Having completed Mass Effect 2 just this afternoon, I've naturally come away with a lot of thoughts about the experience. The gamer part of my brain thoroughly enjoyed it, and it has—after some stumbling in the original Mass Effect—become my favorite sci-fi experience in the whole of vidja-gamez. It's visually stunning, very well written, and a much more competent shooter than its predecessor.
That being said, Mass Effect 2 presents the same problems that games have been bumping into ever since "choice" and "morality" were ushered in as perennial E3 buzzwords—while the game does offer you a series of choices and the potential to be a Right Cruel Bastard (renegade) or a Really Swell Fella (paragon), there's very little nuance to go around. And like many other titles—most of which are settled squarely in this most recent generation of games—Mass Effect 2's moral choices are often clearly demarcated into "good" and "bad" columns, which I'll get to in just a minute.
Before we move on, Mass Effect 2 spoilers and blah blah ahead blah blah mind the gap blah.
Just in case you're not familiar, let's set this up proper: Character interaction and dialogue in Mass Effect and its sequel are handled by a simple exchange of statements. In any given conversation, the player is presented with a selection of statements, retorts, or actions, electable by way of a circular dial controllable with the analog stick. The protagonist, Shepard, rarely goes rogue and speaks of his own accord—with the exception of key cutscenes and those moments in which dialogue and action are inextricably blended, the player directs all of Shepard's words.
Choice and consequence are key themes in the Mass Effect series, but emphasized particularly in ME2, a game marketed with the claim that you can screw up and you may not survive if you make the wrong choices and your comrades will die if you fail. All of these claims are most definitely true, and boy howdy, there are a lot of choices in the game, with costs and benefits on both sides of the decision-a-tron. If you blow up the refinery, you'll kill a lot of people, but you'll track down your target. Elect to save them, and you risk blowing the mission, but at least you didn't slay any innocents.
The difficulties with choice and morality in Mass Effect 2—indeed, with most games that embraces choice and morality as active elements of a game's core design—are that no matter how manifold or well-developed the consequences of your actions may be, the player can always count on the engine to clearly distinguish the good from the bad. Mass Effect 2 does this by sometimes deliberately marking dialogue options in blue or red—paragon or renegade, respectively—but in almost all other instances, the player can expect the following standard: Paragon options are on the upper half of the dialogue dial, while renegade options are on the bottom. In this way, the "moral choices" set before you are as deliberately explained as they were in Sucker Punch's inFamous, which was direct to the point of appearing patronizing.
But unlike inFamous, the substance of the choice—in this case, the words being spoken—aren't as cut and dry in ME2. Topics of conversation vary from interpersonal disputes to condoning genocide, and the situations themselves? Tremendously nuanced. Shepard's responses to these circumstances have the capacity for nuance, but are undercut by the game's insistence to clearly categorize available dialogue options.
One key example is Jack, the borderline-psychotic that lands with the crew of the Normandy relatively early into the game and serves as one of Shepard's many potential romantic interests. Jack's abrasive, a no-bullshit kind of person who has been through too much terror and experienced too much violence to ever mesh gently with the rest of the crew. She has little patience for weakness.
Jack, more than the rest of the Normandy crew, should have presented a challenge; where most everybody else on the ship responds to politeness, support, and understanding, Jack rejects such sentiments. But as with the rest of the game, the player need only select the top options on the dialogue dial to lock in Jack's favor.
The clear structuring of ethics and choice in Mass Effect 2's dialogue is somewhat justified. Lots of players know that they want to be a paragon or renegade from the start, and want to ensure that every choice they make gets them closer to that goal. The game itself reinforces this by allowing Shepards with pure-good or pure-bad ratings greater options in dialogue; players who mix and match are restricted from these dialogues. And for most people who simply want to play the game, complete the quest and get that coveted 100% win with no crew deaths, that works fine.
The trouble comes for those players who want Shepard to live and act as they would, examining situations and making judgments on a case-by-case basis. It's clear from the start how the dialogue dial's placement of paragon and renegade responses work—this information even appears as a tip on the loading screen—but what if the "good" response appears illogical, stupid or generally unpalatable to the player? Going with your gut in Mass Effect 2 isn't rewarding. By endgame, you're stuck with a little from column A, a little from column B, and none of the perks that come with piling all of your eggs in one basket.
Another side-effect of the structure is a general disassociation from the text. Clear demarcations mean you don't have to think about what your Shepard is saying, or about who he's saying it to, or the mutual history between the characters. And once you get into the habit of chasing down your full-rank paragon or renegade rating, you barely have to pay attention to what's being said at all. Top or bottom, then slap X to skip through the remaining dialogue.
The alternative to all of this, then, is to randomize dialogue placement, right? Shake things up, make players understand what they're saying before they say it—inject a little danger, consequence, and intention into the choices that they make. But this solution has some problems, too. Placing the onus on the player to evaluate these decisions may increase the potential to play as his or herself, but restricts their ability to play as Shepard—to know what he knows about the people he's speaking to, the circumstances they're under, and the consequences of his words and actions.
It goes deeper than that, however. Responses in ME and ME2 are listed as simplified, truncated versions of Shepard's actual uttered response—that is, what is listed as "You're being too hard on yourself" could potentially prompt Shepard to say "You were right not to save those orphans, they were all jerks anyway." Without a 1:1 description, players operating without the top-good and bottom-bad rule could potentially stumble into a line of dialogue they didn't intend.
No matter which way you run with it, interaction in Mass Effect 2 has a habit of revealing its own machinations to the player. Whether you're looking for it or not, play enough and you eventually begin to understand how the system works, and how to craft your responses to suit your goals based on the rules enacted by that system. It functions well enough on a practical level, but it kinda spoils the potential of interactive storytelling—that feeling of being a part of something and really, truly not knowing how your place in it all will impact the whole.
It's not so much a failing of the developer—Mass Effect and its sequel are two of the most ambitious titles to date in terms of interactivity—as it is the limitations of the medium. So long as writers must craft content and dialogue must be recorded by living and breathing VO actors and actresses, the level of nuance in games like Mass Effect will always be curtailed by practical concerns such as budget, available disc space, and perhaps most importantly, production schedules. We can pump metric assloads of cash into our games and exponentially increase media capacity, but if we want our stories written by storytellers and our dialogue voiced by real people, time is the scarcest resource.
All that being said, however, Mass Effect 2 was pretty fucking sweet.
