A Little Too Effective?

This is not a First Impressions post; I or someone else will get to that sooner or later. This is a…

…this is not the post I was expecting to write about Mass Effect 2.

NOTE: this contains some story spoilers for Mass Effect.

UPDATE: it transpires that Mass Effect 2 made certain assumptions at the outset I didn’t realize it had made. Thus the accusation contained herein is false – apologies to Bioware and EA. At the same time, perhaps this could be a lesson to publishers: a not-very-paranoid fellow assumed the worst, not because it seemed likeliest, but because publishers, in their obsession with doomed anti-piracy techniques, have forced legitimate consumers to believe that they might do things like this.

I played the first game on 360, but this time around I downloaded the title from Steam. I wanted to play at higher resolution, and I’d accidentally deleted my old Mass Effect saves anyway, so there was no legacy character or history to import into this sequel.

Start with the obvious: EA’s draconian anti-piracy and anti-used game position is at its obnoxious height here. Mass Effect 2 features downloadable content that’s only available to those who buy the game new… which I had. Of course, the game froze whenever I tried to log into EA’s network from inside Mass Effect 2. I could do it via browser (proving that my login and password were correct), and could even manually download and install the DLC, using the incredibly hard to read six-bazillion digit code, thoughtfully presented in a font that makes Y look like V and 2 look like Z.

But upon restarting ME2, I was politely told that the system could not validate my new DLC. I’d have to log in – via the game – to EA’s servers. And again, it froze on “Please Wait” whenever I tried.

Chinthanaichelvan at EA tech support was… unhelpful.

So I decided to start the game without validating the DLC. And that’s when things started happening that made me really nervous.

To review: I played the original game on 360. I lost all my original saves. I’m playing the sequel on PC. Totally new environment. There was nothing to import.

And yet… somehow, Mass Effect 2 knew, without asking me, that in the first game I’d left Kaiden to die on Virmire rather than Ashley. That one’s probably not shocking; Kaiden was a toolbox and I bet less than one percent of players chose him over the racist-but-hot potential poon interest.

More suspiciously, the game knew, again without asking, the decision I’d made at the end of the first Mass Effect, when you are essentially forced to make an impossible choice between two equally unthinkable outcomes. That one is a lot less predictable.

I’d read that the game asks you about key decisions made in ME1 if you have no saves to import. But it never asked me anything. It knew, from the opening cinematic, which characters were alive and which were dead; what decisions I’d made at the end and what I’d let slip away.

Again, these are games played on two separate platforms, with no saves existing. The only thing connecting them is the email address that happens to be shared across my Xbox Live, Steam, Games for Windows Live, and EA accounts… an old University of Michigan email I keep and use for stuff like this as a way to intentionally funnel spam and related crap into an email box I rarely bother to check.

So either Mass Effect 2 is a really, really good guesser, or gamestates were secretly uploaded to EA servers – without the knowledge or permission of the user – and associated with email addresses. And that just ain’t cool no matter how you slice it. Oh, sure, it’s not like there was secret info about me in my old Mass Effect saves. But if EA and Bioware are knowingly and secretly taking that data, what else might they be curious about?