Call me crazy. Call me an idiot. Or call me for a date. It might be a stretch, but I’m going to go ahead and say: Mass Effect, Game of the Year. Bioware has done it before with Knights of the Old Republic, and they have a long track record of great games.
Yet the sheer magnitude of Mass Effect blows anything they’ve previously done out of the water. In a recent interview with Xbox.com, Bioware CEO Ray Muzyka revealed that it will take about "forty hours to do just the core story, and another twenty, thirty hours of uncharted worlds beyond that."
70 hours of game play? I’m not going to have a life… again.
But even just knowing the length isn’t enough to understand the size of this game. Bioware tries to give the players a genuine sense of "exploration, you just feel a genuine sense of awe sometimes when you’re on an uncharted world. You don’t have to take a moment, but you’re just looking around and saying, ‘man this is really beautiful.’ It’s like you’re on an alien planet."
As always, Bioware has made Mass Effect so that playing through will "be a very different experience" for every player. They’ve managed to make it so even who you bring with you in your party, the equipment you choose, and what route you take can change the subtleties of the story.
And to top it off, Muzyka revealed that "as a studio what we’re really trying to do is convey emotion, and that’s expressed through every aspect of the game… Really make [the player] feel like they care about the characters, or that they even dislike characters." And that is the key to a successful story.
And let me tell you, even from just reading that interview, Bioware’s made me feel something too: a massive hard-on for Mass Effect.
