15 Years Ago, the Best Sci-Fi RPG Ever Made Changed Video Games Forever
A true game-changer.
For as long as video games have existed developers have been fixated on the idea of player choice, and how those choices can affect virtual worlds. RPGs, in particular, have always wanted to make you feel like the decisions you make matter, like the world molds itself around you. But most of the time that’s just an empty platitude, and it’s easy to see how design constraints can put a damper on letting players truly choose what they want.
That is, of course, until Mass Effect 2. One of the boldest sequels ever released, Mass Effect 2 is a game absolutely uncompromising in its vision and ambition, and one that inextricably changed video games forever.
Mass Effect 2 quite literally starts out with a bang, with Commander Shepard and the Normandy attacked by a mysterious ship — even resulting in Shepard’s demise. Within the first five minutes, the character that players spent an entire game growing to live is gone, eliminated by aliens you’ve never seen before. It’s one heck of an opening that was unprecedented in 2010, and honestly still is even fifteen years later. That bold beginning immediately sets the tone for Mass Effect 2’s narrative, with the stakes sky-high. Lesser games might not be able to deliver on that promise, but somehow, Mass Effect 2 manages to not just deliver, but continuously get better across the entire experience.
Mass Effect 2 can also lay claim to one of the best video game trailers ever made.
After Shepard is revived by the criminal organization Cerberus, you set out on a quest to gather the biggest outcasts and psychopaths from across the universe, all with the intent of setting out on a Suicide Mission to take down the aliens known as The Collectors, who are abducting humans en-masse.
That setup is what makes Mass Effect 2 so remarkable, it basically turns the game into one giant heist movie — the sci-fi equivalent of The Dirty Dozen or Ocean’s Eleven. The game expands on the universe of Mass Effect in fantastic ways, letting you see more of its seedy underbelly and intergalactic workings. But the other fascinating part is the characters you’re recruiting, each a strong personality that can rival Shepard himself.
Every recruitment mission has a markedly different feel that can almost fill in different genres of sci-fi and action. Helping Garrus feels like a buddy-cop comedy where you’re blasting through hordes of thugs. Tracking down the assassin Thane is a thriller where you’re racing against the clock. Recruiting Mordin and Grunt dives into heady sci-fi that raises questions about eugenics and gene-altering.
Mass Effect 2’s incredible opening sets a standard that the rest of the game is miraculously able to meet.
Because each mission feels so markedly different, Mass Effect 2 has phenomenal pacing that hardly ever leaves you with a moment of downtime, or a feeling that things aren’t moving along. This is supported by the game’s shift to more shooter-based combat, rather than the RPG systems of the first Mass Effect, which encourages faster firefights that feel far more intense and cinematic. There’s a sense of urgency to every aspect of Mass Effect 2, everything you’re doing feels like it matters and makes a difference.
The game brilliantly plays into that idea of player choice, clearly illustrating how the choices you make not only affect the game’s world but also the characters that you’re building relationships with. Those relationships are crucial to deliver Mass Effect 2’s real gut punch — the Suicide Mission finale. There’s maybe never been a more fitting ending to a video game that so properly represents the core themes of the whole experience.
It all kicks off after you collect your entire team, and the Collectors once again ambush the Normandy while you’re away, abducting key crew members. While the entire game has had a sense of urgency narratively, suddenly that becomes entirely real — if you don’t head to the Collector base fast enough your crew members will be taken out. This likely comes as a complete surprise to most players, but suddenly ties that urgency up with a bow, making you question everything to come.
Mass Effect 2 made drastic overhauls to the combat, but it fits the breakneck pacing of the story.
From there, the Suicide Mission makes you pick which team members will carry out key tasks, like who leads a secondary squad or who goes off on their own to shut down barriers. At the same time, preparations you made ahead of time factor into the mission, like if you helped certain NPCs or invested in research to boost your ship’s barriers. All of this culminates in an unforgettable climax where every single member of your team can perish, including Shepard themselves. But on the flip side, you can make it out entirely unscathed if you invested in getting to know your party members and preparing.
Most players will fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, losing a few beloved allies — which can still be utterly heartbreaking, especially if it's a romance option you lose. But the sheer variety in how that Suicide Mission can play out is astounding, and it's a perfect encapsulation of everything you did across the entire game. For dozens of hours, Mass Effect 2 told you that you might not come back from this mission, and you should have believed it.
The Suicide Mission is a near-perfect finale.
Even to this day, the final hours of Mass Effect 2 stand out as one of the most audacious things a video game has ever done. Even the recent release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard took liberal inspiration from the Suicide Mission to do something similar.
Every hour of Mass Effect 2 is an entrancing experience that subverts the way we think about both sci-fi stories and the way players interact with games. It’s served as inspiration for countless games, from The Witcher 3 to The Outer Worlds — but even 15 years later nothing has managed to quite capture the same highs.
