Everyone at Rotpod is a big fan of BioWare, but that really goes without saying when a company has games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire under its belt. There latest RPG, Mass Effect, looks to be no different, delivering solid visuals and great RPG elements. The latest footage can be seen in the stage demo at PAX 2007 below:

Now let’s move on to the meat of the story. Some of you may have heard of the gaming blog Destructoid. They have a more radical opinion on the stage demo. Orcist, the writer of the article, admits that the game is amazing visually, but says that the facial animations and the voice acting is sub-bar and took away from the flow of the game. These are both aspects of the video above that I loved and I thought were done beautifully. Orcist goes on to compare facial animations to a ventrilquist. This is when X-Play writer Matt Keil decided to speak out on the NeoGaf forums.

Do not believe this preview. I had the first hour of the game played in front of me, and none of Destructoid’s criticisms are valid. This is either truly awful taste or a pathetic attempt to get more hits. Possibly both.

Mass Effect has the most incredible facial animation of any game ever (at the time I saw it, anyway…Heavenly Sword tops it in cutscenes, IMO), and the voice acting is perfectly fine. The beginning of the game is all space navy “Sir, we have visual” shit, anyway. It’s obviously not going to be Gone With The Wind.

There are plenty of things to worry about with Mass Effect without making up shit about the presentation. This preview is simply not describing the game I saw.

I agree with Matt and also think that the Destructoid article was just an attempt to get more hits. Mass Effect is a beautiful game and is very high on my list of games to look forward this season. Check out another Mass Effect video after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Controversy Over Mass Effect’