SHOWCASE: Mass Effect still holds strong despite minor flaws on Xbox One backward compatibility

Back at E3 2015, Microsoft announced what was arguably the biggest piece of news in this generation of console gaming, backward compatibility for Xbox One. Over 150 Xbox 360 games are already in the program, and many more will be released when ready. Every other Sunday I will be taking a look at some of the games in the program and reporting back on how they hold up and play on Xbox One. This week I take a look back at a game which started one of the most popular franchises in modern console history, BioWare’s Mass Effect.

History

BioWare started life in 1995 with three newly-graduated medical students from the University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. The three friends who had learnt computer programming during their medical degrees pooled resources to form the studio now known as BioWare Edmonton. A studio now under the watchful eye of industry behemoth, Electronic Arts. The studio has always specialized in the role-playing style of games and is responsible for some of the most popular releases from the last twenty years. Their CV includes titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age and, of course, Mass Effect.

Originally announced in 2005 as a Xbox 360 exclusive, BioWare claimed they were building a game which would move away from the typical good or evil choices which were the standard for games at the time. Instead, they were building a game in which your choices and what you do would have a more definite and meaningful impact.

In the summer of 2007, project lead for BioWare, Casey Hudson, gave an interview with IGN and this was the first time advanced details for Mass Effect were talked about. With me being a gaming and space fanatic, it was about this time that Mass Effect really came into my radar. With details of a vast lore, set in a fictional version of our very own Milky Way galaxy and promises that the choices you made would dramatically influence the outcome of the game itself, I was sold.

Mass Effect did eventually release in November 2007 on Xbox 360. Although I did not purchase the game on release for reasons I can’t quite remember, I picked it up almost eighteen months later. Since that day, Bioware’s space opera has remained right near the top of my favourite games in over twenty years of gaming.

Mass Effect

You play as Commander Shepard, a veteran human soldier and crew member of the SSV Normandy, serving under the command of Captain David Anderson. You begin on what is believed to be a standard shakedown mission on the planet of Eden Prime, humanity’s first extra-solar colony. You soon come to realise the real intentions of the mission are a covert op to collect a piece of ancient technology which belonged to the now extinct Prothean Race.

Upon reaching Eden Prime, you take control of Shepard but the mission goes all to hell when one of your partners, a Spectre (elite agent to the Council) named Nilus, is caught blind-sided and shot in the back. Upon further investigation with the local human colonists on Eden Prime, Nilus was shot by fellow Spectre and Turian, Saren.

The assassination of Nilus sets off a chain of events which has you chasing down Saren across the entire Milky Way galaxy. From our very own Sol system to the Horse Head nebula and to the very edges of known galactic space. Traverse planets with two companions at a time and not to forget, your trusty MAKO ATV. A vehicle just as iconic as Halo’s Warthog or the SSV Normandy itself.

Is Saren working alone? Or is he merely a pawn in a much larger plan? Sheppard seems to know the truth but the controlling council of all Citadel species believes it to be a case of an agent gone rogue. You will also face many other enemies in your travels, from the hive minded Geth AI species, Asari biotic specialists and our fellow human beings to name a few.

This is the part where I would usually tell you a little bit about Shepard and where the commander comes from, but in Mass Effect, Shepard’s history, home planet and other parts of their backstory is chosen by you. How you set your character up goes much deeper than if you were to keep the preset defaults. Your sex, class and basic character build are all customizable with both male and female builds being fully voiced, very much like how Fallout 4 is setup today. The choices you make here will stick with you throughout the game, as well as in both sequels, Mass Effect 2 and 3.

The Normandy acts as your hub for everything. One of, actually, my favourite part of the game is the detailed galaxy map of the Milky Way. From here you can decide where to travel, what worlds to land on, scan asteroids and read in-depth details of a vast number of planets and worlds. Traveling between star systems is done by using Mass Effect relays. The relays are ancient relics from the now extinct Protheans, leftovers from a technologically advanced race who mysteriously disappeared over 50,000 years ago. At least, that is what everyone believes them to be.

The Nitty Gritty

Mass Effect was in the initial run of backward compatible games released to Xbox Preview members in the summer of 2015. Despite its early inclusion in the program, there are still a few issues with how the game runs on Xbox One. For the most part, the game does run fine, sometimes even better than when it was on the Xbox 360. Other times, the frame rate can take a big hit, mainly during larger battles or when there is a lot of movement on screen. The frame drops certainly don’t make the game unplayable, just every now and again it makes things a little more interesting, especially playing on higher difficulties. There are some minor drops at other times as well, but nothing big enough to spoil the experience. I also noticed a couple of more bugs where Sheppard would freeze after cutscenes. This did require a restart and I don’t remember this happening on the 360 at all.

I used the Elite Controller while playing over the last few weeks and tried putting my weapon select, health regen, grenade and ability selects onto the paddles. Doing this took away the biggest problem I ever had with the game. Being in firefights or running for your life, I always felt selecting abilities and throwing grenades to be a little cumbersome being on the bumpers and selecting buttons respectively. Now with the Xbox Elite Controller, action mapping to a more desired setup was a thing of beauty. How did we actually cope before being able to create your own button layouts?

Thankfully all of Mass Effect’s original 1000 Gamerscore achievements work fine, all unlocking as expected. If that isn’t enough, the game’s two DLC releases, Pinnacle Station and Bring Down the Sky, work fine on Xbox One as well. Not only does this add an extra four to five hours of playtime, but another 200 Gamerscore to boot. Overall if you want to go for full completion, trueachievements.com lists the game as having a sixty-hour average to unlock them all. The time is fair given that you can have multiple character builds and several plays are needed to fully experience them.

Mass Effect’s DLC also brings a little mystery to people. Throughout online forums, there are many people, myself included, who never actually purchased the DLC digitally. In my case, I installed it from disk on the Xbox 360 but never had any digital rights to it. On the Xbox One, when I installed the game, both DLC installed along with the game itself, after I repurchased the base game digitally. Some people say that no DLC was included upon their installation while others say it was. I could not find a definite answer to this even after a good while searching. If you are not one of the lucky ones to get the free add-ons, the price is very low and well worth the extra few pennies to pick them up.

Even after all these years, I have still to reach level sixty, which serves as the maximum you can level up to. I am nearly there now because of backward compatibility. Playing my old save from 2011 through the Xbox One’s cloud transfer was seamless.

Overall Mass Effect still stands up well, even for what is now a nearly nine-year-old game. Graphics are still very serviceable and the story is strong. Gameplay mechanics also stand very strong when compared to more modern titles. Yes, the frame rate does suffer a little in combat but don’t let that put you off. Mass Effect was and still is one of the better RPG style games available today. Now thanks to Xbox One and backward compatibility, and with a new trilogy looming in Mass Effect: Andromeda, you owe it to yourself to see where the franchise laid its roots before taking to the stars.

Mass Effect is available on the Xbox Store for £14.99/$19.99/€19.99.