Yesterday BioWare launched Mass Effect, a game that mixes real action with a deep, sensitive story. The game's plot debuts in the year 2183 and its main character is a tough human soldier called Commander Shepard. The player will have to assume the soldier’s role for starting the adventure and direct Shepard’s ship, the SSV Normandy, towards new places and new battles.

Casey Hudson, the man that spent almost three years directing the developing team behind this project, explained that the game’s title is related to what the physicists are currently calling “dark energy” in real life. Inside the game’s universe, the “mass effect” is a physics phenomenon that the humans have just discovered and that some alien creatures can sense and manipulate.

Although the game’s story doesn’t seem to be quite unique (the hero has to fight alien species, as well as his own fears, and eventually to save the entire Universe), Mass Effect offers a gameplay experience that no other games offered before. Mass Effect offers the player the possibility of choosing a human approach in finding the solutions. The player is able to choose what seems for him or her to be the best decision, even if this could threat the future of all the life forms of the galaxy.

Mass Effect is different from all the other games because it comes closer to real life. Its characters have feelings and they are not ashamed to show them. BioWare was innovative enough to use some of the most sophisticated graphics for “drawing” the characters’ faces and not only the battles’ explosions. The game seems to be rather “filmed,” just like a movie, so that the players can see the characters’ faces and how they react and feel in different situations. BioWare was able to even render the speaking digital faces of the characters, which until now seemed to be almost impossible.  

“We wanted to create a video game that had the potential to rival live-action movies in terms of cinematic, dramatic power,” said Casey Hudson, adding that “We wanted our characters to be able to just raise an eyebrow and have it convey a thought or emotion just as it could in a film.”

Mass Effect will definitely change the world of video gaming as you knew it before, and the fact that the game was released only for Xbox 360 represents an important move for Microsoft.