Thursday, December 30, 2010

"Social dungeons"

From a review of Mass Effect 2:
The first thing I notice when I’m playing the second time is that interactions aren’t decisions — they’re social monsters that need to be killed to pass quests. When they die, you get experience toward paragon or renegade levels, which allow access to higher level conversations, which are basically social dungeons. The second thing I notice is, once you know, for certain, that someone won’t add any interesting new information to their initial, perfectly clear summary statement of their role in the story and your expectations regarding them, the game gets alot shorter. Except for when these people are expositing about some shoehorned summary that seems completely out of context, unless you pumped them for redundant information, earlier.