Mass Effect 2 Hates Nuance: Role Play vs. Game Play

by Cameron Walker

I like Mass Effect 2 a lot. I mean, it has some fun shoot shoot game play, a surprisingly deep power system, engaging characters, decent story, good voice acting. Really, what’s not to like about the game?

Even with all that going for it, I rage quit Mass Effect 2 like a motherfucker.

I wasn’t playing on Insane difficulty or anything, just your common man’s Veteran. I rage quit Mass Effect 2 because I was trying to play a role-playing game.

Mass Effect 2, like its predecessor and many other previous BioWare games, has a morality system integrated into the game’s narrative and dialogue system. Give an altruistic speech to a shipmate, ching: lightside points. Take time out of your day to be condescending and slightly xenophobic to a shipmate, dong: darkside points. Plot decisions too, award morality points. These points, to varying degrees, influence your character’s abilities.

Really, the easiest and most min-maxy way to play Mass Effect is to pick either paragon or renegade and then hold fast to your ideology. Choosing the paragon option dutifully, like a true extremist, nets you the maximum number of paragon points. These points unlock “better” narrative and dialogue options throughout the game. If you want to brazenly bullshit your way through a court hearing to decide the fate of Tali, a crew mate, you better make damn sure you have either enough yay or boo points. If not, you have to make a difficult moral decision on whom to hang out to dry with an entire race of people.

You got that? If you avoid making decisions the entire game by simply following your alignment, you get to avoid a morally complicated decision and, instead, get the best of both outcomes.

I have played Mass Effect 2 as both paragon and renegade, but on the particular play through in question though, I decided to role play a different kind of Commander Shephard, one that was neither a paragon nor a renegade, a complicated protagonist.

Playing the game neutral, so to speak, is actually one of the few wrong ways to play Mass Effect 2. As I entered later parts of the game, moral complexity crippled me. Neutral Good Shephard encountered scenarios which he couldn’t just talk his way through. It seemed in this universe, ideological zealotry had a lot of sway. Without high ranks in either good or bad, conversational options are withheld from me as a player. The game didn’t even have the courtesy to hide them. They were displayed on screen, as if to scold me for not being dedicated enough to a way of life.

And, finally when it came to Tali’s admiral hearing, I was unable to simply sway the admiral board with my paragon-ness or renegade-ness. I would have to accept a sub-par result from the mission. I tried to reload a previous save and defer this decision until later when I had enough points to access the alternative dialogue options, but I was already behind and no matter what I tried, no matter how paragon or renegade I swung, there was just no way to make up enough points to be able convince the admiral board with mighty bluster.

So, Tali was banished from her people. Too bad, so sad I guess. My failings as a captain. Then, the problem repeated, and more bad things happened. Shit was not going well for this morally complex Shephard and his crew. Finally, after another compromised result, I got mad and just gave up. What was the point? I was getting close to the end game and half my friends’ lives were in shambles and some weren’t even loyal to me.

My problems made me consider the relationship between role-playing and game-playing. Mass Effect 2’s architecture, as a video game system, does not allow you to play out a character that doesn’t always make decisions according to its two prescribed religions. If you want to fully succeed at the game, you can’t invent a character. That isn’t something the system is designed to reward.

Which, for a video game, is fine, but for a role playing experience, can be damn frustrating. Enough to cause swearing and save file deletion in any case.

Role playing video games have a tricky compromise when it comes to the relation between role-play and gameplay mechanics. How does a game designer choose to give weight to player decisions? Do choices affect more than narrative? Do they affect character abilities or stats in some way? If not, do choices have less meaning? Is it really role playing without consequences for actions? But how do you balance choice with scope. A game can only have so many options.

For the interests of this article, I consider role-playing in video games to include the kind of options that are outside of the actual act of controlling your character: character decisions, dialogue options, customization, and so on. By contrast, gameplay involves the things that a player cannot control, like the narrative, or how characters function in whatever version of game they are playing: fighting, moving through the world, puzzle-solving.

In Knights of the Old Republic, the greater your alignment to a particular side of the force, the less force points it costs to use powers of the same alignment. Your character is made stronger by making consistent choices. But to maximize a character’s ability in the sphere of gameplay, the player must relinquish “choice” in the role-playing realm.

Imagine this strategy laid bare. A character selects either light side or dark side at the outset and all dialogue and plot automatically played out those scenarios in cutscenes rather than in interactive dialogue scenes. Are these two versions of the game so dissimilar? Is the act of choice worth something in itself, even if it is almost unnecessary? Is that simply illusion of choice?

Of course, the alternative is also prickly. If there are no consequences to player choices, what is the point of them at all? There is of course the enjoyment of role-playing in itself, but inside the context of a video game do choices mean anything if there is no outcome for those choices? Is there something lacking in a role-playing system that does not do something with a player’s decisions?

Think of Skyrim. Skyrim has a large world of NPCs, and there are many upon many of them that you can have conversations with. But what are the ultimate ends to these conversations? You can obtain side quests, but the same thing works in WoW without dialogue at all. Conversations in Skyrim are, in large part, exposition delivery systems. Players talk to random townspeople and learn more about the world of Skyrim and that particular NPC’s perception of the world. Indeed, it creates a tangible fantasy world, but you could skip it all and not miss a damn thing in terms of gameplay.

So, that’s the conundrum. Role-play mechanics that are too closely tied to gameplay structure can fix narratives, character relationships, and player interaction with the game, or they can restrict role-playing. Free from the fetters of gameplay consequence, however, role-play can feel hollow or inconsequential–not part of the game, so to speak.

To describe and think about this correlational relationship, I suggest the concept of a spectrum, with role-play as one end and gameplay as the other, and through the middle the different degrees in which they interact. Options are numerous on the role-play end, and absent in the gameplay end. Consequences, on the other hand, are low at both extremes on the spectrum, as the pure role-play has so many options that consequences would be too difficult to construct, and game play has no options to have consequences. The middle, the theoretical mean, has the most consequences to decisions. In this zone there is a tangible sense of role-play and consequence to those decisions, without too much consequence so as to actually render choice moot.

I have made a chart and made placement decisions. opinions – you may disagree, but you can see what I’m going for. Preference is given to dialogue and narrative options rather than character customization options.