How Mass Effect 3’s Role-playing Roots Empower the Multiplayer

For the latest of his weekly columns Rowan Kaiser talks about Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer, and how it’s allegedly empowered by the title’s role-playing roots. Here’s a snip:

With three games in the series of 40-plus hours each, Mass Effect has one of the most lived-in universes in recent gaming history. BioWare’s expertise in building worlds for traditional role-playing games, starting with Baldur’s Gate, is all in effect here. We get to know the characters, their races, and their universe. That all starts to collapse in Mass Effect 3, and in the single-player mode your Commander Shepard tries to get the various different races and factions to work together. The multiplayer is the manifestation of those attempts. It fits within the game world.

It’s also pleasing to see the various races and styles working together. I’m invested in the Mass Effect universe. When I see a krogan, I think of Urdnot Wrex, the best-developed party member in the original Mass Effect, who would eventually become the leader of his people. I think of krogan history, the best-developed part of Mass Effect’s universe, uplifted for their skills in war, then punished for applying those skills to the races who were once their allies. I think of what it took to bring them into the alliance against the Reapers, in the fantastic Tuchanka sequence early in Mass Effect 3. I don’t mean that I ponder these things. I mean that seeing the simple visual of a krogan immediately makes me understand the complex narrative meaning.

There’s meaning behind seeing a krogan in Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, just as there is seeing a drell or salarian or asari, or fighting off reapers or Cerberus. That meaning comes specifically from the world-building that’s only done in role-playing games.