Why the Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Might Not Suck

Bioware sure have done a hell of a lot to alienate me, the RPG fan. They’ve taken their biggest franchise and made it into a third person shooter, they’ve taken their second biggest franchise and made it into morally dual hack n’ slash. They even took the Star Wars license and made it into World of Warcraft. Recently, they said they want to keep doing this, because the EA Way says to never make a sequel for the people who played the first game, but rather to appeal to new people. And now they’re adding multiplayer to Mass Effect 3!

Actually, wait, stop. That might not be a terrible thing.

Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer component, recently described by the developers in a forum post*, involves four players teaming up to take on missions against (presumably) Reaper threats. These missions will be undertaken in a way where they will effect “Galactic Readiness”, ostentatiously the mechanic that will be leveraged in the final “epic” battle against the Reapers.

First, let’s talk about what we now know about Mass Effect 3‘s structure. It’s going to be a modular game, where you go off to complete missions to get the galaxy ready for a future attack. This is both reassuring and disappointing, especially if you were one hoping for a game more Mass Effect than Mass Effect 2. I’m one of those people but I’m reassured, at least, that they’re sticking to their modular guns. Additionally, the idea sounds suitably epic, like the Dominion War seasons of Deep Space Nine (nerd alert!), a slow build up towards a series of epic final encounters, each more important than the last. Structurally, it sounds a lot more exciting that Mass Effect 2‘s Dirty Dozen of storytelling.

But let’s not delve too deeply into narrative implications. What matters is the game you will play with your friends, which sounds pretty interesting. Effectively, this seems like a chance for Bioware to create multiplayer missions in their normal single player structure, which is, again, both reassuring and worrisome. It’s reassuring because Bioware knows how to make a 95% linear run and shoot level. They could do it in their sleep, and I bet they can come up with some neat wrinkles for having multiple players. The problem, the elephant in the room, of course, is how they’ll work in the other half of “guns and conversation”. No game has ever pulled off having multiple distinct players talking to NPCs because other players are, in general, bastards. They’re not going to pick what you want, and if they’ve played the missions fifteen times they’re going to try as hard as possible to mess it up. Bioware has attempted to tackle the problem in The Old Republic, but we’ll see how they do it in Mass Effect 3.

Or maybe Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer will just be a shoddy version of the single player where you’ll never talk to anyone. That’s possible, too. Anything is possible at this point. The important thing about this news is that Bioware have me believing that the multiplayer might not be completely wretched and game-ruining. That’s the important first step.

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*Can we talk about how fundamentally weird it is for developers to release information about their games in forum posts? Does this creep anyone else out?