Mass Effect multiplayer: Surprisingly not awful!

I've been spending a lot, a lot, of time with the ME3 multiplayer demo. The title may sound like faint praise-- "It's not the complete shit-show that I expected"-- but the reality is that it's quite good, and I am super-psyched to play more when the full game drops this week. Psyched enough, in fact, to bring my blog out of hibernation so I can convince other people to play with me.


Much like the single-player game, Mass Effect mulitplayer is a gestalt organism, ideas from several genres simmering together to form a unique gumbo. You start with Horde Mode (or Firefight to you Halo-ites) as a base; a squad of four facing off against waves of enemies. Then, peppered throughout the waves are dynamic objectives akin to traditional competitive multiplayer, like holding a specific point, capturing terminals or assassinating specific enemies. Now layer on top of all that the RPG leveling system from the single player game, earning experience and investing in skills that grow more powerful over time.

So, all of that seems cool but not especially revolutionary, right? Well, here's where things get weird. You use your experience points to buy CCG-style booster packs of power-ups. These bonuses might be something permanent, like a new gun or race/class combination. But the majority of them are single-use items, like maybe a special ammo type to help you through one round. And these packs are completely randomized, so you truly never know what you're going to get next. Mass Effect has always drawn from a broad spectrum of influences, but I was not expecting Magic: The Gathering to be among them.

Med-packs are among the single-use items, and it's fascinating how limiting the availability of this very important item changes the dynamics of the game. Med-packs can be used to revive yourself when you're "down but not out," but squad mates can revive downed comrades free of charge. This means that when one of your squad mates goes down, you have to make a real risk-reward calculation about whether to save them or not. Your own chances of survival decrease exponentially as your squad gets smaller, so you have a real incentive to help out your team by economizing each others med-pack usage. But when you're down to just one or two packs yourself, and it's a long walk through the field of fire to save your buddy, you may decide it's safer to stay bunkered down and try to finish out the round yourself.

I played an amazing game where two of us died trying to revive a pinned-down comrade. We had to watch, helplessly, as the final squad member spent an agonizing five minutes finishing out the round by himself with nothing but a sniper rifle and a pistol. It was easy to fear that the multiplayer portion would be little better than the tumors that usually grow on triple-A titles, but I'm very, very happy that BioWare was able to pull this off. The varied classes and the limited resources engender a sense of teamwork and emotional investment in every game, and this is just with strangers. I can't wait to see how much better it is when I'm playing with actual friends.