The New Mass Effect Should Let Players Be Aliens

The New Mass Effect Should Let Players Be Aliens

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The Mass Effect series is full of unique alien races, but for some reason BioWare has always chosen to limit the player to human characters.

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The New Mass Effect Should Let Players Be Aliens

The Mass Effect series is known for its branching stories that reflect a wide variety of personalities and playstyles. Despite that, BioWare always chooses to confine the players to a single playable race among the multitude of unique, interesting races from the Mass Effect universe.

Exploring and interacting with the various alien species throughout Mass Effect is one of the most interesting aspects of the series. Mass Effect is equal parts action-adventure and politics, with many of the game’s conflicts relating to the rivalries, alliances, and cultural practices of each species. There are more than a dozen different races the player can encounter across the galaxy, and each is unique in their appearance and mannerisms. This makes for a very flexible world where many different kinds of stories can take place, but the fact that all but one of these races (humans) are playable means the player is limited to viewing each of these stories from the human perspective. This was an intentional decision from BioWare, but with a new Mass Effect game on the way it may be a good idea to shake up the formula by giving the player new ways to role-play within the game’s universe.

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BioWare fans know from Dragon Age: Origins that the studio is more than capable of letting the player step in the shoes of species other than humans. Of the six predetermined origins stories Dragon Age players could choose for their characters, only one required the player to be human. Every other backstory either allowed the player to control an Elf instead, or completely barred being a human at all. What’s amazing is that each of these backstories displayed the unique aspects of every race while being incredibly well-told introductions to the world and its plot. BioWare is entirely capable of giving Mass Effect players the same treatment, and letting them step into the shoes of an Asari or a Quarian.

How Adding More Playable Races Could Improve Mass Effect

The company has also proven, through past titles, that the addition of more playable races would not impede gameplay in any way. Both Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda featured cooperative multiplayer modes where players could control characters belonging to almost every intelligent alien species in the series. Even some of the more disparate species, like the short and stocky Volus, were playable as long as they maintained a fairly humanoid biology. Likewise, the different biological abilities granted to these races were accounted for in these game modes. So, barring exceptions like the quadrupedal Elcor, practically any alien species is perfectly playable with existing Mass Effect gameplay systems.

Perhaps the only major hangup to adding more playable races is the fact that character customization would need to be heavily modified to account for many of the races. Only Mass Effect’s Asari resemble humans to the degree where these systems would need little, if any, modification at all. Other popular races like Turians, Drell, Salarians, and especially Krogans would see BioWare creating unique customization systems for almost every race.

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However, BioWare is in no way obligated to make every potential species in the Mass Effect series playable. Aside from convenience and deliberate storytelling decisions, nothing prevents the studio from selecting a handful of the most popular races and writing a story handing control of them to players. In the end, such an addition might prove beneficial. From a lore perspective it would provide more opportunities to explore these races and allow players to experience Mass Effect in a new light. Gameplay-wise it would allow the developers to depart from the norm and explore new abilities through alien biology, such as the Vorcha’s wolverine-like adaptability. They would make nothing more than amazing additions to a franchise as classic and divisive as Mass Effect.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/mass-effect-alien-playable-character-new-game-races/

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