Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Demo Impressions

When it was leaked that Bioware would be adding multiplayer to Mass Effect 3 everyone seemed to freak out and I was right there with them. Mass Effect is a single player experience. I didn't want a poorly implemented multiplayer mucking up my epic space RPG/shooter hybrid. Without even playing it, I had resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't like it. I could have just ignored its existence, but they had to find a way to have it invade the single player experience as well. I was down on the whole thing. 

This past Friday the multiplayer portion of the  Mass Effect 3 demo was unlocked for everyone and it managed to shatter all of my preconceived notions. I am no longer upset now that I have played the multiplayer for an extended period of time. Contrary to my previous belief it's actually quite fun and I don't think I'll mind playing more of it when Mass Effect 3 drops in March.

The experience of the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is most similar to horde mode from Gears of War. This type of thing is becoming more and more popular, so it's only natural for Bioware to capitalize on it. The goal is to fight wave after wave of foes in a group of up to four people with your chosen character.

Character Creation and Customization

What type of character you bring into battle is up to you. Just like the main game there are six classes to choose from. They are adept, soldier, engineer, infiltrator, and vanguard. Unlike the main game other races are finally playable. Each class can be a male or female human, or two other races. There is quite a wide selection of races. Asari,  drell, krogans, turians, quarians, and salarians are all available to play. At the beginning there is only one usable type of each class and they are all human. The others must all be unlocked.

The character select screen kindly displays all of the characters you can unlock.

All the character models are set in stone, but there are ways to differentiate them from everyone else. Only the color of their armor can be changed at first and you must unlock the other ways. Patterns can be added to the armor as well as the lights on the characters backs. I personally haven't unlocked any patterns, but I saw a few people who did and they actually looked pretty cool. The characters all look similar in the beginning, but over time you can make them look fairly unique.

The cosmetic customization is decent, but the gun customization is what most people will be concerned with. That's right, gun customization is actually in this part of the demo. Only two guns can be carried into battle, but they can be any two guns you want. All the gun types from the single player at your disposal, except for the heavy weapons. Each gun has two slots open for weapon attachments, which grant various bonuses to the weapon. These bonuses range from faster reload speeds to adding a scope. It's nothing huge, but it's more customization than the last game had. 

The gun customization page isn't fancy, but it gets the job done.

To round off the customization each character has a skill set, where points can be allocated to certain abilities. These are mostly the same as the single player skills, but there are a few minor differences. Experience is gained through play depending on how well you do. The max level for each character is twenty, so you won't be able to max out all six skills.

Finding Lobbies and How They Work

Once your character is customized it's time to head into battle. Having a party of four players is ideal, but that's easier said than done in this demo. The matchmaking doesn't exactly work as well as it could. More often than not the lobbies I got into would only get two people. There were several occasions when we would start the match and would be added to another game that already had two people, but it didn't happen enough. Other than that I like the way lobbies are done. It's exceedingly simple to view the load-outs of the other party members. 

Searching for lobbies is also easy. What map do you want to play, who do you want to fight against, and what difficulty do you want it to be. In the demo there are only two maps and you can only fight against Cerberus. The final version of the game will obviously have much more available. I've seen screenshots of people fighting against the Geth, which may be why you can't play as them. 

The three difficulty levels bronze, silver, and gold vary greatly in difficulty. The higher you go, the more health and armor the enemies have. Bronze is easy, especially if you have four people. Silver is manageable, but it's pretty tough at lower levels, and almost impossible if you have two people. Then you have gold, which is bananas. Enemies take a ton of shots, but you'll go down in one. If your group doesn't stay together you're not going to live for more than a few minutes.

Lobbies can be searched for based on mission settings.

Gameplay

It may come as a shock, but the gameplay of the multiplayer is almost identical to the gameplay of the single player. The main difference is that you can revive fallen teammates by standing over there bodies while holding x for a few moments. When shot down there is a limited amount of time for a teammate to revive you. Mashing x will keep you alive longer, but if the timer runs out then you will be dead until the next wave. Even though it plays almost exactly the same it feels a lot different, because you're working with up to three other human players.

The AI of the squadmates in Mass Effect is less than ideal. Telling them where to go and what to do doesn't always work out the way it should. This problem can be eliminated in the multiplayer by using a headset. Everything goes a whole lot smoother when you can tell the people you're playing with that they're being flanked, or that they need to help out with something. 

Human controlled squad members enhance the experience.

Since this is almost like a horde mode you'll be facing wave after wave of enemies. The shuttle will drop you off and then it's time to start shooting fools. They'll start easy, but gradually get more difficult as new enemy types are introduced. Most waves consist of killing all the enemies, but there are some objectives thrown in like killing specific enemies, hacking a computer, or disarming transmitters. 

In the demo there are only eleven waves, but that may be different in the final release. Once the tenth wave is wiped out extraction begins. In order to be extracted you have to run back to the shuttle, where a timer will start. If you hold out for the duration of the timer the mission is complete.

Players are awarded with experience points and credits upon clearing a mission. Any experience or credits earned will also be awarded upon failing a mission. You'll get absolutely nothing if you lose connection to the EA servers, which happened to me far too frequently. The experience goes towards leveling, while the credits are used to buy packs. These packs are the only way to unlock guns, mods, powerups, customizations, and characters.

Getting upgrades from packs is exciting and frustrating at the same time.

Packs are are like packs of trading cards. You never know what you're going to get, but you hope it's awesome. In the demo there are only three types of packs. The beginner pack is available the first time you go to the shop for free, so that you can get a sense of what everything is about. The two remaining packs cost credits. You can get the recruit pack for 5,000 credits or the veteran pack for 20,000 credits. The more a pack costs the higher the chance it has of getting a rare item. In the final game there are supposedly two packs that cost more. 

Final Thoughts

In short, I like the multiplayer. It's not ground breaking, but it's surprisingly fun. The final value of the multiplayer will be how well it's integrated into the single player. I'm still not quite clear on how exactly war assets will be implemented. I just hope it's not integral to the experience.

As of right now you have to get a character to level 20 in order to send them as a war asset. It takes a decent amount of time to get a character to level 20 and I don't know if I'd want to get someone up to that level more than a few times. 

It's definitely entertaining to play, but I don't know how long it will hold appeal (for me at least). Multiplayer is generally added to established franchises to bring in new players and I think that's working well for Bioware in this case. Most of the people I spoke with in the demo had never played a Mass Effect game before, but they found the multiplayer to be entertaining.

I'm just glad the multiplayer doesn't suck. Let's hope it doesn't detract from the single player experience.

     -Manny

Mass Effect 3 Single Player Demo Impressions

Stories of Mass Effect 3 have been flying around the internet for months. A demo was accidentally leaked to Xbox live dashboard previewers back in November. It was quickly taken down, but not fast enough. Files were extracted from the demo that detailed much of the story for the game and fans were not pleased with what was found. I have not taken a look at anything related to the leaked story, so I can't speak to the quality of what was found.

It's now Valentine's Day and the previously leaked demo is available to the general public. I played the demo on the PS3. As of now I've only gotten a chance to play the single player portion, because the multiplayer is currently unavailable. Here's my experience.

Part One

The Demo opens on Earth just before the Reaper invasion. I'm not positive, but this sequence seems like it's the very beginning of the game or quite close to it. Freddy Prince Jr. voiced James Vega, a tough marine, has come to fetch Shepard. The Council believes that the Reapers are coming, so Anderson wants Shepard to come and see if he can identify them.

Prior to starting the demo there is a prompt to choose whether Ashley or Kaiden was lost in combat during Mass Effect 1. I chose Kaiden, so Ashley showed up on the way to the council. She looks way different than she did before. She's been sexed up a bit, which doesn't make much sense. Why change her look for the final game in a trilogy? She was supposed to be a tomboy and that's what she was established as for two games prior to this one.

I found this handy picture to show the change in Ashley...

Anderson comes to rescue Shepard from his conversation with Ashley and takes him to the Council. Shepard argues with them for a bit and then surprise, the Reapers invade Earth. Without a visual reference everything I've described so far, bar Ashley, might sound pretty cool. Much to my dismay, it wasn't.

The player controls nothing prior to the Reaper Invasion with the exception of conversations. Everything outside of the conversations looks a bit...off. The character models look fine, but the textures on their clothes were straight up bad. There were multiple instances where the texture of Shepard's shirt didn't load at all. On top of that all of the movement looked super stilted, because the frame rate wasn't holding up.

The frame rate problem and stilted movement completely disappeared each time the game waited for me to select from the dialogue wheel. The textures looked a whole lot better too, which I found to be odd.

After the Reapers invade the player is given control of Shepard as he follows Anderson to the Normandy. Running across rooftops, while seeing the Reapers destroy everything is cool, but the frame rate can't hold up. The stilted movement I mentioned before becomes even more apparent when controlling Shepard. There were even points when Anderson's model would warp past obstacles, which I hope is fixed in the final game.

A tutorial of combat and movement takes place as the two run over buildings and rubble. Everything works more or less the same as it did in Mass Effect 2. Shepard run and gun or take cover in order to fight the husks that the Reapers are sending after him. The shooting felt poor, because of the stuttering frame rate. The main difference in the combat is that Shepard can now use his Omni-tool as a blade to melee enemies. It's attacks feel powerful, because Shepard takes a while to crank his arm back before he strikes. The impact is enough to kill most enemies, which is pretty satisfying.

Jackin' fools with the Omni-blade is satisfying.

Part 2

Once Shepard reaches the Normandy the demo moves to a later portion of the game. I have no idea why, but everything in the second portion of the demo seemed better. Everyone was in their N7 armor and the textures looked fine. On top of that the frame rate was totally fine.

The second scenario is exactly what I wanted to see out of this demo. Shepard, Wrex, Liara, and Garrus have arrived on the Solarian home world in order to rescue a female Korgan from the clutches of Cerberus. This portion of the demo is meant to show off the more action oriented sequences and it does a great job.

Wrex stays back, while Shepard, Liara, and Garrus kick some Cerberus ass. Shortly after control of Shepard is given back to the player he comes across Mordin, who is locked in a containment cell with a female Krogan. Your goal is to take out all of the soldiers around you so that you can send the cell to the next level, which will eventually make its way to Wrex. 

Prior to any combat the demo prompts you to level up the squads skills. Everyone is level 12, so they have a fair number of skill points to allocate. The skills are the same ones you could choose from in Mass Effect 2, but now there is much more customization. The first three levels of a skill are pre-set, but after that they branch off. The 4th through 6th progressions of a skill each have two choices. This allows for a deeper level of customization than was previously available in Mass Effect 2. How you choose to level the skills will depend on your play style. In the demo there was an option to undo a previously made upgrade, which may allow for the player to respect.

The new skill trees offer more customization.

Shepard is given one of each type of gun for the sake of this demo, and most of them are new. They all handle well and feel different than the guns I remember from the previous game. It's a shame that the gun customization didn't come into play, or if it did I wasn't able to access it. I did find an assault rifle scope, so I assume that in the final game you'll be able to add parts to your guns on the fly. 

Final Thoughts

The second section of the demo felt worlds ahead of the first. I hope that the first section of the demo was an older build of the game, while the second portion was newer. It's entirely possible that the problems I had were specific to the PS3. I am going to download the 360 version to test that theory and I will update this post with my findings. If anyone played this on PS3 and didn't experience these problems I'd like to hear about it.

People talking about the leaked demo and story elements got me a bit worried about Mass Effect 3. After playing the demo I am no longer worried. While the first section of the game may not have looked or played the best I liked what was going on. Everything is coming to a head and it looks like this will be an exciting conclusion to the story of Commander Shepard.

All of the gameplay in this demo (When it's working properly) is on par with Mass Effect 2. The improved skill tree shows that Bioware is at least trying to put some of the RPG elements back into this series. Sadly the weapon customization wasn't available, but I'm going to assume that it will be fine. 

Mass Effect 3 seems like it's shaping up to be a great game. This demo was certainly entertaining and I recommend that you play it. I'm still skeptical on the whole multiplayer mode. I'll post my thoughts on that in another post, so look out for that.

UPDATE: The multiplayer is only accessible right now for people who have played Battlefield 3 online. Since I do not have Battlefield I will have to wait until Friday for access to the multiplayer.

     -Manny