by:	October 06, 2005

Since 2003, Bioware has been a key player in the world of Xbox. Their first RPG on Xbox, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic not only gave the Xbox a great killer-app, it also made the Xbox the system to own that year. Not shortly after the release, Bioware began work on their completely exclusive Jade Empire, which shipped earlier this year. The game would mark Bioware’s first completely original title, not using any sort of existing franchise, and was indeed a very exciting game. Enter Mass Effect: This is Bioware’s second original title yet, and already people have compared the style of the game with that of Knights of the Old Republic.

As the first human Specter – sworn defenders of galactic peace – your mission is to halt the advancing armies of a legendary agent gone rogue. But as you lead your elite team across hostile alien worlds, you will discover the true threat is far greater than anyone imagined. The game focuses around the battle between organic life and artificial intelligence. What is even more shocking, is that Bioware has even announced Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, as the game will be part of a trilogy. It is unknown at this time if the second and third game will be on the Xbox 360, but one thing is for sure, if we know Bioware, the entire series will have a completely engaging story complete with enough twist to make a soap-opera writer cry.

As far as we know so far, the game will be setup more like Jade Empire than it will ‘KOTOR’. It seems as if though the story for the game will be able to branch off even more than these with much more choice-based gameplay elements. Although not much has been revealed about the gameplay, our best guess about the title is that you will be able to do more fighting in real-time, but you will still be able to select commands ahead of time to heal yourself, or to do special attacks. There will also definitely be a good or evil element to the game much like in ‘’KOTOR’ and Jade Empire. Hopefully, the game will go deeper into the good and evil element more so than Jade Empire, as Jade Empire’s elements just meant that you were basically being an ass to everyone around you if you were becoming evil, rather than you actually doing something much more different. It would also be nice if depending on what path you choose you can earn different abilities and have the option of wielding different weapons. As the future of gaming goes online, Xbox360 live features, including premium downloadable content and recognition of achievement will be available via the Xbox Live service.

Also much like in KOTOR, depending on the armor, weapons, or clothes that you equip your appearance will change along with those changes. The game is also one of the first games that I can think of besides ‘Gears of War’ that actually uses the Unreal Engine 3 to it’s potential. I knew that we were going to see some amazing games this generation, but for a RPG to look this amazing? I was already impressed with ‘The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’ but believe it or not, this game looks even better than that. Hopefully, there won’t be to many framerate problems however, as I could imagine this entire game will be at least forty hours of play time, and that might mean sacrificing some things to fit everything on one 8GB disc. Still, if one thing does pop out about this game it would have to be the visuals and the imaginative creatures that you encounter. The trailer below will illustrate just how imaginative as well.

That is all we know so far about the game, but hopefully we will be rewarding this game ‘Game of the Year’ or ‘RPG of the Year’ before 2007. Here is hoping—also make sure you check out the trailer of the game below!

Mass Effect Trailer (13MB Quicktime)

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