I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2, the latest action RPG from BioWare/EA. If you like computer gaming, you’re probably aware of BioWare, which has made some of the best action RPGs (role playing games) ever, including Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. More recently, they made Dragon Age: Origins, also an excellent RPG, which I recently completed twice.

Mass Effect 2 is the latest in their series of big budget RPGs for PCs and consoles. It continues the story began in the original Mass Effect, from 2007. Mass Effect 2 is bigger and better in almost every way, with beautiful visuals, great audio, good game design with useful skills and talents, and plenty of atmosphere. Combat is great, almost FPS-like, with different weapons and ammo, a good targeting system with double damage points for head shots, etc. The weapons are well thought out and feel different, each with its advantages and disadvantages, each requiring adjustments to your strategy.

Mass Effect 2 is a space based RPG, which borrows elements from a lot of cinematic history. People will find parallels to Firefly (the chief villains are aliens called “Reapers” which sounds suspiciously like the “Reavers” in Firefly, not to mention a wild-west sort of frontier much like Firefly, and Star Wars before that). There are elements of Blade Runner in the cityscapes on different worlds. The “Collector” ship (“Collectors” are another group we’re fighting in this story) has distinct touches of the Alien movies, with organic looking architecture vaguely reminiscent of H.R. Giger, Alien-like sound effects, and even “pods” that reminded me of the eggs in Alien. There are even elements of previous computer games like Starcraft.

I don’t say any of this to detract from Mass Effect 2. While it borrows heavily from different sources, it’s not a clone of any of them, and all the elements are well integrated into the story. The game is very polished and feels that way.

However, there is one problem that annoys me tremendously. In fact, that was what provoked me to write this blog entry. And that problem is the inability to fast forward through the dialog.

First, let me say that I am only writing about the PC version. I understand that the XBox version is different, and does in fact have a way to fast forward through dialog. So please don’t worry about it if you’re only playing Mass Effect 2 on the XBox.

Mass Effect 2 is an RPG, which means it has a strong story line. This is good – in fact, it’s considered a mark of great RPGs to have a story which can interest the player and draw him into the game. The downside of it is that the story is told mainly through dialog and cut scenes. Mass Effect 2 is an incredibly long game, taking many hours (many days of many hours) to complete. Unfortunately, a large portion of this is dialog.

Now I understand that not everyone may have a problem with dialog. After all, there are people who love the old D&D games, which are almost purely dialog – reading stuff on the screen. Not to mention there are many RPG fans to whom story and dialog are an essential part of enjoying the RPG genre. If the game doesn’t provide a sufficient story element, these people make it up on their own.

I point to World of Warcraft as proof – not only does it have an incredibly detailed background spanning multiple games from Blizzard, it also has tons of in-game information about the story, factions, events, and characters available for anyone interested. But since it’s primarily an action RPG, you don’t really need to know any of that in order to play the game. You pick your faction, you roll a character, you start playing. The guys with the red name tags are enemies, you kill them. Sure, there’s some dialog from quest givers. But it’s short and sweet. There is no waiting – the text appears along with the dialog, if you read faster than the dialog is spoken, you can click right in the middle of the dialog and move on. If you’re playing your second or third character and know what choice you’ll make, you can skip the reading too, you already know where to click. This keeps the action moving for those of us who like the “action” part of the action RPG genre.

Yet even in this very action oriented game, the story and background are there for those who care about such things. Blizzard simply leaves it up to the player to determine their own level of interest and tolerance for things such as story and background, which get in the way of gameplay.

To get back to my point – even when the game doesn’t force you to spend a lot of time listening to dialog and involving yourself in the story, some people create ways to do that for themselves. This is why Blizzard has role-playing servers, and there are multitudes of people who create guilds that deliberately build a mythos that relates to the story line. These are people who love fantasy, obviously, and to them a good part of the enjoyment of the game is fantasizing about their character, the story, the events. I’ve heard of people getting kicked out of their guild for “breaking character” – the offence of repeatedly talking as if they were Joe the Computer Gamer, rather than Aragorrrn the Magnificient on a quest to retake Alliance territory from the evil Horde.

Now while I don’t grudge these people their fantasy – their money is just as good as anyone else’s, and they have just as much right to enjoy themselves as anyone else – I have to say that I am not one of them. Very emphatically not. I like stories as much as anyone else, but the fact is that when I’m playing a computer game, I want to play a computer game, not listen to an audio book. If I’m in the mood for a story, I’ll read a novel. That’s not to say I think computer game writers are cheap hacks. Some of them might be good writers. But I am not playing a computer game to read pages of text on my screen, or to listen to hours of dialog. That’s what books and movies are for, in my opinion.

This is why I have such a problem with Mass Effect 2. This game has way too much dialog, too many cut scenes. In short, there is too much time when the game takes over my keyboard and mouse, and turns me into a passive reader/listener. This is not why I play games.

In case you are not a gamer and wondering why this is such a big deal, let me explain. Since the game is a well-designed RPG, events unfold very much based on the choices you make. Typically, RPGs tend to build upon the motivations of your character. In fact, they have a vocabulary assigning your character to a spectrum ranging from Lawful Good through Chaotic Neutral to Lawless Evil. It’s sort of a continuum, with characters being lawful, neutral or lawless, and good, neutral, evil. What kind of character you are depends upon the choices you make in the game, and this in turn affects how other people in the game respond to you. These differences can be quite dramatic, with whole parts of the story arc or side quests being closed to one kind of character but open to another.

This is also true for Mass Effect 2, which uses the words “paragon” to describe “good” and “renegade” to describe “evil”. It doesn’t matter what words a game uses, RPG gamers know that every time they talk to a character and try to reason with him instead of shooting him (and vice versa), they are making a choice to fulfill their role as “good” or “evil” and that this choice will have consequences for game play. In other words, they have to pay attention to such matters.

The problem happens when the game makes you sit through a screenful of text, 2 minutes of dialog, a lengthy cut scene, before you are allowed to click a button and make your choice. Now imagine this happening over and over and over throughout the game. You begin to realize you are spending a lot of your time just sitting back, listening to inane chatter and dramatic declamations, waiting for a button to appear on your screen. But we’re not done yet.

The consequences of a choice might not be apparent until the dialog is complete, and you see the message flash up “You just won 15 Paragon Points!” No matter how carefully you listen to the dialog, you’ll still make mistakes. Or maybe you just got bored the 36th time this happened, and your attention wandered. At the end, the message flashes “You just won 15 Renegade Points!” Damn. You just moved 15 points into the evil column instead of 15 points into the good. Or the other way around, if you were trying to be evil. What do you do? Well, the only thing you can do is to load from the last save you made, and play some portion of the game again, to come back to this dialog, so you can pay more attention and make the right choice.

It gets to the point where players get into the habit of automatically hitting the “save” button before any such dialog. Of course, you can’t always predict when the dialog will happen, so you’ll find yourself replaying significant portions of the game just because you clicked the wrong button on a dialog screen, because you were so damn tired of listening to the characters squawk that you had stuffed your ears with your fingers. No, I’m not kidding, I have actually done that with Mass Effect 2. Usually the second or third time I was forced to replay the same dialog to pick a better choice.

This turns the game from pure fun to alternating periods of pure fun and pure torture. Since we humans can’t instantly switch our emotions at will, even the periods of pure fun are marked by long slopes where the fun is admixed with irritation at the dialog you had to sit through a minute ago.

What does it take to avoid this, if BioWare had chosen to avoid it? Simple, it just takes two things:

1. Keep dialogs to a minimum. No matter how much you’re paying your writers, no matter how spiffy you think your dialog is, no matter whether you hired Hollywood talent to speak the voice parts for you. Remember, you’re selling a computer game. Not a book. Not a movie. Keep dialogs to a minimum. Mass Effect 2 has about 5 – 10 times as much dialog as is needed.

2. Always present the choices along with the dialog. Do not impose a delay, where the whole dialog has to be spoken before the choice buttons appear. After all, users have the choice to turn on subtitles to the dialog. They can read. If they can read faster than your voice talent speaks (which everyone does), they already have the information needed to make the choice long before the characters are done speaking. Let them make the choice when they are ready to make it. Don’t force them to wait for the whole tedious thing to be voiced out before you present them with choice buttons.

That’s all there is to it. But Mass Effect 2 breaks both these rules. Dialog is excessive. There no way to stop it. At least, not on the PC.

When I started this game, I picked “Soldier” as the class I wanted to play. Since the game is otherwise so excellent, very soon after I started I decided that I would play it again, as one of the other available classes. This is a great feature of RPGs, that you can replay them as another class for a whole new experience.

However, by the time I was about half way through it, all I wanted was for the game to end. There is no way on earth that I would sit through all that dialog again. It’s like getting a root canal. Two root canals. And then having the tooth pulled by a pair of rusty pliers just after you went through the trouble of getting the root canals.

It amazes me how game designers who spend millions of dollars on a game make such foolish choices. How willing they are to ruin the game experience for thousands of people (and I know I am not alone in this), for lack of a simple feature that would have been trivial to implement.

Again, please don’t take this as a rant against RPGs, or against people who love story lines, who love to listen to hours of dialog, who want cutscene after cutscene to the point where the game begins to look like a movie rather than a game. I have no problem with such people. It’s possible to give these people exactly what they want, but for the sake of those of us who want control back on our keyboards, just give us a fast forward button. You’re taking nothing away from anyone else if you do that.