I finally forced myself to finish the original Mass Effect. The main reason? Finally owning Mass Effect 2! You need a completed mission file in order to bring your Mass Effect character over into Mass Effect 2. My Captain Shepherd is a female named Torah Shepherd, but as I soon found out, a lot more than just her name, appearance, stats and character level survived the import.

You see, BioWare had promised that your decisions and the way you played Mass Effect would deeply affect how the story plays out in later games. So far, I’m seeing that to be a case of truth-telling, not just hype. For example, my character took the Paragon path and chose to save the Council at the end of the game; my Mass Effect 2 game started with those events taken into account.

Had I let the council perish, my Mass Effect 2 experience would have been immediately different. And while I haven’t searched through the game enough yet to know where all the electric fireplaces are, I can say that BioWare is rather unique in actually delivering a notably different experience based on how you play. In a few years, we might look back on this story-branching approach to game design as simple, rudimentary, even a bit dated… but whatever we’re playing by then, the branching storytelling with genuine differences in play revolution started here.

Mark it down in the chronicles.