Today I spent eight hours playing Mass Effect 2. The game can be summed up in one word: awesome. I'm sure I'll wax lyrical about it a lot over the coming weeks, but for the moment I'm interested in one set of choices the game design encompasses. Computer role-playing games and traditional role-playing games face many of the same issues, just in different ways. A traditional role-playing games faces them in terms of game design and decisions at the table, while the computer role-playing game faces them largely in game design as that also covers the play experience. In the past, I've discussed conflicting issues over player versus character skill, the handling of character death and whether opponents should scale. Now Mass Effect 2 brings up some interesting issues regarding the tossing aside of traditional RPG baggage.

Historically, traditional role-playing games came with a host of sacred cows and baggage. It's hard to list them all, but a selection of them would be: character build science, encumbrance, random encounters, gear, the importance travelling to places and no doubt other things I can't remember at this stage. In terms of traditional role-playing games, key products arose that challenged the concepts upon which role-playing games were based: Ghostbusters (1986), WEG Star Wars (1987), Prince Valiant (1989), (Over the Edge (1992), Fengshui (1996) and no doubt others I'm missing. They shifted what was important in a game away from the aforementioned elements to storytelling and supporting genre conventions.

Computer role-playing games have kept the traditional RPG baggage for longer. In fact, the biggest games in the genre have had a focus on the baggage. Virtually all of them have a strong element of character building as an important part of the game in order to be more effective. They've also involved inventory management and collecting gear, often plugging into the character building. A number of them even have travel and random encounters. This has been true for a very long time, though Fable ditched a lot of the elements. The big Bioware games like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights and even the Knights of the Old Republic held onto the baggage, and Dragon Age: Origins is a nostalgic throwback to such games (not a bad thing). The Final Fantasy games are all about the baggage, right down to grinding experience to confront non-scaled enemies.

What makes Mass Effect 2 different, is not only does it represent an even more perfect merger of game and interactive narrative, in that they are one and the same, it also strips down the baggage.

The levelling and build science of the original Mass Effect is stripped back to a lean set-up that seems to be so lean the game is almost experimenting with advancement not being important. The choice of skills for each character is that limited the efficiency gains for playing the build game is probably very small, if not non-existent. They have set abilities rather than a palette of many choices which can result in highly varied ranges of character power. This has two advantages for me. First, I don't care about character power advancement. Second, it means the game can be more effectively balanced as the variance will be smaller (or the chance of a particular build rendering the challenge irrelevant will be smaller).

The need to manage inventory and gear and even fancy ammo types has been almost completely removed from the game. It's just a non-issue and what is there pretty much happens automatically. Yes, you will see yourself having one pistol and at some point using another, but this seems to happen without major decisions needing to be made. Not only that, once you have that pistol everyone in the team seems to be able to use. It's like you gain the right to use the equipment rather than finding a single pistol which then has to be micromanaged across your team. Simple and efficient, a simulation of reality be damned. It's the same with gear upgrades, as it's done by research. You just seem to pick up ideas for upgrades and get resources from surveying planets and every so often it's just possible to research an upgrade. All of these are not specific items, but equipment spanning bonuses like +20% on all assault rifle damage. It's in the game, it's good to get the bonus, but it doesn't count as a 'game' in and off itself.

What this means is Mass Effect 2 has made the transition to a new type of computer role-playing game. It's focused on delivering a grand, exciting space opera in which are central to the story, making choices on which 'great things rely' and the game is a mixture of enjoying the cinematic action scenes, soaking up the brilliant colour provided by the setting and getting to be a major protagonist in a science fiction epic. It weaves and imaginative and dramatic fabric that is truly brilliant.

I am playing it, and as I set out in my resolutions for 2010, I'm making notes. It might be useful one day.