That “Investigate” choice in the first Mass Effect was maddening. I was always thinking, “Oh no. I thought we were done here.”
The weakness of this in Mass Effect at least is that we are being forced to hear this stuff cause we really don’t care, we just want to get back to shooting stuff but the devs want us to know, so we pretend to care by reading it all. At the end I was just hitting the handy “all read” button.

I really doubt now after this lengthy (and brilliant post), that I will invest in ME2.

That they really drastically improved the shooting part is saving their bacon, because the plot (and much of the dialogue) is mediocre at best.

Now arguably any game can be described as talk, shoot, repeat. So the secret to making a good one is to make it not FEEL like that. Mass Effect 2 doesn’t succeed in that, which is kind of a pity.

“The worst outcome in dialogue trees is that they become static, in which button presses in conversation cease being interactions and just trigger another packet of exposition. To wit, whenever the “Investigate” option appears in a dialogue tree, as it does with almost every exchange, the play element turns into a three-minute encounter with an audio book. I realize, in many respects, that’s an unfair thing to write, mostly because the audio book is much more interesting than it could have been. But what about listening qualifies as gameplay?

The argument is that it builds empathy with all the characters you’ll eventually expose to deep space death. To fully appreciate the complex personas of all your squad members you’ll need a rich understanding of the worlds and species that affect them. I would argue this is a wholly unnecessary, a relic of writing which only bogs down games. Books are, by nature, an information-poor medium. Complex emotions, ideas, and characters are hard to communicate directly in writing, so books tend towards figurative language that evokes, makes metaphors, and spins interwoven yarns that mirror the complexities an author might want to capture.

Film contains an order of magnitude more information than writing. It carries music, image, color, shadow, performance, inflection, and human expression on top of the words written in the script. In a few seconds of film, the longing of a character can be instantly communicated in a way that would take Hemingway five pages to fully lay out. Games arrive next in the evolutionary daisy chain bearing even more information than film. Stories act on our intellects and imagination, but games act first on our senses and secondarily on our intellects. That’s why games are so much easier with the sound off, and it’s also why it feels like such a frustrating waste of art and voice acting to peck through Wiki-explanations using a dialogue wheel. ”

Oh, yeah, baby. I’d like to buy this guy a drink. Anyone knows if he’s coming to Serbia any time soon?

He seemed pretty cheerful about the whole thing, to be honest. He said morale was fine and they weren’t worried about it. Alpha Protocol is definitely a must-buy for me. You can’t go wrong with Chris Avellone’s work.