GamerNode: Columns - Beam Me Up, Shepherd

Beam Me Up, Shepherd

Space. The final frontier. At the moment, it's also the final frontier of creativity in terms of science fiction, if you're ignoring alternate dimensions. The main problem with space is that it's a big place, full of a lot of planets, stars, black holes, gas clouds, asteroids and other bits of geological wonder, but very rarely do we consider that it might also be boring.

Mass Effect is a game that manages to bring half of the galaxy (as we'll be exploring the other half in the 2010 sequel) into your living room on a normal level. You do indeed fly around in your own ship, the high-tech wonder Normandy, but you're not actually doing any of the flying itself. That falls down to a team of thirty people you'll never see sitting anywhere else, and a pilot who seemingly never sleeps, though, seemingly, neither do you.

You can visit so many different places, but they all seem to fall into one of two categories: the high-tech "merged civilisation" cities, towns and colonies, full of the same doors and the same technology, or wilderness, ruins and excitement of the Prothean ruins later in the game. The problem this creates is that you're not really exploring new worlds: you're landing on them, and looking for things you expect to see there anyway. I can understand that humanity has spread to thousands if not millions of worlds in Mass Effect, but in a universe with many different races, why do they all use the same front doors and elevators?

Creating a mass standard of technology is a very fine line. On the one side of it, you can make the user feel comfortable and at home with the surrounding environment through small details they've seen a thousand times before, or you can put them on edge by making every single room unique. I suppose the real reason behind all of this falls down to the time it takes to develop one set of walls and their corresponding textures, and the time it takes to design over four thousand.

That said if your spaceship isn't appealing, you're not really going to want to go anywhere in the first place, which is something of a big hurdle for developers to hurl themselves over when it comes to designing transportation. EVE Online is a fantastic example of exactly the amount of variety you need to entice someone into a universe where their spaceship (for now, anyway) is the only visual representation of themselves in the game.

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