s certifiably silly, but that’s more of a personal gripe than anything. Anything nuclear has the potential to be taken very seriously, but when you see games like Fallout 3 trivialize the gravity of nuclear warfare, then you just learn to accept it. I have and so the mini-nuke in Mass Effect 2 follows the traditions of BioWare’s extreme nature. It’s a little odd, especially when you consider how Infinity Ward handled the devastation of a nuclear bomb with professionalism in Call of Duty 4 and it really made an impact, but I digress.

The same can be said for the tweaked dialogue system. Now, in the middle of the dialogue sequences, you might have the option to interrupt and halt a conversation by doing something extreme, like kicking a guy out of a 100-story building. Whether or not all actions in the dialogue pop-ups will be extreme is unknown, but when the system is designed to disrupt a conversation, expect a lot of extreme actions.

Extreme. That’s the problem I have with Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, which I’ll go on about below. A lot of it seems forced and childish. It feels like a 5-year-old fantasy of guns blazing and only working in extremes. With Mass Effect 2 it’s tolerable, because from what I saw, it really does seem darker and mature with its narrative, even though those keywords sound awkward and forced all the time, but with Dragon Age, it’s a completely different story.